What awaits me is 5-8 minutes of adding up all the chickens I have and dividing them to the amount of coops I have in total so that they are all spread evenly. Combine this with the occasional lag spikes (which occur even when the game is paused) and eventually losing track of which coop has how many chickens, and it results in me dreading to do this every time. Yet I have to (or rather want to) every 2-3 years because chimkens are cool.
So, I would love to see a “spread animals evenly” button that would boil this entire process down to a single click. Unless there are some obscure cases when you wouldn’t want to have an even nr of animals in each coop/barn, but I have yet to come across such a case.
Colonel Sanders applauds your dedication but wow…Not sure it is needed unless they make a game mode where “too many chickens without coops turns the chickens into carnivores”.
I just feel like it would make expanding your animal population less tedious if you want to get the most of out of your births. Eggs aren’t as important as milk (though a lot of chickens are born every year), but this could obviously be applied to all current animal buildings
Such a case being that these buildings only produce meat when they are over population so if you are always spreading them out then you are never producing any meat. You may want to keep some full for that purpose.
Chickens don’t make the best meat per worker scenario though and the only use for eggs beyond the no meat achievement is for Pastries. You can get 85 meat per worker from cow barns and 45 meat per worker from goat barns, which are both very little compared to what the hunter does with between 150-300 meat per year (no traps). We simply need to be able to house more cows/goats in their barns so they can produce more per year over their limits for slaughtering.
That would not give you more meat per worker. My point is that the hunter cabins are a first step to meat production, and as such the barns should produce more per worker but they don’t.
Barn caps out at 3 cows a year to butcher when over populated.
340 meat x 3 cows = 1020 meat each year.
1020 meat / 12 workers = 85 meat per worker per year.
Goat barns cap out at 3 goat a year
120 meat x 3 goat = 360 meat.
360 / 8 workers = 45 meat per worker per year.
Basic Hunter: 150-300 per year from my observations around different locations hunting deer only, no traps, in a pacifist game.
IMO, they shouldn’t. Firstly the biggest benefits of ranching is milk, meat is like a bonus one you’ve decided to stop growing your herds; which you might very well never do or, at least, not until way after having T5 houses everywhere. I’d even say that the ability of cows to raise fertility (both by pasturing and by providing tons of poop for composting) is more important than their meat.
More fundamentally than that, ranching is scalable, hunting is not. You very quickly run out of hunting spots that are reasonably close to town (efficiency drops off massively if you need to carry meat all the way across the map, not to mention deaths to hunters / bears will be huge). Barns, however, you can place to your hearts content: you will never run out of place for it. Ditto for growing hay as feedstock or clover fields as pasture for your cattle. It’s not technically infinite, but your computer will die before you hit cattle cap. This is the basic economic scaling that the whole food game is based around: you start with a high resource-per-villager efficiency but with a very limited scope, and end up at a lower efficiency but with systems that can grow much larger. It’s actually a genius balancing trick to provide a fun challenge at all stages of the game, while also being (very) broadly historically realistic. Look at foragers vs farming or fruit trees for the same logic.
If there is a problem, it’s with smoking meat. Meat is near useless if not for smoking. Hunters provide a steady stream of meat year round, making it easy to smoke from the very start, because smoking is insanely easy and efficient. But ranching gives you all the meat in one go once per year, meaning spoilage is far more likely. But this is more of an issue in the balance between hunting and gathering than anything else.
To get back to the actual OP: it would be nice, but surely this is a very low priority? Almost no one will be in such a crazy situation. While there is no harm done in having an extra option, dev time and resources are not infinite.
Treating meat like a bonus for barns can be a problem when you consider that as your town grows, you are pushing wildlife off the map. Hunting cabins can still be used in dense concentrations without deer when you have trapping because they will often harvest the traps before hunting any available deer anyway. This produces less meat then the deer which is why I don’t bother with traps until I am forced into this predicament.
Having clusters of hunters together affords them protection from boar and bear alike as they will work together to fight them off. Placing brick cellars near by with roads you can group several branches of distant hunting, fishing and forage cabins to an outpost with a stock yard, brick cellars and smoke houses. The smoked meat will then be carted off by wagon or neighborhood market workers in large batches, keeping the hunters from individually having to haul long distances.
If you have a lumber camp in the area, then a wood splitter in the outpost would feed the smokers while allowing any excess to be carried off into the city. Otherwise, you’d use the stockyard to request a minimum storage quantity of split wood be delivered for your smokers to use.
Building doesn’t push the deer off the map, it pushes them further away on the map. The vast majority of the time anyway, maybe they disappear if you build on their spawn point while the herd is depleted.
But yes, the fact that you can get as much meat as you’ll realistically need just from hunters is why the meat from barns is just a bonus. And yes, it is possible to make use of hunters far away by grouping them, having nearby cellars / smokers / depot, and generally investing an ever greater amount of resources (and workers) into logistics. As you say, traps do the same, it lets you have more hunters, but makes each one less productive. That’s exactly what I mean by “scaling badly with size” - each hunter is less efficient than the one before.
Barns, on the other hand, are the opposite. The first barn takes ages to get running because of the time it takes to grow a herd (or the huge expense / delay of importing cows). But the 5th is trivially easy, take a single year’s the calves from the other barns and, boom, your latest barn is already running at the same efficiency as the others. Furthermore, the more cattle you have, the more you can boost soil fertility, so the easier it is to grow feedstock with which you can feed even more cattle. You can also, to a large extent, reuse the existing infrastructure of hay storage, cheesemongers, etc… because you can cluster them without being limited to sparse resource spots. These positive feedback loops (or, at least, the lack of negative ones) is exactly what I mean by “scaling well with size”.
