Cow quality is too slow.

[Dataslycer]

Summary:

Cows are livestocks that gives us several things:

Milk- This is the primary usage, mostly with cheese and butter (mostly for buttered cave bulbs). The former, however, relies very little on the curd quality in which I will discuss in a future post.

Meat- Cow Chorizo are a source of pure

Intestine- Not as useful if you have high survival and can hunt level X bears.

Bone- Same as above

Hide- Same as above

Problem:

When a cow gives birth, the attribute of each of the calf is the (average of the respective attribute of the parents) +- 5, the same incremental system used by the crop farming system. This is dandy for crops since you can be able to mass them and sort out the stronger crops and replant them to ensure a growing quality. You do not have to luxury when it comes to cows. They take severals days to produce one and, unlike crops, they come out at a very slow rate. In addition to this there is also the variance factor that may cause the desired attribute to increase or decrease (in which you will need to cull the weaker one). All of this is assuming that the player is able to maining a constant full trough especially during the high fooder-consumption pregnancy stage.

Because of this, the current rate of the quality increase of cow is entirely too slow compare to many things such as metal, equipment, leather, and even wood and pumpkins! I made a little c++ program that simulates the growth of the quality of the cow (assuming player is responsible enough for feeding cows and culling weaker Q ones). The c++ source code is available upon PM. Upon usage, here are some of the example results that I receive upon running the program. Now I do not know how many days it takes for a cow to give birth so I am assuming 4.5 days for the sake of this topic.

It takes an average of 23 generations to reach q40. (103.5 days)
It takes an average of 60 generations to reach q100. (270 days)

In 15 generations, the average quality is 29. (67.5 days)
In 30 generations, the average quality is 49. (135 days)

Note: Results in-game may vary due to randomness.

Upon results, there is a bigger chance of a reset than a high quality milk. This needs to change.

Solution:

Instead of a variance factor of -5 to 5. You could set it as 0 to 5 to cut the required time to increase quality by half. Because of the fact that you would need a cow to be pregnant in the first place to obtain milk. This will allow people to start actively trying to get the higher quality as opposed to having 1 bull with a harem.

Also an alternative or even adding with the above mentioned one, you can have the attribute have a chance to increment by 1 ( plus or minus based on fodder quality as opposed to cow attribute) each time they eat from the fodder. This allows the casual players to increase the quality of their cows so they are not forced to constantly fill fodder on a binging pregnant cow.

The above solutions are not set in stones as suggestion and can be molded. Other suggestions are welcome as well to address this problem.

[Potjeh]

You're forgetting that calves also need to grow up before they can breed, so it's actually 14 days per generation rather than 4.

Anyway, I think the best solution is to make the variance -5/+20 (it's actually -2/+5 right now). The increased range of the random numbers would mean that prize bulls would be very rare and thus very valuable, and people might even pay to have their cows impregnated by one.

[Flame]

ah..cow quality don't grow simply eating good food O__o...??
...uh....and why not?

[burgingham]

Very nice post and agreed. I would like to add that in my eyes it might be useful to shorten the pregnancy and growth cycles of cows to make meatproduction more meaningful. Especially if we ever get other uses than sausages for meat. To not punish newbies and players with not so much playing time at hand, you would have to decrease the food requirements too.

[Dataslycer]

I feel the high maximum increment of +20 would cause the quality to grow too fast which may be overkill (reminds me of village authority change). The net change of -5 to +20 is an average of 7.5 per generation as opposed to 2.5 per generation for my proposed solution. This might be too slow still especially so I had added the second solution as an addition possibly. The alternative would be a less extreme variance of your proposed solution, perhaps -5 to 12?

You're forgetting that calves also need to grow up before they can breed, so it's actually 14 days per generation rather than 4.

Not sure if I had worded it clearly so I probably should clarify a bit. I was refering to the rate of calves the cow can churn out, not quite the maturity rate though I hope I did not quite misunderstood you as well.

Very nice post and agreed. I would like to add that in my eyes it might be useful to shorten the pregnancy and growth cycles of cows to make meatproduction more meaningful. Especially if we ever get other uses than sausages for meat. To not punish newbies and players with not so much playing time at hand, you would have to decrease the food requirements too.

That could also be a possible solution as well as to directly influence the rate of calves born as well as reduce the amount of fodders to compensate for the same rate of consumption. You want me to post that under solution with your name as credit?

[Potjeh]

If raising meat quantity was faster, there'd be no need for shorter generations. I'd rather have fewer cows that give more meat each.

And yeah, +20 was just a random number, exact value should be determined through some kind of analysis.

Also, the pace at which cows can churn out calves is irrelevant, since you can't improve q by using the same cow over and over again.

[Dataslycer]

Also, the pace at which cows can churn out calves is irrelevant, since you can't improve q by using the same cow over and over again.

I would have to partially disagree with that. It doesn't matter if you got a good calf out and will need to wait for it to grow. It does matter if you end up with an inferior calf and need to wait for a better offspring.

[Flame]

i'm simply shocked.

a child have base q higher than his father........but if i give to father meat 10 q and to child meat q 40, is totaly crazy that each one don't grow or low his quality.

the biology..the..the natural law..the...


.....i'm shocked.
i need to play ffx now. NOW.
Gosh.

[Dataslycer]

It's called Evolution, Flame .

[Potjeh]

I would have to partially disagree with that. It doesn't matter if you got a good calf out and will need to wait for it to grow. It does matter if you end up with an inferior calf and need to wait for a better offspring.

The assumption is that we're dealing with a large village that has a big breeding program. When you have 50 cows churning out calves, it's pretty much guaranteed you'll get *some* good rolls.