Cattle

[theguruofreason]

So... I really don't know why no one has discussed this. Maybe no one but me does quests for the villages.

In the beginning of the game, and probably all the way to level 6 or so, you can go to a small village and ride up to the "village elder" and when you ask to buy cattle from them they typically tell you, "Hey there sonny-jim! I gots me 126 heads of cattle. You can buy 'em fer 22 denars a piece if ya like." However, by level 15 you ride up to the same elder and you'll hear one of two responses to the same query; "WHAT!? Who are you? What do you want? Not here to raid us are you?! Oh, you want to buy cattle. We have none left. 15 Marauding lords have been through here in the last month and we're all out!" or "WHAT!? Who are you? What do you want? Not here to raid us are you?! Oh, you want to buy cattle. We have 3 heads left and you can buy them for 2200 denars a piece."

Holy Funkin' Waggles! When other villages are asking you for 8 heads to replenish their corals you first must spend days trodding around the countryside until you find a village that actually HAS cattle, and then must pay exorbitant prices for, frankly, not enough cattle. Even at level 25 it's not worth it to me to spend 10 days and 18000 denars to get +8 reputation with a village. Is this a broken game mechanic? Am I the only one having this problem? The other quests for villages are very reasonable; "Go buy us 8 sacks of wheat at 100 denars a piece from the nearest town/villiage. They always have them in stock." "Spend 2 days training us and then fight with us against 25+ local bandits." Not too easy, not too hard. Why the hell do the cattle quests become so outlandishly resource consuming? Not only that, but they increase in frequency if I'm not mistaken, likely because no villages have cows left.

One final thing, IMO the rate at which lords raid villages is too high. It is likely a reflection of "reality" but it's just an annoying mechanic which causes all the world's villages to constantly be in a state of gut-wrenching poverty. The game could do with some party-level AI enhancements.

[Blead]

what is the point of this topic?

[Engima]

what is the point of this topic?

Ditto.
Although i hate the cattle quests...

[theguruofreason]

what is the point of this topic?

Cattle quests are broken.

[chantrain]

i hate the cattle quests, i dont do them if i can help it

[Nathan90]

I have had no problems with cattle quests..They are easy.and if you don;t want to buy the cattle just steal them.

[fragonard]

They're not quite as bad with the discovery of a quick fix to make them easier to herd.  There was a thread about it a few days ago; just change one number in a text file.

[theguruofreason]

I'm saying that I can't even find a village that has any cattle, let alone one with cattle of reasonable prices. The problem isn't herding and the problem isn't just the price, it's that lords raid villages so much that all the cattle in Calradia end up slaughtered.

[Engima]

I'm saying that I can't even find a village that has any cattle, let alone one with cattle of reasonable prices. The problem isn't herding and the problem isn't just the price, it's that lords raid villages so much that all the cattle in Calradia end up slaughtered.

Poor cows... 

[erikred]

I'm saying that I can't even find a village that has any cattle, let alone one with cattle of reasonable prices. The problem isn't herding and the problem isn't just the price, it's that lords raid villages so much that all the cattle in Calradia end up slaughtered.

This is a function of trying to pay off two or three 500 troop garrisons. After a certain point, the only good, reliable way to make enough money to cover your weekly expenses (and keep up the morale of your 100+ member entourage) during a siege is to plunder the nearest four villages and sell poor Bessie for meat.

If you factor in costs for improvements, bribing Ladies to keep you popular with the Lords, and paying off heroes who do quests for you, you can see that a King probably doesn't have time to do much _apart_ from raiding villages.

Quick tip for those wheat missions, btw: wheat does occasionally run thin, so if you have a castle, consider stashing wheat in your chest there.

[Nathan90]

I think i'm just lucky when it comes to Cattle...i just found a village that had 256 heards of cattle 

[Sephran]

just try to find any prospering villages, they usually have quite a bunch.

[TheMageLord]

I'm not sure if it's changed in 1.003, but looking at the .960 trigger for cattle it's obvious why theres a problem.

Theres a 3% chance of all cattle being eradicated no matter the number, and a 40% chance of losing 3-8 cows. 50% of the time they get positive growth, which gives a 1% to 11% growth plus 1-3 on top of it. So if you have 10 cows, you'll get 1-4 extra. Then a 7% chance gives you 11% to 21% growth plus 1-3 on top of it, so with 10 cows you'd get 2-5 extra.

So once you reach 0 cows: Week one, you have a 57% chance of gaining 1-3 cows. Week two, you have a 43% chance of losing all your cows and a 57% chance of gaining about 1-3 more on top of it. Week three, same 43% chance of losing them all and 57% chance of gaining a couple again. If you get consistently lucky you might get 20 or 30 and have it start building, but hitting 3% even once brings you back to 0 and every 40% hit will knock you back a few checks.

I can't see anywhere else that adds cattle in the .960 files.

Hopefully this has changed in 1.003, but given that the problem still seems to remain... I doubt it has.

-edit- I just compared the two text files, it's still the same. No wonder everyone has trouble with cattle, they are on a decline from the get go and never really have a chance to go back up once they eventually drop.

[Ringwraith #5]

Very interesting, MageLord. Obviously it could do with some tweaking.

[TheMageLord]

Heres the 1.003 trigger (simple_triggers.txt). It's on line number 37 if you have a text editor that shows lines (like notepad2), or you can just search for some of the numbers and find the right spot.

24.000000  32 6 3 1224979098644774912 648518346341351501 648518346341351591 521 3 1224979098644774913 1224979098644774912 45 2136 3 1224979098644774914 0 100 4 0 2147483678 2 1224979098644774914 3 2133 2 1224979098644774913 0 4 0 3 0 5 0 2147483678 2 1224979098644774914 10 2136 3 1224979098644774914 111 121 2107 2 1224979098644774913 1224979098644774914 2108 2 1224979098644774913 100 2136 3 1224979098644774914 1 3 2105 2 1224979098644774913 1224979098644774914 5 0 2147483678 2 1224979098644774914 50 2136 3 1224979098644774914 3 8 2106 2 1224979098644774913 1224979098644774914 5 0 2136 3 1224979098644774914 101 111 2107 2 1224979098644774913 1224979098644774914 2108 2 1224979098644774913 100 2136 3 1224979098644774914 1 3 2105 2 1224979098644774913 1224979098644774914 3 0 2112 3 1224979098644774913 0 101 501 3 1224979098644774912 45 1224979098644774913 2121 3 1224979098644774915 1224979098644774913 10 2108 2 1224979098644774915 2 1 5 936748722493063202 1224979098644774912 288230376151711816 1224979098644774915 0 3 0

There are many ways you could edit the way it works. The red 0 and 100 are the parameters for the random number generated (between 0 and 100), and it then takes 0-2 for 0 cows (3 in the code), 3-9 for big growth (10 in the code), and 10-49 (50) for negative 3-8. 50+ is the low growth one. You could change that to 45 100 to make it give a roughly 9% chance of 3-8 negative growth and 91% chance of small positive growth - that'd probably balance it out good enough to work, but it would remove the chance of big growth and big loss entirely. You could also go through and modify the blue numbers - the first and third being the straight cattle added range, with the second being the range to subtract. The lime green number (3) is the chance of eradicating the herd. The yellow numbers are the amount to increase the herd percentage wise, first for the big growth then for the small growth. It takes that number divided by 100 so 111 is 11% increase.

That should give someone enough info to make whatever changes they want. I'm not sure if it will take effect in a savegame (I haven't actually tried editing simple triggers between games before...).

Link to other tweaks.