Keep in mind this is only going to apply to size matters. It will help to create some further challenge variety. With this, such variety of challenge can help to make the wilderness both more exploitable and more dangerous at the same time. Hunter units cannot merge themselves so some animals out there may even be able to challenge them if they are of sufficient spawned group size.
This has been a requested feature for Size Matters and something I've had tabled for a while. That Toffer is willing to help with the xml for it and the fact that we've got a lot of current focus on animals is a good reason to implement it now.
If it somehow imbalances things or makes the game frustrating then we can certainly reconsider.
EDIT: You're talking about the renaming bit... It can be much nicer for the player to see the difference in the name of the unit wouldn't it? I also do like Toffer's point about making the number of graphically show meshes vary based on the group size. That's been something I've wanted to do for a while and it will help a lot. Will take some serious research though.
Personally I'd skip the animals hunting other animals, too, since it doesn't really add anything to the game from a gaming POV. Only flavour. And not much flavor since most of the time you don't see that this is going on. So you mostly add more processing time for very little value. And it can be frustrating as well. Imagine you're happy AF that you finally found a Horse that you can try to subdue and then you see it eaten by a Lion one turn before you are there - and you can't do anything against it!
Argument taken. I'd like to see how it plays out though. I have similar concerns but there's also some potential benefit in that it can keep the numbers down a bit. Besides, that point you made about the horse is actually what I'm thinking would be the fun part about it... it's the very kind of frustration that hunters can often encounter when competing for their prey. It can therefore guide strategy... kill competing predators. It also gives surviving animals the opportunity to gain exp and some promos so as to become some unique characters providing unique challenges out in the wilderness.
If all those potential benefits prove to be more frustrating than fun, then yeah, I can easily see reverting to only having one animal group.
And if they spawn in different sizes (which I think is a VERY cool addition)
Wait... isn't that what you just said would be over the top???
, how do we think about hunting? DH said that subduing a unit is capturing a baby basically. But how do we think about killing a single unit animal? You get the outcome + the Subdued animal, which is technically wrong. And do you get a higher outcome from a bigger size animal? Would make sense.
Would make sense, yes, but I'm not sure how such a modification based on group size could be implemented. I'll think on it and perhaps at some point a solution will become obvious.
Aaaaand about agression: Higher aggression on higher difficulty seems logic; but actually this makes the game easier since you can kill more animals per turn with one hunter. Do you think about making animals slightly stronger? IMO the dangerous hunting modmod we had some time a go was pretty cool; how about a middle ground between the overpowered animals in the modmod and the "weak" animals we have now.
Back to what I said above, if you have some very large herds or dangerous animal groups out there getting easily aggressive, it takes the choice of whether to clash or not away from the player. That's the main thing. Probably true that IN GENERAL it can make things easier with more aggressive animals roaming around except that it's generally the stronger animals being more aggressive and the weaker ones being much less so (and skittishly avoiding combat) so the ones that can really challenge units are the only ones tending to respond to the handicap. When your hunter just survived a Neanderthal but is at about 10% HP remaining, you'd wish that Elephant herd would just ignore him as he heals but that's not going to be as likely on a harder setting.
The group size variation is exactly what we can use to make animals both more and less challenging and creating a wider sense of variation such that we shouldn't really need to re-evaluate base stats so much.
unit walks unsuspecting into the plot containing a unit capable of it?
