How do you go about hunting effectively in this game?

[Thunderbrd]

haha so I was not the only one with 9.0 str ancient era archers (merged 3x3) destroyed by invisible "predatory lone bengal tigers"

Nope. And I'm sure historically there really were some cases where an actual tiger in an Indian jungle with a taste for man flesh really did tear apart a small military force like an Alien hunting space marines on an orbital prison colony.

in several previous games I was adding bottleneck 1-4 promotions to hunters, and it greatly helped them against barbarians and neanderthals, sometimes they were able to take off whole stack of these units in open space, also woodsman 3 and strength 1 is awesome in prehistoric

yeah that can be a powerful strategy as well, particularly on master hunters (individual group size unit)

 

[JohnnyCamel]

I'm surprised that creating a large mix of units (hunters, melee, recon...) seems to be the norm. In my games usually I send hunters on their own, and most of them do quite well (66% survival I would say).
For promotion I prioritize invisibility (take it up to level 2 at least) to increase survivability, then hunter promos to increase subdue rate, and finally visibility promos to see more targets. I manage them manually up to the second invisibility promo, then I set then on autohunt. This is only vulnerable to big cats roaming forest/jungle - in these rare cases a "special force" is indeed needed for a short period (until the cat is killed). But even then supplementing the hunters with a fex upgraded dogs in the area is often enough to eliminate the visibility advantage of the big cat.

Note than I don't play with Size Matters, and usually I play Immortal.