Anyone knows what's up with the ranching meme?

[glass zebra]

Does anybody have infos from somewhere why the ranching meme got nerfed? Double animal skill training, 10% raw sale price and 20% taming is nice for early game, but that is basically it? Am I missing some tactic, some bonus that is not listed on the precepts that makes ranching desirable? Anything for endgame or even midgame?

[flango]

It was a pretty annoying meme because of the forced animal farming/slaughtering. They removed the forced part of it and just reduced plant work speed, so it's more inclined towards animal farming without strictly prohibiting plant farms

[Astasia]

Animals specialist is 2x taming chance, 2x training chance, and 0.2x revenge chance, with the ability to calm an animal that does revenge IIRC. Pretty useful for thrumbo ranching I would guess.

AFAIK the changes in the update yesterday were more of a buff than a nerf. Most of the mechanics of the meme were downsides, basically an RP/challenge meme, with the specialist being somewhat of an offset. Animal Personhood also gets the specialist but without the ability to really benefit from it beyond combat/hauling animals.

I looked at doing a RP Rancher colony a few months ago, the meme just seemed too brutal though and I changed my mind while on the ideology screen.

[Vermillion Cardinal]

While I do appreciate the changes, I can't help but feel that it kind of waters down the idea of having high impact memes, the kind that are specifically meant for you to go all in, or work around at worst. Just show the devs that a meme's a pain in some manner and it gets altered next patch. Might not be entirely surprised if future updates "dumb down" things in memes like Animal Personhood.

I've no horse in this personally, since I use a largely neutral VE meme for my runs.

[glass zebra]

I played the meme with a bigger colony and had no issues with the slaughtering. It's something that comes natural if you ranch any bigger animals at all (even as simple as cows). The whole description/idea was around ranching, but it's pretty bad at that. Just going primacy gives you more hay => allows more animals to ranch. They are now in a place where any other ideology is about 40% faster with plant work and plant work is not just rice. It's drugs, medicine, cloth and hay. I do not understand this "more animal farming less planting". Animals require plantwork if you are not playing in jungle or with only ~5 animals.

Several other memes have specialist with hardly any downside (e.g. natures primacy, human primacy etc.), so just having a specialist is not really something I would call a buff for a whole meme, especially since you are not forced to play 1 ideology only. You can just get a rancher into your colony and make them an animal specialist. Then you just get that, without any needs. Anyone who actually wants to create a big ranch will just have some early tame bonus, earlier level 20 animal skill and the specialist vs a nerf in speed to a crucial work type that you are going to do in every single colony. Granted it's just speed and not yield, but it's pretty noticeable anyway.

If you compare it with animal personhood: They stuff that got removed from the meme is the stuff that animal personhood was pretty much rubbing against. You had to eat animals and you had to slaughter them rarely (and frankly both were mostly mood debuffs and that's it). Animal personhood frowned open both. With the new changes. "Animal Personhood also gets the specialist but without the ability to really benefit from it beyond combat/hauling animals." in what way? They can just not slaughter them. That's it. If you didn't want to slaughter (and that was the downside that was removed now, so I guess people didn't want to slaughter as a rancher either?), why not just go animal personhood?

Maybe I should read the patchnotes again.

Originally posted by flango:

It was a pretty annoying meme because of the forced animal farming/slaughtering. They removed the forced part of it and just reduced plant work speed, so it's more inclined towards animal farming without strictly prohibiting plant farms

It's more inclined towards animal farming, but it was annoying because it forced animal farming? The only colonies I played which didn't slaughter a handful of animals in 1.3. were colonies with animal slaughter haters people in it. I even had ranchers together with people who hated animal slaughter, so I didn't do it even for the rancher and all I got was a mood debuff and a small opinion debuff for that person. That situation had been buffed was it was already too minor to really care about. Having it as a main ideology is just not understandable for me anymore. At least not when they call it "Rancher", but they do not provide anything that wants you to ranch except that +3 mood buff (which can be entirely ignored) and some early game buffs. You can get an animal specialist pretty much anygame you want without choosing the ranching meme for your own ideology. I do not see why I want to do that.

Thrumbo farming is fun, but I already call that rather niche and animal personhood can just do the same. Animal personhood can still make their thrumbos fight for them and they can still ride them. They can not slaugther them (actually they can), that is basically the only downside. I do not see a buff here by removing stuff that you were easily able to do or could also just ignore because it was just some minus mood, especially not by lowering a stat that you are using in every game. I just see an npc ideology being created, that you recruit for their specialist. When I want to build a big ranch, I just go natures primacy. For anything but the wildest animals, you can also just get the animal high enough to take care of their training. For everything else, there is animal personhood.

