How difficult would it be to allow a caste to override the random selection of what caste to birth with a specific caste of the modder choice or even have a specific sub list of castes to produce? This seems like a feature that would give a lot of power to modders and it is somthing I have been waiting to be introduced for several years now
Isn't that what pop_ratio does? When I did my steel angel experiment they were all female and often had trouble with world-gen pop numbers, later I added a 1:5000 ratio male adventurer-tuned caste and while they were around enough to keep them breeding and whatnot, checking legends I rarely saw them, and never encountered one in game. I did a similar thing with my dwarf male/female/dorf adventurer caste thing, where the dorfs had 0 ratio so they only showed up once in a blue moon during world-gen weirdness, unless chosen by a player to use that caste.
pop_ratio does what it says on the tin heh, each caste will have that chance to be born (1:10 1:948 1:10000 etc), it does not however do what i want to do which is discriminate which castes are born from which castes.
An example of what i want to achieve is this:
Caste A can give birth to Castes A, B, C
Caste B can only give birth to caste B
Caste C can give birth to only Caste C
The caste born would use the mothers limitations, so a Caste A father reproducing with a Caste C mother can only produce caste C.
Though thinking about it, maybe a caste should only be able to give birth to the intersection of the caste lists from both the father and mother, might be a more useful way of doing things.
What im thinking is that the pop_ratio tag would turn into [CASTE_BORN: GIANTBADGERDRAGONCARPUNICORNELEPHANT : 10] which just means that the caste with this entry will produce this cast in a litter 10% of the time. You can then just stack more of these tags to extend the list.