Prey kill predators too often

[Kraehe]

In one of my last two games my Arctic Wolfes got beaten by turkeys. Everytime after they hunted some they are almost died because of the bleeding, or did if i saw it not soon enough to safe them.

Yesterday I started a new game to try something, and after 10 minutes i saw a unconscious fox, because of his fight with a rat. I use no mods that modify animals or how battle works.

From yesterday i have a screenshot. Is this a bug that carnivors die so easily while hunting or is it intentional? It happens almost everytime a carnivore went hunting in my games (when i saw it).

[attachment deleted due to age]

[scorlew]

I'm one year into my first B19 game and I'm seeing the same thing.  There's some vicious turkeys in this world.

[zgrssd]

I'm one year into my first B19 game and I'm seeing the same thing.  There's some vicious turkeys in this world.

I had that with boars murdering colonist 1v1. Meanwhile Elephants can not hit a Husky.

[NeverPire]

Boars can be really dangerous in the real life.
I have personnally seen an emu and a cougar both injured to death after a fight.
When I check on internet, it looks correct.

It must depend of the luck. However, elephant vs husky looks a little bit too much. Who win this fight ?

[zgrssd]

Boars can be really dangerous in the real life.
I have personnally seen an emu and a cougar both injured to death after a fight.
When I check on internet, it looks correct.

It must depend of the luck. However, elephant vs husky looks a little bit too much. Who win this fight ?

The husky/Elephant fight seems to have been a aberation indeed. Propably got some damage in the Manipulation/sight stat early on.
At least when fighting my colonsits, Elephants are quire dangerous.

[viperwasp]

What the circumstances were.
Version 1.0.2029 on Steam, no mods, new game.  Cat's and potential other animals now hunt again. But often take extreme wounds and die while hunting their prey. They don't often die right away. But they bleed out or take devastating wounds very easily.

I believe this is because the previous bug preventing Cats and other animals from properly hunting has been resolved. Thank you Tynan and Ison for resolving the previous bug that others and myself posted. Here is a link to the bug that was fixed that now causes this new potential bug/balance issue. https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=39279.0

What happened.
I tested out the results of Ison's work to resolve the previous bug. And indeed animals where hunting properly in Rimworld. But I noticed a lot of dead animals all of a sudden. And not just the prey. Cats were dying from hunting rats. I have never seen this before in previous versions of Rimworld. What I assume is that after A17 the strength or various stats of animals where changed. I read something about how they may have been buffed to be more viable in combat VS raiding enemies?

This change caused an imbalance of power from Hunter and Prey type animals making them almost the same strength. Since Ison changed the threshold for Hunting prey from 85% to 100% I assume based on his comments? It now revealed another issue. In my opinion this is difficult to resolve. Because the stats of animals where changed to balance other mechanics in the game. And now natural animal hunting is kind of broken. I don't know if this is a bug or perhaps just something Tynan has to decide if it's okay as is. Or maybe even revert the changes that Ison back to 85%. If it's reverted though than cats and other animals won't hunt at all. While this issue potentially effects all hunting animals it is more easily seen in cats because none of the current animals that cats hunt are weak enough not to wound the cat enough that it bleeds out. So most of the balance issue probably effects smaller hunting animals. Even snakes for example are probably going to die a lot while hunting. Here are some statistics from tests I ran in Rimworld current version 1.0.2029 and compared to one test in A17 before all of these issues started.

Test Results
On a new game with no mods I made 100 walled in rooms to spawn animals to fight it out as a test to see the outcomes.

Rimworld Version  [1.0.2029 Steam Unstable]
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Test 01 - Cats VS Rats
In each of the 100 rooms I spawned one cat and one rat.

Cats won 98 out of 100 fights.
53 of these 98 remaining cats died shortly after due to Wounds/Blood loss.
45 cats survived out of 100 after all was said and done.

