Since Lioden is after all meant to be a realistic game, I decided I would bring this up because I've been thinking about it since joining. I love Lioden in many respects, but it doesn't do that great a job of simulating male lion coalitions.

Basically, recent research shows that male lions, rather than ruling specific prides of lionesses the way the game and Lion King have it, band up and form male groups of anywhere from two to four or five, which then patrol between as many female prides (which claim their own specific territories) as they can manage to keep other males and male coalitions from. Solitary male 'kings' DO exist but they are at a disadvantage and can control only one pride of females. It is more common for a male to have at least one other dominant male, often a male littermate but not always even a related male, as an ally and co-leader.

Right now the game sort of approximates this in the following ways - you can have two accounts, and if you want you can pretend like you have a male pair coalition which controls two female prides. But that's as far as you can really get with the idea. Submales add the illusion of a larger coalition, but they are by definition subordinates rather than the (more or less) equal partners as in a real-life coalition.

I don't have any good ideas about better simulation of controlling multiple prides right now but I'm still thinking about that. Here's something that hit me as I was typing this but it's very embryonic.

Given we can currently have way more lionesses than would normally be in a single pride, perhaps we could have an optional 'pride splitting' system so that within our male king's overall territory allotment (which could remain the same as now) we could distribute all the lionesses we own on that account within anywhere from two to five prides, with the number of prides depending on the number of sub-males you have - each submale would allow the whole coalition to control an additional pride. That would also make submales more useful.

I also think submales should be allowed to breed. Perhaps only with lionesses within their coalition's controlled prides and not with lionesses belonging to other prides (players), but being able to breed with the lionesses of their own prides would better simulate how real-life coalitions mate with the females of their prides.

Rather than one male in the coalition being dominant and mating with all the females, the individual males and females have specific favorites, and when the females want to mate, they will go off for a few days alone with the male of their choice, and then when the courtship and mating are done, she returns to her pride and the male returns to his coalition-brothers (who may or may not still be hanging out near that same pride - they might have gone off to visit one of their other prides.)

So in short, real life coalitions are more like traveling 'resident fathers' (that's the term they used RL) than 'kings' of the prides. They move between a small number of female prides, mating with the females as the occasion arises, with no one male necessarily being dominant in that respect. Some females will like Male A, others will like Male B, and so on. And as such there is no realistic reason to bar submales from mating, at least with your own lionesses.

I can see barring submales from being studded out the way kings are - but to be perfectly honest that's totally unrealistic anyway. So if studding of kings can be done why not submales? Still for game balance if nothing else I can understand if you'd want to disallow studding of submales. But I don't see any good reason submales shouldn't be allowed to breed with the lionesses in their own pride(s).

In summation, those are a few ideas I had about making the game feel a bit more realistic in terms of male coalition behavior. Right now the game seems more like it's based on Disney's version of lion behavior than reality.

Don't get me wrong, that isn't entirely a bad thing. TLK was a great movie and the game is full of nods to it for a reason. Obviously we don't want to entirely toss the Lion King vibe because it's fun, but this IS supposed to be a 'realistic' sim and so I'd love it if the lions were more like real lions and less like Lion King lions.