Goals

• Experience points for your commanders.
  
• Dropped animal parts/hides to be gathered by skinners and cotters respectively.

Hunting best practices

• Hunt with ~100 T2 cavalry. You can use any commander.
  
• Rats, Wolves, and Wild dogs are the easiest animals to fight and their parts and hides are worth a nice amount of gold.
  
• Other animals are more difficult and their hides are worth rather more. Scaled chargers and elementals have the most expensive and useful animal parts. Animal parts are collected with skinners, if you don't have skinners there's no point in hunting them over easier animals.
  
• Hides are worth 2-4k gold each when sold in a hub. They are gathered using cotters, and each cotter can hold 100 hides.
  
• It can be a worthwhile investment to build a few levels into your consulate or get a foreign office. It'll give you an idea as to the size of the animals nearby. If you don't have access to those, however, build 5-10 scouts will be sufficient to scout any Uknown animal party.

What commanders should I have?

• Level 20 barracks unlocks research for 5 commanders per city.
  
• You can have more than 5, but only 5 may be alive at any one time.
  
• A cavalry city will want 5 T2 Cavalry commanders.
  
• An infantry city will want 5 T2 Infantry commanders.
  
• A spear city will want 5 T1 cavalry commanders. You may want a mix of cavalry and infantry commanders.
  
• An archer city will want 5 T1 Cavalry, and possibly a mix of cavalry and infantry commanders like spear cities. An elf archer city may also want T2 Archers if want the ability to launch effective attacks with their archers.

Suggested skill progression

Tier 2 commanders: Forced March, Heroism, Charge/Bloodlust, Defy Death/Vitality/Healing

Tier 1 commanders: Forced March, Square Formation/Interlocked Shields, Defy Death/Vitality/Healing, Tortoise Formation, Agile Defence

Commander equipment

Boar spears and overpadded chainmail are good starting hunting equipment that people will probably hand to you for free, either through your alliance or through Global Chat. It is more difficult to get the more advanced and better equipment, which you will eventually need, like Silversteel. Silversteel equipment is very expensive and not critical until you are engaged in combat against other players.