Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Using Inbreeding and Outbreeding Depression to keep Tamers Relevant in the Breeding Market
Goalid
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
In the most recent livestream Steven gave an outline of the animal husbandry system Intrepid is seeking to have in Ashes of Creation. We learned all sorts of new proposed mechanics, such as every animal having recessive and dominant alleles for certain traits, maybe he even meant for their stats. We were told that you may be forced to specialize in one of four animal husbandry training paths: mounts, battle pets, beasts of burden (mules I assume), and livestock. I would want to go over some implications for these systems as they relate to RNG and how to keep taming relevant.
Taming an animal is the start off point of the whole animal husbandry process. The tamers are the gatherers, the processors are the trainers and breeders, and there will be crafters for animal armor and some animal husbandry tools in this system. (According to Jahlon who asked Steven privately:
https://youtu.be/24auF5saoKY?t=117 )
I don't understand how the crafting side of this is going to work, so I'll just talk about the gathering and processing side of this system.
A problem with being a tamer, is once you capture an animal in Ashes and sell it, you've given breeders a parent who can reproduce an innumerable number of future animals that will greatly increase the supply of mounts. And then their children can breed, and their children can breed, etc. If you give away two animals of the same species and opposite gender, the breeder can simply have them reproduce and not have any need for a tamer anymore. This is an exponential effect that at first is only limited by the number of breeders on the server. It is a snowball effect as well, no matter the initial rarity of the animal or trait. Once I get two rare animals of the opposite gender who can reproduce, I can reproduce their traits, and then have their children reproduce those traits until the end of time. Their good genes are in the system. The breeding system is a gene replication system, so we can expect there to be a form of "natural selection", that we might call "breeder selection", going on. Animals will be bred for the best traits, while animals without those good traits will be passed over and used as livestock. So, where is the tamer's job in all this after the first couple months? Why pay someone hours worth of labor to try and capture a unique mount with a rare gene, if I can just pay someone to reproduce one for me for cheap?
To address this, there are a number of systems Intrepid could implement to prevent rare traits from flooding the market. The first is to limit the number of pregnancies for female animals, and to have some sort of fertility time limit for males. The RNG could also be important in breeding. We've already gotten talks about there being recessive and dominant alleles. Putting the best traits on recessive alleles greatly reduces the number of offspring who will have a rare trait, unless two mounts with said rare recessive allele trait are reproducing. Intrepid can increase the number of genes that affect a given trait as well, instead of just having one they could have two genes affecting mount speed, or five. @Chillmaw also had a splendid idea, of allowing breeders to neuter their animals, so that they can partially monopolize the breeding market. Neutering animals would mean that a breeder would have to pay a premium price to get a non-neutered animal with the traits they want. All good ideas, but ones that only increase the amount of time it takes to get a large enough breeding pool that makes tamers irrelevant.
The best way to keep tamers in the market for the long run is to have a significant amount of inbreeding depression. Inbreeding, as we know from popular TV shows like Game of Thrones, comes at a great cost. Many people and animals have numerous recessive alleles that are bad for them, but aren’t expressed because of a dominant allele that is paired with them. But, when inbreeding occurs, it becomes more likely that these harmful traits get expressed as both recessive alleles are present in the child's parents. It is necessary to have this inbreeding depression for the game, because without it there is only the positive benefit of passing down good recessive alleles within families. Good recessive alleles that tamers are probably spending tens of hours to find.
Implementing inbreeding depression can either be done by simply banning inbreeding by some family limit, either if the parents are related at all or up until they're "x"th cousins and closer, or to actually put numerous, unique, negative recessive alleles in wild animals. Numerous recessive alleles because that increases the chance of inbreeding depression, and unique so that a captured wild animal is always a mate free from the chance of producing offspring with inbreeding depression. I personally like the latter because it's more interesting to me as a system. 10th cousins have a risk of producing offspring with bad traits, but that may be worth the risk. And it does have the advantage of potentially having a breeder waste money and a large amount of time buying a mate from a breeder and waiting for the pregnancy to conclude. But the former is obviously a much simpler system.
