Interbirth period bugged for animals with a high age of maturity

[Carson]

I think this thread deserves another bump since we just have a community challenge with a species where this is very much relevant. Due to juvenile adolescence being used instead of interbirth periods (and Pandas being a bit lazy in the bedtime fun department) every female Great Panda will have at best two juveniles before she becomes sterile.
That means:

1. Pairing them up 1 male and 1 female can never grow your population but at best uphold current numbers.

2. From 1. follows that 1 male must be paired with more than 1 female to have a chance of increasing the population. That necessarily results in a chronic shortage of females put up for sale. (This whole week I saw 2 females up for sale that were not mere months away from infertility or unusable for breeding purposes to begin with. No, I will not pay 10k CC for a 33% fertility female.) So, for any long-term project involing these animals self-sustainability is a necessity.

3. For a self-sustaining breeding zoo at least 50% of offspring must be female or population numbers will decrease. To increase your population you need one big or several small "female surges" (generations with more female than male offspring). If you get a significant "male surge" before having sufficiently grown the population it's basically Game Over. (This happened to me today. Of 8 juveniles 7 were male, so that apruptly ends my contribution to the community challenge.)

This constellation basically turns breeding certain species into a very frustrating game of chance with little to no opportunity to make up for lack of luck with bought animals due to all players having to deal with the same issues to some degree for a given species. Personally, I can say with confidence that I will never incorporate habitats for Bornean Orangutans, Great Pandas or similarly handicapped species in any of my larger franchise zoos until this problem is adequately addressed since I can't just put the whole zoo on hold for a couple of real-time weeks or months just to keep those habitats from ending up empty.

Hi there, I love playing this game as a breeder & as it happens one of my recent projects was pandas. Pandas are the hardest to breed (as they should be), but you should be getting at least 4 offspring per famale. I'm sure you already have, but make sure they are 100% researched.

Here is the real secret to panda success - you need to keep 2 males & 2 females together. 1 on 1 will never work b/c it is unlikely that the male will be in the mood to mate when the female is, however when you have 2 males/2 females the chances that they will be in the mood mate goes up greatly. Of course, this make selectively breeding them harder, but that is part of the fun. Also fertility rating plays a much larger role in breeding this species, so its not something that can be (oftentimes) ignored as with other species.

Also not sure what you are saying about the Orangs (another one of my previous projects) - so long as you have their welfare at 99-100% & they are fully researched, you should be producing 4 babies/female.

 

[Locce]

Hi there, I love playing this game as a breeder & as it happens one of my recent projects was pandas. Pandas are the hardest to breed (as they should be), but you should be getting at least 4 offspring per famale. I'm sure you already have, but make sure they are 100% researched.

Here is the real secret to panda success - you need to keep 2 males & 2 females together. 1 on 1 will never work b/c it is unlikely that the male will be in the mood to mate when the female is, however when you have 2 males/2 females the chances that they will be in the mood mate goes up greatly. Of course, this make selectively breeding them harder, but that is part of the fun. Also fertility rating plays a much larger role in breeding this species, so its not something that can be (oftentimes) ignored as with other species.

Also not sure what you are saying about the Orangs (another one of my previous projects) - so long as you have their welfare at 99-100% & they are fully researched, you should be producing 4 babies/female.

Ahoy, thanks for your input, but I think you might have overlooked the problem described in this thread: the interbirth period, fertility rates etc. are irrelevant unless you remove the young from their parents' habitat since otherwise the females won't procreate at all before the young have matured regardless of how many males and females you have in that habitat, how high their well-being is and how fertile they are.

For example, if we look at Giant Pandas with a fertile lifespan of ~14 years we run into the obstacle that gestation and the cub growing up add up to ~6.5 years which doesn't fit four times into 14 years no matter how you slice it. You'd have to get very, very lucky to get a third pregnancy with those numbers and a fourth just doesn't work at all mathematically.
You can work around this problem by putting all the young on ice until their parent generation is dead which is pretty much unfeasible with limited trading centre slots and offspring that you don't want to breed piling up over time. With that the only feasible solution seems to be a "kindergarten habitat" where you transfer all the cubs to so that their parents are free to mate again once the interbirth period has passed. Then and only then you can get your four babies per female. To me, that seems a bit cruel and is not really part of the fun, and that is the point of this thread.

 

[Carson]

Ahoy, thanks for your input, but I think you might have overlooked the problem described in this thread: the interbirth period, fertility rates etc. are irrelevant unless you remove the young from their parents' habitat since otherwise the females won't procreate at all before the young have matured regardless of how many males and females you have in that habitat, how high their well-being is and how fertile they are.

For example, if we look at Giant Pandas with a fertile lifespan of ~14 years we run into the obstacle that gestation and the cub growing up add up to ~6.5 years which doesn't fit four times into 14 years no matter how you slice it. You'd have to get very, very lucky to get a third pregnancy with those numbers and a fourth just doesn't work at all mathematically.
You can work around this problem by putting all the young on ice until their parent generation is dead which is pretty much unfeasible with limited trading centre slots and offspring that you don't want to breed piling up over time. With that the only feasible solution seems to be a "kindergarten habitat" where you transfer all the cubs to so that their parents are free to mate again once the interbirth period has passed. Then and only then you can get your four babies per female. To me, that seems a bit cruel and is not really part of the fun, and that is the point of this thread.

Oh wow - thanks for explaining that to me kindly. You're absolutely right.

I have "kindergarten habitats" for all the animals I breed in my zoos, so that explains why I was able to get 4-5 offspring/female.

I haven't really thought about the ethics of it too hard, but I certainly take your point that the females should be able to breed after the interbirth period, not after their offspring has matured.

 

[Roxxsmom]

I've wondered about this discrepancy too. Seems to be an artifact of the way the game treats juvenile animals as babies that suddenly morph into adults. I am guessing the lack of an "in between" or subadult/adolescent is to simplify the animations.

Most of these species actually wean their babies before they are full grown, and the adolescents may even become independent, disperse, or live in bachelor herds in the wild and no longer depend on their moms at all (even if they are not yet mature enough to breed themselves), so their mothers are not still nursing them and are "free" to have a new baby.

Of course, IRL, immature (adolescent) animals of some species can also become parents, even if it's normally unlikely to happen in the wild. Males and females of some species reach reproductive maturity at different ages too. I suppose the game is programmed as it is for simplicity's sake. Think of all the processing power the game eats already.

One question I have (I guess I can test this): does the mom have another baby if you take the juvenile and place it in the trade center, where the baby goes into stasis, or if the adolescent age animal is placed in a different zoo (or a different habitat in the same zoo) where it can mature on its own?

I see Locce answered this question. I would argue it's not necessarily cruel for zoos to move adolescent animals to a different exhibit or zoo, and in fact it might even be necessary, as adolescent animals aren't always tolerated by the other adults, or even by their mothers, once they are weaned. Zoos do in fact do this.

Come to think of it, it's not uncommon for zoo babies to be raised by hand if there is any question that the mother is not caring for them adequately, or if the social environment in their mother's habitat isn't safe for juveniles.