Overall the default pasture without bonuses should have a similar yield and wood-food conversion rate than farms. Then you can give it to other nomadic civs (Mongols Huns Cumans) without fear of breaking the balance.
Really want the Pasture to replace the Mill also as the Mill is for farming peoples.
Allow the yurt also to receive food from other types of food gatherer, then move the upgrades from Mill to it and introduce a new Dark Age tech that cost exactly 100 wood there to unlock the animals otherwise it’s just equal to a Mill with 1-tile gap surrounding it.
In terms of gameplay, the core concept seems to be that pastures can be used by two villagers simultaneously rather than just one. Anything else seems secondary to that.
Thematically, the core concept is mostly visual, i.e. the villagers are gathering from grazing animals rather than crops. One could argue that the work rate is related to that, because food from animals usually collects quicker than food from farms. Hunters normally have a high carry capacity, so the trickle of food actually goes against the existing game logic.
So I think advantages 2 and 3 should stay, and 5 should arguably stay as well. Hence I voted 1, 5 and 7 (although they wouldn’t necessarily need all three nerfs).
Pastures are thematically quite weird. Why do they have wild animals rather than domestic ones? Why can they be used by two villagers rather than one? Why can they be rebuilt in exactly the same place, when actual nomads move their livestock around different grazing sites? etc.
One way to do that would be that pastures, once built, are first inaccessible for harvest and take some time to reach their food capacity, after which they are harvested. Herders automatically move to a pasture that’s ready.
The issue is it would be a nightmare to micromanage having to constantly move new pastures around…
That’s right. You know my point.
The player can build the First Pasture near by the chickens or next to the berries/shore fish as if it were a Mill, and later research the tech at a price of just 100 wood to unlock the animals and turn the Pasture a Farm-equivalent buildings like now.
I suddenly come up with another idea…
When the food of a Pasture run out, the Pasture would become a “Pasture Yurt Wagon”.
The Pasture Yurt Wagon would work like a wagon unit in AoE3, that is, just click the button and put the foundation at a place and the wagon would go to there and disappear as if it turned into the foundation, then the foundation would be automatically under construction at a extremely slow rate.
You can drop the foundation wherever you want to rebuild at, same place or another place. Click the button, click the place, and the Wagon would charge you 100 wood and go there to make the Pasture built.
If the auto-“reseed” is turned on, the Wagon would just immediately build a new Pasture at the same place, with no moving, so practically the wagon wouldn’t appear.
The only problem is that the herders would probably be idle when the Pasture become a wagon. Maybe we can let them automatically follow the wagon that used to be the Pasture they had worked at and automatically join the construction to make it built faster once the wagon turn into a foundation.
But eventually I don’t know whether we need to have the things like this. I mean, now it visually very nomadic, which has already made it a great addition to the game, though it essentially still equivalent to the Farm.
Yes, I’m not actually suggesting that pastures should have some deliberate poor QoL feature – just pointing out that representing herding via a stationary building feels a bit off. Thematically I prefer the Tatars’ sheep/herdable bonus, which feels like a different way of representing the same thing that fits better within the game logic.
They emphasized domestication in the upgrades, so I think that is acceptable.
But since they are Argali and Ibexes, I would expect them to reasonably carry 140 food like wild Argali and Ibexes, and naturally decay like all animals. As long as we make the two herders on a Pasture rather gathering from one body than separately, the amount of food that would be gathered should not differ too much than now.
That would still be predominantly agricultural towns there, with a large area occupied by farmland.
There is thematically fine for the Tatars, and even for the Khitans, to have some degree of agriculture. But for some of the more nomadic civs, like the Huns, Mongols, or potentially Gokturks, having large amounts of farms would be visually inconsistent with their identity. Although Pasture is stationary, essentially a Farm equivalent, it allows civs to visually get rid of agriculture.