Bison herds are here! They're ready and waiting for you...but are you ready for them?
Some basics:
* Bison herds are persistent (like elk herds). Each map has six herds, and each herd is reliably found in a particular area of each map. Like elk, they generally are in the highlands in the summer and lowlands in the winter. There are still those small groups of old bulls here and there.
* These herds are about the size of elk herds in the game -- nowhere near the size that real herds can get. We would love to have huge herds, but we're limited by computer performance constraints.
Bison are the most dangerous animals in Yellowstone (except, of course, for humans). They are not too impressed with wolves. Every other ungulate will flee if they think that wolves pose a threat, but not bison. They do want to protect their calves, though, so if wolves approach, they group up, forming a circle with their calves in the middle.
So as a wolf, you need to disrupt that formation and hope to draw a calf out of the safety of that circle. The way to do that is by harassing the adults, especially the cows. If you can lure a cow bison away from the herd, then its calf will probably follow it, and that's your opportunity. You and your packmates can swarm it, trying to get in enough bites to kill it, while avoiding the hooves and horns of its mother. And, hopefully, not many other adult bison will come to the aid of the calf before you succeed.
The emphasis there is on "packmates." Wolf biologists have found that the optimal number of wolves in an elk hunt is only four -- but it takes more than that to hunt bison. Biologists have found that optimal number of wolves when hunting bison is nine to thirteen, because you need a lot of wolves to harass the bison and spread out the damage that bison deal out.
We've built the bison hunting gameplay on that finding, along with many other observations and insights by wolf biologists. The book "Wolves on the Hunt" has been an important source. It has dozens of observations of wolves hunting bison, which give you a new appreciation for the patience of a wolf. In most of these hunts, wolves spend most of their time just hanging around near the herd, waiting for something to happen, for some bison to wander away from the group, or to make a mistake. One thing we learned from this, then confirmed in some email correspondence with Dan Stahler, one of our advisors and the head of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, is that bison rarely flee from wolves. Not that it never happens, but it's rare, and usually brief. Bison understand their power, both individually, with their massive size and strength and their pointy horns, but also the power of the herd. They're much better off grouping up rather than fleeing. They form that circle around their calves and dare any wolf to come and bite a calf.
So instead of a brute force attack, wolves have learned to tease and coax individual bison away from the herd in hopes of getting a calf out of that protection as well. That's the main tactic to use. But if you're patient, you can also wait. Bison have to eat, and every so often, they'll start moving along to find another grazing spot. You can hang back and watch for an opportunity then. Maybe a cow or calf will fall behind, losing the immediate protection of the herd.
Calves in summer and fall are the wolves' primary targets in a bison herd – but almost every herd has one or two weaker adults who, due to sickness or whatever, are not thriving. They often have half or even less of the normal health of adult bison. You can identify them by their protruding ribs and pelvis -- that's the sign of an emaciated bison who, again with some help from packmates, offers a reasonably good chance of a successful kill.
So, the bison herds are here in the new public beta for the next update, v2.0.4. It's out now on the Steam public beta branch! This update also has the new difficulty level, Unforgiving, along with Critical Hits for Adult NPC Wolves and Packmate Health display. We are still tweaking and tuning all of these new features, and we look forward to getting feedback from everyone who opts into the public beta!
See the build notes for v2.0.4, and how to opt into the public beta on Steam.