Conclusion
A cat in Rimworld has about a 45% chance of surviving hunting one of the weakest possible prey one rat.
----------------
Test 02 Cats Vs Squirrel
In each of the 100 rooms I spawned one cat and one Squirrel.

Cats won 100 out of 100 fights.
44 of these 100 remaining cats died shortly after due to Wounds/Blood loss.
56 cats survived out of 100 after all was said and done.

Conclusion
A cat in Rimworld has about a 56% chance of surviving hunting one Squirrel.
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Test 03 Cats Vs Hare
In each of the 100 rooms I spawned one cat and one Hare.

Cats won 100 out of 100 fights.
48 of these 100 remaining cats died shortly after due to Wounds/Blood loss.
52 cats survived out of 100 after all was said and done.

Conclusion
A cat in Rimworld has about a 52% chance of surviving hunting one Hare.

Those are all animals that in A17 and in real life cat's should have almost no trouble hunting. I also tested other animals like Chickens etc... results were about the same around 50% survival rate after bleeding out. This game is not real life though so ultimately at the end of the day it's up to Tynan/Ison to either fix, balance or leave this as is. I'm not complaining really I'm just sharing this information.
----------------
After finishing tests involving cats I decided to try one test with Timber Wolfs.

Test 04 Timber Wolf VS Rat
In each of the 100 rooms I spawned one Timber Wolf and one Rat.

Timber Wolf won 100 out of 100 fights.
3 of these 100 remaining wolfs died shortly after due to Wounds/Blood loss.
97 wolfs survived out of 100.

Conclusion
A Timber Wolf in Rimworld has about a 97% chance of surviving hunting one rat. I don't think this is an issue or needs to be balanced. In A17 rats really did not harm Timber Wolfs at all. But 3% fatality is no problem. I suspect that smaller animals that hunt. Like cats have it much worse
because less options for prey that is weaker than them. But if the thrush hold is 100% instead of 85%. I imagine Timber Wolfs will attempt to hunt prey that will often kill both animals every time.
----------------

Here is the final test done on A17 to compare how Cat's used to do VS Rats.
Rimworld Version  [A17]

Test 01 - Cats VS Rats
In each room I spawned one Cat, and one Rat.

Cats won 100 out of 100 fights.
3 of these 100 remaining cats died shortly after due to Wounds/Blood loss.
97 cats survived out of 100.

Conclusion
In A17 cats had about a 3% chance of dying hunting one Rat.

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What you expected to happen.
Animals don't have about a 50% chance of dying while hunting their prey. Either they won't hunt at all. Or there would be more of a balance like in A17 between Hunter and Prey animals.

Even though most of my tests involved cats. I want to make it clear
that this technically effects any animal that will now hunt prey that is about equal in strength. Smaller
hunting animals are effected MORE because there is less opportunity for prey. The three weakest prey
for cats are like Rats, Hares, Squirrels and each of them is around 50% fatality rate.

Steps we can follow to make the bug appear on our machine.
1. Start new game.
2. Spawn Cats or other animals that are likely to hunt.
3. Spawn Rats or other small animals.
4. Put them in individual combat cells if needed.
5. Let them battle it out and observe that many animals lose their lives hunting any prey.

Thanks!
Good luck I personally have no idea what the solution is. I don't think this is a bug anymore. It's at most a balance concern.

One last comment: With the new ability to replace limbs on animals. As long as you quickly attend to wounded animals that hunt. And replace lost limbs this balance issue is not that big of a deal. It's more an issue with wild animals who hunt other animals because they just bleed out and die without medical aid. I'm still glad the no hunting problem was resolve this is still better than no hunting at all I think.

[Thane]

Bringing this back to the fore as it is still a pretty annoying issue. Very immersion breaking at the least that our maps are scattered with the corpses of all but the largest predators within a couple seasons. Agreed that this is a balance issue and may be fixed by allowing smaller predators to have a much stronger first attack (ambush) when hunting, as a cat can be screwed up by either a rat, hare, or other small animal if they don't get the drop on them.

