The 3 tiers of Animal Pens are identical gameplay-wise. They only differ in how they look and how many HPs they have.
On the other hand, many people complain that Animal Pens are way too big, thus too hard to build indoors. When built on the ground, stability bugs also make them decay really fast if the unsuspecting player doesn’t pay attention.
Here is my suggestion:
Animal Pens have different sizes and different capacities depending on the tier, exactly like Wheels of Pain.
Tier 1 is a simple cage holding only 1 pet.
Tier 2 is a group of 3 cages, still smaller than the current size and with a 3 pets capacity.
Tier 3 is unchanged and can host up to 5 pets.
You can tame any pet in any tier, just like before (exactly like Wheels of Pain)
The crafting costs are unchanged
It would make higher tier Animal Pens more useful (e.g. for farming greater pets) AND would make lower tier Animal Pens easier to build indoors, thus providing a nice trade-off, exactly like Wheels of Pain (at the risk of repeating myself).
Thank you for reading Funcom. Your game is the best but it could be so much more.
That isn’t true any more. Perhaps it used to be, and even the Wiki currently says so, but the higher tier pens raise animals faster now. I’m not sure when that changed or if it was ever documented in a patch, but try putting the same animal baby in each of these 3 buildings and the Tier 3 will finish first, and the Tier 2 second. I haven’t been able to find exact numbers anywhere in the Dev Kit, but if I had to take a wild guess, I’d say T2 is 33-50% faster and T3 is 50-100% faster.
I’m sure most players (myself included) agree that we need smaller animal pens. While amusing, being able to fit 5 Elephants in one pen is a bit of a fringe case I don’t think it should have been sized around. Reminds me of this old Age of Empires 10 slot transport joke…
Really, I’d be happy with a 5-slot pen for anything up to Shaleback/Rocknose size, and critters Rhino or larger can go into a single stall structure just like Horses go into a Stable.
I didn’t know about the crafting speed changes, I agree with Masmassu though, faster crafting time doesn’t make a huge difference when you can already tame 5 at the time!
I completely agree with your last point: I would love it if Rhinos and Elephants get some kind of Stable as well, where you can tame them then ride them