[Feature] Garrison Domestic Animals into the Corral to get a <ResourceTrickle> of Food

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I wish we could have made it like a storage place for animal "relics" you capture around the map. 

Still can

[alre]

isn't this feature in the game already since last alpha? does someone use it? 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

8 minutes ago, alre said:

isn't this feature in the game already since last alpha? does someone use it? 

No, I mean you find sheep, goats, cattle on the map; they become yours; then you corral them for the trickle. 

[alre]

right. I was referring to this comment by @real_tabasco_sauce:

13 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

I am a little bit concerned about this feature.

If a corral can both garrison livestock and train livestock, then one could use autoqueue to establish an exponentially growing amount of unraidable, 0 pop food economy.

This wouldn't be great in the early game (I think) but later in the game, making more and more corrals and autoqueing to fill each one from one another could result in a disastrous gameplay consequences.

Players could make dozens of corrals just to garrison each one. Then, there is much more pop space for more champion cavalry AND it is economy that can't be raided, at least like women can be raided.

I think if the trickle is low enough to avoid this, then it will be weak/unused and if it is higher, then it will probably be used as above which I don't think is the intended use case of this feature.

 

[sternstaub]

15 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

I think if the trickle is low enough to avoid this, then it will be weak/unused and if it is higher, then it will probably be used as above which I don't think is the intended use case of this feature.

Hmm. There'd be 2 ways to use it if there was a gar effect:

1) produce and kill animals -> in my opinion makes sense with early cavalry tactics -> this requires workers, we already have it and it is fine. 
2) slowly harvest food from animals, like milk. This is what we discuss.

The aim of this would be that there are different ways to use the corral in different situations, making it more versatile, probably. I have tried some corral gameplay and must say:
You need to have some amount of fields to support the creation of animals. It is not fit as the sole source of food. Also, you cannot have your cavalry play farming game in your base all time. So, i would say that the effectiveness of the corral should be kind of fluctuating, with a more and a less efficient way of usage.

1) When your cavalry is at home, you may quickly create and kill animals. For that, you place a food investement and get back more than you staked. We already have that. It might be desirable to make the corral a food dropsite, or to add a tech to do this. 

Because of the issue mentioned by real_tabasco_sauce, animals should not be created infinitley, without any way of "disposal" / killing them. They should spawn sometime and die sometime, not just decorate the buildings. As said above, there should be fluctuation and the needs of management to it, instead of just having an "afk res spam" method. The latter would be unintended, that is true.

2) When you are engaged in fighting later on, you still have all the animals at home, and they are to no use. So, they will not be disposed in this case [==what we have now] either. This would be the sitiuation to switch the corrals and animals into some kind of "low profit mode" [==what we don't have now; the very object of this discussion, so to say]. Maybe like this: the corral generates food for animals within, but the food has to be gathered by women and brought to a farmstead. This would not make sense with the above tech suggestion (dropsite), but there could be other tech to make it more interesting. Higher storage in the corral for example.
Another option is to not garrison the animals, but women into the corral, which then gains a trickle effect for nearby animals. But might be problematic performance-wise.

 

Probably a simple linear trickle effect is not the best solution here, after considering what @real_tabasco_sauce wrote.

 

P.S.: Animal units are limited to 50, it is not unlimited.

Edited February 25, 2023 by sternstaub

[real_tabasco_sauce]

18 minutes ago, sternstaub said:

Animal units are limited to 50, it is not unlimited.

Yes, I forgot about that part.

I think its fine.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 hours ago, alre said:

right. I was referring to this comment by @real_tabasco_sauce:

Oh, best to quote next time.