Humor me, Veeky Forums. A post a long time ago got me thinking along these lines

>I'm so aware of the patterns of human civilization it would seem to me that it would make much more sense to join them than to fight them

>Veeky Forums reinvents domesticated canines

>join them
But that's as silly as my scenario. Like implies if you were intelligent you would move as far away as you could, because humans have so many things stacked in their favour, and they don't look kindly on competition.

Let myself and the pack be 'domesticated', find out who the key humans are, and kill them in their sleep from the inside as soon as an opportunity presents itself..

Adapting and surviving is OP.

The only way to beat that would be to take action for no other reason than spite, or to be Cthulhu.

Wolf - Since its a village, that means they probably have some sort of proto-dog already. Gain their trust, figure out who the strongest and best hunters are. Use your pack to coral a large amount of deer a good ways off from the village, alert the humans of the presence of deer. Use your pack to manipulate the deer movements into making the hunters waste or break their weapons. Then have you pack come in a tear them to shreads. Repeat until there's no one able bodied enough to keep your pack from overrunning the village and breeding with the proto-dogs to make trustworthy looking wolfdogs to keep this murdertrain running into other villages.

>they don't look kindly on competition.

Yeah neither to wolves. Or anything else in nature. That's how the whole universe works. When shit competes for limited resources, it can get ugly.

So cooperation is the most logical choice to ensure survival.

Attack one villager a night, leave some alive, rape the women and occasionally send a young child back with bites.

Cause mischief around the village, actively pick at feuds

Eventually the village associates wolves with witches and bad luck but only in a folklore manner

Do something major, drag brands from the fire to the fields let it all burn, make sure I'm seen by a couple of people.

Villagers are now actively accusing the returned children and eomen of being witxhes/werewolves whatever, kicking them out of the village. Others still believe it's people causing this.

Kickstart a feud

Let the villagers fight use this as an opportunity to kill the livestock and destroy food supplies where I can.

Village is now destitute, they likely have to trade their few meagre posessions for food, many will leave, let them go of course.

Waylay travellers and slaughter any livestock they trade for/ambush lone villagers, eventually they will be forced to abandon the village due to lack of food and increasing irrelevance.

You are taking too long. They already called for help or are leaving to get more humans to come in and kick your doggo teeth in.

>see pack of hungry wolves led by a giant alpha with rippling muscles
>"ooo who's a nice doggy"
>???

Then I stop a while, this is a primitive village, help is probably fucking days away, probably a week or two round trip. People will stop helping pretty fast if they make this long journey for absolutely nothing to happen. If things get hot I can just skip town for a week or two, come back and start to wreck shit again when they've given up looking.

The basic plot of any werewolf movie would have the werewolf winning if the werewolf was able to use tactics and not just a dumb animal.

Then they hunt you down and they find you.

Anyone can learn how to track, homie and you assume that you can magically vanish off the face of the earth.

Also you are assuming that humans won't expect you to come back.

>Do something major, drag brands from the fire to the fields let it all burn, make sure I'm seen by a couple of people.
At which point it been months, and you are literally hunted down.
You are better of creating a burning circle around the village, and just let it burn down.

This sounds like a good idea actually. Set fire to their houses in the night and grab them as they run.

At this point you are praying for a numbers advantage.

Also that they don't catch on after the first few houses light up.

Also that your wolf crew can be trained well enough to pull this off.

And that's not getting into how you are going to make fire.

You just have to steal it, if they have a fire burning outside you can easily grab a stick, light the end, take it to each house.

> easily grab a stick

No you can't.

Why can a wolf pick up a stick? Dogs are very good at it.

> Dogs are very good at it.
> Dogs

Ok so once again. What's the problem with just walking into a village and picking up a stick from the fire?

Also that's assuming they leave fires unattended in the first place.

There's a lot of 'what if's' involved here, although it's fun to think about. A lot would depend on how large / well-armed / primitive / isolated the village is, and how good your pack is.

You might be able to wipe out some isolated villages simply by destroying their winter supplies or other means of surviving the winter. Perhaps use fire from the village itself, utilising their torches or one made of branches, to burn their supplies and set fire to critical buildings. You can then slaughter people with your pack as they try and control the fire (though the rest of the pack may avoid the fire), or leave them to suffer and starve until sufficiently weakened.

In fact, if the village is small enough and unused to conflict it might be even simpler. If the village is large or advanced enough this is unlikely to work however, but the longer your campaign the better the humans will adapt to defeat you. Guiding the humans with your knowledge and becoming domesticated might well be a better option for your progeny and the future of your race as humans are pretty OP.

Good points but being domesticated and slowly changed to suit human whims producing breeds like some of the least healthy we have today sounds like a grim future.

Houses on fire: Bad idea
Ring of fire: Good idea

> being domesticated and slowly changed to suit human whims
>this is the same as cooperation

Do you have a hard time with relationships?

