The stupidity of having wild animals on the map...

It strikes me as a bizarre design choice to have wild animals as "units" roaming the landscape and able to attack your units. In Civ, a single unit (for example a warrior) does not actually represent one guy with an axe obviously - it represents a unit of perhaps a hundred or more individuals. Therefore an animal "unit" would have to represent a coherent force of hundreds of animals, all moving in unison to attack an encroaching enemy. Now i don't know about you, but to my knowledge animals don't possess this kind of intelligence. Even if you make another assumption...that a bear unit just represents "an area with a high bear population", i still don't believe that would be any threat to a group of trained warriors. Even a settler unit would be unthreatened really...most settlers would be able to use their hunting skills effectively. The only possibility of defeat would occur if every bear within a 200 km radius decided to come and attack you simultaneously...in which case i'd still bet my house on the warriors/settlers.

Luckily it will be easy to mod them to either not exist, or have an attack and defence of zero, but i believe it was a fundamentally stupid decision to put them there in the first place.

The wild animals could also be seen as the fundamental forces of nature. Many colonists have been lost throughout history, not just to animals, but to weather, dumb luck, etc. I'd much rather have a concrete game mechanic to counter rather than some mysterious force mechanic hidden beneath the surface.

And so Humans freely walked the Earth wihtout any kind of threat from Animals?

Antiochus said:

Even if you make another assumption...that a bear unit just represents "an area with a high bear population", i still don't believe that would be any threat to a group of trained warriors.

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Wow...do you have any idea how large and incredibly strong bears are? My uncle encountered a large bear, don't remember what type, in Canada on a hunting trip. The bear charged him for some reason, I think he came near the bear's cubs. Anyway, he emptied both barrels of his 12-guage in the thing and it still kept coming. He was lucky to get out alive, and the only reason he did so is because his friend managed to hit the thing another two times and take it down. Now imagine that scenario, but with stone axes instead of shotguns. And that bear wasn't even a grizzly or anything, just your run-of-the-mill brown/black bear.

as long as "wild" animals get phased out by some point in time (i.e. having wild animals after the 1900s would be pretty ******ed), i don't see it as any more of a nuisance or that it make any less sense than those "roaming barbarians" from earlier Civs

Antiochus said:

It strikes me as a bizarre design choice to have wild animals as "units" roaming the landscape and able to attack your units. In Civ, a single unit (for example a warrior) does not actually represent one guy with an axe obviously - it represents a unit of perhaps a hundred or more individuals. Therefore an animal "unit" would have to represent a coherent force of hundreds of animals, all moving in unison to attack an encroaching enemy. Now i don't know about you, but to my knowledge animals don't possess this kind of intelligence. Even if you make another assumption...that a bear unit just represents "an area with a high bear population", i still don't believe that would be any threat to a group of trained warriors. Even a settler unit would be unthreatened really...most settlers would be able to use their hunting skills effectively. The only possibility of defeat would occur if every bear within a 200 km radius decided to come and attack you simultaneously...in which case i'd still bet my house on the warriors/settlers.

Luckily it will be easy to mod them to either not exist, or have an attack and defence of zero, but i believe it was a fundamentally stupid decision to put them there in the first place.

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I aqree with you totally, however I still have some hope
perhaps animals are rendered harmless after you discover "hunting"
that is a tech in civ4.

I could live with that, because before you discover hunting,
your people really aren't anything except animals

vbraun said:

And so Humans freely walked the Earth wihtout any kind of threat from Animals?

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You're missing his point. An animal is a threat to a man, yes. But no other species has every been a threat to an organized group of human beings. The idea of a settler unit--which represents at least 1,000 people--being wiped out by animals is preposterous.

Take shady's bear example. One bear is a fearsome opponent, to be sure. But predator/prey population ratios necessetate that there won't be nearly enough bears in any one given area to threaten a large migration of people.

I made a comment on this issue elsewhere, noting that in actuality, it is human beings who have historically been the threat to large populations of animals. We wiped out most of the world's megafauna as we expanded out of Africa. It's really only African megafauna that were able to adjust their population dynamics alongside our species's emerging capabilities.

I kind of like the rationale, though, that these animal units just represent "natural" threats to human expansion. The recent disaster on the US's gulf coast shows that humans remain very vulnerable to other natural forces.

vbraun said:

And so Humans freely walked the Earth wihtout any kind of threat from Animals?

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To individuals yes, but I've never heard of "animal armies" annihilating military units.

And to the guy who says bears would be dangerous - as i said yes, maybe a bear would be dangerous to a couple of hunters, but bears do not attack people en masse, and the warriors would have plenty of tools at their disposal to counter (eg flaming torches, h2h weapons, spears, bows), not to mention pure numbers on their side.

It was a big threat and needs to somehow be represented in the game.

You are placing a big assumption that that one unit represents 100+ people. What if I though it as like 10?

Then you'd be completely wrong.

10 people defending a city of tens of thousands?

100 people to a unit is a VERY low estimate.

