Kinda no matter what is happening in the game, if you manage to find a few mammoth sanctuaries in the Neolithic your game is going to be *way* stronger and if you don't find anything to hunt at all during the Neolithic your start is going to be miserable.  Because Mammoths are generated by Mammoth Sanctuaries this creates very massive deltas between starts which make both MP as well as teaching SP games pretty frustrating, as I at least don't feel great recording on 3 sanctuaries or on 0 as either one will be massively misrepresentative of what the game is really "about" in my opinion - balancing fame vs snowballing while being as accessible to new to 4X people and interesting as possible to old 4X vets.

Proposed changes as follows-

1.) Instead of utilizing sanctuaries, take a page from Slay the Spire's cumulative chance on rolling potions/rares.  Every turn a mammoth is on the map vibing and not getting hunted to extinction by a player hell bent on getting that influence before the Ancient flip the mammoth gets maybe +10-20% cumulatively to "make" another mammoth, resetting on success.

2.) If the new mammoth is "made" as a separate stack, this new stack will randomly walk around the map, spreading the love and value of mammoths more evenly and preventing one player from getting waaaaay ahead just because of T0 mapgen.

3.) Players can no longer pillage -> flip to enable stronger aesthete starts and instead have to manage their mammoth population and scout population carefully in order to get the "most" out of them- tension is, at its core, what makes Humankind so much cleaner in design space than any other 4X I've played, and creating management tensions for the player is almost always a good thing when it is easily understood (and biological processes governing your animals is something most people can "get" at a glance).  This also would allow for aesthete cultures to remain being very powerful early without being disruptive to game balance and hopefully could help them get more precious influence to compete with the +passive economy cultures that seem to be the new dominant force on the Enheduanna update.

4.) Have the map naturally remove mammoths after a certain point to make it so you don't have infinite mammoths forever if you're gonna go with biological processes instead of Sanctuaries.  As far as I can tell this kinda happens in-game right now anyways but it's really hard to be sure given how much incentive you have to become the perfect Anthropocene Extinction event and just kill all the mammoths now and forever.

You right about animals in the game. I had games where i in turn 14 have 20+ people, 250+ influence and claimed 3-4 territories. No matter ehar difficulty you play on, this is a insane boost to your start. Usually when I have this start I am the first in classical æra.

In MP this is game breaking, and in SP at certain victory. 

But I think Kain's VIP mod have solved the problem fine. Reduced gains from mammoths and bears, the more people you have. 

I rarely have more than 10 people, 120 influence and 1-2 territories with hos mod