So I was minding my own business at work today when the idea hit me hard:
Should livestock pens generate 0.80 worth of food per second passively?
This has worked well for making taverns and churches be seen more in the average supremacy game.
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Absolutely not. Adding a trickle to every underperforming building is horrible design.
Churches and Taverns have a build limit so itās passable for them. In the case of Churches, the XP trickle is a good solution. In the case of Taverns, they shouldnāt have a trickle by default. Itās more of a bandaid fix that makes people build them, but not necessarily use them.
One option for more viable Livestock Pens could be to change the Ranching card to enable them to passively generate cows. And normally training cows could just be enabled by default in Age 3.
Pens could also maybe have a milking/shearing upgrade to let animals work at them like a shrine to generate food/coin.
2 Likes
Food trickle is not a good idea (see Inca estate wood trickle. They need to add an unnecessary build limit)
Food trickle depending on garrisoned livestock would be more reasonable.
Also add alerts for fattened animals, and villagers should consider fattened animals as crates (gather automatically when idle).
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Only if you give them a population cost equal to the benefit.
For example if the cattle generate the same as a villager then the pens should cost 10 population and get their own upgrades.
They would basically become a resource production tool just like farms and plantations.
Personally, I think they should produce half the resources that a villager produces and cost 5 population.
There is a soft cap to livestock pens anyway, thereās no point in having more than 3.
I believe itās a better idea to have cattle doing that, instead of the building itself. And for it to require a sizable upfront investment. We already discussed a similar idea in a previous topic to mixed reception.
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A trickle based on livestock assigned to the pen could actually make sense (representing milk and cheese production). But IDK about the balance.
Thereās two reasons people dont use the pen:
- Takes a lot of attention
- Long payback time
Iām fine with the first, but for the second I would love to see the devs add chickens like WoL so you could start making resources back way quicker.
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I think my proposal works similar to how the Italian Lombard works, where each cow/sheep would function as a āmini-Lombardā. Reinvesting would be similar to creating the animals you have killed, but it would just be as if you were feeding and maintaining them. The pens could generate resources, but only with animals āgarrisonedā in them. [Suggestion--rework] š <Double Purpose Cattle of Europe> š
A potential rework for the livestock pen could be that settlers which are tasked at it will go next to the pen while there are not fully fatten animals, increasing the fattening speed and when the animals are fattened the settlers automatically go gather from them and when they are done go to the pen again. If there are no animals anymore the building would slowly generate new ones while the settlers are tasked at this.
It could ofcourse also be integratted in a card that the pen automatically generates animals.
However the pen should not simply become another mill as basically any automatization will make it another mill building but most likely better.
I think the Livestock Pen is too expensive.
Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese and Africans have a Livestock Pen that does other things (farms, market, houses etc). Itās almost a free building.
Europeans have to pay 200 wood just to get herdablesā¦
I thought to myself after I captured some cows on a map. I wanted to fatten them up, but between that and building a barracks, the choice is quickly madeā¦
PS: We should make a compilation of all the threads talking about improving this building, I didnāt really know where to put my humble comment ^^ā
Personally I use livestock to bank food when food is high and there are still huntables,
and as a way to boost food income in the late game, mills are just too slow and I donāt want to waste pop space on vils when I can have more military units.
If it were 100 wood it would be an equitable choice in those early moments.
The problem isnāt livestock pens, but the ranching card, for most civs itās the only way to produce cattle (for spanish and ports itās lamas). unlike other economic cards you donāt get an immediate benefit, you have to spend food to get the boon and you donāt get a shipment of units.