Butter Too Damn Expensive? Aye or Nay

[niltrias]

Hmm, since we didn't get what I asked for in this latest update, let me reformulate the request: let cows feed infinitely on grass tiles, but not produce any milk without proper feed. This would serve well for letting you take a break without letting you get infinite milk with zero effort. And you can't conduct breeding without feed, so I really don't see how it would be exploitable.

I like this. Make the upgrading of livestock time-dependent, not the simple production of basic wool and milk.

[loftar]

let cows feed infinitely on grass tiles, but not produce any milk without proper feed. This would serve well for letting you take a break without letting you get infinite milk with zero effort.

I dunno. I do agree that livestock is too time-dependent, and that it should (probably) be possible to take more-or-less indefinite breaks from them, just like with farming (though some kind of decay-like mechanism probably wouldn't hurt either, so that inactive settlements decay properly, even with livestock).

On the other hand, that particular mechanism would still allow the raising of virtually infinite stocks of cattle, which both seems kind of unreasonable and wouldn't be too good on server performance. I would like to see that livestock maintenance, somehow, scales with diminishing returns with the number of cattle kept so as to keep their population withing reasonable bounds.

I haven't been able to think of any way to combine those two without conflict, however. It should also be mentioned that I support the idea of grazing being, at least in optimal circumstances, better than feeding on fodder from a trough. I'm still trying to formulate a system which allows for both that, and for a better system of crop farming.

[Potjeh]

It doesn't allow infinite raising. Calves will starve without milk. Maybe you could even make them temporarily infertile if they don't have proper feed.

As for decay, have cattle die of old age. Let us see their age first, of course.

[loftar]

It doesn't allow infinite raising. Calves will starve without milk. Maybe you could even make them temporarily infertile if they don't have proper feed.

True as that may be, you can still raise more calves indefinitely just by keeping one or a few cows lactating. While population won't scale exponentially with time, it will still scale linearly.

As for decay, have cattle die of old age. Let us see their age first, of course.

That would still make it kind of the same (in terms of game mechanics, that is) as having them die of starvation with just a bit of hunger adjustment -- while a cow wouldn't require constant feeding per se, a herd would require constant breeding, which would, in turn, require feeding.

[Avu]

Pretty please can you add traveling with cows? I cannot defend my cows from the guy that killed more than 20 of them (who has ancestor bonus on his side and doesn't care about dying again) so maybe allow me to move them somewhere else where it might take him longer to find and to kill them?

[loftar]

Pretty please can you add traveling with cows?

I'd love to. It's just very unclear how to do that in any way that isn't entirely ugly code-wise.

I'm also a bit worried that it would make it far too easy to steal cattle, truth be told.

[Potjeh]

Hmm, obviously cows should require a certain minimum of grass tiles. But it does get fuzzy with overlapping feeding radii etc. The obvious solution is to have grass constantly grow at a certain rate, and have only tall grass tiles usable as food for cows (they could also double as a source of hay). But as you said in that suggestion thread of mine, that doesn't mesh well with the engine.

As for age, well, it should obviously give you more time than feeding does. A cow should live like two RL months (if someone doesn't log in in that long, he's not really playing any more). Another option is to just make them go feral if they go without human interaction (through feeding, milking etc.) for some set period of time, and then have these feral cows disappear as normal aurochsen.

[loftar]

Hmm, obviously cows should require a certain minimum of grass tiles.

That is probably a reasonable analysis, indeed. While overlapping feeding radii could be a problem in the naïve implementation, it could probably be implemented rather well by simply looking at the number of nearby cows and calculating some reasonable factor. That is worth giving some thought; especially so because it would also fulfill my wishes of making it super-linearly harder to take care of a growing number of cattle. The greatest problem might be to visualize it some way that makes it possible to determine why some cows are left hungry.

Another option is to just make them go feral if they go without human interaction (through feeding, milking etc.) for some set period of time, and then have these feral cows disappear as normal aurochsen.

Interesting thought. I will bear it in mind.

[Avu]

Pretty please can you add traveling with cows?

I'd love to. It's just very unclear how to do that in any way that isn't entirely ugly code-wise.

I'm also a bit worried that it would make it far too easy to steal cattle, truth be told.

Do it the simple way. Make them liftable... And stealing them will just be like stealing anything else not easier nor harder. Like I said right now I cannot defend my cows due to other systems you haven't gotten around too. Allowing traveling with them will open up trade and help with their security a little.