Poll: Making Animal-Unique buildings constructable with appropriate Folklore+

Which of the following options are preferred? May choose multiple:


  • Total voters
    25

Blazenclaw

eccentric eclectic
Joined
Sep 19, 2010
Messages
496
Some discussion on discord shows mixed opinions on the current status of subduing and storing animals.

I'd like to get feedback before working on the following change:
Animal-unique buildings (e.g. Snake Pits, Feather Worker, etc) can be constructed with hammers if there exists the appropriate folklore for that animal in the city (think of the dog-adjacent buildings that work in this manner). They will still be able to be built for free with a subdued animal. A small maintenance cost (fractional gold, ideally) may be levied for subdued animals to encourage only saving animals of importance.
It would have the following benefits:
  1. No need to stockpile large quantities of animals. No micromanagement of which go where, how many to keep, etc.
  2. AI will be more likely to take advantage of animal unique buildings that they were not able to before (due to not saving them, as humans do).
  3. Reduces the 'trap' of using animals for culture, or saving too many. Greatly reduces/removes metagaming knowledge of which animals need be held onto for far in the future.
The following are possible downsides:
  1. Reduced value for catching duplicates of the same animal, particularly without 'teleport hunting rewards' in prehistoric. May be mitigated by buffing the output of using animals as culture?
  2. Might make an excess of constructable buildings, or be too strong to have e.g. having a shellworker in every city. May be mitigated by making sure animal buildings are expensive for their time?
  3. Less interesting hunting minigame, as only one is needed. May be mitigated by increasing diversity spawning of animals slightly?
Another option is to make the first animal give folklore, and second subdued animal provide an animal 'resource' which is required to construct buildings of that class. For example, one snake gives snake folklore, second snake builds a reptile enclosure (probably trapping tech prereq for all enclosures?), providing a reptile resource required for snakes, amphibians, etc. (Doing one resource per each animal species is probably not a good idea.)

So, thoughts? Vetoes?
 
If fractional is possible - it would probably be ok. But if it's still considerable, like 0.5, it could have potential for choking AIs. Or make it a trade-off, possibly by making a build-up option (should make it easy to work for AI) to fatten/breed them before enabling source construction/harvesting something (possibly progress towards AH). If not, culture boost certainly deserves a buff. Same for selling/freeing slaves and conducting trade missions, those are outright useless now.
 
All buildings buildable by animals that aren't folklore could be built normally.
This would mean additional OR requirements - folklores related to subdued animals that can build given building.
So snake pit would require one of snake related folklores and so on.

Also dance huts (buildable by entertainers line) could be buildable normally too.
 
I'd VERY MUCH enjoy the removal of "which animal needs to go where" micromanagement nightmare, please - this is 100% upvoted.
Unless you can make it automated somehow (including for AI) - but this sounds like wishful thinking anyways, so better just eliminate it altogether.
The rest... is way more ambiguous.
I would find it funny, if you could correlate certain buildings with animals having LEVELS and/or SPECIFIC UPGRADES, though.
Better yet, make these "evolutionary" in a way - like, you get access to "higher taxa" buildings only after you build enough of "lower taxa" ones.
Example: You get to "reptile" buildings after constructing some of "snake" buildings and "lizard" buildings, not just from the get-go.
This, obviously, requires a much better variety spread of the buildings to begin with (with better rewards), because it's stupid to apply this to the current state of "reptiles equal snakes".
Thus, again, becomes ambiguous and somewhat tedious.
But if someone can dedicate a week or a two for branching out the animal-related buildings into a much wider and deeper system, the end result might be rather impressive, lol.
 
