Livestock / Farming balance

[openoliv]

Hi,

I'm playing multiplayer since a couple of months and I think that some balancing should be done about livestock :

At the end of a game we can see some statistics. In particular the food type used.

I NEVER saw anyone under 90% of veggy found.

Which, I guess, means that nobody uses livestock. The non-veggy food comes from hunting I guess.

Either we are all missing something about livestock (maybe some more details/documentation are needed about it)

or it needs more added value so that we feel the need to use it.

Regards,

Olivier

[Lion.Kanzen]

This mostly discuss about corral sometime ago we have a proposition to garrison sheeps in order to increase meat. The hunting, there are a patch about that. All parches need be testee before can be added to main game.

[Prodigal Son]

I used the corral and cavalry to gather from the sheep trained there for a while in multiplayer, in combination with a rather small number of farms. It was extremely effective after some point in the game, having a huge food income (that constantly booms when you start being able to train bigger and bigger batches of sheep) gathered by just 2-3 cavalrymen. It needed too much attention though, especially in the early to mid game and I couldn't cope so well against most decent players, so soon I reverted back to the lazy ways of only farming. But in long games that you're not under heavy pressure, it should become increasingly superior over farming. As the Mauryans I was able to support huge numbers of food-draining elephants with this strategy while having a bigger army and more spare workers for the needed metal as well.

Have in mind that it's function will change though, I believe to something like a steady source of food from each sheep garrisoned in the corral, rather than killing the sheep and gathering from them and it will get balanced afterwards. Edit: Just noticed Lion already mentioned this.

Edited April 3, 2014 by Prodigal Son

[niektb]

Currrently (maybe this changes in the future) the rates are specified as follows for normal citizen soldiers, where higher is better:

<food.fruit>0.5</food.fruit><food.grain>0.25</food.grain><food.meat>1</food.meat>

As you can see, hunting is 4 times faster than farming, a pretty nice boost, I'd say. The counterpart however is that you need to pay more attention to, therefore best suited to get an early game boost.

The citizen cavalry is even more faster!

<food.meat>5</food.meat>

Edited April 4, 2014 by niektb

[scythetwirler]

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1907 contains the current discussion on that.