Have you ever walked into a forest and decided you need to kill every single living animal in that forest? If no, apparently you’ve never played as the Rus in age of empires 4.
This is a mechanic that initially made sense to me, the Rus sell the pelts of animals they hunt and make gold from this sale. However, animals don’t decay in age of empires 4 so a Rus player may kill all the animals on the map in the dark age but later on when they are building massive armies and destroying their enemies, there are carcasses of their slain animals everywhere. I think the Rus Hunting mechanic is illogical, frustrating and tedious and I’d like to propose a solution of how to make it better without changing the reward for collecting pelts.
Firstly, killing all the animals on the map at the beginning of the game, or at least attempting to gets tedious very quickly and is rather brutal. The fact that their skinless bloody corpses remain in a game where dead soldiers vanish and broken siege weapons splinter into fairy dust is a bit off to me. Counter play is mildly interesting, but feels almost like laming as the opponent gets nothing out of the effort of stopping your Bounty from going up other than pulling you down.
The solution as I see it is the pelt is removed and the gold is earned when villagers start to gather from the deer. This way, it is still possible to kill the animals and take them back to your base using professional scouts, (carrying a dead animal, but with its skin on) but also the villagers are the ones that gather the gold and food at the same time and animals CAN be skinned only for the pelt but it’s more effort and less of a slaughter.
That’s my solution, what do you think?
TL:DR: Killing all the animals on the map at the beginning of the game is stupid, let’s change how pelts earn gold by making villagers the ones that get it.