If fractional is possible - it would probably be ok. But if it's still considerable, like 0.5, it could have potential for choking AIs. Or make it a trade-off, possibly by making a build-up option (should make it easy to work for AI) to fatten/breed them before enabling source construction/harvesting something (possibly progress towards AH). If not, culture boost certainly deserves a buff.
Would probably be 0.1-0.2g, but ofc will have to playtest a bit.
Build-up to breed seems like just extra steps onto catching one, doesn't seem like it'd add much interesting other than just 'click this button before clicking the other buttons'.
And yeah, culture really does need a buff.
Also dance huts (buildable by entertainers line) could be buildable normally too.
Somehow I do kinda enjoy the dance hut "minigame", but not sure how well the AI understands it other than incidentally constructing entertainers until they have a surplus. Though, AI also has really poor build orders too, so... oh well. Good point though that it would be reasonable to skip the middleman and have the buildings constructable directly.
this is 100% upvoted.
Funny to say that and also not vote in the poll... :rolleyes:

I'm curious what @JosEPh_II and @strategyonly think? And @Toffer90, is there something I'm missing that would make this a bad idea (other than an afternoon's worth of xml work), or is it just your personal pref for keeping as is?
 
And @Toffer90, is there something I'm missing that would make this a bad idea (other than an afternoon's worth of xml work), or is it just your personal pref for keeping as is?
I don't really mind too much either way, although I'd prefer that we don't make them buildable (there's more than enough buildable buildings and it would reduce the importance of capturing animals), better to make them national wonders that doesn't spend NW slots. Or possibly make these buildings give themselves for free in all cities, so the moment you get it in 1 city you will get them in all cities forever (important that they then can't be conquered or gained on city trade so each civ must catch the relevant animal to get it); would make it more of a cultural heritage thing than an actual specific building. I think I'd prefer national wonder actually as that means they mean much more early game when you only have 1-3 cities, and then less and less the more cities you get.
 
As long as I can always build a tamed trainer later on and spread the animals around the empire that way - in fact, I believe there's a handful of subdued animals that don't have a tamed version later on - now some of those clearly make a lot of sense, like monkeys and bears, though an argument could be made for those (they were circus animals after all), but chickens are also missing, which is a big oversight in my opinion.

Edit: actually I think you can train bears, and tigers too, which makes the lack of chickens even more appaling. Hawks and parrots are also not spreadable. Edit again: and also pigeons. I mention these four feathered creatures because they all have a unique building they can build, on top of the chicken herd building. Hawking hut, singing parrot and homing pigeons coop if I remember correctly.
 
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I think it should remain as is, to be honest. If you change it so that everyone can build it, it pretty much mitigates the use of hunting animals in the first place. They gotta have something unique to construct, otherwise. It might also be too overpowered to have it be buildable in every city.
 
Ok, mulled this over, and my final vote is: All options except #2: "buildable with hammers".

I still want to eliminate the need of moving animals around to build stuff in each city, though, so maybe the combo would be to build buildings anywhere, then make it auto-spread like "culture" does, then need more animals (not just one, can be many more "levels") to build additional stuff, again everywhere where the required "animal culture" is present.
In fact, you DO have "animal resources" for SOME animals - so why not make ALL animals into their own "mini-cultures", and also make those cultures "nested" like in my previous example.
Namely, there can be two opposite options:
1. You need to first build a "reptile" culture in order to build a "snake" culture. This is the EASY way. One "meta" culture unlocks a bunch of "sub" cultures.
2. You need to first build ALL "reptile-type" cultures in order to build THE "reptile" culture. This is the HARD way. ALL "sub" cultures are required to unlock the "meta" culture".
In both cases, though, the NEXT STEP cultures should always be "better" in some way, and preferably UNLOCK something useful (like, say promotions for units OR for animals, OR animals).
For example, make "animal venom" require a much harder route of attaining (while "plant poison" still having a different path, lol, and you could have TWO additive promotions there).
Or make animal-based units gain strong promotions based on having harder-to-attain "animal culture" buildings (read: breeding better dogs by researching them at home, lol).

Side IDEA:
Breeding, you say?
Well, this is very much "non-priority", but for the future, how about this one?
You build special "breeding buildings", then move specifically promoted 'required animals" there, then literally "breed" them.
The catch?
The "offspring" can have "randomly gained promotions" based on "pseudo-genetics" ("animal culture buildings", or maybe just random potential promotions for the starting project phase).
Kinda like Astrology, but in a slightly different angle, and more specific.

