Okay, so I know this has been mentioned over and over, but I feel like the more it gets posted then the more we might see something done about it; the alpha system is a bit silly.
It works for the lions, because that is how lions work. A dominant male, a harem of females, yes okay. That isn't how it works with any other animal, though. Wolves and wild dogs don't work that way, big herd animals don't work that way, and primates don't work that way. I get that these social interactions can be incredibly finnicky with programming and coding, so I'm not pushing too hard for major changes, but there must be something that can be done. One of the zoos I frequent in New Zealand has a herd of nyala sharing the giraffe habitat, and there are about three beautiful males in there. Great ape groups have a dominant male, yes, but there are also subordinate males, and social hierarchies only tend to change when the dominant male gets old and can't defend his title, not all the time just because.
Additionally, I'm having a problem with this in sandbox - I turned off animal death and fighting (mostly to reduce the management aspect a little so I could focus on building for a while), but my alpha male wild dog got too old to breed. The message came up saying he was preventing other animals from breeding, so I got a new male and threw him in there, but because my old dog was the alpha the new dog couldn't breed with the girls, and the alpha status couldn't change because the fighting was switched off. Then of course I switched the fighting back on, let them at it, and the old dog won over and over and over.
There shouldn't be a pack alpha anyway. If the old dog is too old to breed, then the females will naturally shift their attention to the younger male who still can (natural selection - better genetics and so on).
Anyway, in general that system still has a lot of problems that need smoothed over. I'm still loving the game (though I'm experiencing crashing - again!) and I'm slowly learning to use all the various tools (seriously those YouTubers make it look so easy, but boy is it not), so the more I play the more I enjoy it, but I hope some of these small user-unfriendly problems can get worked out.
It works for the lions, because that is how lions work. A dominant male, a harem of females, yes okay. That isn't how it works with any other animal, though. Wolves and wild dogs don't work that way, big herd animals don't work that way, and primates don't work that way. I get that these social interactions can be incredibly finnicky with programming and coding, so I'm not pushing too hard for major changes, but there must be something that can be done. One of the zoos I frequent in New Zealand has a herd of nyala sharing the giraffe habitat, and there are about three beautiful males in there. Great ape groups have a dominant male, yes, but there are also subordinate males, and social hierarchies only tend to change when the dominant male gets old and can't defend his title, not all the time just because.
Additionally, I'm having a problem with this in sandbox - I turned off animal death and fighting (mostly to reduce the management aspect a little so I could focus on building for a while), but my alpha male wild dog got too old to breed. The message came up saying he was preventing other animals from breeding, so I got a new male and threw him in there, but because my old dog was the alpha the new dog couldn't breed with the girls, and the alpha status couldn't change because the fighting was switched off. Then of course I switched the fighting back on, let them at it, and the old dog won over and over and over.
There shouldn't be a pack alpha anyway. If the old dog is too old to breed, then the females will naturally shift their attention to the younger male who still can (natural selection - better genetics and so on).
Anyway, in general that system still has a lot of problems that need smoothed over. I'm still loving the game (though I'm experiencing crashing - again!) and I'm slowly learning to use all the various tools (seriously those YouTubers make it look so easy, but boy is it not), so the more I play the more I enjoy it, but I hope some of these small user-unfriendly problems can get worked out.