Allow All Males to Breed within the Pack

Alright, let's try this again! I'll quote the original suggestion from Anneliese's thread:

While Wolvden is decidedly different than Lioden, I feel like this mechanic transferred over to some degree. However, it’s also worth noting how males in Lioden are practically worthless. Let’s face it, submales just don’t contribute much to a pride. In Wolvden, males can contribute more to the pride, but they will still never be preferable to females. 

I already see a reluctance to purchase or keep male pups. When befriending, I immediately leave if the wolf is male. I’d love a few more males in the pack for lore purposes, but the space is too costly. 

Females can do the same job as males, but (again, exception to breeding male) are the only ones who can pass on their stats, marks, etc. Males can contribute, but will never play a long term role in improving the integrity of the pack. Females will quickly become the primary preference of players site wide. 

Which leads me to this suggestion: one studded male, with inter-pack breeding for all others. This would lead to the following: 

1. Fewer pups born to one pack (space is occupied by fewer females because there is use for males, thus fewer litters)

2. Diversity- a pack can have more than one breeding goal

3. Allows players to avoid inbreeding- many players have a personal dislike for inbreeding. With main male being a semi-permanent role it becomes hard to mate a whole crop of his offspring without inbreeding or a lot of studding. 

Now here are the main objections I’d like to address: 

1. It will ruin the studding economy- a person looking for stats, marks, or different colors will still want to use outside studs. Additionally, there will still be only one stud per pack so the market won’t over saturate. I feel this is perfectly adequate and will only maybe cost a few SC from players with otherwise blander breeding males, who wouldn’t make a big income from studding anyway. If it becomes like Lioden, the studding economy will already be pretty meh. 

2. You can buy a sex-changer- sex-changers are a bit expensive unless the pup is very good. It would not solve the majority female bias and would go against a lot of the above mentioned benefits. Sex changers would still be bought often even if males became more functional, as people have certain pairs they’d want, might want a female to become their breeding male, etc. 

Edit:

In order to limit the amount of pups a male can produce in his lifetime and keep the breeding male "special" within his pack, a breeding cooldown could be applied to males after they breed. It would be ideal for this cooldown to be close to or equal in length to the one that is currently applied to females, to allow players to synchronize their breeding pairs.

Yes, please. It is nearly overwhelming how many people feel male wolves are useless. I sex-changed all my males to female todya just so that I can pass on their stats/genetics. Otherwise, those male wolves end up essentially useless. Why even have them? I could just buy females or use a NBW to do what they're doing.

More thoughts on the current breeding system here and here!

And a lot of folks are sad that their lore wolves can't have pups because the male of a mated pair isn't the stud.

I like this idea, would prevent inbreeding because while I want to have my lead wolf be a direct descendant of my first two wolves (lead and breeding male) that means I'd have to pick a female pup as an heir who then picks an outside male for breeding male role. If I were to pick a male pup (and then he wouldn't be lead wolf he'd be breeding male) I'd either have to stud out for his siblings I had kept or start a whole new pack because I will NOT inbreed. It also makes for good lore stuff!

Support. This is really well thought out. At first I thought I’d be against this but after reading I am in agreement. I’ll keep my lore the same, but I’d love some forbidden pups in my life!

Yes!! I am all about lore/building personalities and relationships, and I would LOVE to get into it more. This would make it much easier and more enjoyable, and perhaps even motivate me to continue doing it in the future. All the points made in the original post are great, and all the thoughts I've had since starting this just two weeks ago. While I love my breeding male, I've come to realize he does not pair well with most brown/tan bases, and given how the studding fees work and the current state of the in-game economy, I'd be paying an arm and a leg to get a stud. Being able to have even just one more male to be able to breed to would be nice!

As with the other thread suggesting this: Support!

I will also add what I added ove in the other thread:
If having all males being able to breed is to "strong" a change for devs, I personally would be content with limiting all males except the chosen breeding male to a certain amount of possible breedings per life (like how female wolves are limited as well).
But that't up for debate, just throwing it in here as a possible idea to discuss and think about :)

Huge support!

I'm someone who came to play wolvden only for lore (yeah, and for pretty woofs) so finding out that we can only have one breeding male, like in LD, was disappointing. At first I tried to push it away and "go around it" by studding my females with outsiders and pretending that the pups belong to their lore mate. But I'm already seeing the downsides to it. Studding out every female is expensive and having to keep a separate document of who is who's "real" father is becoming a hassle and I don't see it getting any better.

I personally think the males should just have the same cooldown (excluding breeding male who can mate willy-nilly) like the females in the pack. This would help reduce the amounts of pups flooding the markets and more importantly, make having males in the pack actually desirable.

Partially support - I don't think I would want every single male breedable, but at least having the option to have two breeding males would help reduce the chances of inbreeding within a pack, give more options for stat and marking pairs to exist, help players expand lore, etc. Just having a primary male and a sub-male or secondary male would be an improvement. You can even give the secondary slightly lower fertility or something, just give me an option lol. I like the suggestion above also of perhaps having a cooldown for the secondary males.

Absolutely agreed, I love to think of lore for my wolves and I'd love to have some family pairs in my pack. I hate to resort to writing out every bred female as either someone who had left her family, or write the same old "forbidden love" story with a male from another pack.


If you don't want studs to devalue as much, consider this:
- Non-stud males cannot pass on mutations or mutation-carrier genes to pups.
- Non-stud males only get 1 breeding per week.
- Non-stud males pass marks/stats poorer, if a female has 200 stats and 2 marks, and the non-stud male has 300 & 10 respectively, pups are likely to be a lot more similar to the mom in characteristics than to be in between the two parents.
- Non-stud males can only sire litters of 1-3 pups.