As @Palaxin pointed out on trac some years ago (#3779), “currently animal stats are quite counter-intuitive” and need to be rebalanced (or overhauled).
As @ValihrAnt pointed out in a private message, animals are very hard to kill when using macemen.
As @DanW58 pointed out on the forums, some animals are simply too strong, especially lions, tigers, and wolves are frustrating for new players. Moreover, it's quite challenging to kill deer.
As @borg- pointed out here, spearmen are very poor at killing wild animals.
This patch does not attempt a proper rebalance of all animals, but addresses the most glaring problems by making the following changes:
- Animals inherit their resistance from template_unit.xml, which has a crush resistance of 15. This is changed to 1. Other units are unaffected by this, because the other template_unit_* templates already set different resistance values.
- The dog, elephants, hippopotamus, and walrus had different resistance values; those are purged, to make comparing them by health easier.
- The tiger has its hack damage removed, keeping it more dangerous than the lion, but not as excessively as it used to be.
- The wolf has its attack time doubled. The template_unit_fauna_wild_aggressive_wolf.xml file is deleted and its attack lines are simply inserted into fauna_wolf.xml, because that was its only child, so maintaining two files is unnecessary.
- The walrus has its attack time doubled.
- The Health node is moved out of template_unit_fauna_hunt.xml etc. for clarity and consistency, making it easier to compare and tweak individual animals.
- foxes have their health reduced to 20, dogs and wolves to 40, lions and tigers to 50;
- bull has its health raised to 150 (same as cattle), rhinoceros to 160, walrus to 120;
- giraffe health was lowered to 80 (from 150), deer and gazelle to 25, piglet to 15, rabbit to 5.
Furthermore, D3301/rP24527 differentiated domestic animals, giving all of them different values, but with the same food cost to food supply ratio, though with bigger animals having better food to time ratios. However, the goat's values were rounded up from 75 to 80, which resulted in it being slightly more time efficient than the (larger) sheep, contrary to what was intended. This patch lowers it to 70, making the goat cheaper but slightly less time efficient than sheep.