[ADDED!] Multiple party hunting suggestion

I'd like to be able to send out multiple parties.

Two of my hunters died and I had to replace them, lowering the synergy of my hunting party.  They were continuously unsuccessful.  All the quests I got were for successful hunts so I wasn't making SC to even be able to buy food.  Got on today and 18 wolves had left my pack, leaving my two from joining and two others.

I feel like something needs to change if a string of bad luck can cause something like this to happen.

Support! I can’t imagine what it’s like for players with +100 wolves. 

As someone with "just" 30 I can say that leveling is an enormous pain in the ass. Keeping everyone fed isn't, so much, but I've been careful about waiting to move to other biomes until every party is finding large prey fairly reliably (winter notwithstanding).

That said: being cautious also means the tedium of grinding is jacked up by 1000%, hunters still have to be pulled from their group to do "quicker" leveling as Scouts before being shuffled back in if they want to hit level 11 before they die of old age, etc, which leads me to question why on earth the option exists to expand your territory to even 50 wolves, let alone 200.

EDIT: This is not accounting for the tedium of landing on 'Everyone gets an open wound/the flu/infections/ticks!' days.

The option exists because there are people who don't care about stats and won't be concerned with trying to level every wolf, as not every wolf they have will be important to stats/stat breeding. For example, pairs containing low and below fertility females purely for breeding for mutations or someone who does high NBW turnover or TC cleaning. People also would complain if it was capped any lower, since some people - like myself - just have a hoarding problem. It's also a good currency sink for the site. Not gonna lie, I would like to have them all at 20 just because it looks nice, but it's not a reasonable goal.

I also think the hunting XP isn't as horribly balanced as it may initially look. My more experienced team is level 13 at 3 years 2.5 months. They have only been out of the starter zone for less than a single day, as I went to the Rainforest to peek at the XP values. The XP values there are pretty high, considering a failed critter trail is significantly higher than a successful starter zone large trail. Had I put my scouts on the lower zones instead of Rainforest and Glacier, they may have leveled even slower than my hunters.

The balance problem isn't in the XP, but in the speed at which we can access the largest XP gains. I can get my scouts into the Rainforest and Glacier pretty quickly and then have unlimited access. Once they get into the higher levels, they get 1200-1400 XP per scout and can do ~4-5 scouts per day (~8-9 if you use Guarana). So, they get about 4800-7000 XP per day (9600-12600 XP with Guarana). To do this on a hunter, you would need 480-700 XP per hunt - which does sound entirely reasonable for large trails to me if the critter trails are awarding 200+ XP.

Unfortunately, I saw someone in chat state they had read somewhere that large trails in the challenging biomes were expected to require a wolf to have 2000 stats. Now, I am going to be entirely bullshitting here, but I am going to take a huge leap and guess based off my current finisher. 231/667 stats are Strength, which is required for her role. So, about 1/3rd of her stats are dedicated toward her role. (My scouts have a similar ratio, actually.) If the stats required for hunting the large trails comes out at a similar ratio, at 1/3 for finishers and 1/2 for other roles, it would mean that you would need a finisher with 670 strength, chasers with 500 speed and 500 agility, and a stalker with 500 wisdom and 500 smarts. Theoretically, you could breed these stats up without actually hitting 2000 stats, but it would be a very long, painful process.

So, I can get max XP with NO STAT REQUIREMENT (you don't have to have 101 strength or wisdom to rescout, only to initially scout, so replacing your scout is easy), but I need FOUR wolves with 500+ in two stats and one with 650+ in one stat. That's where your imbalance is. We're not even gonna get into the lack of ability to do more than 10 hunts per day with a single team nor the fact that people who want to avoid inbreeding are going to find it exceedingly difficult to find a 2000 stat non-inbred wolf, let alone five or ten for one or two hunting teams.

Now, please note, I'm functioning on low sleep and it's 10PM, so I may have fudged some of the math, but my brain tells me it looks right. I also have no clue what the actual stats for Rainforest and Glacier are for hunting, but I do know my 660+ stat wolves didn't find anything over critter while I was there. I could be completely wrong on the required stats, but it still doesn't change the fact that once the Rainforest and Glacier are completed, you have unrestricted access to max scout XP while max hunter XP is permanently locked behind stats.

This also isn't something I'm sure I would want to fight to balance on. Not because I don't want my hunters to level faster, but because sometimes the easier route is exactly what you DON'T want - which, in this case, would be a heavy nerf to scout XP. Considering how much XP is required for just one level after level 10, let alone after level 15, I don't particularly want that to happen - especially since I'm planning on using a scout slot to level my next lead so I don't have to deal with the absolute bull that is leveling through battles.

EDIT: This read as overtly hostile, so rewording--

When people say 'rebalance XP' it's not a shorthand for 'nerf scouts.' I wouldn't advocate for that at all. Nor was I saying that it should be easy-street leveling to 20 on every wolf. But there should be a balance between Hunter and Scout, just like there should be a balance between biomes-- assuming the devs insist on keeping the at-the-moment-invisible requirements. XP is an issue if you're not constantly on here platespinning, or taking chances with jumping territory (and therefor running into altogether different risks).

