Hello, I think adding chickens as a food source for some civs might add a good medieval vibe to the upcoming game. I don’t know if they already have it, but it might be fun to add it if they haven’t.
So, here is what I suggest:
One new building, specifically for the chickens, or combine chickens into a livestock unit building.
The building could work two ways, one way or the other. You could build a coop and click on it, which will bring up the building options, to produce a chicken and/or add a tech for faster fattening or better egg production and won’t be able to select the unit, or, you could be able to free-range the chickens (not in a coop), and select them to go to a building and lay eggs. And, you can get villagers to meat-harvest the chickens, kind of like sheep in AOE3.
This idea is completely open to change, but I thought it might be nice to include. Again, I haven’t seen enough footage to know if there already in the game or not, but please leave ideas in the comments.
or to keep things simpler, they can simply add tiny groups of chickens instead of the sheep, as in 3 that represent 1 sheep… and have them behave as a tiny flock, but moving in unison, in a similar way to how we have cows or sheep in aoe2 and they still keep them balanced
Yes, good idea. I meant to include that idea in the original post, but forgot when I was typing lol. I think that would be great because chickens are much smaller than sheep, plus that means that if it was only individual chickens, it would need a bigger hitbox to be worth it. And with all of the sizing issues already (like the arrows), it would only be worth it to group them together…
I do not see anything particularly jarring about this mechanic, and it seems exactly like the way Celts train Sacred Deer to harvest/sacrifice in AoEO from their Sacred Grove building.
Adding a new way to produce food would obviously affect the balance of the game (more the internal balance of civs and their economy than the civ v. civ external balance that is often discussed). In this way, adding chicken buildings to produce food to most (or all) civs seems like it would unnecessarily clog up building rosters. Every change in the game should be made by first identifying what problem you are trying to fix. Presently, we have no reason to believe that civs need more food. And only after we have agreed that they do, we would then need to ask whether chicken buildings are the best answer.
So for these reasons, I am skeptical of this idea. But perhaps giving a new civ this unique kind of mechanic that balances out by reducing some other mechanics available to that civ (perhaps that civ is worse at gathering a different resource or has worse farms/is otherwise worse at gathering food and/or its units require more food than most other civs, etc.)
Based on what I have seen publicly revealed, the absolute last thing these civs need is giving them even more shared buildings or units.
Thanks for your advice. I think that if I thought about this earlier, like before the closed beta, I might of gotten the idea interested with devs, but now that the closed beta is over, I think they won’t be adding anything else until after initial release. Then after that, they might add the idea in an expansion pack. But like you said, there is already enough food options already, so we might not see it in any AOE games now…