Why A Breeder Needs So Many Animals

[kazkid 23]

Thanks Stacia...Knew I had read it then posted it to notebook to peruse again at a later time...then couldn't find the OP again..Best explanation I have seen....!

One of the things I haven't seen really addressed is why people keep so many animals. I have been breeding horses for about a year. On Deli I have bred 5 speed horses from the original spawned horses without the use of any fo spells. Here is my take on it and suggestions for fixing the problem:

1. Its takes 40 animals to skill grooming if you want to grind the AH skill nonstop due to the 45 minuite timer. Its easier to do this then groom wait groom wait so people will continue to do it.

Remove the timer. FIxes that reason.

2. You can't breed parents, children and siblings. Means you keep more horses. Maybe not many but you keep more.

Remove the additional bad trait for breeding related animals.

3. It takes 5 irl weeks before a horse is old enough to breed. I also never ride a horse till its mature cuz it just looks stupid. Never seen anyone else ride one either. So, I breed at 5 but don't really use them till they are 8 weeks. 2 months of waiting for them to get old enough to be really usuable.

Make a horse adolescent at 3 weeks, breedable, and the size of a mature horse.

4. Now here's the big one. At AH 50 then at 60 it takes massive amounts of breeding to produce 5 speed horses. After 8 months of keeping about 30 horses pregnant at all times I have 18 5 speeds, 12 of them are still too young to do anything with. This number was due to the randomness of bad traits. I killed 80% of what I bred. The only thing the skill level seems to effect is number of traits, not whether or not you got good traits or bad traits.. I am breeding for 5 people to each have 2 5 speeds. Then I need to breed enough to replace the ones killed or lost. So, to get keep us in usuable horses I will need 10 breeding stock plus 10 growing old enough to be used plus several spare.

Getting bad traits should be tied to AH skill so the higher you are the less chance you have of bad traits and the lower you are the more bad traits you will get regardless of the traits of the horses you are breeding. Right now anyone at AH 30 can breed fleeter, lightening, carry more and have a pretty fast horse. I know of no other crafting skill where a 30 quality anything has any real value. A AH 50 should have very few bad traits show up.

Most breeders would be quite happy to have smaller herds but the numbers you have to breed to get good horses makes us keep far more than we want.

I think the whole enchant grass nerf is to get abandoned horses to die so there are less horses. The above fixes and expanded disease will fix that problem more long term then nerfing enchanted grass

I would add to the above the math that with 5 possible speed traits....that is equal to 120 potential combinations....x 4 colors is 480 combinations...one male one female of each is nearing 1k horses...then add beyond that desired fighting traits and the picture of combinations is ungodly huge....

Edited June 7, 2012 by kazkid

[Stacia 0]

Hi Kazkid,

I wrote this, thank you for your kind words

It was posted on the upcoming changes to diseases thread in City Hall.

I hope to see a longer term fix for the "you horrible horse hoarders" problem.

Good luck on Celebration!

Stacia

[BrQQQ 2,854]

If animals become breedable much quicker and you won't even have to do anything about inbreeding, that can also mean that people will have an easier time breeding even more animals. I understand the suggestion comes with a good intention, but it will kind of work both ways (which is also the case right now).

[kazkid 23]

If animals become breedable much quicker and you won't even have to do anything about inbreeding, that can also mean that people will have an easier time breeding even more animals. I understand the suggestion comes with a good intention, but it will kind of work both ways (which is also the case right now).

I could see the faster breeding...but that could lead to even quicker overpopulation imho...by irresponsible breeders keeping all...or 'giving away' undesirables.....inbreeding? IDK FO's pretty useless now..take need for genesis away and what they got left? LOL...

[Keldun 335]

1: it takes 40 animals, not 40 horses to skill up and 40 is a reasonable amount for any kind of farm. A lot of people that breed have more anyway, simply because they want. Problem are those animals that can't be groomed, so those people need to keep extra to skill.

The timer is a bit in the way of those people that don't want as much animals though, that's true. But then again, they could take a brake to tend to the fields or something, there is no need to grind AH constanly for hours at a time. Whats the difference between grinding AH for three hours then doing eg farming for three hours, or doing three times half an hour of AH and half an hour of farming?

2: You only need three horses to be save from inbreeding as it doesn't affect grandparents at all. When you do any kind of breeding you are likely to have way more anyway, so this point is no longer noticable.

3. Agreed, the longer the breeding takes the more stock we want to make it flow.

4. I am not sure what you are trying to say here as I haven't got experience with selective breeding yet.

Are you using parents with bad traits and are mad that your skill doesn't keep them from the fowls.

