by Potjeh » Tue Dec 12, 2017 1:24 pm
IMO current livestock breeding is a bit dull, there's lots of stats but quality trumps them all, so there isn't really all that much decision making when picking your next generation breeders. I think this is in large parte due to the way stat inheritance works, ie baseline being the average of both parents. I think a relatively minor change here could have profound impact on the way breeding works. Namely, instead of using average of both parents, each stat should be inherited from just one randomly selected parent (still capped by father's breeding). So for example your piglet could inherit it's father's quality, milk quantity, hide quality and milk quality, but it's mother's meat quantity, meat quality and breeding. The idea is to make it viable to create specialist breeding populations (breeds if you will) where you focus on just one or two secondary stats that you don't really consider much in the current systdem, and then to breed these with your mainline quality-focused stock to hopefully get the best of both in your new mixed breed. Of course, working on all the possible breed at once will only really be doable by major factions, and even for them it would be a headache, so instead we might see people specializing in different breeds and actually trading livestock to get decent score on stats they're not focusing.
Bottleneck