Additional idea:
Make "age" promotions that affect the unit's overall stats - "young" is clearly weaker than "adult", and "aging" should be either fight wins based, or maybe turn life based.
Again, you do have "resurrecting Generals" that wait for specific number of turns in a forcibly induced state, so this could be applied to "aging" just as well.

For a funnier application:
Make this apply to ALL biological units in some way.
Either make them start as "teen warriors" that "mature after their first kill", lol, or maybe something similar.
At the first glance, this looks like a reverse application of the older Vanilla "Veteran" promotion logic, just in reverse.
But it's not, lol.
Technically, you could have a "rookie" unit that has +5 strength and whatnot - via non-battle "training".
Still, "maturing" would be a step that is needed for some specific goals (like a list of promotions only available to "real men", ya know), and isn't merely a strength bonus (if at all).

And for a VERY DISTANT FUTURE (like, version 123, literally):
Make it Real Roleplaying, mwahahaha - make all humans into gendered units that actually "breed" with "genetics", and their "offspring" can "inherit" promotions from their parents.
Would be much more interesting than the bland "every unit is expendable, since even the best General is nothing but a bunch of XP points".
Now, with "genetics", a lot of promotions would (should) be far too hard to achieve via XP alone, and that obviously means the best ones, lol.
Again, this is for the VERY DISTANT FUTURE, unfortunately, but let me at least DREAM about it, okay? LOL!
 
We already have breeding, but only on the civilian side of things. Once you settle an animal in a city and research animal breeding and build the corresponding trainer building, you can train breeding pairs of dogs, horses, donkeys, cows, pigs, snakes, bears, tigers, etcetera, and send them to a different town to settle a new herd or animal attraction there, getting the bonuses that come with that. A full round of animal herds is somewhere around 10 hammers and food and a bunch of gold, which adds up. I always make sure to spread all the animals across the empire to benefit the most.

We just can't do it with chickens and other birds though, for whatever reason. Cats on the other hand don't have a corresponding animal unit at all and are instead a free building.
 
We already have breeding, but only on the civilian side of things. Once you settle an animal in a city and research animal breeding and build the corresponding trainer building, you can train breeding pairs of dogs, horses, donkeys, cows, pigs, snakes, bears, tigers, etcetera, and send them to a different town to settle a new herd or animal attraction there, getting the bonuses that come with that. A full round of animal herds is somewhere around 10 hammers and food and a bunch of gold, which adds up. I always make sure to spread all the animals across the empire to benefit the most.

We just can't do it with chickens and other birds though, for whatever reason. Cats on the other hand don't have a corresponding animal unit at all and are instead a free building.
That's "spreading", not "RPG-breeding".
I meant it much more literally:
Coding a "mission" not unlike Merging, but instead it would simply produce a third unit BASED on the two (having very strict compatibility requirements) used in the mission.
Unit "gender" would only be there for "immersion", it can be ignored for the sake of "less immersion believability for the cost of much less nuisance with coding all those gender details".
But the point is that you'd still take two separate (and same-type) units, and they would "give birth" to a third one, with promotions based on its "parents".
Alternatively, we can "rebrand" this as "active soldier training" and instead of "breeding" it'd be closer to "teaching", and would include not only promotions, but maybe even sub-combat types.
Well, some of them, that aren't unit-restricted.
ADDITIONALLY:
We could eliminate "unit types" almost entirely, and instead go for "sub-combat types working like cultures, but for almost all categories".
Namely:
If you "train together" a Good Melee and a Poor Archer, you could (if "successfully trained") end up with a Mediocre Melee-Archer, capable of both sub-combat types (including effects).
Kinda like how Pokemon can have two Types in one species (but here it wouldn't be limited to just two, and would have much more categories of those "types" to begin with).
This way, you'd have much less "basic (read: starter) unit types", but you could "type-promote" and then "combo-train" them into really funky combinations.
I'm like 101% sure it will NEVER HAPPEN in this mod, sadly enough, but I *wish* it was true one day.
So many possibilities, lol.
 
