Allow All Males to Breed within the Pack

Support! I was going to post my own topic, but I will piggyback off of yours and post my thoughts here to avoid getting locked!

I agree pack males should be allowed to breed to females WITHIN their pack, through the use of a Grove item, seasonally, or with limitations. This prevents pack males from having the same breeding capacity as the current breeding males, which would devalue studding.

Breeding Limitations (not all options need to be used):

1. Pack males have a breeding cool down like females do.
2. They can only breed to females within their own pack that aren’t on a trading cool down (discourages traditional breeding).
3. They can only breed through use of a Grove fertility item.
4. Pack males have a set number of breeding slots, either per week or over their entire life. Per week slots would be considerably lower than a breeding male: 1-3 for pack males vs 15 for breeding males.
5. Pack males can only breed in the Spring, when food is abundant and the pack has resources to allow more litters to be born. Real wolf packs have multiple litters in times of plenty, compared to leaner times when only the breeding pair produces just one litter per breeding season.

I can imagine that implementing this would be considerable work for the coders. We couldn’t even breed our first litters without first assigning the father as a breeding male, so allowing any male to breed would likely call for an overhaul of some current game mechanics. However, this work would allow more freedom of game play and increase the value of male pups.

I support! Even just having 2 other spare males would be nice. Not necessarily to stud out, but having the option to have other males only you can breed to would be fair I think. 

I completely support this one billion percent!!!

I definitely can't restate things better than has already been done in the other thread, but I think allowing more breeding males would make a great deal of sense, and would certainly not do anything to hurt the in-game market in any way.

1. It will hurt the stud market

A. No, it won't. People who want to stud to pretty or strong wolves will do so regardless. I've played plenty of games which allow free breeding of all pets and still routinely utilized the studding systems, and those sites all had very robust stud markets.

B. Even if it did....so what? People will find other ways of making money. And frankly most players don't ever rely on studding as a major income source. Besides, it's not up to the development team to protect one particular small player group's economic interests while ignoring the pleas of almost the entire player base. This is a silly argument. The point of the game is not to become the most successful stud wolf.

2. The game will be flooded with puppies!!

A. Yep, it sure will. It's a pet sim focused on breeding. That's how they all go. But that has already happened with people being artificially restricted to one breeding male, anyways. Look at Lioden.

B. All females are already breedable. Players are going to breed females in heat or not, and that decision will be made outside of what male is available. Basically...if 100 females are going to be bred this week to produce approximately 300 puppies...those same females would still be bred, producing the same 300 puppies...regardless of what males they're bred to. All it would do to allow more breeding males would be to have the same number of puppies coming from a more diverse gene pool. 

Hope I'm not being rude or offensive here. I love Wolvden so far, but this is one feature that really could use a hard look, imo.

Adding a support here too :) If all of the males could breed within the pack, some kind of cooldown or limited amount of breedings would work nicely. Same cooldown as females or a bit shorter, only a few breeding slots per week etc

As I mentioned on the other thread, I think the way to balance this is to give the non-stud males a 20-24 day cooldown, same as females. There would be no realistic/logical reason to have this, except to make males and females completely equal in terms of breeding ability.

I definitely don't think all males should be able to breed without restriction, even if it is only within your own pack, because that might still encourage mass-breeding (I.e. 5 males and 50 females). Plus, the game is really focused on planning ahead, and this kind of feature would make you have to think carefully about your pairs.

As the coding is already in place for female wolves, and males even have hidden breeding cycles and fertility information attached to them (in case they're sex-changed) I hope this would be a relatively simple addition.

Support for sure! While I understand the idea behind having only one stud wolf, it does limit significantly what can be done in terms of lore, and I'd almost rather see a limit on breedings period than have only one breeding stud.

Support! The single stud system on LD has bothered me for as long as I've played the game, and I'd love a different dynamic here! We already have a wolf creating medicine, so I hardly think realism is a concern. 

I definitely support this! Only on stud, but let me breed with any of my boys please 🙏

I really liked the idea of linking season and the ability of males to breed.

Perhaps something like this:
3 breeding slots per male in spring
2 in summer
1 in fall
0 in winter

The anount of males being able to breed could also be limited by the territory size, example:
1-15 territory: 1 extra male breeders
16-25: 2 extra male breeders
26-35: 3 extra male breeders

And possibly set a limit to the maximum amount of male breeders.

I tentatively agree. I already find myself avoiding purchasing male puppies, planning to sex change any nice male puppies born (that aren't quite nice enough to be set as the breeding male), chasing any male puppies born with next to no notable traits, etc. It definitely does feel as though males already hold nearly as little value as males in Lioden - but unlike Lioden their sex ratios are 50/50.

While I would absolutely adore being able to breed males within my pack, I just worry that it would utterly flood the market with excess puppies. Perhaps the system could be highly limited to something like 3-5 times per the male wolf's lifetime. OR, perhaps it could have a fun, yet highly RNG system in place. Maybe each time the male attempts to breed a female you either fail and are scolded by the pack's current leader (perhaps taking damage or gaining an open wound as penalty.) Or you succeed and successfully breed the female. Both outcomes resulting in a long cooldown period until the male can attempt another breeding.

Either way I'd be eager to see how other users or the devs themselves may approach the idea of breeding other males within the pack. I'll be keeping my eyes open and my fingers crossed!