Or are you using clean Parents and have you fowls randomly show up with a lot of bad traits aynway?

If it is the former, just get a better stock, if it is the latter I agree the code needs to be changed.

Edited June 7, 2012 by Keldun

[Ayes 3,715]

Solution: Rolf should recode all horses to make them equal to 5 speed horses with only desirable traits; thus the breeding of horses for these purposes would be eliminated and in turn the "need" to keep excessive amounts of horses would be eliminated as well. Then people could only keep a few horses for different desired colors and once they had those horses use the "care for" option on them to preserve them in perpetuity. As an added reduction to the "need" to keep more than the desired horse colors, Rolf should make "cared for" horses immune to any damage from other aggro mobs.

With the implimentation of these above changes the horse hording situation would be resolved as there would be no valid reason to keep more horses that there are available colors of them. To enforce this situation, Rolf should code it so that any horse that is not "cared for" will die once it hits the mature stage. The number of "cared for" horses available to players would continue on the present basis according to AH skill, with the exception that a new player would have to reach 15 AH skill to "care for" their first animal to prevent alts from being easily used to horde excessive animals by the main account. Problem resolved! Next.

=Ayes=

[Wraithglow 787]

Solution: Rolf should recode all horses to make them equal to 5 speed horses with only desirable traits; thus the breeding of horses for these purposes would be eliminated and in turn the "need" to keep excessive amounts of horses would be eliminated as well. Then people could only keep a few horses for different desired colors and once they had those horses use the "care for" option on them to preserve them in perpetuity. As an added reduction to the "need" to keep more than the desired horse colors, Rolf should make "cared for" horses immune to any damage from other aggro mobs.

With the implimentation of these above changes the horse hording situation would be resolved as there would be no valid reason to keep more horses that there are available colors of them. To enforce this situation, Rolf should code it so that any horse that is not "cared for" will die once it hits the mature stage. The number of "cared for" horses available to players would continue on the present basis according to AH skill, with the exception that a new player would have to reach 15 AH skill to "care for" their first animal to prevent alts from being easily used to horde excessive animals by the main account. Problem resolved! Next.

=Ayes=

similarly, lets make it so all tools and weapons are instantly made at 99ql with 99 in every enchant, and never take damage. This way each player only needs 1 of each tool.

It's a silly idea because it removes a significant (and very enjoyable) part of the game.

Here's my view of things:

I keep many horses (30-50) not because it's hard to skill AH (i very rarely do more than one lap of the horses grooming), not because it's hard to get 5-speed horses (at 58AH i get them probably 1 in 3 times), not because inbreeding is a problem (like was said, 3-4 horses is enough to avoid that), not because they don't live long enough (i don't even remember the last time a horse died of old age), and not because they have a long pregnancy.

It's for 4 reasons: I enjoy looking at my farms with a bunch of horses on, i enjoy taking care of a large group of horses (replanting crops and so on), i enjoy the peace of mind that if I get low on silver i can sell some of them at a low rate and get some emergency coin, and i don't want to constantly be breeding to keep the herd going - i like to breed all the horses once together and have a 3-4 day period where every time I log on theres a new foal or two skipping around merrily.

If people are keeping herds >40 5-speed horses and constantly grinding out more of them every time a horse can get pregnant, there's no way prices for 5-speeds would be as high as they are. Some people just like to keep a herd of animals. I am willing to groom my animals every day (as i do currently) with the understanding that it means those who don't care much about their animals will lose them to disease to free up space for the animal cap, but while there are unicorns sprawling around my town with nobody killing them, I don't see a reason to reduce my herd so more non-aggros can spawn.

[joedobo 1,187]

+1 to OP.

1. Either shorten cool down, increase skill gain per groom, or rework how skill is gained perhaps like meditation.

2. I think inbreeding was implemented because some realistic hardship player(s) didn't like how everyone had 1 or 2 males with 20+ females. Its just plain dumb and should be removed.

3. Yep, Id like for the horses to just pop out at mature and don't care about realism.

4. Idk about this. If we where to change things I'd rather see a system where we control what traits populate the assignment pool. A relationship between AH skill, number of bad traits, and good traits in the pool would dictate its likelihood of occurring. Failure would be a plain horse with no traits at all.

Faster breeding could work if we could find a way to implement penalties for keeping excess. Faster can come from shorter birthing windows and the ability to breed an animal sooner. The penalties are very important because otherwise its not a balanced change, and people will just keep same number of animals to achieve greatness even faster. I've tried to come up with excess penalties by looking at it from different views. All of them can be generally classed into categorizes: lots of maintenance work, lots of space requirement, slowing the cycle, and hard cap per a player.