With inbreeding depression out of the way, let’s move onto outbreeding depression. Outbreeding depression is what occurs when you attempt to cross two very genetically distinct populations / species. Sometimes it’s possible to get... interesting results from these crosses, look at the liger or the tigon for example. But these crosses are often cursed with genetic defects and sterility. Looking into the genetic causes of outbreeding depression, I would think that it would simply be too hard to implement into the game with a Mendelian system of dominant and recessive alleles. Rather, Intrepid should have a group of animal species / sub-species that can copulate but suffer from outbreeding depression. Then, have a success rate for the pregnancy determined by breeding method / breeder profession level. After that check, have a rate for the percentage chance of fertility within the cross-breed offspring. By successfully passing all of these RNG checks, a breeder can bring a cross-species to life in Verra by eventually raising fertile cross-bred animals. The harshness of the cross-breeding attempts will require many fresh animals from the wild, again giving a job to tamers. It is also possible in the real world, for an animal to suffer from both inbreeding and outbreeding depression. The animal receives outbreeding depression from a lack of paired genes that mutually help with survival in their parent's respective environments, but if the animal is a second generation cross-breed with sibling parents, it can still suffer from an increased chance for bad, recessive alleles to be passed down. By implementing both these systems, the race for cross breeds on each server will be competitive and provide a strong market for both breeders and tamers.
Hopefully Bucky Collins went over all this in his twenty page paper to Steven and the dev team. But as a potential tamer, I felt I may as well talk about some problems and solutions I see happening with the, admittedly limited, animal husbandry description we were given last livestream.
Taming an animal is the start off point of the whole animal husbandry process. The tamers are the gatherers, the processors are the trainers and breeders, and there will be crafters for animal armor and some animal husbandry tools in this system. (According to Jahlon who asked Steven privately:
https://youtu.be/24auF5saoKY?t=117 )I don't understand how the crafting side of this is going to work, so I'll just talk about the gathering and processing side of this system.
A problem with being a tamer, is once you capture an animal in Ashes and sell it, you've given breeders a parent who can reproduce an innumerable number of future animals that will greatly increase the supply of mounts. And then their children can breed, and their children can breed, etc. If you give away two animals of the same species and opposite gender, the breeder can simply have them reproduce and not have any need for a tamer anymore. This is an exponential effect that at first is only limited by the number of breeders on the server. It is a snowball effect as well, no matter the initial rarity of the animal or trait. Once I get two rare animals of the opposite gender who can reproduce, I can reproduce their traits, and then have their children reproduce those traits until the end of time. Their good genes are in the system. The breeding system is a gene replication system, so we can expect there to be a form of "natural selection", that we might call "breeder selection", going on. Animals will be bred for the best traits, while animals without those good traits will be passed over and used as livestock. So, where is the tamer's job in all this after the first couple months? Why pay someone hours worth of labor to try and capture a unique mount with a rare gene, if I can just pay someone to reproduce one for me for cheap?
To address this, there are a number of systems Intrepid could implement to prevent rare traits from flooding the market. The first is to limit the number of pregnancies for female animals, and to have some sort of fertility time limit for males. The RNG could also be important in breeding. We've already gotten talks about there being recessive and dominant alleles. Putting the best traits on recessive alleles greatly reduces the number of offspring who will have a rare trait, unless two mounts with said rare recessive allele trait are reproducing. Intrepid can increase the number of genes that affect a given trait as well, instead of just having one they could have two genes affecting mount speed, or five. @Chillmaw also had a splendid idea, of allowing breeders to neuter their animals, so that they can partially monopolize the breeding market. Neutering animals would mean that a breeder would have to pay a premium price to get a non-neutered animal with the traits they want. All good ideas, but ones that only increase the amount of time it takes to get a large enough breeding pool that makes tamers irrelevant.