...it would reduce the importance of capturing animals
I think I'd prefer national wonder actually as that means they mean much more early game when you only have 1-3 cities, and then less and less the more cities you get.
National wonder (bonus for one city or all) is an interesting take on it. I agree that having it matter more with fewer cities and less as number of cities increased would be a good structure for animal buildings, but strictly limiting it to one ala national wonder style would seem to reduce the importance of capturing animals compared to option #2 whether the bonus be applied civwide or on a single city; seems a contradiction there, been thinking a bit and not how sure how to resolve.
Edit again: and also pigeons. I mention these four feathered creatures because they all have a unique building they can build, on top of the chicken herd building. Hawking hut, singing parrot and homing pigeons coop if I remember correctly.
Thank you for reminding me about this, I can do something about that soonish regardless of larger scale changes.
If you change it so that everyone can build it, it pretty much mitigates the use of hunting animals in the first place.
To be clear: You'll still need the folklore of a corresponding animal, which means there'll be a higher return on catching a spread of different animals, rather than catching a larger quantity of animals. Ensuring you subdue that rare X will be of greater importance than catching four snakes for a snake pit in all your cities, for instance.
I'm also concerned it might be slightly overpowered, but hopefully making the hammer cost for animal buildings disproportionately high for their value/position on the tech tree should alievate it somewhat. Plus, the high hammer cost will make capturing copies retain value for people who do want to micro that anyway.
And for a VERY DISTANT FUTURE
Yeah, I'm not looking to overhaul the system right now, just some xml tweaks. If you are that interested though, xml work is really easy to do and we happily accept code submissions ;)

In any case, judging by responses I think I'll go ahead and start working on implementing #2, so people can feel how it handles in-game; it'll be easily reversible if it turns out to not feel good once actually playing with it, or for any other reason that becomes more apparent. Will probably take a few days, don't have much time this week unfortunately.
 
Just a quick update, having some issues with fractional upkeep but should be otherwise done; ought to be in next svn ver, whether with fractional upkeep or none.

Rough changelog:
Animals are still required for:
  • All non-taxidermy folklore
  • Basic animal, naval totem
  • All herds
  • Prehistoric remains
  • 'Wonders of the Deep' in each coastal city
Can use hammers (at 2x tech-expected cost; you're funding an expedition to get a sample?) instead of animals for:
  • Advanced animal totems (requires folklore of any appropriate type)
  • Taxidermy (requires folklore of subtype)
  • Animal enclosures & special buildings (requires taxidermy of appropriate type)
Additionally:
  • Animal fight & tale rewards have been buffed 5x
  • Master Hunter building rewards require at least 1x of their free building to place (need to have hunted something big at least once/twice to have a masterful hunting tradition?)
  • Introduced tamed duck and turkey (needs icon art tho)
  • Some misc fixes and which-units-can-make-what tweaks
Would appreciate responses when it comes out in next few days, whether how it feels, pointing out errors in prereqs, or whatnot.
 
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Two suggestions:
1. Unsure if the animal rewards need to be buffed. Because they spread to each city, if you have a grip of cities early that can lead to a massive culture/science advantage from collecting animals. I find it pretty balanced how it is now, encouraging hunting but not dooming folks who start on islands.
2. At Biology, maybe there can be a group of national breeding program NW's that grants a zoo enclosure in each city if you have a set amount of enclosures of that type already. Biology is late enough to not disadvantage the hunting for enclosures route, while also helping folks who (like me) don't wanna deal with all that animal micro.
 
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/c2c-svn-changelog.429816/post-16319771
Change is up on SVN, would appreciate feedback from new games. Effect on existing game will be weird because you'll probably suddenly have a number of constructible, cheap buildings, but on new games it'll be more clear.