-Lots of maintenance work is things like routing grooming and feeding. The problem here is that in-order to limit someone with multiple toons playing 8+ hours a day the restriction need to be so severe that the casual player with a couple horses is gimped hardcore. Also a general resistance to more work exists because everyone wants good horses and likely has lots of animal to get this. Well if we start imposing more work it just angers many. I believe anyone with good AH skill should be able to create animals in the same realitive time it would take a skilled craft toon to make a tool.

-Lots of space is where we start imposing disease penalties for overpopulated areas. This just doesn't work because there are so many ways to get around it. This control method has been one of main tools to limit over population for the past 3 years or so. History has proven its just not a workable solution.

-Slowing the cycle was an idea where someone(s) (who Id love to insult here) thought we could limit things using things like: inbreeding, killing older animals, longer wait before young can breed, decreasing the chance a foul will be born. All this stuff just doesn't work in a system where we have many player in relation to so few available animal slots. Its unbelievable someone would think a system would work that encourages people to keep more items when item availability is so limited.

- The hard cap is the only solution. The problem is we have limited animal slots and need to find a way to divvy them up in some acceptable way. I like a simple AH skill modified average, maybe add weighting for animal taming. The more skill a toon has the more animals it can have. Then speed up breeding to compensate for the animal reduction by reducing birth window and making young breed sooner. If we have less animals that in-breeding really needs to go away.

[joedobo 1,187]

1: it takes 40 animals, not 40 horses to skill up and 40 is a reasonable amount for any kind of farm. A lot of people that breed have more anyway, simply because they want. Problem are those animals that can't be groomed, so those people need to keep extra to skill.

I keep many horses (30-50)

Their aren't enough animal slots available for people to be keeping that many. No way 40 or even 30 is a reasonable amount. I have way more then 40 but would reduce that in a heart beat if all the "more is better" limitation where removed. And as a breeder with 52 AH, with many horses, spending time on them daily, I disagree with all of Wraith's Not comments. Your entitled to your opinion but I just read all that and thought, that's BS.

[RomaN 890]

Roman dislikes when players hoard like this.

Goodbye Southern Steppe on Celebration.

[Vroomfondel 1,128]

Roman dislikes when players hoard like this.

Goodbye Southern Steppe on Celebration.

Since that is a new set of pens on Cele, I must say they were quite fast in gathering all the horses they could find. But it is not excessive, in fact I'd say it is what every player that wants to grind AH needs to get anywhere. And they have set up the pens without crowding them too, well done! Now if you showed a pic with 100 or more in a single pen, I'd agree with you.

[Keldun 335]

Difficult to count from the picture exactly, but that is three pens with about 10x10 tiles and 25 horses each. Perfectly acceptable example of a horse farm.

Depends on the amount of players that set this up though.

[Vedurin 29]

My humble suggestions would be:

- Increase the Animal Husbandry Timer.

For those who love having a lot of animals it won't make much difference. They'd still have many. But for those who get lots of horses to gain an infinite AH gain circle it means they require lesser horses to bridge the 45 minute reset. More time spent on the skill also means more skill gain in the end. So that should be fine. A failure should occur before the end of the timer. So a failure after 1.5 or 2 minutes of waiting is not as frustrating. Maybe implement the decision between failure / success at somewhere between 20% and 40% of the timer. If it fails stop the action and the timer. If it succeeds grant the success at the end of the timer. Et voila, ppl won't get fed up and bored with wasting a lot of time for failures.

- Separate animal pools for each kind of animal

People complain, that when breeders hold a huge amount of horses they can't find any cows, deer or other peaceful animals around. Well, that just makes me wonder about why there even IS a pool for all peaceful animals ! It can't be that resource taking to use a pool for every kind of animal. That way it's secure there won't be any "extinct" animals. When coding the counter you can avoid the dirty resource taking object counting functions by carefully placing increments and decrements to the race related counters in the functions of birth and death.

[Domhnall 68]

similarly, lets make it so all tools and weapons are instantly made at 99ql with 99 in every enchant, and never take damage. This way each player only needs 1 of each tool.

It's a silly idea because it removes a significant (and very enjoyable) part of the game.

Honestly I don't see how this relates. Are people whining and moaning to Rolf that they can't make a pickaxe because you're hoarding them all? Have anvils been nerfed so that you can't make as many nails?

Breeding and raising animals in Wurm are not equatable to any other aspect of Wurm.

