Animal Behaviour

[Thunderbrd]

Wood3 is the wood attack promo, which makes it very interesting. Unless you play with Reckless Animals, most of them aren't very likely to attack you, but stay in the forest, so this is one of the more important promos for hunters (both master and regular hunters). And if you stumble on a big cat, you need every bonus you can get.

This is the beauty of the proliferation of the varying ways to improve hunters that we have now. There's no right way to improve them, just a number of good ways and lots of not so effective ones. I like to focus on the invisibility and stealth strikes on one hunter and pair him off with another that develops his vision abilities. This is a huge struggle with wanting to also develop raw combat skills like Combat and Woodland promos and pursuit promos, all of which accumulate in extra movement which makes the hunter even more valuable and capable of more rapidly advancing. But along the way you get interrupted by the temptation to destroy all progress for a long time to come by taking a quality up promo...

I suppose this is all about what happens when playing the full combat mod but suffice it to say it's delightfully frustrating that there are so many lovely flavors of power variety to our hunters! Truly a crowning achievement for C2C as a whole imo. I'll have to now try to abandon other goals temporarily to get them up to Hunter 4 to see if they can then compensate by having earned that ever so powerful blitz.

I'm telling you guys though... do NOT underestimate the power of stealth combat bonuses!

Hunting Tactics (with the regular hunter unit) is usually the time when humans start to rule the planet.

This is another awesome thing we're experiencing in the mod right now... we really truly have set this up so that you FEEL that shift as a player. That was something I've always thought was critical to the Caveman side of the mod, that the feeling of being weak and powerless and nowhere near the top of the food chain in a constantly threatening wilderness was the spark of the struggle that humanity has emerged from. It's so important for us to understand how this still plays on our personalities and behaviors today and why we are poised to destroy everything in that primal fear now that we have so much more power than any other lifeform on Earth could dream of. Our terror of this disadvantaged primal origin is so plain to see in the way we interact still today.

Just started a new game with Neander Cities On, SO Off, and PaNPCs Off. Preds are prolific. But it's on Normal GS because of something else I want to get too rather quickly in the tech tree.

Those options are definitely the way I would suggest to play and where I've been focusing my balancing efforts. Predators probably aren't as prolific today as they were a few weeks ago if you didn't just start this in the last few commits. I may want to playtest some of the other configurations to ensure they aren't totally whacked out of balance in some way. I'm feeling animals MAY be spawning a little too often in general but only by maybe 10% at the moment. And that could be just a perception based on Snail. If it gets much faster on other gamespeeds it could seem pretty overwhelming quickly I would think.