Allow All Males to Breed within the Pack

Males breeding would actually lower pup numbers! If a pack has 20 slots and they're all female, that's 20 potential litters! But if a pack has 10 males and 10 females, that's only 10 potential litters - half the pups!

@VagueShapes- No, the customise featured overwrites all existing features so a diorite custom has to be marking apps.  And yeah, if the litters very are limited I'll do much simpler designs. I only want a diorite as a secondary breeder anyways because the Cool group has several fails I hate that I wouldn't want to get a lot of from my primary breeder. 

I did see the suggestion about changing marking apps and my first thought was 'glad I saw this first now I know not to buy any'.  Which is probably not a reaction the devs want to encourage.  I might buy apps anyways despite my initial outrage, but we'll see how the game develops. 

Ah, I should've clarified,  before I tried to use it I was under the impression it wouldn't overwrite. It definitely shouldn't do that in my opinion, because it makes the feature pretty useless for anything that isn't a Newly Befriended Wolf. If you, or somebody else, were to suggest a fix for that, I would give my wholehearted support ^^

The breeding male thing weirds me out because that's how lions work, not wolves. I found it jarring to come to this wolf sim made by the lion people and have the pack structure actually be pride structure. I never played Lioden but it works the same way right, except your breeding male is also your lead? Why would they just reskin the breeding mechanics when wolves and lions reproduce so differently? Honestly I'm really curious about the thought process behind this decision.

Since some semblance of realism is important to me, especially for such a core feature, I've thought about this a bit myself. Restricting breeding to only an alpha pair would make the breeding part of the game really boring, who wants to breed only two animals? Maybe we just loosen the rules and allow multiple pairs to breed. Or we change your den from one pack to a union of packs, structured like caves, and only the alphas of each pack can breed. On paper I like the idea of pairing wolves until one dies, but gameplay-wise I'm not sure since that would kinda prevent studding. Maybe your alpha females are all bonded with a male but can still be bred by studs? Maybe breeding for free with your own males is discouraged by them refusing to breed if another pair currently has puppies, to prevent excess burden that would hinder survival.

I guess that's a little out there lol. Your lead & BM would be heads of an "alliance" of packs, each with their own breeding pair, which again would just be a wolf sorting system, replacing caves for instance.

As for female bias: literally any breeding game that features pregnancy will have that. Females are simply more important. The only exception I know of is Dragon Cave, where eggs are born immediately, the cooldown is the same for both sexes, and you can only breed with your own dragons, so it makes no difference who's the mother or father. But it would be nice to bump up males from completely undesirable to simply slightly less important.

@Mossfoot- There are several suggestions along your lines that you might like more than this one, from your comment.  I like this one best because I'm looking for freedom not penalties, but you could search them out.

Popping in a little late to say that I think that a male wolf having the same amount of potential breedings in his lifetime as a female, but usable whenever, seems like a very reasonable solution to a lot of the concerns people have expressed here. However, it might just complicate trading a little bit... Like if you buy an old lady wolf you know you're not getting many breedings from her, but if the males could use all their breedings, say, within his first year of adulthood then that might make trading a little weird. Which could be worked with but it might be messy.

@Red- It would be another thing to advertise/check based on preference, that's for sure. I think it would only be a problem if someone advertised a wolf as having breedings left when they don't, but I imagine that the slots would be visible to all players, and mods would step in to deal with scammers pretty fast.

As someone who is very protective of limited resources... I'm not into limited lifetime breeding. It would make me anxious to do any breeding and probably have horrible effects on the stud market. The types of wolves that get 100+ pups now would become crazy expensive and just hinder everyone's breeding projects.

I don't think anyone was suggesting the breeding males would be limited, only other males breeding in-pack.  They wouldn't affect the stud market much at all.

Totally support!! <3

Although, maybe, if needed and so studs aren't so majorly reduced in value or whatever, you could have a maximum? So 1 stud(or stud-able wolf) and then like, 3 or 5 or whatever non-stud-able wolves? In that case there could be the same thing for females too -- like, only 5 females that can be bred at one time or whatever.

Idk if someone else said this already as I didn't read everything: just my suggestion. Oh, and I want to mention one last thing -- people could always choose!! If someone wanted to only ever breed their alpha pair, for whatever reason, they could! So I don't think this would be detrimental or anything! :D