*AI

^{I don't think this has been suggested before; my apologies if it has.}

I'd love to see the option to collect from stallions for artificial insemination.

Last edited on 2017-12-20 at 11:32:46 by River

So you can delay breeding, or...? What is the point from a gameplay perspective?

@Almare I think a good reason to have this is to be able to breed with a mare of your choice even after your stallion has passed away. 

Perhaps there could be a time limit as to when the AI had to be used by like in real life? 

It could be useful to players that accidently mis calculated a stallys age like i did last week & missed a breeding to a 1200 stud by one day. To say I was gutted is an understatement! Now if I had taken an AI straw... I'd be one happy girl!

I don't see the point either. I'm not sure that most players would plan ahead to use this feature. The other thing is how many players would want thier stallions dna showing up at some random time in the future.

That and you could save up EVD to buy a time twister to go back and breed with your high stated studs

I think it work work nicely if we could sell the straws, that way you could essentially offer public breeding for a set number of foals - instead of just opening and hoping! Might encourage more people to allow breedings, especially from rarer lines :)

Sounds cool :D
Support!

I have goats, and we do AI with them. It is very useful because in the goat world one "collection" can get you 30 straws, with the effort of covering one female. I don't know a lot about horse AI, so I'm not sure how it works for them.

^ The figures I can find suggest that although there's a lot of variation from stallion to stallion, an average collection will get you around 50 straws, which is enough to cover about 4-6 mares. If that's accurate then we could maybe have an option at the vet to collect semen from a stallion, and each payment of the fee would get you 5 AI doses, i.e. enough to breed 5 mares. Or for simplicity we could discard realism and just make it 1 collection = 1 AI dose = 1 breeding.
[*edit* If we factor in the fact that it takes on average about 2 breeding attempts to get a mare pregnant through AI then it might be more accurate to say 1 collection is enough to breed 2-3 mares, not 5. From this I'm leaning more towards the simplified version above, where 1 collection = 1 breeding dose, then if you want more than that you just make more collections.]

There should be an option to discard/destroy semen, in case you decide you don't want that many breedings.

Another thing to consider, how would breeding from semen work? Would the stallion's stats, genetics, etc be recorded at the time of collection and this be used in the foal calculation when that dose of semen was used to breed? This would make the most sense considering how breeding mechanics work in EV - a stallion will produce better foals if bred later in life when he has more stats, than if he's bred young. Likewise a semen sample from when he's young should produce the same foals that would be possible if he was bred then. Also, these stats/genetics/etc should be visible with the semen sample details, so it's clear what you're dealing with.

Regarding degradation of semen, although this would be more realistic, considering we can lock stallions and effectively freeze them for however long we want, then it would make sense from the perspective of game mechanics that we should be able to do the same with their semen, although a storage fee would be sensible.

Last edited on 2018-05-08 at 01:11:33 by UlyssesBlue

Support! We were promised AI and Eggs in this version but never got it. I would like it if we can get those promised features.

I noticed that there was an issue about stallions not being able to breed because their owners didn't roll over. So maybe they could sell straws so mares can still be bred without waiting for the owner to roll over. And you can have a limit on how many foals they can have. :)

I love the idea! Support!

I do have a lot of trouble with players who have not rolled over so support the idea of straws being available.  Semen/eggs are likely to degrade over time so maybe a timer could be placed to show quality of specimen. 

Another reason for AI is that a lot of players have extremely large herds and don't want to use up valuable space freezing the mare/stallion until the other partner has reached desirable breeding age.

Last edited on 2018-07-31 at 07:50:09 by Kryssyn

I think this is a great idea! It's a way to preserve a fantastic stallion and utilize his genes even after he has passed on. Love the idea!