American Megafauna

American Megafauna is an awesome game designed by Philip Eklund which covers the evolution of  North America's large animal life from the Triassic to the present day. For a synopsis of the game, see the entry on Rick Heli's site A Spotlight on Games!

With Phil's kind permission, I've put together an Access database to help analyse what creatures are most suited to what environments (in game terms). This information all relates to the second edition.

As a sample, you can access the results of three of the main queries online.

Biome Suitability is the most important query. For each genotype and immigrant it lists all biomes for which the genotype/immigrant meets the DNA requirements. In addition, it lists what the niche for the biome is, and the rating of the genotype/immigrant for that niche. Biomes with mast are treated as two separate biomes.

Best Biome Suitability builds on Biome Suitability. For each biome it lists which genotypes/immigrants are most suitable (i.e. those that would survive a herbivore cull).

Best Prey Suitability is similar to Best Biome Suitability, but lists which carnivore genotypes/immigrants are most suited to predating each herbivore genotype/immigrant. It it based on another query (Prey Suitability) which I haven't made available online due to space constraints.

In addition to these queries, there are similar ones that select both the best immigrants and best genotypes separately. This avoids the problem that the two best suitability queries above have, which is that the immigrants tend to out-compete the genotypes thanks to their wild card DNA and superior dentition.

There is also a query which lists which genotypes/immigrants are susceptible to which catastrophes. Wild card DNA is ignored for this purpose.

Underlying these queries are four tables containing the data for biomes, genotypes, immigrants and extinctions. Finally there's a bunch of other tables and queries which are just there to make it all work.

Caveats

While wild card DNA for immigrants is handled correctly, the handling of genotype wild card DNA is slightly wrong - it is not available for meeting husker DNA requirements. Since this only affects the Primate genotype I haven't considered it worth worrying about. The results for primates are a bit misleading anyway, since they will generally occupy more than biome and cannot choose a different form of wild card DNA for each. This isn't a problem for immigrants since they only occupy one biome or predator triangle.

Predator size vs. herbivore size is another tricky issue. I've used a scheme which favours carnivores which can predate a herbivore across the full range of the herbivore's size. For predators that only cover part of the range, the ratings are weighted towards larger carnivores.

Download the Access database here. (35KB zipped)

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