Trance Lynx

We are having some gameplay issues with reproduction of wild animals, and I think it"s rather interesting stuff (this is the reason why we currently have a quite sophisticated system).

Wild animals shouldn"t just be there, and eat and reproduce randomly; they should in some way behave like acctual animals, such as they should die when deprived of food. Also, their number should correlate to the state of the ecosystem they live in. So if you have large areas for wood, where they find enough food, there should be a lot of them. This should lead to a natural understanding of users to the way animals in Unknown Horizons behave.

Those are the requirements, the current implementation works like this:
Every animal has a certain amount of "health", or you could also call it "inverted hunger", because the health increases everytime an animal eats, and decreases if it can"t find any food. As soon as the health reaches a certain lower bound, it dies, and if it reaches an upper bound, it reproduces, which works like cell division (there really *is* a border to how realistic UH should be ;).

The main problem we are currently facing is, that the number of animals decreases too fast, if a hunter kills some of them. But if we increase the reproduction rate of the animals, the island gets very crowded with them if you have no hunter.

A possible solution we thought of would be to make the hunter breed animals, that should balance the population he hunts. But that is nearly a hack, imo; what i would like is a system that balances itself. The idea that might help here is the ecological gap: if the hunter hunts down animals, there is more food for the remaining ones, so they should in turn reproduce faster. Yet this seems to be somehow difficult to implement.

Do you have any suggestion, how we could improve that? Could we improve the system by changing some mechanisms? Should we introduce something new that can somehow control the population, to increase it, when it"s small, and nevertheless keep a boundary to the growth? What do you think?

So long,
totycro

PS: i"m quite aware that i put way too much effort into this small issue, but i"m convinced that a kind of appreciation of details can make a game much more interesting.