Corrals

[illumanatee]

I have examined the use of Corrals and I have noticed that it's only 25% more efficient than farming at best (resource cost included).
Take into account the extra management it takes, initial resource investment, the time it takes to create the sheep, having to build a corral, ... for 25% extra yield, it's just not worth it.
Nobody will ever make use of Corrals in the current state because of the hassle it takes opposed to automatic farming for only 25% more efficiency.
My suggestion is to make sheep yield 4x more food than they do as of now (so that they are double as efficient as farming) and to halve the cost.

Edited December 31, 2015 by illumanatee

[niektb]

You should use cavalry to gather when using corrals.

[illumanatee]

You should use cavalry to gather when using corrals.

As far as I know cavalry does not have a sheep gathering bonus.

And I did all my testing with my sheep literally right next to a farmstead, so unit speed wouldn't have mattered a single bit in my experiment.

Edited December 31, 2015 by illumanatee

[xfs]

Under optimal conditions, a corral takes 250 food to produce 5 sheep of 500 food in 81 seconds (3.1 food/s). Cavalry meat gathering speed is 5.

Under optimal conditions, a farm with 5 women outputs 5*0.5*(1+0.15+0.15+0.25)=3.875 food/second.

The problem with corrals and cavs is once the sheep are all finished before the next batch is out, all cavs become idle and will not proceed gathering the next batch of sheep.

[illumanatee]

Under optimal conditions, a corral takes 250 food to produce 5 sheep of 500 food in 81 seconds (3.1 food/s). Cavalry meat gathering speed is 5.

Under optimal conditions, a farm with 5 women outputs 5*0.5*(1+0.15+0.15+0.25)=3.875 food/second.

The problem with corrals and cavs is once the sheep are all finished before the next batch is out, all cavs become idle and will not proceed gathering the next batch of sheep.

Even if you have 5 sheep, the cav will not start gathering from a new sheep once it's done with it's current one unless you shift click on the other sheep with the cav.

In my experiment I used 5 women who constantly gather from sheep directly next to a farmstead and it only produced 25% more (sheep cost included) than if those same women were farming.

[illumanatee]

Even if you have 5 sheep, the cav will not start gathering from a new sheep once it's done with it's current one unless you shift click on the other sheep with the cav.

In my experiment I used 5 women who constantly gather from sheep directly next to a farmstead and it only produced 25% more (sheep cost included) than if those same women were farming.

Forget what I said, the cav does gather from the next sheep once it's done with it's current one. Also the cav does gather from sheep faster than women. But yeah the problem is that once the sheep are all finished before the next batch is out, all cavs become idle and will not proceed gathering the next batch of sheep. So increasing the sheep batch creation time would be a solution to this problem.

EDIT: if you make shift-click sheep batches, then the batch does finish on time. Still I feel like the return the corrals give is simply not worth it.

Edited December 31, 2015 by illumanatee

[niektb]

A little of practice, a couple (say 3) of corrals and a couple of cavalry can really give a boost to your food. 1 cavalry gathers 5 food/s, compare that to a female citizen that gathers 0.5 food/s -> 10x faster.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Corral supposed to have other feature that make it a lot different. I started work on it, even had it working at one point, but team did not support me. They had other priority. So we wait.

Corral and sheep supposed to work like the temple and relic of AOK. Capture a gaia sheep, horse, goat, pig, or cattle, and garrison it into the corral. Then you will gain a free trickle of food resource (or in the case of horse, your cavalry are cheaper or train faster).

I had the 2nd part woeking in my mod with the help of a team member who had a patch sitting in Trac. I had to copypasta some code from his patch into the UnitAI.js file to allow the animals to be garrison. A simpel garrisoned aura and some tweak to the corral template to make the animals show up completed the trickle effect.

Only problems were:

1. The animals still performed their "wander" animation and pathing. The actor stayed at the prop point and would "wander in place" but the actual entity would wander outside the corral. lol. I could see the selection rings wandering around. So, a new state need to be made to stop the animal from wander or an existing state need called.

2. Gaia animal cannot be captured yet. I try to givee them capture point, but the soldier always stab the animal, not capture it.

This would be very nice feature for team to implement for this alpha and is super simple.

Edited January 1, 2016 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Stan`]

The capture not working is probably due to the fact it's slaughter not attack

Id like to see that patche AFAIK it was deleted from the ticket

Edited January 1, 2016 by stanislas69

[Alekusu]

In late game, I think that deleting all the women and the farms (50 women for 10 farms) and using 5 corrals with maybe 10 cav give you a pop advantage on your enemy (it's a pain in the *** to manage though)

Having 40 more champs than your enemy wins the late game.

I'm trying to find a way to use corals in early build orders but so far it's just more micro management and I cannot reach 140 pop in 10 mins using corals. I still need practice.

[Mr.Monkey]

I agree with this, corals have almost no usage.

A few suggestions:

• Corals are self sustaining sources of food, similar to the fields
• Corals spawn farmers/breeders instead of sheep, the more farmers you have the faster food production you have.
• In the first stages you have a limitation on how many farmers you can have on one coral (at first for example 5, like the fields). Every phase you have a new upgrade that increases the size of the coral allowing more farmers to be garrisoned (therefore they can farm more sheep).
• Various upgrades allow the food production to increase (better tools, better farmers etc)

This way corals are more of a late game strategy which, if you fully upgrade and if you have a coral fully garrisoned, it should provide as much food as the typical 8-9 field set up does. However because of the expensive upgrades and farmers, this would not be a good early game strategy. the benefit is that it takes up less of your max population, the catch is that it is expensive to max it out.

This would make the corals much more useful, and they would be much less of a nuisance to use.

Extra point:

• An interesting upgrade would be that instead of breeding sheep you breed cattle which increases food production by X% and armour upgrades cost Y% less food/metal(?) (leather). This would only be available in the 3rd phase to maybe some civs, mainly middle eastern ones such as Ptolmies, Persians and maybe Mauryans?

Edited January 4, 2016 by Mr.Monkey