Edit: Also keep in mind that the food requirement was just bugged and it always said you could just use milk/eggs. Needing fines meals with milk/egg + rice was not a downside I take seriously. (Edit edit: Okay based on how they changed it, the precepts description might just have been misleading instead. You can and could still just do meat + rice and there were many nutrient positive meat animals, even without the extra hay or cooked meal nutrition.)
@Astasia: could you expand on what you found brutal with the meme that is not brutal anymore? The food and slaughter things are the only things that got removed right? And seeing how the food thing got removed from most memes, I would not even count that a buff for ranching, since that's pretty widespread for npcs now. (Edit: seems that was just patchnote words understood wrong. Animal personhood still has vegetarians.)
@Vermillion Cardinal: they removed a lot of restrictions, especially some rolls for npc ideologies. Getting people into your ideology is now mostly recruiting specialist. The DLC has lost a lot of interest for me over the patches. Having a diverse colony was noticeable and interesting to play. Now I feel I just recruit employees, which is an even more widespread power creep than Royalty offered, since it touches most parts of colony growth.

Edit edit: I just saw that npcs can still roll food restrictions. I did understand the patch notes differently for this and it's kinda a relive. Seems they just removed bigotry (which the ancient ideology always rolled with). They patchnotes state

"Bigotry precepts don't have associated memes any more, so won't appear unless specifically configured by the player. This reduces annoyances around dealing with bigoted guests and recruits.
[...]
Remove most meme associations from vegetarian and carnivore precepts. These shouldn't appear unless player specifically configures them. This should reduce annoyances around food requirements of specific guests or recruits."

seems like they just removed it from natures primacy, body purist and rancher. The keyword is "most". I thought they might have removed it from the ones that requires them, not just the ones that did not.

[Astasia]

I would say first off the memes aren't balanced or meant to be balanced. Some of them do basically nothing, some of them make things very easy, some of them make things very difficult. It's not really a question of "is this meme worthwhile to take compared to this other one" it's more "would using this meme make for a fun and interesting experience." Rancher is not a powerful meme, it wasn't before and it's not now, but it's less crippling now.

The restrictions on what they could eat, the requirement to constantly slaughter, and the penalty (speed and mood) for sowing the crops needed to tame anything, were a pretty rough combination early game, especially for say a desert tribal start. The removal of the slaughtering requirement and food hard restrictions is a pretty big buff toward making the meme less stressful in the early game before you can get an actual "ranch" up and running. It doesn't really matter what other changes happened with other memes because it's not a matter of balancing against those memes.

[glass zebra]

The slaughtering was not something you had to do early game and the plant penalty just got bigger. You also started with carnivorous meals, so I don't really see why having to have some meat before your starting survial meals runs out is a bigger problem than having your plant speed reduced even further. That's just super crippling in early game. I did not run into any issue with having meat in my first fine meals, though I guess it could be an issue if I started in an extreme desert.

I brought up the meme comparison because of the specialist. Not being a rancher is now an over 40% plant speed boost, which should be way more important early game to get your ranch up or frankly get anything up. -3 mood for not slaughtering an animal was not really something that broke a colony early game and it did not start on day 1 and you did not have to do it constantly either (sowing rice is also -4, which is worse). I think it only started at medium expectations and was like 1 human sized animal every 20 days or something like that. I frankly did not see that debuff/message ever on my rancher start and saw it first on another colony of mine that recruited a rancher late game. Then I was like "oh, that's how it works" (because the precept description was incomplete).

The first thing you usually do is probably cut wood and sow rice and that got reduced a lot. Some stuff that gives minor mood penalties (which you can satisfy quite quickly) being removed from a colony that already built up basics does not feel like a buff over having one of the most basic work types slowed downed, especially since you need that work type to grow hay or like you said to tame early on. Especially early game feels a lot worse now. In late game the 10% plant speed penalty was something I could easily stomach for a 1 ideology colony, but the 30% penalty is something that feels bitter right from the start.

Removing restrictions made it a bit more boring (even though as I said I did not notice them at all without actively caring for them apart from having a ranch) even with the minor impact it had outside of extreme biomes, but the plant speed stuff is just pretty crippling when you start the game. That is why I call it a nerf. I did find it weak before and it did not have something to boost pen ranching a lot (having animal skill 8 and cooking 10 already makes the boni gone), but it just seems detrimental to take now.

[Astasia]

Lets say you start with a colonist that is skill 8 in plants, the plant work speed penalty from rancher makes them work at a similar speed as a colonist with 6 (closer to 5.5 if that was possible) plant skill. If you start with a colonist at skill 4 planting they will work at very close to the speed of a skill 3 planter. It's not a huge difference. They'll gain that extra skill level or two in comparatively less work completed and it will become even less of an issue over time.