Once people became "civilised" ie living it cities instead of caves, animals were no longer a threat.

I seriously doubt that armies of ten of thousands of people walked around 6000 years ago.

Unless I'm somehow mistaken, a size 1 city in Civ3 has a population of 15000 people. I think a settler would therefore represent at least a number close that. That's a lot of people to be destroyed by a group of wild animals. Personally, I don't think anyone actually thinks with those numbers and I like the idea of wild animals.

It has been staated in various articles now that even lowly warriors have no trouble dispatching the wild animals. It's only the unarmed settlers to whom wild animals pose a threat.

Now remember that early game turns encompass 20 years. So, a animal unit destroying a settler unit would represent a group of settlers who where decimated over the course of 20 years to the point where their attempt at establishing a new settlement failed. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that they were all killed, just enough of them that the group is doomed as a whole.

Thinking about it this way, I see nothing wrong with the animal units in Civ4.

I found a Web page on the history of cities, saying that human settlements started about 7000 BC as villages of about 150 people. Gradually through ancient times the sizes grew to 2,000 and to 20,000 people.

Athens at its peak (about 400 BC?) is said to have had about 150,000 people.

Rome at its peak (about 150 AD?) is said to have had about a million people, but after the fall of Rome cities were much smaller for centuries.

Based on the above, we could estimate that a group of settlers founding a city in 4000 BC might have consisted of (say) a hundred people, and the city size might have built up to (say) a thousand people within a few generations.

I think a group of settlers would have been able to protect itself adequately from wild animals. However, a sufficiently dangerous population of wild animals might have induced them to move on and try somewhere else. If you're going to settle down, you want somewhere reasonably safe for the children...

As the original poster said, animals just won't go all out to attack people unless they are being attacked. And they won't be able to eliminate a whole group of settlers (1000+ people!). It's ridiculous Firaxis work on something that stupid instead on say introducing natural disasters to the game.

If they want to slow down expansion in the early stage, they could possibly increase the production costs of both settler and worker. Military units will become cheaper as a result, and military conquests, a common option of expansion in the ancient world, will become a more viable option. This will force players to build more defensive units, and it will further slow down the rate of expansion. Isn't that what Firaxis wanted?

As several of us has mentioned earlier for me the animal units are there to show the many perils early man faced when he walked the face of the earth. With an imagination that's not hard to depict. As a gameplay element I think this addition is excellent and I'm looking forward to facing that challenge.

I can agree with Jonathan and grumbler. I see no problems at all in the introduction of wild animals as a balancing force in the early stages of the game. Places that are fruitile would not only attract human beings, but certainly also a lot of animals. If a bunch of lions on the map is what would simulate this presence, making it harder to get settled, then this looks like a very good idea to me.

Regards,
Jaca

Do we know anything about how strong the animals will be in comparison to barbarians?

Personally, I don't mind wild animals. I think they're only meant as a variation instead of barbarians. Natural disasters etc could easily have been a bit unfair, as certian types of natural disaster occur more frequently / only in certain regions etc, so how much you were affected could depend on your starting position. Wild animals seems more balanced.

return of the wild animal complaints. Lions with a skull banner is one of the best units i have seen in the previews thus far. They can eat Great peoples and settlers and cows and sheep. One of the greatest and most realistic elements to put in the game. Much more believable than having only 18 civs in the world with only two leaders to choose from one of which will live forever to build a magic space rocket and militaries that have the same uniforms (with different colors) and weapons. In the Bibilical story of Rudolph the red nose reindeer it was a Lion that watched over misfit toys- not barbarians. And in the Old Testatment story of the Lion King the Lions knew how to talk and stuff. Man, people's knowledge of History is abysmal.

troytheface said:

[...] In the Bibilical story of Rudolph the red nose reindeer it was a Lion that watched over misfit toys- not barbarians. And in the Old Testatment story of the Lion King the Lions knew how to talk and stuff. Man, people's knowledge of History is abysmal.

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Rudolph the rednosed reindeer was introduced in 1939 for a commercials campaign of a department store.
A short search at Google didn't find any Lion King (of lions) at all, although there are some remarks of lions. But maybe, you can enlighten us about this story?

As you may find on this page regarding the bible mentioning lions sometimes even shepherds were mentioned to have killed lions.

So far about people's knowledge of history.

Concerning the topic:
Sure, the animals are meant to symbolize the many dangers humans are exposed to when being in the wilderness. So far, I have to agree with many of the posters above.

Yet, the means to cope with these dangers is the warrior unit.
And this is exactly the weakness of this concept.

Tribes or settler groups being able to found settlements of considerable size may have been extinguished by nature, but for sure they never have been extinguished by a group of lions or bears or whatever.
They would have been killed by starvation, feaver (submitted by mosquitos), fire, illness due to bad food, poisoned water or whatever.
None of these dangers could have been eliminated by the sheer presence of warriors. Yet, those warriors would have died away as well.

Therefore, at the bottom line I have to agree with anyone who finds the introduction of the wild beasts most unlogical and unrealistic.