Hunting and foraging

Hunt

In empire earth you can hunt animals to harvest food. This method is the fastest of all food gathering methods (except space farms in the AoC expansion)because you have large numbers, over twice as many as mines/forages, gathering from them at once. Also hunting gathers food faster than forages (assuming you have at least equal distance town centers/settlements) just using the same number of citizens as a forage would use.

Hunting can be tricky at times such as the phenomenon called "sterile hippos" or "gay hippos" where your herd (most often the large 290 food animals like hippos, walrus, and elephants) do not reproduce more animals than the size of the original herd. Normally you start out with 2-3 hippos where the adult (large) hippos will periodically create another hippo until they reach the maximum number around 8. But if you have sterile hippos you can only have 2-3 hippos at one time so they must be eaten wisely or you will run out of your herd.

Also animals have either 115(ish maybe 135) food if they are a medium sized animal such as horses, goats, ostriches, or giraffe. Large animals have 290 as listed above. But the smaller animals like goats have larger herds than large animals like hippos and the smaller animals are horny bastards and reproduce much faster. But if these animals are killed by a military unit or building instead of a citizen they only have a very small amount of food left. So it is strategical to both kill enemy hunt and protect your own. But in some sets such as P2S it is against the rules to kill hunt(animal kill= AK) due to the scarcity of food in the set.