1. Unsure if the animal rewards need to be buffed. Because they spread to each city, if you have a grip of cities early that can lead to a massive culture/science advantage from collecting animals. I find it pretty balanced how it is now, encouraging hunting but not dooming folks who start on islands.
Folklore is unchanged; the reward for animal fights and directly turning them into science is buffed by 5x, to hopefully make it more of a tradeoff between A) saving them at 0.2g/turn for X turns until needed to immediately construct a building, and B) turning them into science/gold/whatnot right now. I hope it's not overtuned that farming pigeons will substantially boost your tech rate after early prehistoric, but that's what I need playtesting for.
2. At Biology, maybe there can be a group of national breeding program NW's that grants a zoo enclosure in each city if you have a set amount of enclosures of that type already. Biology is late enough to not disadvantage the hunting for enclosures route, while also helping folks who (like me) don't wanna deal with all that animal micro.
Cages are now buildable with hammers if you have the folklore, which means by the time biology rolls around the cages should be <1 turn to build and so you'll probably have acquired them by then.

Also @Maltazard let me know if there's anything missing from the tamed duck/turkey I added, hopefully it should get everything on the bird side but might be missing some. Hawks maybe? It's a real pain to navigate from the xml side, so could very easily have missed something. I think all herds except ratite should have a tamed animal that provides them now.
 
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Also @Maltazard let me know if there's anything missing from the tamed duck/turkey I added, hopefully it should get everything on the bird side but might be missing some. Hawks maybe? It's a real pain to navigate from the xml side, so could very easily have missed something. I think all herds except ratite should have a tamed animal that provides them now.

I have to reinstall my C2C so give me a couple of days but off of my memory it'd be pigeons and hawks, yes. Those are two early medieval buildings though, not herds.
 
Alright, back in the game, it's quite a bit messier than what I remembered, and not quite as easy to figure out as just comparing subdued animals to tamed animals and herds to trainer buildings. In fact, it's quite the opposite, since there's no 100% correspondance to subdued animals and herds, and tamed animals and trainer buildings. Then you have one off buildings making things more complicated, and then enclosures, so it's a lot to go through.
My main focus is to identify those animal buildings that can only be built with captured units and not with trained ones, and thus are limited by hunting luck, in the same category of other buildings which can be built with both options, and can be freely spread around provided you had at least one*(or two, or even three sometimes) copy of the animal at some point.

On the herds side, there's the deer, goat, zebra, ratite, kangaroo, sheep and musk ox herd buldings which can be built by subdued animal varieties, but don't have an equivalent trainable tamed animal variety. The other herds have a tamed animal unit that can be trained elsewhere and used to spread the buildings around the empire later on.

Apart from herds, there's other animal buildings with similar functions: of these, the unit reward: dance (fox) and unit reward: dance (bird), as well as the unit reward: shell worker's hut don't have a corresponding trainable, tamed unit.
The dancing bear however, as well as the governor's pets and governor's menagerie, do have this option. Similarly, the lion's and tiger's cage have trainable, tamed animal units to build them around.

Then, we have the unit reward: hawking hut, which can be built only with subdued units, and unlocks an extra building, the falconer. Similarly, the homing pigeons coop can only be built by subdued pigeons, without a tamed unit equivalent. Together, the hawking hut and the homing pigeons coop unlock the falconry school later on.

Lastly, at least as far as I can see right now, are the enclosure buildings, of which again, some have the option of being built by either subdued or tamed units, and others are only built by subdued units - therefore not replicable without lucky hunting trips.
These enclosures are: bad boys, marsupials, nocturnals, primate, seal, rodent, walrus.

One more thing, the Herd (Poultry) is the only herd that is not a special building but a normal building, not sure if that has any implications.

Last but not least, there are two tamed wolf units for some reason. Tamed wolf (breeding pair) and tamed wolf. As far as I can see, the only difference is that one can only defend and comes earlier in the tech tree, but they are otherwise identical. Might be redundant, as we already have several other dog units.

