With the recent relaxation of the feeding mechanic, people are concerned that there will be an epidemic of quantity over quality when it comes to thralls.
Perhaps having beds and barns as “thrall capacity” would be a more diegetic approach to both base building and population management.
The idea is that each thrall and tame requires basic accommodation, which translates to structural capacity. If the beds and barns get destroyed, nothing will happen to pre-existing thralls and pets… it’s just that new thralls and pets can’t be deployed until more beds are built.
Whether this will just translate into more land-grabbing or not, i’m not sure.
And it is a way to create bases in a more realistic way (if this word may be used for such a game at all). Everyone living there needs some structures for his basic needs and wants.
It’s basically realism within the game’s confines.
An example is Astroneers diegetic inventory system, where nothing loses it’s physicality, and you actively drag the items with the mouse, and snap it physically to storage. Or Dead Space’s inventory system, showing the character the menu, which just happens to be visible to the player.
Or Star Citizens 5 minute subway commute across a city the size of Austin, to the spaceport, from your home.
Non of that has to be “realistic” but it’s perfectly realistic within the game’s confines.
Diegetic is the opposite of “implied gameplay”, like… turning a thrall into an icon and storing that in a small box. It’s not even realistic within the game’s confines…
If a base is built right, you need only 8 archers and 8 melee to defend a 8x8 base, covering every side.
The second floor of said 8x8 would be the barracks housing 8 beds; directly around it, a ring of balcony, to shoot from, for the archers stationed at every corner of the base.
The melee downstairs are the vanguard.
The more excess thralls one captures, the bigger base one will need, which once again means more thralls. At some point, one’s base will be so big, i will never have enough thralls to cover each segment sufficiently, unless you expand vertically.
Vertical expansion is the most PvE friendly thing to do on a PvE server.