Allow All Males to Breed within the Pack

I guess I don't understand what you mean.

Strictly realistically, only the dominant pair would breed, and only in late winter.  But that gets old very, very quickly in a game.  I don't understand how limits on the males breeding is realistic at all.  I'm open to weekly slot caps if the devs are willing to open up more breeding options.

@Lunar Lords- A cooldown is semi-realistic because male wolves would stick around to parent the pups until they're a fully independent (i.e. full grown at a year old). The males wouldn't be breeding with everyone left and right and ignoring their offspring, but if you want a wolf that can do that then the stud/breeding male feature fulfils that role.

EDIT- Another suggestion was a lifetime cap on the number of litters a non-stud male could breed, equal to the maximum number of litters a female can currently have. Not entirely realistic, but it evens the playing field for males and females.

Males would only stick around the female if the pair were splitting off to make their own pack.  This is about freedom and fun for players.  There's nothing realistic about wolvden.  

I know a breeding male can sire all the litters in the pack without limits.  The point is very few players expected or wanted the same breeding system as Lioden.  More male breeders can only be good in my opinion.  My favorite bases are Cool, light and medium.  But my least favorite bases are also in those groups.  I'm not going to make a breeding male that will throw 50% pups I hate so I'm gradually turning all my pack to Monochrome light females.  I at least like all the bases there. 

If the other males could breed, not only would I keep more males, I'd keep more colors.  I'd probably buy a diorite pup and maybe marking app him if they can breed in pack unlimited.  If they have, say, three slots a week I either keep the second color low in number or get more than one male.  But if the males have a cooldown it'll be difficult to line up their breeding with the heats of more than one or two females.  Which would make m unlikely to bother customizing.

I think if males used the same system as females, minus that they have a heat window tied to having to breed or any cooldown beyond just having bred, it wouldn't be as restrictive as you say. However, the idea a lot of people want is a way to stop genetic dead ends of males without making it so you could now have want is basically another free-for-all breeder like the breeding male.

I understand the want for freedom @Lunar Lords but three slots a week per male you keep still makes the balance as female heavy since under your suggestion you have one unlimited Breeding male and each other male can knock up 3 females a week. I don't see that being very good for lowering the amount of unwanted puppies, but instead making it worse. The original pitch of the thread was trying to increase the value in keeping more males among other points.

While what you are suggesting would do that, it would also make it very easy to just grab NBWs and keep hoping to get lucky with RNG. Which people will already do with the system as is. But that comes with the side effect of a whole bunch more puppies sitting in the TC unwanted as some try to recover their investment of at least food/nesting. This would further drop the price of puppies as even the rarer RNG 'wins' would become more common. Males would still be worth proportionally less as you still need less males to females to do this.

While being able to breed everyone is a good idea for some petsims, WD doesn't have a good incentive to get rid of unwanted puppies like many of those do or they have garbage pet markets as well. So I feel there needs to be some balance and the simplest solution in my eyes is the same after-making-puppies cooldown for both genders. It would be a natural limit on how many litters they could sire same as the females cooldown/heats without any Grove items (As if you IPD every litter you should get one more litter than average over their lifetime if I can math) limits females.

@Lunar Lords- Hence why I said semi-realistic. Although I disagree that there's nothing realistic about WD, the devs tried very hard to add in certain elements based on real life.

I'm all for males being able to breed within packs, and I'm personally happy with lifetime limit OR cooldown. You can easily sync up your female's heats with your male being off cooldown if the males had a shorter one than females. Somebody earlier suggested half the length of females, which I feel favours the male more, but it's an option. I suggested 20 days, so that if you instant birth your pups you can breed again to the same female, and if you didn't they'd still sync up. You don't have to breed a female on every heat either, and in some ways it's better not to grow your pack too fast.

I don't agree with a slots per week system, as that still favours a mostly female pack if it's not 3 slots per week per male. If it is per male, that favours the males in the pack more. Whilst realistic, in the sense that males could breed more litters than females biologically, in a game sense I think both sexes should have equal breeding ability to give them similar values.

As the stud feature would still negate all cooldowns/slots for breeding within your pack, it means you would just have to replace your stud if you wanted unlimited litters from a wolf. I also don't think retiring a male should make him infertile, so that players like yourself could customise a few males and swap between them. The site has to make money somehow, and I think that's the fairest compromise.

In short, if the cooldown option were widely disliked, my second favourite solution is a slot counter on the males' pages, that starts at the maximum number of litters a female can have, and goes down for every successful mating.

An incentive for getting rid of/chasing puppies might aleviate concerns of pups filling up the TC 

Like 5sc bonus for chasing wolves from the den ?

@VincentMango

Not really the scope of this suggestion so I don't want to derail this thread, but there is at least one suggestion that address that concern already.

Considering retiring a male costs as much as customizing them I can't see swapping out males as a viable way to diversify breeding options.  As I've said, any option to allow more males breeding would be an improvement and I'm game for almost any way its implemented.  My preference would be for slots over cooldowns, but either would be a good thing.

I do know the site has to make money.  I was stating what would encourage me personally to do so.  At 6 gold per slot, marking apps on a diorite base would be one of the more expensive ways to customise.  I wouldn't spend 60 gold for only seven or eight litters.  I'm sure others would have different criteria.

I had been tired of seeing everyone saying they wished they could use all of their males for breeding and wasn’t going to read through this thread, but I’m glad I did! You had a lot of good points and solutions to the problems that might arise by making it possible to breed to any male. Other people in the thread have had good suggestions too, like having your non-stud males have some sort of breeding cooldown like females do.

I do worry that mass breeding would become more of a problem, but I wonder if pup survival mechanics could be adjusted a bit to compensate. Not necessarily making it more likely for them to die randomly or decreasing pupsitter effectiveness, but maybe making it harder to stock up on pupsitters? I’ll admit that I don’t actually know if there’s a limit on how many wolves you can assign to that role but if a limit was set (or an existing one lowered) and it cost several GC to add more slots, that could potentially help. It would allow players to still protect the pups they like the most while making it harder to protect all of them at once, ensuring that not too many survived to adulthood. I feel like that might help to balance out the increased numbers of pups people would see. 

@Lunar Lords- i agree that 60GC is an awful lot on top of the early retirement fees. You could always keep the design simple on your non-studs to lessen the cost, and pick females that compliment them, but I'll admit it's not a great solution.

If there isn't one already, you might want to make a suggestion to tweak the "customise an existing wolf" feature. I was under the impression it would keep the traits they already had, and only charge you for changes, not rewrite the whole wolf. That'd definitely help with a part of your problem.

I think there's also a suggestion to change it so you can choose a specific opacity when using a marking app that you might want to support too. The extra GC just to fix whatever random % you get is overkill imo, especially if you need anything under 50% to make it look good

EDIT- @Bluefox- I don't know if you saw my large-font post, but we're all limited by territory space, and if some of them are taken up by desirable males then we actually will end up with less litters overall. Right now people have more females, and the numbers of females determines the number of litters/pups produced.