Animal Poll

[sanchez]

Animals ARE Resources - they CARRY Resources. NOBODY want to change how animals work.

What Doug's bizarrely worded poll is asking about is population density!

One position being that Animals (and thus the resources they carry - eggs, hide, meat, etc) should be available in good variety widely, as should strength training through hunting.

The other option, Animals are 'animals', means they should be looked at as populations and NOT considered for the resources they carry, so if you don't have any meat or eggs or hide, too bad.

The real debate is whether places like Western Treefeather, with mountains and forests abutting deserts all with no natural food sources in the ground should be considered a problem when the animals are gone, which they nearly are. It's very difficult to grow cities without easy access either to the sea or some other food. Food trade is not thriving there.. there just aren't many successful towns. This situation has obtained for some time in the Polish Zone on some islands as well. Total hunting bans, punishable by death there. Still, populations are not increasing. So, player control is not possible yet.

There have been some artificial fixes, adjusting spawn rate, etc. But one issue is that the populations are being considered as a whole, Cantr-wide, or region by region. So, it's skewed by places like Aki and Burgeo and the French Zone, where it's very difficult to survive. A small minority of chars live in those places, so should they be protected by lowering animals for everybody, even if it means more heavily populated areas will lose access to hide, meat, etc.?

Birds are almost gone from the older islands in English Zone. Poll option 1 considers this a problem. There should be more birds so there are more eggs and feathers.

Poll option 2 means birds go extinct.

This may be interesting to some people in the abstract, but the fact is that RD has assumed chars have access to animal products for some time. We design foods, primitive tools, etc. all with this assumption in mind. This hurt the PZ for a long time, at least until cloth bellows were introduced to make up for their lack of hide. Inequity can only be interesting for so long before regional imbalance starts to look ugly. We need more animals, and to see them in greater variety. There is no way to simulate natural ecosystems (viewing animals as 'animals' and not as resources for people). And attempting that is going to cause too many problems.

[SekoETC]

Small animals get wiped out because they cannot dodge. In real life it would be very hard to catch a hawk or a pigeon. If we add a dodging ability to animals then birds wouldn't go extinct. They already have speed, that could possibly be used but it's more about reflexes than travel speed.

[sem]

The animals should be considered as populations within their natural boundaries. If, for example, horses can't cross mountains then horses on either side of a mountain range should be considered two distinct populations. If the towns on one side hunt them to extinction then they should be allowed to live with the consequences for a while until RD introduce a small breeding population of something else that fills the 'large herbivore that can't cross mountains' niche.

As for the mountains and desert I don't see a problem in leaving them as areas where it's difficult to establish towns.

Having said that I seem to recall reading that some of the western Treefeather problems (especially on the Akypor and Plaekur peninsulas) were caused by a buggy implementation of animal roaming. If that is the case then that should be rectified by boosting the populations in that area, since it wasn't the characters fault that the animals disappeared.

I can see that birds are a particular problem if they're more wide-ranging than other species in terms of the terrain they'll tolerate. Perhaps it would be worth introducing some birds that are more limited in the terrain they'll occupy (dodos in the woods?).

[Sicofonte]

I would vote for the third option:

Animals still being "mobile" resources, but being resources, and not individuals: resources (as stone) that can reduce or increase its availability due to migration.

Hunting would be a project, then (as me and others have suggested before, but Cantr players do love to hunt as an instant action).

I don't think the current system adds anything really critical, over a well thought static one, to the actual purpose of Cantr, which is roleplay.
Any slight advantage it may have it's countered by the extra lag and the extra development time.

I do agree.