That aside, the hostility came from the decentralized and almost entirely user dependent documentation on the game, which should not have been directed at you. A lot of this information is pretty crucial to knowing where to set your goals, and almost none of it is openly available except in random posts. Even the player written user guide on hunting doesn't say what biomes require what.

And while it's true that 'frustration and trial and error are an inherent part of wildlife sims'-- the ahh place doesn't really lend itself to immersive realism.

I totally support this idea! 

The only thing I don't really agree with is having it based on the amount of wolves within your pack. I think having extra hunting parties (up to 4) should be purchased with either GC or SC that way every player would have an opportunity to add extra hunting parties. Right now, it seems like the only reason to have a second hunting parties is to prepare for when your old hunting party passes.

If needed, the more hunting parties you send out, the longer it would take. Maybe by 10-15 minutes per hunting party.

Actually, 2nd hunting party has another reason: more hunts and chances to get the successful hunt quest done. One time, my one and only hunt team failed so many times that I couldn't complete the quest. 

Not the only reason I'm responding. 

I don't really agree with having to spend sc or gc on them, we already have to do that with territory and immortal slots. If anything, make it be like cave slots.

I agree with them depending on pack size though. Someone with a small pack isn't going to have enough wolves for multiple teams anyway. 

Initially I was on board with buying the slots, but right now I think it could be like pair breeding slots, since smaller packs dont actively need simultaneous hunts, or created with items like cave slots, which means anyone at the start of the game could have it, making it not something super privileged.

I hit the 50 wolf threshold several months ago, and despite having the funds to keep expanding my territory, I have realized that 50 wolves is right about the limit that a dedicated but casual player can hope to comfortably feed, assuming they breed their wolves at all. I have two solid hunting teams that can reliably bring in large prey from the starter biomes (one of which has a chance at mediums from the rainforest), and if I want to feed my pack without having to buy food, especially in winter, I have to live in either the easy or medium biomes. Period.

The idea that as a player expands and gets further and more successful in the game, that they should be limited to the starter areas in order to continue playing is downright unbalanced. I've had several friends that have expanded beyond 50 wolves, and many have reached the point that they don't want to log in anymore lest their wolves continue starving or run away. I repeat, they DO NOT WANT TO PLAY THE GAME ANYMORE because feeding the wolves they love and enjoy so much is completely unsustainable, and there is currently no way they could ever achieve that sustainability without sacrificing large numbers of their beloved wolves. 

Lets run some numbers. 

The largest, most valuable prey available in the Mountains is the bull elk at 20 points. In spring, with a strong hunting team, you get a 100% chance on large trails, so lets say you're successful every hunt you attempt, every day, with two hunting teams. If you always only go for large trails (sometimes there will not be the option by RNG and you'll have to grab a medium or worst case a small), and manage to get lucky and only get elk bulls (and not cows which are only worth 16 points), and are online consistently for the 10 hours every single day you would need to use all 20 hunts for your teams, with ALL of those unlikely events in place, you get 400 points of food, and can feed exactly 200 adult wolves. 

In summer and fall, at 90% efficiency, you can feed 180 wolves. In winter, at 75%, only 150. But that's assuming a lot of very unlikely things - realistically you'll see 50/50 cows and bulls, so that maximum in spring is actually closer to 180 wolves, unless you have to take some medium trails, and that drops to around 175 wolves in spring, 130 in winter. Maybe most days you can only get in around 15 hunts, so that drops to 130 wolves in spring, 115 in summer/fall, 95 in winter. 

Maybe you can only manage to send your wolves out ten times in a day - that's only around 90 wolves in spring, 75 in summer/fall, 65 in winter. Let that sink in - if all you can manage in a day is 10 hunts, and your hunting teams are absolutely stellar, your maximum sustainable pack size is around 65 in a starter biome.

And this all assumes you aren't breeding your wolves at all (foregoing a core gameplay mechanic), you have no puppies or adolescents to feed, no pregnant wolves that need more food, and that you never roll over a day or two and then realize you're too busy to get all those hunts in, leaving you with a deficit you can never recover from on your own. 

If Wolvden is going to allow a maximum pack size of 200 without any in-game warnings about sustainability, there NEEDS to be some way to support that many wolves, and right now it just isn't possible. I don't really care if an increase in teams you can send out at once comes with pack size thresholds or some other upgrade method entirely, but it needs to happen, and badly.

“Support! I can’t imagine what it’s like for players with +100 wolves“

I’m back and I have +100 wolves and many damn adols. I’m constantly running out of food even though I moved to an easier biome so my wolves can bring back better prey, I even use all my energy to explore for food and nothing else. Exploring in tundra/glacier seems to be the best as there are walrus and baby seal carcasses there (but it’s never enough) I send out 20-25 hunts a day, I’m very active and continue to struggle with feeding my wolves. 

To not “waste” food I’m not feeding the pups, until they reach 5 1/2months to save them for my adults and adols. It’s crazy that the limit is 200 wolves, mad respect for those above 150.

I’m using my spare funds to purchase food off tc and at this point, I no longer have an excitement for the game I used to have. I’m hoping some type of feature would be added to help players with over 100 wolves because now I can’t imagine someone owning 200 wolves.