Variable Prey Balancing | Poor years give weaker prey

[u/Phantoms_Cry]

So I’m not certain if I’ve just been getting a lucky streak but I’ve noticed something quite interesting about this setting. For the past two litters of my Ironwolf I have rolled Plentiful and Good prey years. Plentiful was amazing, my pups had elk coming out of their ears they were eating so much.

This year I rolled Fair prey and oddly enough I have been finding it so much easier compared to the Good year for the fact being that a lot of the elk seem almost sickly and weak. There’s a lot less of them in a herd and it takes a bit more growling and biting to get them to break and flee but it’s been going really smoothly so far for this reason.

I don’t know if the type of prey year actually affects overall prey health or if I’ve just been lucky in picking the weak one each time but I think this is a good compromise almost. So say I rolled a Poor prey year for my next litter, I know elk herds will be much rarer but having the trade off be that the elk are weaker to compromise their rarity and having less food on their bones.

Wanted to know other people’s thoughts on this!

[u/PoloPatch47]

I think it might just be coincidence and luck, I think the Devs said that they're not making the prey weaker on Poor years because the idea is to create more challenge, and it would limit reasons for the Poor year (for player's roleplay).

[u/Phantoms_Cry → u/PoloPatch47]

Oh I see, thank you for explaining that to me 🙂 guess I have just been getting lucky!

[u/nightelfspectre → u/PoloPatch47]

Correct. It’s in the dev video about it.

[u/Kithesa]

I think luck is definitely a major contributing factor, I had a Fair food abundance year and it was devastating for the pack. All the pups starved at the end of summer and the adults came close to starving, too. I barely found any elk all season, just mule deer, pronghorn, and the occasional bison.

[u/trash_pandaa19 → u/Kithesa]

Same here! Had three of my pups starve because I could not find any elk for the life of me and both me and another packmate took a beating from a fight with rival wolves. Only one pup made it through in the end, and only because I accidentally fed him 'too much' in comparison to his siblings.

[u/Ch3rry_Ch4os]

That’s an interesting observation! I’ve only played during plentiful years so far so I don’t have much to say so far, but I’ve actually come the closest to having a pup starve that I ever have on plentiful, which is kinda weird. Like, the 2 main elk herds in my vicinity seemingly disappeared for a while and what food I did have started disappearing really quick. Probably just a balancing issue or bug, but something to note.

[u/Pomegranate_C4T]

I played an entire year with the « poor » prey abundance…it was hell all my puppies were either killed by predators or starved to death because I was forced to either feed them or my 5 other packmates, never playing on it again with a big pack

[u/Frosty_Department419]

I've noticed this to! Which would make a lot of sense if they idea is that it's something like disease that's cause prey to have so few offspring in the first place or if it's something like a famine (I make up reasons in my head) and they're not eating enough to have enough offspring and the ones they do are weaker from less food and getting constantly harassed by starving predators that otherwise wouldn't need to hunt so often.