Spear Hunting for Dummies

[plazek]

You can range animals from the deep water if you use the spear.

[jordancoles]

Will have to watch later but why is spear preferred over bsword?

Spear has a longer reach than bronze sword. Its still possible with a sword but its pixel perfect whereas spear you can be more sloppy with the placement

[Agrik]

If an animal can't path to you and it has no ranged attack or no line of sight, it should run away.

This.

it could perhaps work in a way that moving back to a spot it can reach would have it return if the animal is still aggrod and not fleeing because of damage.

Perhaps the animal shouldn't return immediately when it finds a path to you. It can wait until the player gets further from that point. More intelligent species can even be made to remember when a player repeatedly lures them and gets back into unreachable place, so on Nth time (N=2..4) they won't fall for it.

Also, I think animals should flee not only when they're at low static HP but when they lose HP too quickly. Perhaps relative to their remaining HP, so the result of the calculation would mean "I have X minutes and Y seconds of fight in this manner before I die". In general, at least for smarter animals, it would be more interesting if the animal was able to estimate somehow whether it's winning or losing the fight.

[Archiplex]

If an animal can't path to you and it has no ranged attack or no line of sight, it should run away.

This.

it could perhaps work in a way that moving back to a spot it can reach would have it return if the animal is still aggrod and not fleeing because of damage.

Perhaps the animal shouldn't return immediately when it finds a path to you. It can wait until the player gets further from that point. More intelligent species can even be made to remember when a player repeatedly lures them and gets back into unreachable place, so on Nth time (N=2..4) they won't fall for it.

Also, I think animals should flee not only when they're at low static HP but when they lose HP too quickly. Perhaps relative to their remaining HP, so the result of the calculation would mean "I have X minutes and Y seconds of fight in this manner before I die".

Animals fleeing by default makes almost no difference; and most animals DO flee if they can't path to you and have no way to attack in return.

However, you can peace them and immediately re-aggro while standing somewhere it can reaggro you and pull you back into your old position, allowing you to chain this more or less infinitely (much harder with skittish mobs, but still doable; bears, mooses and similar are some of the easiest mobs to kill because they will almost always come back to you on re-aggro)

If you want to fix cheesing, give all mobs a long cooldown, decent power, 0-IP cost defensive move that reduces all of their openings. In order to kill most high armor mobs, you need quite high openings (70+) before you start dealing meaningful damage, any amount of opening reduction makes it a pain in the ass to cheese them. Case and point: boars. Boars have a ranged attack that gives them IP, which then allows them to use bristle (a defense move that reduces all openings)- it constantly does this cycle, which makes it quite annoying to cheese. If boars had any more armor than they do now, it probably wouldn't be possible to cheese. If mooses, lynxes, etc were able to gain IP and use bristle/unstoppable like boars can, they wouldn't be able to be cheesed. (disclaimer: they would still be able to be cheesed if you have very high quality weapons- but if you have those, likelihood is you dont really need to cheese anyways so...)

[Kaios]

Animals fleeing by default makes almost no difference; and most animals DO flee if they can't path to you and have no way to attack in return.

Not in the example Jordan presented though. The moose is just sitting there like a dumbass while he is out of range in his boat, and it only goes peaceful once he hits that certain damage threshold. What I was suggesting was that if an animal can't path to you then it should simply run away without gaining the peace status, and it only returns to try and fight should the player move somewhere it can path to or it continues to run until it breaks aggro itself. You could still probably cheese this in some way but a mechanic like that is at least to me more palatable than how it currently works.

I'm not sure there are any animals that run should they not be able to reach you unless something changed that I am not aware of, but for example if you aggro a group of goats and go inside a palisade, would they not sit outside attempting to fight?

The other method to deal with is the utilization of palisades which is often used in hunting mammoths by luring them inside a palisade and trapping them there while you attack them through the wall. This could perhaps be fixed by not allowing combat to happen through walls but I am not sure how difficult of a fix that is.

[Agrik]

Animals fleeing by default makes almost no difference; and most animals DO flee if they can't path to you and have no way to attack in return.

I think... I didn't mean "by default"? Just saw the video and remembered my experience when animals stood exactly this way at the edge of deep water, unable to find a path and unable to hit me. Just stood there, waiting to be hit.

However, you can peace them and immediately re-agro

This looks like a bug, TBH. Re-agro, at least in a such way, shouldn't change the choice of the animal between fighting and fleeing.

[shubla]

Simple method is to make animals flee slower if they are injured ( so you can run and catch them). Because otherwise people just find exploits for eternity to stop them from running away too fast and it will be fun to no one.

Make ranged combat OP so that you can kill every animal easily by bow if you want to (animals should run away for a short, short bit and then stop, so you can shoot them again) Historically bows and spears were used a lot so this would be very nice indeed.

And of course disable pve combat from boats and probably horses too (until we get some nice mounted combat mechanics). But at least from boats, because all kinds of boat - to ground- combat is just outright retarded idea.

Also add some more depth to animal AI in general, like bears should sleep in nests during winter, which you could ambush in the spring and easily kill the nearly defenseless bear right at its doorstep. (blinded by light, still clumsy from his hibernation)

[jordancoles]

Some animals in this game are literally unkillable without being able to reagro btw

The whole fleeing mechanic in general is really bad. Animals should not flee at sprint speed, and they should not flee forever. Idk if the devs have even actually tried to chase down an animal but if you keep them on screen and run behind they will never stop running if peace moded. At the very least they should run slower while fleeing, and stop after a map grid or so

[Zampfeo]

I didnt even know that combat was so much broken

Since the first days of the game. Hope devs will do something with animal AI someday.

If an animal can't path to you and it has no ranged attack or no line of sight, it should run away. Wouldn't solve the problem completely in the case of something being blocked in somehow but would definitely make it more difficult to cheese things. You could also likely still utilize a boat if this occurred, since it could perhaps work in a way that moving back to a spot it can reach would have it return if the animal is still aggrod and not fleeing because of damage.

I don't disagree, but changing this without completely overhauling animals/hunting would be a huge pain in the ass. Imagine if the only way to kill a boar would be up in its face 1v1. Hunting needs more depth first. Like the addition of traps or something.

[Kaios]

Yes, you guys are right and I didn't mean to imply that the flee mechanics should change without some thought towards combat too. However, I think a large reason as to why many are so hesitant to take on animals straight up is a by-product of how damage and openings work. A good set of armour used to negate a majority of the damage you'd take while it lasted. Now though because of the way the current combat system works in relation to openings if you attempt to fight an animal without some form of cheese method or kiting then you are pretty much guaranteed to take damage from everything.

Adding the wound system to that, making animals more dangerous (such as murderous moose), all tend to contribute to that mentality of avoiding a straight up fight.