So, one of the beefs (pun intended) I had in legacy was the fact that livestock was a very tedious mechanic. Yes it meant that you had to login and maintain your troughs, otherwise they'd all starve to death. So I don't want to see the activity requirement become entirely mute. I also understand that if animals run out of food in troughs they'll still consume grassland like they did in legacy. One thing that bothers me is that in real life herding animals across large pastures is a viable way to grow livestock for human consumption and in reality, it tends to be industrial farming where we have large amounts of food input.
What I would like to see is an improvement to grazing and possibly the addition of some herding mechanics, the purpose of this post isn't to remove feed troughs or change them in any way. Here's some thoughts I have:
[*]Feeding livestock with grass terrain should be a viable option as long as the area is large enough and there aren't too many livestock. Not only would this justify some of the large areas that some villages take up and never use, but it would also give more reasons to actually plant grass as a renewable source of food for livestock.
[*]Livestock should be able to go up in quality eating just grass in place of fodder providing the grass quality was higher, perhaps we could have the grass quality be based on some formula relating to soil quality & seeds planted with. This means still that if you want the best livestock that you need to feed them yourself with high quality fodder or have a good grasslands for them.
[*]Perhaps to still maintain the 'activity' portion of this type of grazing, we could have weeds that need to be removed or increased grass regrowth when there aren't any animals present, so herding animals to a different pasture would be useful and serve a greater purpose. Perhaps add in some way to move tamed livestock in larger numbers while on a horse.
Just some thoughts, would be interested to see what other people think.