At long last, I’ve made progress. It’s just a tiny bit, but I’m hopeful.

This is the result of a month’s work of balancing and testing. If I knew what I was doing, this would have taken a week at most. But I didn’t, so it went through many iterations.

I eventually scrapped everything I was working on and went back to the basics: one “harvest” equals 10 food. Then the first question becomes: how much meat does the AI gain per day?

I had to implement some smarter AI behavior, namely:

• Only consider unlocking +Meat Skill technologies if it has already discovered the Hunting Grounds
• If it has found the Hunting Grounds, travel there each morning. Otherwise, stay put (and look for the Hunting Grounds)

From there, I figured out how much food to consume per day. Then, I tested different food costs for the first technology. Then the second tech. Then the third, which is displayed in the table above. If I want a survival rate of say, 60%, I want to set the third technology’s cost to be 600 food. It’s that easy!

Before, I was aiming for final end-game amounts (like how to feed 1000 tribe members), but couldn’t fine-tune the early game like I wanted. The changes wouldn’t effect the survival rates in an expected way. I like this bottom-up approach because I can see how each alteration changes the game.

A friend suggested copying another game’s numbers. So simple I’m kicking myself for not doing that earlier. At least my current approach looks promising.