Actually there are team spawn variation values to help with balance between NON-Peace Among NPCs and Peace Among NPC options. The idea is that spawns are set individually for the frequency with which they are ideal to show up on a Peace Among NPCs game and then the NON-peace game applies these modifiers. The modifiers are setup a little opposite to what one would assume though - less is more frequent and more is less frequent. But it still works nicely for balancing between those options. Currently, Alphas, the most dangerous and thus the most consuming, are the least frequent. Beasts are in between because generally they aren't as dominant. And Prey tend to be very frequent. There is a little bit of a str vs str assumption here that assumes that Prey are more likely to be taken out by the opponent teams of animals and barbs so need to be more frequent to be encountered and to benefit the player that keeps his hunting territory clear of competing predators. My point is that it IS an influencing factor that the balance of power between the animal groups will determine more or less need for frequency of spawns on a sweeping level.
I know of the sweeping team spawn adjusters, but each animal still need their individual spawn adjustments based primarily on their strength and secondarily on their likelihood of getting offed by units in other NPC teams.
Peace among NPC (PaNPC) option then apply the sweeping adjustment to calm down the spawn of all animal teams. The power of that adjustment should be based on the teams average strength; so "creatures" spawn calm down the most under PaNPC. It could of course be done completely opposite so that each animal spawn rate is individually balanced for the PaNPC option instead of without it.
Unless we put elephants, buffaloes, bulls, bison, hippo and other high strength creature animals into the beast category; and weak animals like foxes into the creature category, the sweeping adjuster would never do the job properly; if we want a similar animal population balance for both with and without the PaNPC option it would actually be better to have replacement spawn for each animal that is used under PaNPC.
So maybe we just keep the polar bear as an alpha. The rest could be beasts and it would work.
I feel the Grizzly and, for some consistency, the brown bear should also be predators; the rest could be beast. In other words, the only ursine I want to change the team for in the SVN right now is the cave bear.
Problem with this is that their prey is just waiting to come into the game and I don't think I can be ok envisioning a predator in the Creature category. We really need more lesser prey critters to flesh this out properly. Mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, etc... Obviously, foxes are on the lower end of the predator category but that's what beasts are about really. Most other canines probably won't go after foxes too often. And foxes don't breed with the rate you'd expect of a prey creature. The others are pretty core concept Beast imo.
I feel the mod doesn't need more low strength animals, I would actually like to see all critter type animals gone. The most important reason for having an animal is IMO that they are tied to important resources (pig, elephant, horse, sheep, livestock in general, and poisons) or that they can pose a threat to player units in early game, then secondarily for the food, hammers, culture they bring in through hunting them which make the early game quite interesting.
But whales and such should be on the same 'team' as well, which suits the mid-level beasts. No dolphin is going to hunt or have to defend itself against a whale of just about any kind (except for perhaps an orca.) I think we could have a few more fish types too. We also have crab in the prey sector.
I still feel all whales and dolphins should be on the creature team; almost all animals we have in game eats or confront some other animal that is in the game or an animal similar to what we got.
Hopefully, this discussion helps us gell our perspectives. Another reason for some of the adjustments were overall counts of each team and trying to balance that out a bit more. I do want to state that I'm not terribly attached to any opinions here... just hoping that some of the design intents can be on the same page here.
Discussions like these are healthy for the mod. ^^