Work speed doesn't make a huge difference which is why people are able to play tribal who have effectively -50% research speed for most of the game.

Having a large mood penalty because your tribals are forced to eat vege simple meals before they have a herd of animals while also getting the penalty for growing crops is a much bigger deal. -4 mood by itself is not a lot, but stacking it with the other penalties came close to entirely countering low expectations.

[glass zebra]

You noted the work speed penalty yourself when talking about the 90% version of the last patch. You can just hunt 1-2 animals on most maps early game to get the meat. You don't need to get a ranch up to have meat for the 3-5 starting colonists. Tribal start is harder for this, yes, but that is just tribal start being tribal start. They could have removed the -4 penalty for sowing rice instead, because that is one you have a much harder time to work around. Getting meat into your meals is not that hard. Getting your meals without any veggies in it is a lot harder.

It feels very weird that you are using the examples of very low skill levels since those have higher skill differences than the higher levels. A rancher with skill 10 is very close to a non rancher with skill 7. People install bionics arms to their people for smaller work boosts than the ~40% non-ranchers get over ranchers. Field hands are of course one of the more powerful ones, but people do care about work speed and I am frankly really confused why you say that work speed does not make a huge difference. It's one of the most important aspects of the game and you can even make fights almost entirely about economic power, even on higher difficulties. Tribals just have a slower progression, not a nerfed economy.

If the small mood penalties that you may or may not ever see depending on how you start or choose to play your ranch are more important than over 40% work speed boost for an important tasks, then this is a matter of opinion and playstyle I'd say. It's not a nerf, but a shift. I'd rather have my colony grow and not clogged up by choosing a meme than having to not care about hunting early game and slaughtering ~4 animals per year as of mid game (which I am doing anyway without this meme). Seeing what the patch did, I see that I am rather alone with this. It's slightly annoying that you can't just dev mode this one though because the penalty is linked to the ranching precept, while the food one was its own entry. Mods and xml edit are bit more annoying. What's more annoying is that I see just debuffs for a ranch of pen animals, apart from the early game taming boost. This is not feels like a rancher meme.

[Astasia]

I did note the penalty before, it's a small thing and many small things add up. Removing some small things is why I think it was buffed.

I used average starting skill levels as an example because you were talking about early game. I don't remember ever starting with a colonist with more than 8 in growing, it's just not an important thing to look for. Mid game, field hands trivialize sowing and harvesting, even a -50% plant work speed penalty wouldn't really matter at that point.

If you think the plant work speed thing is a big deal then that would be a reason to grow less crops and instead rely more on say kibble to keep your animals fed as needed. Take the 20% extra output of animal products and meat and convert that into kibble using 60% less hay. 40% of the amount of sowing and harvesting needed with a 30% increase in work needed is still only 52% of the total plant work needed compared to a pure hay diet.

It's not like we are talking about the Raiding precept with a global work speed penalty and no other benefit than a bit of mood when engaged with, but is still a fun meme to play with.

[Jigain]

Question - how does a Rancher pawn with double Field Hands compare against a non-Rancher pawn with bogstandard human fleshy bits? Say, at skill level 10?

I'd do the maths myself, but I have a nerd meeting in five minutes.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Astasia:

If you think the plant work speed thing is a big deal then that would be a reason to grow less crops and instead rely more on say kibble to keep your animals fed as needed. Take the 20% extra output of animal products and meat and convert that into kibble using 60% less hay. 40% of the amount of sowing and harvesting needed with a 30% increase in work needed is still only 52% of the total plant work needed compared to a pure hay diet.

The extra output is gone at animal skill 8 and cooking skill 10. Animal skill ~4 and cooking skill ~3 are the last levels that get the full bonus. The growing penalty stays forever and is multiplicative to every bonus you get.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Jigain:

Question - how does a Rancher pawn with double Field Hands compare against a non-Rancher pawn with bogstandard human fleshy bits? Say, at skill level 10?

I'd do the maths myself, but I have a nerd meeting in five minutes.

362% for a skill 10 rancher with two field hands
123% for a skill 10 non-rancher with flesh hands.

At skill 20 it's 700% for a rancher with two field hands (1000% for a non-rancher with two field hands). Field hands add onto base plant work speed then are multiplied by any bonuses including those from skill level (the wiki is wrong).

[Jigain]

Thanks!

Yeah, I'm not worried in the slightest then, a field hand or two on one pawn will completely obliterate the penalty.