[Vroomfondel 1,128]

Honestly I don't see how this relates. Are people whining and moaning to Rolf that they can't make a pickaxe because you're hoarding them all? Have anvils been nerfed so that you can't make as many nails?

Breeding and raising animals in Wurm are not equatable to any other aspect of Wurm.

But you have hit upon a key weakness to animal breeding. Rolf's code cannot support the number of animals necessary to grind the AH skill, at least not so everyove can do it. I know, animals are not the same as wood, iron etc., but if they are an item to gain skill on, they need to be about the same as resources codewise, so the vast numbers needed by the playerbase are not a problem for the server to handle. Kind of funny, Rolf has us all pointing fingers at each other, each saying the others are causing the problem, when he and his code are the real sources of the issues.

Edited June 8, 2012 by Vroomfondel

[Alyeska 2,621]

But you have hit upon a key weakness to animal breeding. Rolf's code cannot support the number of animals necessary to grind the AH skill, at least not so everyove can do it. I know, animals are not the same as wood, iron etc., but if they are an item to gain skill on, they need to be about the same as resources codewise, so the vast numbers needed by the playerbase are not a problem for the server to handle. Kind of funny, Rolf has us all pointing fingers at each other, each saying the others are causing the problem, when he and his code are the real sources of the issues.

That, and silly things like inbreeding.

[Postes 5,282]

We used to hoard horses like crazy but it was because we were on a PvP server and commonly they die first in battles.

[Pingpong 1,070]

*gasp* An admitted horse hoarder

[kazkid 23]

Since that is a new set of pens on Cele, I must say they were quite fast in gathering all the horses they could find. But it is not excessive, in fact I'd say it is what every player that wants to grind AH needs to get anywhere. And they have set up the pens without crowding them too, well done! Now if you showed a pic with 100 or more in a single pen, I'd agree with you.

Since that is a new set of pens on Cele, I must say they were quite fast in gathering all the horses they could find. But it is not excessive, in fact I'd say it is what every player that wants to grind AH needs to get anywhere. And they have set up the pens without crowding them too, well done! Now if you showed a pic with 100 or more in a single pen, I'd agree with you.

+1 Saw more than 10x that many horse corpses on those same steppes....looks like a pretty reasonable farm to me...also that is nowhere near enough to 'hit the cap' ROFl

BTW why buried in ideas and suggestions...Was a thread explaining mechanics of breeding...NOT a thread about new idea...?

Edited June 8, 2012 by kazkid

[Uberknot 327]

BTW why buried in ideas and suggestions...Was a thread explaining mechanics of breeding...NOT a thread about new idea...?

This one? That was a suggestion that got put into the game to help breeding.

From the thread.

Sounds good, looking at implementing this now:)

[Wraithglow 787]

Honestly I don't see how this relates. Are people whining and moaning to Rolf that they can't make a pickaxe because you're hoarding them all? Have anvils been nerfed so that you can't make as many nails?

Breeding and raising animals in Wurm are not equatable to any other aspect of Wurm.

I don't see people complaining that you can't breed new horses either - i've never had a failed birth. It's people complaining there aren't enough wild animals - this is a matter of perspective and preference. But I do agree with vroom that it would be better if the cap was raised (new hardware, anyone?)

[kazkid 23]

Since there are changes to ability to care for domestic animals...I think hunters should now have to dismount to skin their animals....after all .....all those corpses and 'piles' after they decay are also taking up server resources and therefor lowering what is available to the server right?

futhermore they should not be allowed to make a kill unless last corpse was buried (similar to house building, finish one else wait 24hrs to plan another) This would also lessen server loads due to corpses being removed....

Edited June 11, 2012 by kazkid

[Kraljtatov 34]

Sounds reasonable, kazkid, but it should only affect NPCs.

[SmeJack 5,798]

I don't see people complaining that you can't breed new horses either - i've never had a failed birth. It's people complaining there aren't enough wild animals - this is a matter of perspective and preference. But I do agree with vroom that it would be better if the cap was raised (new hardware, anyone?)

There was a time not long ago where the animals just constantly miscarried because of the animal cap, no one could breed at all.

futhermore they should not be allowed to make a kill unless last corpse was buried (similar to house building, finish one else wait 24hrs to plan another) This would also lessen server loads due to corpses being removed....

From what I understand, the corpses are counted as containers and do not contribute to the animal cap

[kazkid 23]

Correct corpses do not count toward the animal cap..however each corpse creates 10+ items which the server must then track....IF resources were not used tracking these items...more resources would be available to increase the animal cap.....thus one can conclude that hunters leaving their unclaimed goodies laying unclaimed all over the map contribute equally to a lack of animal population....