tl.dr: I want more animals in this amazing amazing game.
Ok so firstly I bought this game not even 7 days ago and I’ve dumped almost 40hrs into it already, to say I love what you guys are doing would be a gross understatement, this game rocks. I honestly enjoy the efficient layout management/farming systems/resource collection more than any of the fighting or trading for money or anything like that so these ideas come from a humble farmer who often plays on pacifist mode but I had a couple ideas about farming that I think would really improve the game for me.
So firstly it seems like there could be a lot more basic barn animal options other than just cattle. The regular barn could definitely be used to house horses (higher value, harder to acquire, enable advanced things like cavalry at large cost, target of raiders) or pigs (lower value than cows, deteriorate surrounds requiring labor to maintain grazing area, higher rate of disease spread but much more consistent meat for the smoker…mmm bbq…) or even sheep which would produce meat and milk but also wool that could be used at advanced levels of the weaver building to produce luxury clothing items. Different animals could require different amounts of grazing space and deplete it at varying levels with too much overlap of grazing area causing detrimental environmental and disease outcomes, thusly a barn farmer would have to be assigned like a field farmer to either spend their time tending to the grazing area to keep it functional, or harvesting meat/milk/wool.
Next I think another type of barn, a fowl coop, could be awesome. A place to keep chickens or ducks that produce large quantities of eggs or meat depending on what you prioritize. I would suggest that these need to be maintained with grain from farm fields with different grains giving better outputs and that these building would attract more predators than usual, with wolves being frequently drawn to them for easy pickings.
In addition to the other farm animals I would love to see more harvestable wild animals. My current village is founded near an amazing little system of lakes with lots of rushes and plentiful fish but I always scroll past that area expecting to see ducks… I know there are bird nests as harvestable resources by a forager but what if the hunter could be used to harvest wild ducks or even geese at the second level, either killing them for meat and using the feathers to improve the output of the fletcher, or capturing them for transport to a fowl coop for egg and meat production? Geese could also descend on your fields in the fall requiring dogs and hunters to keep them from eating all your crops where proper response would increase meat and feather output but neglecting to fend them off would lead to failed harvests and famine.
Lastly I would looooove to be able to equip dogs. A dog trainer/handler/breeder building chain would be really fun and could alter gameplay in a lot of ways. I would love to be able to assign dogs to fields or fowl barns to watch for wild animals, or to hunters to improve their output. They could be grouped with a human to create a ‘herder’ laborer type that would protect sheep or fowl coops or other farm animals and move them around the map for grazing to spread out their deleterious grazing effects. Dogs could also chase down fleeing raiders faster than your soldiers to help finish off a wave that broke against your defenses. Additionally i would love to be able to equip a group of dogs to a laborer to create a “scout” that could vastly increase speed of exploring surrounding area and could also give advanced warning of potential incoming raider attacks ie: 'your scout uncovered evidence of an impending raider attack in X area in X months" oh no, better move my soldiers to the gate closest to that warning…
Cats would also improve the game for me, they could be assigned to rat-catcher buildings to vastly improve their effectiveness and honestly I think the rat-catcher building itself is already the perfect building chain to serve as the cat ‘barn’. Excess cats could also be assigned to homes to further increase their desirability rating.
Thats just my two cents on adding a little more depth and inter-meshing the farming capabilities with more animals and affect types. Anybody else have similar thoughts? Thanks so much for all the work on this game guys, the results are astounding and beautiful, 10/10 im telling all my friends:)