Types of Animals in the Game

AC Feedback and Suggestions
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This is sort of a random topic, but I’m very curious as to what types of animals (both wild and domestic) will be included in the game and what we will be able to do with them? I’ve seen from the current videos that we at least get wild goats to start with, which I assume our people will be able to tame and use for either food, clothing, or both, but are you able to tell us about any others you have planned? Personally, I would love to see dogs (or just domesticated wolves, as they would probably be at this point in history) and horses, both for fun and for work. City builders are my favorite genre of PC games, and it has always disappointed me that animals were never a very important part of them. Given the setting of this game, I think dogs would be particularly important, as they played a crucial role in the lives of early humans. Our citizens could use them for hunting and guarding the village against raiders. It would also be fun to watch our citizens interact with them in their daily lives, like seeing children play with them. If wild wolves are included, taming them could be one of the jobs citizens could choose to do, thus ensuring that the village always has enough wolves for whatever they choose to use them for. Villages could breed the wolves to trade with other villages to try and get different breeds that are better at certain things, like hunting or fighting. They could also be used to trade, for whatever the player wanted, including new wolves with different skill sets.

I’m not sure when horses were domesticated, so I don’t know what their role was to early humans, but they would definitely be useful in-game, especially as migration and raiding are present. They could also be used as farm animals when our citizens progress to that point. If an ancient Egyptian era expansion is ever introduced, cats could be included. They could be domesticated or worshipped (or both. That could lead to some interesting gameplay). Also, I know you said there wouldn’t be any, but someone suggested that Saber-tooth cats be included in the Ice Age expansion, as they existed during that time period. Is that something that could happen?

I’m not sure what the devs already have planned, and I certainly don’t expect anything like what I’ve suggested above in the very beginning, but it would be something I would like to see included at some point, even if it doesn’t end being a complex part of the game. Basically, I just really like animals and would like to see them included as more than just livestock, as so many city builders tend to do, and if there was ever an animal themed expansion, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

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I hope dogs are in the game too. They were probably a big part of Mesolithic and Neolithic people’s lives, especially when it came to hunting and (later) herding. Cats too: they were domesticated in the Neolithic.

Horses on the other hand weren’t domesticated until the Bronze Age, so they shouldn’t be in the eras the devs have talked about so far. There would have been wild horses in Europe that people hunted, though.

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I hope to see some cave bears in the first release, and if indiegogo will reach the goal about more fauna let’s put in mooses, deers, ducks and more :smiley:

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Disclaimer: I’m no expert, so please feel free to correct me if you know better.

If there are dogs in the game, I don’t think that they should be tameable - Dogs/wolves are pack hunters, and it would be a case of gaining the Alpha’s respect over time, at which point, the rest of the pack would follow the Alpha.
I don’t think that would be a very good/fun gameplay mechanic, as you’d have to track the pack for miles, in the hopes that they’d “convert”.

I would like to see a Mammoth. They’d just be an extra challenge of nature - a later game objective, that you wouldn’t be able to attack until you had enough hunters / skills / technology (stone-tipped arrows)

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We actually think dogs “tamed” themselves, rather than the other way around. Wolves are great hunters but also opportunistic scavengers. Humans were a rich opportunity for them: they could follow hunting parties and eat what they left, or hang around camps looking for scraps. Obviously people wouldn’t have wanted a great big wolf circling their camp, so over time the wolves that were better at getting humans to put up with them (i.e. smaller, cuter, friendlier ones) were more successful. After wolf-dogs had adapted to living in and around human settlements, people probably started to treat them as pets, and the natural social instincts of wolves as pack animals made it easy to keep and train them for specific tasks (like hunting).

This happened at least thirty thousand years ago, so it would make sense to have already-domesticated dogs in the time period of the game. Or if you have wild wolves, they should be found loitering around the player’s settlement, and be tameable.

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Wikipedia: Origin of the domestic dog

The archaeological record shows the first undisputed dog remains buried beside humans 14,700 years ago, with disputed remains occurring 36,000 years ago.

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@joeroe I do not thing that how the taming process happen according to current knowledge (could be wrong). The domestication process of the dog is not well known, even the actual date is unclear (between 30 000 and 10 000 BC). It took hundred/thousand of year of human selection to go from wolf to dog. However, it had been prove that wolf’s cub can be tame easily and are sociable with human if they are raised that way (since human are the one who feed them). It could be implement like that : the tribe kill wolfs then find the cubs and keep/raise them (I know it is not a nice and romantic way of bonding but it is the most realistic one).