Now, I understand some of these might be intentional, especially the hawking hut, since some animals are quite rare and hard to train after all. On the other hand, sooner or later conservation efforts, zoos and whatnot, allowed so see all animals all around the world, so I'd be partly inclined to provide a tamed unit for each herd and enclosure building - and even the turtle, fox and bird unit reward building, but that's just my completionist's opinion on the matter. In particular a couple more bird varieties would also help with the bird's enclosure, since a turkey or duck enclosure doesn't sound anywhere as cool as a rhea enclosure :p but this is just RP at this point.
 
musk ox herd buldings which can be built by subdued animal varieties, but don't have an equivalent trainable tamed animal variety.
Pretty certain there is a tamed muskox, no?
there's other animal buildings with similar functions
Most of these should be constructable with hammers now, if you have the folklore.
enclosure buildings, of which again, some have the option of being built by either subdued or tamed units, and others are only built by subdued units - therefore not replicable without lucky hunting trips.
Enclosure are buildable if you have the taxidermy for that category, which is also buildable; so, as long as you have folklore of some dog, for instance, you can slowly hammer your way to wolf enclosure without having to do more hunting, though it will be expensive.
two tamed wolf units
And two tamed horse units iirc, will need to look at that.

I think most of what you wrote is fixed on the recent svn; or are you saying it isn't...?
 
Pretty certain there is a tamed muskox, no?
Yep, my bad.
Most of these should be constructable with hammers now, if you have the folklore.
They are, I can actually just build the dance fox building now, cool!
Enclosure are buildable if you have the taxidermy for that category, which is also buildable; so, as long as you have folklore of some dog, for instance, you can slowly hammer your way to wolf enclosure without having to do more hunting, though it will be expensive.

And two tamed horse units iirc, will need to look at that.

I think most of what you wrote is fixed on the recent svn; or are you saying it isn't...?
I'm on 11501 at the moment I believe. Looks like it then, just adding those few missing herd units might be the icing on the cake - I don't think those can be built with folklore and will also unlock farm autobuilds later on and so on. Sheep, goat and ratite at least - deer and zebra aren't really livestock material after all.
 
@Blazenclaw ,

This so called "Glut" of animals is directly related to How you play the mod. I.e. how you set up and use the Game set up options. And Preferred gameplay style, everyone has one. Those that complain about micromanaging have created their own problem. And they don't want to admit it. Why? Because it is the way they like to play their favorite Options.

I never ever have a "glut" of animals. Yet my 36 yr old son and his friend in their games has hundreds in each city. And they want it that way. I ask why don't you use all these excess animals. They save them for a particular time when they want a Culture Bomb or Hammer Bomb or Gold Bomb or Research Bomb.

I have to hunt hard to get the necessary animals for the very important herds. Why? Because I don't use the Options: Peace Among NPCs and Animals Stay out. Instead, I do use the Options Reckless Animals and Dangerous Wildlife.

AND I do Not play the Game speeds that have more than 8000 turns. This is very significant. a 20K turn Game will have 2000 fold more animals in it than a 2000 or 4000 turn game. Even moreso with a 1000 turn game.
EDIT: what needs adjusted is the rate animals spawn for those Game speeds that have more than 8000 turns, Snail, Eons and Eternity. Marathon is borderline. Blitz thru Epic is relatively good and stable If you are Playing Difficulty levels above Prince. (Those that play settler/Cheiftain/Warlord and complain about micro...I have a name that I shall not post for them!) :p

So in light of these Options and their usage I see no need to change anything. As I have always supported Dancing Hoskuld's original ideas for his modmod Subdued Animals. But since DH is no longer involved, then others (since his departure) have made changes. More will come.

This is the nature of modding a mod that has been this long of time running and being developed. New modders new ideas and wants. Old ways and old modders ideas are forgotten or not in "vogue" anymore. Many younger players have a stilted view of 4X gaming impo. I have played this mod since its inception back in 2008, and its predecessor Rise of Mankind since its inception back in 2006 by Zappara. (Man I miss that Modder!) 16+ years of playing BtS in a modded form.

You all will do what you deem necessary. The Discord group is the now more dominant force. This Civfanatic group is waning. StrategyOnly and I are the "oldtimers" here.
 
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