Just look at the king charles spaniel or the hip and spine problems in german shepherds. Those are what I mean. I wouldn't want my descendants, even centuries in the future, to be that degenerated.

Once again you create a straw man for how human/wolf cooperation would look like.

You're assuming more organisation than the op implies, he specifically mentions a primitive village. These would be relatively fair arguments if we were talking about a feudal settlement that happens to have a bunch of trained hunters hanging around, instead of a few dirt eaters with pointy sticks slings and basic agriculture.
All these posters are also expressely ignoring the fact the op says your sapient and knowledgeable in tactics which probably instantly makes you more intelligent than any of the villagers.

But it literally happened...

You could maybe (a big maybe) gain the trust of some of the humans by having the pack help them, demonstrating that you are supernaturally intelligent and creating a secret cult around you. That's a big gamble, tons of things can go wrong.

Then when you have gained their trust you get your pack and your most fanatical human followers to kill enough adults that the village becomes too weak to resist the next winter.

Again, this plan could spectacularly backfire any number of ways, but compared to a direct confrontation it's at least possible. There's just no way a pack of wolves can win an all-out fight with the village.

The only other alternative I can think of is waiting for the village to face a sufficiently harsh crisis that you can finish them off, and that might never come.

Can I impregnate human females and if yes, what the offspring will look like?

Is my offspring loyal to me? Or just inteligent but otherwise left to their own devices?

And finally:

How big is the village population, how many people they have there and any of them has armor?

Gimme the answer to those and I might be able to craft something. Not knowing them, I dont know.

You can only make babies with wolves. Your offspring are loyal to the family group but when they get old enough they may try to form their own packs and spread out.

Let's say the village is fifty people, of which twenty are children, five are elderly. They have no metallurgy or armour.

>no metallurgy
So everything is made of wood?

Wood, animal products, that sort of thing.

Then you *may* be able to have yourself and the bravest of your offsprings set fire to the village at strategic points, while the rest of the pack wait for the panicky villagers to flee outside. Assuming you're dextrous and daring enough to handle fire and can get the humans to flee the village.

Well then...I would use my superior force to take control of the pack as Alpha and produce as many children as I could for the first two years, hunting and being chill and wolf like. Then, when all my boys are old enough to fight, I'd lead the pack to hunt the villagers, only the ones alone and by surprise, killing them and dragging them out of sight if possible, isolating them from the world. Wouldn't allow anyone to leave the village and would command my kids to watch the roads for travellers and such coming in. Assuming half female/male ratio, there should be around 12 fighting male adults. If I can kill half of those isolately, I can then just rush into the village and slaughter the other six, assuming a pack of twelve or more wolves.

I dunno about you but when I see rippling muscles I always want to pet them

do I have to kill the children or can I take them in and make a harmonious society were humans and wolvws live together happily?

Yes, you could. Controlling factors would be the size of your pack, your control over the pack, and the size of the settlement you were facing.

But wolves were feared greatly during earlier times in parts of Europe, and for good reason. There is no reason to assume that a wolf as you describe could not pull it off.

Other animals (bears/lions) would have a much harder time of it as they are either not pack animals or do not form large enough packs to threaten a village of any reasonable size. Of the normal pack predators out there that might form a pack capable of doing what you describe, wolves are probably at the top.

Consider: guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-wolf-pack/

There was a pack in Yellowstone that was 37 strong at one time.

The first example could easily do it if it occured during earlier times without modern weapons. The second (yellowstone) would have a much harder time, but still possible if it was a small settlement.

If you are asking if a SINGLE creature could pull it off...that is a lot more tricky. And the answer is likely no. Certainly you could terrorize a village. But humans do work together and long before you could really significantly threaten a village they would likely band together with other settlements and do you in.

Still, if you tried with one creature. Hmmm. Lion maybe? Thinking stealth here. You are going to need to hit and run.

But in the end, I think someone is going to get you long before you reach your goal.

And we also have things like the Siberian Husky, the Rhodesian Ridgeback, the Greyhound, Mastiffs, etc

Not all dog breeds are degenerative vanity pets.
In any case, becoming a degenerative vanity pet is probably an excellent fate for your species, humans are likely to defend you as greatly as their own kind.

All of the major issues are a result of dog shows anyhow. Prior to that becoming a thing almost all breeds were healthy and capable.

If a huge demon bear comes in at night, I reckon it could be pretty devastating.

You keep coming back to this assumption that stone age dirt farmers would be less able hunters. I would expect the opposite, in a primitive society with no wider social net and reliance on basic crops for sustenance there would be veteran hunters everywhere. A lot of underdeveloped subsistence farmers that you have in mind supplement their meager diet with hunted game, and if there are already wolves they would have already had a fair deal of experience tracking and driving them off.