Then come the selection process : it is a very important thing ! Human selected crop and animal in order to match it requirement. I do not know if it will be implement in the game and how but I think it could be interesting for the game experience and realism in general (both for crop and animals).

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Also not an expert about this, but as I understand it probably began as a natural selection, humans spent some time in a place where there were some wolves, after a long winter or drought a lot of them died of hunger, but some animals were curious and brave enough to get near humans to try to eat bones and other stuff, but not so ferocious as to make people be afraid and kill them, over time this resulted in the animals who had those qualities being better fed and passing along their genes even if they were not the biggest and strongest of the pack.

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“The archaeological record shows the first undisputed dog remains buried beside humans 14,700 years ago”

“These dates imply that the earliest dogs arose in the time of human hunter-gatherers and not agriculturists”
Source:

“Cats have been our furry, purr-y companions for at least 9,000 years”
Source:

I think it would be cool see how people domesticate dogs, cats, and so on. But dogs and cats i choose 1st because dogs could be used to help in hunting, defending or just as pets. Cats could defend food suplies from roddents and other animals and be pets too.
Thoughts?

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@ftpordeus A lot of animal scavenge (jackal, bears, wolf, etc…), genetic show that the dog is closer to the grey wolf than any other canidee. I doubt a natural selection could influence a sociable animal like wolf to change so much so quickly (20 000 is very short genetical speaking).

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To my knowledge the “self-taming” or commensal hypothesis is the current view of how dogs were domesticated. See e.g.:

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That’s my understanding of the matter as well, based on what I’ve read on the topic.

As to cats, to my knowledge the domestication happened after the transition to permanent settlement. Granaries -> mice -> cats :slight_smile:

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“Traditionally, historians tended to think ancient Egypt was the site of cat domestication, owing to the clear depictions of house cats in Egyptian paintings about 3,600 years old.[3] However, in 2004, a Neolithic grave excavated in Shillourokambos, Cyprus, contained the skeletons, laid close to one another, of both a human and a cat. The grave is estimated to be 9,500 years old, pushing back the earliest known feline–human association significantly.[15][255][256] The cat specimen is large and closely resembles the African wildcat, rather than present-day domestic cats. This discovery, combined with genetic studies, suggests cats were probably domesticated in the Middle East, in the Fertile Crescent around the time of the development of agriculture, and then were brought to Cyprus and Egypt”

Wiki

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Well, depending if you are in Europe or middle east with the European neolithic period, we will probably see things like wolves, Bears, Deer, Aurochs (Wild cattle), Iberian ibex is a possibility, rabbits, ect… with middle east their could be camels,
lions, the Caspian tiger is possible as well as the Syrian elephant. if we look at the paleolithic period then it depends on how far back they decide to go with it but mammoths would definitely be in Eurasian cave bear when extinct 24,000 years ago,
the Eurasian cave lion is possible as it when extinct around 10,0000 years ago, same with the wholly Rhino as it went extinct around 10,000 years ago

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@joeroe From what I understand two theories are on the line (the self-taming is one and active selective breeding another).
There actually an experiment on this process in russia on fox to replicate the process :

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The basic tech for wild animals is already in the game. But we still have much to improve there.
There are plans for pets in the future, there is an still hidden indiegogo stretch goal about this.

It is not clear at this point how many wild or tamed animals will be in the first release. This is still to be decided, but we prefer to have a well developed technology for them than to have a lot not at the quality we would like.
If the tech is fine but the number of animals is limited at release more may be added later as AC platform updates.

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When games is released and modding tools are provided, i guess it will be possible to create new animals, right?

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We are planning to release modding tools in several steps, from simple modifications to more complex ones. This is because this way things that are easy to mod doesn’t have to wait for the tools of the complex ones.
At some point adding animals should be possible but at this moment is no an ETA for this. Our focus is in the base game. Modding tools will come later.

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Assuming the game is set in the Old World, Homotherium latidens (scimitar-toothed cat) would be suitable, but Smilodon sp. (sabre-toothed cat) would not.

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This is officially my favorite game ever. Where in the list of stretch goals is this one?