[viperwasp]

Bringing this back to the fore as it is still a pretty annoying issue. Very immersion breaking at the least that our maps are scattered with the corpses of all but the largest predators within a couple seasons. Agreed that this is a balance issue and may be fixed by allowing smaller predators to have a much stronger first attack (ambush) when hunting, as a cat can be screwed up by either a rat, hare, or other small animal if they don't get the drop on them.

Yeah I'm always thinking of solutions. I don't know what the Devs would want to do. I think your suggestion is very similar to the kind of idea I had. I was thinking that the only real solutions to this are.

1. Re-balance all the animal stats. Have fun with this one as it's very difficult. Animals where likely made stronger to be more viable VS human enemies etc. At least that's what I remember in change log etc. So changing these stats around are like having your cake and eating it too. But still possible.

2. Make it so the Hunting animal is more resistance or more damage dealing VS it's prey. So leave the core stats along and add special stats or buff VS only the type of targets it will hunt.

3. Make it so the hunting animal gets a special ambush attack VS it's prey during a hunt. Stuns the prey target for long enough that by the time the prey starts fighting back it may deal some damage but not enough to kill or bleed out the hunter. Or maybe the Ambush just does increased damage or both more damage and stun effect. (However don't some animals already get like a stun effect? I don't know if that only hurting hunting? Or if it works when fighting human pawns too like during manhunt or berserk. I remember see this at one time? What I am trying to get at is I hope those animals are still original it was cooling that certain animals had special effects. So if they gave all animals a stun during hunting. The ones that already had a stun should have a longer stun. lol )

Note: In either case the Devs may need to play around with that percentage thing that Ison changed. It used to be 85% before and now it's 100%. It makes sense for it to be less than 100% because creatures of exact power don't often hunt each other. But I guess in extreme situations they might. Plus this is not real life so things can be different it's all up the Devs. This is one of those situations where I don't envy the Devs.

[asanbr]

I agree it's clearly imbalanced in the new version.

I see dead cougars everywhere, maybe they are particularly fragile. And wargs, one of the most dangerous animals, die from the wounds they get hunting turtles, over and over again.

I have a couple wargs of my own that roam free, and mostly they do fine, but yesterday one of them almost died after hunting either a boar or a turtle. I noticed by pure luck that it was bleeding and could take it in for hospital care, then it was fine. But it would have died on its own.

I think one issue is that we get no notifications for this. If a colonist is wounded we get lots of notifications at different stages, but it seems that (tame) animals can get seriously wounded, maybe even bleed to dead, without notifications.

[Serenity]

Even if predators aren't killed off right away they often sustain fatal founds and bleed out. It pays off to look over the map now and then for fresh corpses

[Thane]

3. Make it so the hunting animal gets a special ambush attack VS it's prey during a hunt. Stuns the prey target for long enough that by the time the prey starts fighting back it may deal some damage but not enough to kill or bleed out the hunter. Or maybe the Ambush just does increased damage or both more damage and stun effect. (However don't some animals already get like a stun effect? I don't know if that only hurting hunting? Or if it works when fighting human pawns too like during manhunt or berserk. I remember see this at one time? What I am trying to get at is I hope those animals are still original it was cooling that certain animals had special effects. So if they gave all animals a stun during hunting. The ones that already had a stun should have a longer stun. lol )

Note: In either case the Devs may need to play around with that percentage thing that Ison changed. It used to be 85% before and now it's 100%. It makes sense for it to be less than 100% because creatures of exact power don't often hunt each other. But I guess in extreme situations they might. Plus this is not real life so things can be different it's all up the Devs. This is one of those situations where I don't envy the Devs.

They do get a stun attack, but it's worse than an EMP on mechanoids, which we can already agree is relatively useless in all, but the most situational instances. There is no serious boost to attack, as far as I can tell, and they just basically get two free attacks, which is not enough to save most of the poor predators.

[Tynan]

This was addressed for 1.0, thanks.