Barbarians and animals.

[blitzkrieg1980]

nice Colbert reference

 

[Quagga]

Animals add some interest to an otherwise boring and tedious part of the game. If I didn't have to worry about animals, I'd just put my unit on auto explore and just keep hitting return.

Besides, I know my scouts will eventually die. The only question is how many goodie huts do they pop and how many other civs do they encounter before they expire.

 

[TheLastOne36]

I think there should be an option to seperate them on costum game. But that's all.

 

[alvan]

I voted yes because I don't think animals are totally necessary for gameplay balance. Sure, they keep you from exploring all the fog without any risk... but so do barbarians at a slightly later stage. Plus, an experienced early-UU rush player will use animals to get an easy CRII Quecha or Axeman or whatever you're attacking cities with - which is pretty cheap IMO. Getting real combat experience from killing animals? You can do the same thing with barbarians I suppose... but if there were only human barbs and not animals I don't think it would be as easy.

From a realism perspective, animals killing units is so ridiculous. My entire "unit" was eaten by 1 bear? Give me a break. If animals did attack your unit in RL, they'd kill one person out of a unit that represents many. It's hard to say that a bear "unit" represents many bears because bears don't really behave that way. Even if a pride of lions attacked your worker unit they'd only kill one person and eat them. Barbarians would murder everyone (possibly) but animals would only kill what they're about to eat, they wouldn't be killing your whole unit. Maybe animals should be like seige units where they can damage you but not kill or do collateral damage obviously.

Sounds nifty. Altough I think it would take away the "challange" some people talk about. Cos if they can only do collateral dmg, you wouldnt need to rest them. If you somehow add that if your unit is below 1/2 of his health (or some value) the animal does normal damage..?

Or! Just make it an option! Im not much of a axemen rusher either, I dont need the extra xp, I just wanna explore for good spots to settle in peace.

Now, if I check 'no barbs' I will also check 'no goodie huts' since it would be somewhat unbalanced otherwise.

 

[ushram]

What is L2P? Does that mean leave to player? Anyway, animals are there for 3 reasons AFAICS

1. Give scouts/warriors experience
2. Ensure that the player must build a few units so they aren't building / chopping workers and settlers without defense units
3. Kill scouts to force the player to sacrifice hammers to continue early game fog busting.

/agreed 100%

 

[sydhe]

My main regret is that we have lions and bears but no tigers. Where were the Oz fanatics when the game was designed?

 

[Grimus]

I wish bears were a little less... brutal.

Also, animals keep you "honest", so that you just don't carelessly send out settlers alone to found cities in single player, before the barbarians start spawning.

It's also nice to get some xp for your scouts (as long as they survive) so that they can get double movement within forests/jungle.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

Animals add some interest to an otherwise boring and tedious part of the game. If I didn't have to worry about animals, I'd just put my unit on auto explore and just keep hitting return.

Besides, I know my scouts will eventually die. The only question is how many goodie huts do they pop and how many other civs do they encounter before they expire.

I only use Auto-explore after fog busting manually for a good deal of time. I like to create a huge radius of cleared land around my capital before allowing autoexplore to take over. By forcing myself to manually send the scout around, I will (as a byproduct) know the surrounding resources. Sometimes on auto-explore, I forget to follow around the scout. Also, auto-explore tends to send the scout in one general direction as far as possible. Without multiple scouts auto-exploring, you tend to have one long streak of busted fog with tons of fog still very close to your city radius.

You are also very likely to grab more goodie huts by fog busting around your city radius first before expanding your exploration further away.

 

[Mannu]

I hate them so much, they are so stupid. Why not just have barbarians appear from the start? They don't enter your cultural borders until about 2500BC anyway (on epic). Give scouts a 100% vs barbarians instead and make them actually useful. As it is now the lifespan of any scout unit is pretty meager, it's a waste of hammers to build them imo.

 

[Nishdog]

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but I'm noticing that my units can't get more than 5 XP from barbarian combat. Didn't that used to be 10 XP?

 

[jray]

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but I'm noticing that my units can't get more than 5 XP from barbarian combat. Didn't that used to be 10 XP?

Cap is 5xp from barb animals, 10xp from barb other.

 

[Grimus]

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but I'm noticing that my units can't get more than 5 XP from barbarian combat. Didn't that used to be 10 XP?

max 5 from animals

max 10 from barbs

(i think)

 

[Nishdog]

Ahh...thanks...

 

[Stylesrj]

It's a whole army of bears or lions or panthers. Your army of warriors is probably like 50 or 60 men with clubs, even less.
Just remember that in the game, combat can take a long period of time, it's not like a 1 minute battle. Since the early years advance quickly, your warriors and their sons are fighting bears and stuff...
although it does not sound right when I type it down, after a long period of time, your units die because over time the animals kill them all, down to the last soldier. Or they beat them back.

In the later years, combat again takes a lot of time to pass

 

[Noble Norbert]

In the very early game (when you have just one unit on a goody hunt), their main effect is to provide experience. With City Raider promotion, my warrior has a good chance of knocking over my nearest enemy's only city (and taking it if it has pop 2), at least if it's not on a hill.

Well, on the fairly amateurish levels I play at he does, anyway.

One bear-fight in the woods - a bit of luck - a few turns recovering: take Berlin by storm. Sorted.

Whether you see that as a good feature or a bad inducement to rush depends on your style of play, I guess.

 

[Noble Norbert]

...although come to think of it, that was also the strategy the South Park boys adopted in their World Of Warcraft episode.

"We're going to hide in the woods and kill boars, dude!"

 

[Todd Hawks]

Animals are great. They provide my units with something to do and watch out for (other than just running around clearing the fog) without being as threatening as barbarians.

In fact they fit so well and feel so "natural" that I didn't even think about them before seeing this thread.

(I don't care about the "realism" aspect, this is still a game... but if you really think about it, it's not like your warrior in 4000 BC represents a "unit", it's more a small group of maybe half a dozen hunter/gatherers sent out by the wifes to hunt some deer or bonk the neighboring clan members on the head. And I think a bear family (representing the dangerous part of nature in general) should be able to cope with those.)

 

[caimeizhu]

hello ok ka lang

 

[alvan]

Well I guess the problems isnt animals really. The problem is those odd games where ur explorrior gets killed within 10 turns. I dunno, it completly screw up my mojo (yes, I have a gaming mojo).

 

[hoopsnerd]

Yeah... and the real problem with Animals is that if they are not killing your scouts they are serving as your early-game barracks. The thing that really bothers me about them is that they are so "exploitable" by early rushers in MP. What do I mean by that? Instead of building barracks early if I intend to axe-rush, I just keep building axemen and have them go kill a couple animals when they pop out. Then you've got 3-4 CRII axemen before you even fight your first war... it's pretty easy to kill CGII archers with CRII axemen in the early game...