Did animals get changed?

Maybe its because I appeared on an island. But 40 turns in, and no sign of land or sea life. I last played a long time ago, and even on an island I'd see at least sea life.

I saw the "DON't CHANGE: ECONOMIC ANIMALS" as one of the map generating options. It was automatically ticked. I left it ticked, cause I didn't know what ticked off did. From my understanding...and the description was rather confusing...if I wanted to leave animals on I'd leave it ticked on so it doesn't change it?

Or do I need to re-make the map and tick it off? Because having no animals is really boring (and lame imo) when you are on the slowest speed setting on giant map size My favorite part of C2C was all the variety of animals.

Did most animals get removed? Or was I supposed to unselect it?

It has no effect yet as iut has not been implemented yet. I should set it to hidden until it is usable.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

It has no effect yet as iut has not been implemented yet. I should set it to hidden until it is usable.

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ah I see. Well, maybe my game has been unlucky thus far. I played up to 106 turns before getting off for the night and no animals.

At ~100 turns on Epic/Marathon game speeds animals will be showing up. But Eternity/Eons takes longer. Not sure why players who use the slowest speed expect things to show up at the same number of turns as the faster gamespeeds.

100 turns as a ratio to 3000 for epic vs 100 turns as a ratio to 14,000 for eternity is a World of difference!

And changes IIRC were made to gamespeed ratios recently were they not?

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

At ~100 turns on Epic/Marathon game speeds animals will be showing up. But Eternity/Eons takes longer. Not sure why players who use the slowest speed expect things to show up at the same number of turns as the faster gamespeeds.

100 turns as a ratio to 3000 for epic vs 100 turns as a ratio to 14,000 for eternity is a World of difference!

And changes IIRC were made to gamespeed ratios recently were they not?

JosEPh

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Ah, I didn't know animals were tied to game age/game speed. I thought they were just always there at the start of the game.

Vendayn said:

Ah, I didn't know animals were tied to game age/game speed. I thought they were just always there at the start of the game.

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I've always had land animals start appearing turn 2. But I always do a whole bunch of stuff with the animal spawn file before I start a game (because maybe I like kangaroos and I don't want them to be confined to some arbitrary quadrant of the planet perhaps?). And, in the file A_New_Dawn_GlobalDefines.xml, I always put the animal spawn modifier to 300. I put the sea animal spawn modifier even higher of course. Even without that animals usually start spawning very quickly.

For the sea monsters, if you look in the CIV4SpawnInfos.xml file in the Assets/XML/Units folder, sea animals are only supposed to spawn after 20000 BC. So that's quite a few turns in, especially on snail or eternity speeds. I suspect it's a resources saving device, as you're not even expected to have mere rafts for quite a while, and having dolphins screwing around in an otherwise empty ocean is wasted processor time. But if you beeline the techs your canoes can be zooming around stealing all the unexplored islands before the word "orca" even enters your vocabulary.

And of course no animals spawn inside your cultural borders. Which makes starting off on an island exceptionally bad. It's so easy to cover every land square when on an island. And with hunting so utterly vital in C2C, right up until Bronze Working and somewhat useful well beyond that, you being on an island, as opposed to a vast continent, is potentially a death sentence.


(For fun and profit, try putting the ANIMAL_SPAWN_MODIFIER to something ridiculous like 6000, but just for a turn or two because it's quite laggy. So many delicious animals!)

Edit: also, it does seem to be tied to game speed to some extent. What's weird is it also, or instead, seems tied to <iResearchPercent> in CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml
This part is anecdotal, but when I did a massive increase to research percent the amount of sea animals also dropped off massively. I had to alter GlobalDefines to compensate.