Much of this has been said in other threads but with the update closing in, I wanted the subject to have a bit more attention.
What they would do:
Provide a set amount of food for thralls and pets in an area so a reasonable number of thralls can be kept with less maintenance.
What they wouldn’t do:
Provide infinite food thus putting us right back at huge numbers of thralls per base.
What they could do with a bit more work:
Make bases a bit more lively with a few thralls that actually come and go.
Allow for special events in which players aid/ rescue thralls in trouble
Create a way for settlements to be attacked short of full scale assaults.
At the most basic implementation, a food gathering thrall would attached, like any other laborer thrall, to a food station that feeds the rest. The thrall would produce an amount of food per day based on its level. Only one food station and thus, one thrall would be allowed in a given area.
Expanding the idea, and the work involved, gatherer thralls could move about and have equipment that could be upgraded like that of combat thralls. In this case, better equipment would mean more food brought in.
Programming thralls to actually go and hunt is likely too far fetched but having them come and go from the base would create a sense of immersion. At a set distance from players they could just come and go from the ether.
Expanding even further, it would be great to occasionally see them running about in the wild. Thralls out on their own could get into trouble so rare events where they need to be rescued from slavers or wild animals could occur. They could even be targets for an enemy player fast enough to catch them before they run home.
Even if gatherers are not vulnerable, it could be fun to have more than one. In this case, a limit on food gathered could be created by saying there is only a set amount of each food resource in an area. Each gatherer thrall pulls a percentage of that resource based on their ability.
Again, much of this has been said in other threads. If you see an idea of yours here, please take credit.
I live the concept however they are making feeding mechanism to clean servers from abandoned thralls and You want to put even more thralls with more complex coding so the servers will die.
If they would really consider creating this the first suggestion will be to change servers to better ones and make some improvements in game performance.
Yea, programming costs and server load are certainly something to consider.
For that reason I start off mentioning a very basic implementation which would be a single station with a single, non moving, thrall attached. The devs could start off with this very lightweight solution and then look into adding more features.
It would probably be easiest computing and AI wise to not have wandering food gathering thralls but rather make it possible to place farm-houses, logging-huts, fishing-huts, hunting-lodges etc. as crafting stations which then gather local resources of their specific kind e.g. farm-houses gather plants (also aloe, lotus, etc.), berries and seed from the plant nodes within a AOE (higher with increasing tiers). You put a farmer, fisherman, logger, miner, hunter thrall into the crafting station and, these are locked, so raiders can come, destroy the crafting station, steal the accumulated contents and the thrall.
Separate out buildings? As much as I like the idea of thralls wandering around this is probably a better first step in expanding beyond just a single station.
It would be simple to implement and players could still decide how far from their defenses they want to risk placing a building.
A step beyond that would be to have the thrall just outside the building doing a relevant animation. If enemies are spotted, the thrall rushes inside and alerts his clan to an attack.
i have made a concept before with a mining station at first. It like what you said but in my case i could not rely on a Set find and go harvest because of how the game handles itself. you see there this thing call a Culling process of which Each resource mode are only loaded when a player is near them. Other wise it just unloaded basically the entire map of conan is not active at once rather it load and deload depend on if there a player or not that has activated that square.
The entire idea of requiring thralls to be fed is to increase the maintenance.
My only criticism of the thrall food system is the Thrall Pot. A pot? really? that is super lame. It should be a big as feast table that populates the table mesh with meats and foods for display based on what is inside. One of the great things about this game is displaying your wealth, and stroking your own ego with an awesome looking fortress. This would add to that in an immersive functional way. A thrall pot is NOT impressive, NOT cool.
The entire idea of requiring thralls to be fed is to increase the maintenance.
I think ( I hope) The idea of feeding thralls is to make huge populations of thralls unmanageable. The gatherer thralls would feed a smaller number while still making people work for their armies.
My only criticism of the thrall food system is the Thrall Pot. A pot? really? that is super lame. It should be a big as feast table that populates the table mesh with meats and foods for display based on what is inside. One of the great things about this game is displaying your wealth, and stroking your own ego with an awesome looking fortress. This would add to that in an immersive functional way. A thrall pot is NOT impressive, NOT cool.
Fair enough; a pot is a bit lame. Early on though, we are lame, barely scraping by, dodging crocodiles etc… Perhaps we start with dirty old food pots and later unlock fancy spreads.
Early on though, we are lame, barely scraping by, dodging crocodiles etc… Perhaps we start with dirty old food pots and later unlock fancy spreads.