Dev's drop new comment on Herd Management situation! Way of the Hunter

Hey guys, we got a new statement from the dev community manager in regards to caps and limits on fitness. It's what I suspected, but looks like it is mostly confirmed. Let me know what you think =)

[@mattmccluer7625]

Good information! Also, I agree with you, I’d like a way to mark or name the herds. Especially since they overlap.

[@bumblewoot]

Game needs some nice ui buffs

[@Cameron9788]

Interesting update! Was in the same area yesterday taking some cape with the gavi and one of the shots actually went into its heart a little and that was going tnrough a rib. So definitely can take every animal in the game. Good fun to use too!

[@bumblewoot]

A Gavi heart shot on a cape? Nice!

[@Cameron9788]

@@bumblewoot haha yeah only just tho. Also tried a frontal shot for the heart but no where near enough pen for that predictably

[@jamesbevan9989]

Had to delete my first comment because i was rambling and repeating what you already said and wasn't clear what i was trying to say based on my testing. So i finally found Toothless guide after googling and your testing rifle toothless style being the first result i finally figured out you had a link, duh I'm slow. So i hardly ever got 5 stars and just used to call low fitness and go slow. Now that toothless confirmed what i was saying about racks and fitness i drive around and shoot only wonky racks, i now after 8 hours of play time have killed four 5 stars and have about four more that will be 4-5 star. I think aggressive culling works and i think from my testing is what the developer is saying you can't have more than say four extreme high fitness 5 stars. (just giving a number but the max i can get). By killing all the wonky small racks i still get spawns of 10-20% fitness but i just kill them right away. Doing this the new spawn "average" fitness is around 60% fitness but still get the really lows that fill the respawns but the average increases. With the potential 5 stars of extremely high what i call the 75% plus will not spawn more if there are a certain amount alive. But whith culling the wonky racks i know wont make 5 star Everytime one spawns, it appears after i kill my 5 stars the spawns from them are at the right side of the bell and seem to respawn at an extremely high fitness. So in short from my testing is you can only have a few 5 star potentials and the rest get filled with a roll based on the average fitness and most of my respawns are un the 60s which dont have symmetrical racks, but still get the very low fitness spawns and my hypothesis is that doing this and advertising herd management gives you something to shoot while waiting the 12+ years to grow potential 5 stars. But while i have potential 5 stars growing no more extremely high fitness spawn just low and average. (I dont consider 60% high fitness as the wont reach 5 star). But when i do kill the ones that grow to 5 star the chance of spawning another extremely high fitness increases dramatically for me. So in conclusion i shoot everything for fun that is really low amd leave a baseline of medium fitness 60%+ and when its at the end of the life cycle i take my 4 and 5 stars and the likelihood for me to get another extremely high fitness increases. More testing needed to confirm but in about 2 life cycles so far its worked flawless.

[@yoshimitzu3967]

The advertisement for the game was: u can create ur own hunting heaven with the culling system.(somthing like that) and now I guess u can't because it'll balance itself?

[@bumblewoot]

Herd management does work and does improve chance of good trophies it just has a limit is all. We were always told that fitness of new animals was based on the average fitness of the habitat. Which is true, we just were never given any info about the game sort of capping just how high or low we could get that average fitness to. I had increased my average fitness in the mule deer of the grasslands to a high level, and had gotten 18% and 20% deer spawns. Which created concern that herd management didn't do anything. But what had happened is I guess I had capped out the system and low fit will spawn anyways 🤷‍♂️

[@jamesbevan9989]

Just joined discord so i could read the posts . Makes perfect sense to me and my post below confirms what was said. The bell curve is 0% far left and 100% far right middle is 50% we all know that. The average herd starts in the middle with many near the median and a few at the far left and right. The starting point is a say bar in the middle. I think people are confusing killing all the low fit you leave high fit. Not true. Anything coming to low fit is below 50% anything coming to high fit above 50%. If you kill all low fit and leave the unculled "high fit" your leaving the median the same, the bar in the middle of the bell curve. To shift the curve as he stated in discord you need to make the average median to a bar more right in the bell curve, shoot everything less than 70% will bring the median, the bar in the bell curve right and you get higher fitness and less lowers as the curve median may now be 60% rather than 50%. If you leave a herd of 50s you're not going to move the curve very fast. You shoot all you know wont make 5 star and leave the ones with the most symmetrical and less wonky racks wich toothless confirmed is usually high 60 to 70s you start shifting the curve to the right towards higher fitness. Your atill going to get spawns within the curve from 0-100 but your average respawns will increase in fitness with more chance of spawning extreme high fitness. Thats why its working for me ATM, im shooting youngs that have the worst rack in the herd and they are ending up in the 60%s. I still get the spaws of the 15%s but much more rare now. But they are still part of the 0-100% of the curve, you cant avoid it its in the game. Its just my average moved on the bell curve from 50% in the middle its now shifted right to a higher fitness potential in the curve The cap is so you dont just have herds of 5 stars hence the ad nauseam comment and its unrealistic. you would no longer need to manage herds. It gives you stuff to do and a reward for doing it finally getting a few selections of 4-5stars but still have ro work at it.

[@bumblewoot]

Always great info James! Thanks 👍

[@RenderB12]

What is the discord name?

[@Haristoteles]

Makes sense, otherwise our maps would end up being unrealistically high genetic environments.