The best way to keep tamers in the market for the long run is to have a significant amount of inbreeding depression. Inbreeding, as we know from popular TV shows like Game of Thrones, comes at a great cost. Many people and animals have numerous recessive alleles that are bad for them, but aren’t expressed because of a dominant allele that is paired with them. But, when inbreeding occurs, it becomes more likely that these harmful traits get expressed as both recessive alleles are present in the child's parents. It is necessary to have this inbreeding depression for the game, because without it there is only the positive benefit of passing down good recessive alleles within families. Good recessive alleles that tamers are probably spending tens of hours to find.
Implementing inbreeding depression can either be done by simply banning inbreeding by some family limit, either if the parents are related at all or up until they're "x"th cousins and closer, or to actually put numerous, unique, negative recessive alleles in wild animals. Numerous recessive alleles because that increases the chance of inbreeding depression, and unique so that a captured wild animal is always a mate free from the chance of producing offspring with inbreeding depression. I personally like the latter because it's more interesting to me as a system. 10th cousins have a risk of producing offspring with bad traits, but that may be worth the risk. And it does have the advantage of potentially having a breeder waste money and a large amount of time buying a mate from a breeder and waiting for the pregnancy to conclude. But the former is obviously a much simpler system.
With inbreeding depression out of the way, let’s move onto outbreeding depression. Outbreeding depression is what occurs when you attempt to cross two very genetically distinct populations / species. Sometimes it’s possible to get... interesting results from these crosses, look at the liger or the tigon for example. But these crosses are often cursed with genetic defects and sterility. Looking into the genetic causes of outbreeding depression, I would think that it would simply be too hard to implement into the game with a Mendelian system of dominant and recessive alleles. Rather, Intrepid should have a group of animal species / sub-species that can copulate but suffer from outbreeding depression. Then, have a success rate for the pregnancy determined by breeding method / breeder profession level. After that check, have a rate for the percentage chance of fertility within the cross-breed offspring. By successfully passing all of these RNG checks, a breeder can bring a cross-species to life in Verra by eventually raising fertile cross-bred animals. The harshness of the cross-breeding attempts will require many fresh animals from the wild, again giving a job to tamers. It is also possible in the real world, for an animal to suffer from both inbreeding and outbreeding depression. The animal receives outbreeding depression from a lack of paired genes that mutually help with survival in their parent's respective environments, but if the animal is a second generation cross-breed with sibling parents, it can still suffer from an increased chance for bad, recessive alleles to be passed down. By implementing both these systems, the race for cross breeds on each server will be competitive and provide a strong market for both breeders and tamers.
Hopefully Bucky Collins went over all this in his twenty page paper to Steven and the dev team. But as a potential tamer, I felt I may as well talk about some problems and solutions I see happening with the, admittedly limited, animal husbandry description we were given last livestream.
2
Comments
Wouldn't the offspring also be able to reproduce in this system? That would create an excess pet population. 2 parents-> 4 offspring > 8 children etc.
Ehh, I didn't come away with that impression at all from last livestream, sounded like this would be the most in depth crafting system in the game by far. If you want to keep it simple, all you have to do is say "no inbreeding allowed, cross breeds require x breeding level + y breeding method for success." Don't even require an underlying genetic system for those rules, but Steven did say they were going to use a Mendelian genetic system.
But wouldn't a better way of defining families be like mammals, reptiles, amphibians, aquatic and such. While increasing the options in cross-breading it avoids that snake and horse monstrosity. Sort of balances realism and fantasy.
but also a breed interval that gets higher the rarer the mount to slow down a bit
also an rng not only for apearence, also for stat, skill siblings
what i dont know yet if the mounts will have genders cause from the optical its not visible but it would be nice if females would look rather normal and males look fancy kinda like it is with birds IRL.
The wishlist is gonna have to face reality at some point. Not to make too direct a comparison but Star Citizen is a perfect example of feature creep and I don't think any of us wants to wait that long just for a "blue/green/red" horse that runs fast.
(I think I used the wrong thread for this post - but too lazy to move it around - carry on..)