Matrix Games Forums

I know some of these suggestions have been offered in the past, but in light of the arrival of aquatic creatures with Oceania, I thought I'd bring the topic up again and expand on it.

It's hard to tell exactly what algorithms are driving the non-sentient creatures' behaviors behind-the-scenes. Only Vic knows that, so forgive me if some of the following is already the case.

Control of territory
Non-sentient creatures should only "control" the hex (aka tile) they currently occupy. They should never control adjacent hexes (animals do not typically sent out units to recon in force).

When a non-sentient creature moves from a hex, control of that hex should revert to its former status before the creature occupied it. Animals do not set up any sort of government or military administration to maintain control and it's somewhat silly that when a herd of animals run across a road, then the entire logistics structure is in dissarray and broken.

General Behavior
Often it feels as if non-sentient creatures operate like well-trained military units. Groups of non-sentient creatures should not act in coordinated fashion.

Non-sentient creatures should not seek out and attack valuable targets (in human terms). Instead, creatures should typically avoid human contact and seek out targets that are valuable in their own terms.

For example, a species of grazers should probably wander towards grasslands or savanna. A species of tall herbivores might seek forests, and so on. Exceptions to this could be species with attributes such as Killer and perhaps some more aggressive carnivore species that might actually attack human enclaves or military units.

Migratory Creatures
As an interesting immersion feature (admittedly less important for actual game-play) that could be very cool is to give certain species seasonal, predictable migration patterns to and from known regions that are widely spaced. Maybe during the migration, a species might be more aggressive towards a unit blocking its path. Players would begin recognize that they need to garrison certain roads and assets during certain times of the year.

I second this

I figure this is a good place to point out that whenever I create a planet that is at least 4 or 5 billion years old, the wildlife has been brutally and unnecessarily tough to kill

I usually try to stick around the 3 billion year range and the wildlife is reasonable, but I'm currently playing a 5.5 billion planet (2nd time i'v played a planet this old) and it's taking 5+ turns for 5 infantry/MG units with gauss and combat Armour plus 2 med tank units with 50mm armour and 105mm howitzer to kill single units of wildlife - and taking heavy casualties to go along with it. I think I lose 3-5 tanks PER wildlife killed, and 10-15+ infantry/MG losses, while not really inflicting much casualties on the wildlife each battle

Perhaps a bit too much on the toughness

i kinda like that local megafauna can get extremely scary, it's just nice to know what you might be signing up for before you start playing.
The game I'm currently playing the planet is I think 4 billion years old and there are 2 evolutionary branches of megalobster. The 4 m tall ones which are sentient and have guns and the 7 m tall animal intelligence ones the sentients domesticated to use as shock units. Both of them are classed as hard targets (walkers) so they just mauled my MG infantry. I had to field anti-tank weapons to be able to kill them. The 60 mm high velocity gun did well on light tanks and as a towed gun.