[@bumblewoot]

That's what I figure. Players would be breaking the habitats without a built in balancing thing

[@bill1016]

So there's a limit but no cap. A cap is a cap. So basically herd managing is meaningless, which is ok I guess. Good video.

[@bumblewoot]

It works to some degree. People are having success getting their average to 60% or so. I'm not sure it's worth it, but still can be fun to try I suppose 😀

[@kennethmasters9329]

Yeah I like it this way I don't want to play a "hunting" game on a high fenced ranch like in Texas.

[@greglewis7546]

The WT in the grasslands is not showing that to me, .not sure where a cap would be. But it's slow truckin

[@plantsbatsandcats]

Id say a limit is a cap. They have the basically the same meaning in a dictionary. Least in these usages of the words.

[@bumblewoot]

The community manager said cap and then said it wasn't a cap but a limit. Sounds the same to me lol. They also changed the word average in habitat fitness to median. Although it wouldn't change the results 🤷‍♂️

[@ruggiero541]

Still haven't played this map. It looks really nice. I really have to get back into this game. Been mostly addicted to an old game, Gangsters: Organized Crime. 1998 game (lol), and haven't played it in probably 2 decades. I'm rambling, anyways, good to see WotH again.

[@dahsellsavon113]

i really wanna play that game!

[@ruggiero541]

@@dahsellsavon113 get the GOG version and you can play it through a program named DxWnd. Works flawlessly. GOG version is cheap, just a few US $$.

[@polpox12]

You walked past an exclamationmark!

[@bumblewoot]

That's normal 😆

[@perrys5954]

I am glad that the slow but steady method works. But if sticking to reality (which I want a culling-hunting game to parallel as close as possible). IF you dramatically bloodily took out low fitness animals from a herd there should be all offspring resulting with 'higher' fitness from the sired offspring of the high-fit guys. Some variety on just how high the high-fit offspring are because yes because the females are technically carrying low/high potential along as well.. So a low fit female mating with a high fit male should produce at least a mid. and a high fit carrying female mating with a high fit male should produce great high-fit... So saying all that I am not a fan of the game just replacing dramatically lost low fit males with more low-fit to fill the void. It makes sense for some to be 'lower-ish' and not ALL born being super high but to put out low fit for the sake of it doesn't make rational genetic sense. (yes i know they arent factoring in female genetics, im just imagening what makes sense if you do something IRL dramatically then what would the realistic outcome would be.. Oh my another rambling rant. sorry bumble don't feel bad if I lost you there but id be impressed if you did pick any of what i was trying to put down :p :p

[@bumblewoot]

haha, no I get it lol. The game is what it is I guess lol. The slow and steady is producing the majority of animals to be above 50% so that is good. At least there's that 😄

[@nyarlat2609]

Personally, I find it obnoxious how the devs keep these mechanics opaque and obscure. These should be details available in the encyclopedia or as reference somewhere. The game has been out for over a year, and we are told, "things work like X" and they don't, and decent people like you have to extensively experiment just to see how that engine is running. They say, oh, pass time to mature herds, but then make it so sleeping doesn't actually pass time. I get wanting to make it feel natural, and not feeling like you need to show people what's under the hood, but at the end of the day, this game is a simulation, and it's natural for people to want to understand the system they are working with. Misleading and incomplete statements makes it seem like the devs want to keep secrets for their own personal egos. I'm done with this game, it's been fun, but it's a chore when you have to do this much work to understand it, and thats coming from a player of paradox grand strategy games.

[@bumblewoot]

I understand where you're coming from. I've spoken about it a few times and more so on livestreams. If the mechanics are not clear enough to the player base then it actually hurts the game. I just keep making videos in hopes that it helps somehow 😀

[@Wayneawebb]

@@bumblewootBut isn't it a game & they are devs. Devs don't do walk throughs & hold your hand or the game becomes pointless. NO ONE EVER has been told that RL hunting works like this, this & that. If wee are handed everything on a plate by the devs then it just makes the game pointless. (Disclaimer: I watch ALL your videos & appreciate them but there's nothing like working things out.)

[@nyarlat2609]

​@@WayneawebbI don't expect hand holding, I just get miffed when the game tells me "things work this way", then find that secretly, there are parameters that modify or outright negate my efforts to play as directed. Maybe a part of it is me coming from a world where patches and updates are detailed, so you actually know what is changed and what is happening, so you can adjust your play style. Why frustrate players trying to achieve high fitness herds, with them only learning through experimentation? I don't need things to be easy, just to make sense, within the world they created. A paradox game like Europa Universalis, one of my usual time sinks, is about as far from hand holding as it gets, but when I have a question on why something is, I can look up the answer and learn.

[@nyarlat2609]

​@@bumblewootI agree, and your videos have been very helpful. Pardon my griping... I spent a couple hours last night paring down low fitness wolf herds trying to get a 4 star at least, and I now find I may have been too aggressive, hah. The atmosphere of the game is delightful, and I am likely to find myself there again later. 😅

[@bumblewoot]

@@nyarlat2609 it's all good. I'm grumpy on their discord sometimes. I think some of it is that there isn't enough feedback in the game in terms of little things. I've been playing an older Cabela's hunting game pro hunts and there are parts to that game that feel far better than WotH. Alot of it is UI and feedback to the player. Hard to explain but there will be a video 😀

[@greglewis7546]

It was an ...... interesting discord conversation

[@jamesbevan9989]

Great guide, thanks for the hard work!

[@greglewis7546]

Ah it's stuff I find interesting, and would b silly not to share if anyone finds any of it useful