And here you'll see the Westernized Dragon, a symbol of great strength,
but also formidable evil. Knights would come from miles around to slay the beast,
but very few would succeed against this mighty foe.
Question.
*Sigh* Yes?
Yeah. If these things are so powerful that hundreds would die,
why didn't they just try to tame the Dragons to conquer everything?
Well, in East Asian cultures, dragons were often depicted helping to fight off evil armies,
although they often just gave strength to the righteous. They weren't exactly
fighting people themselves. And besides, I'm not sure having a giant lizard stomping
around and breathing fire everywhere is going to be the best tactical decision.
But actually, it worked really well in this game right here. So yeah, you're wrong.
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, where normally I'd be
ready to present all my scientific evidence and deep research about new and exciting franchise,
but just haven't been able to make it happen this week. Sorry guys, I couldn't do it. I've
been spending too much time playing this new mobile game, it’s literally all I've been able
to think about over the last week. You know, I guess not so today.
Wait, what? They're sponsoring this episode. I can do an episode based entirely on their immersive
and diverse fantasy world. And my entire week of binging this game wouldn't have been for waste.
Oh, multitasking for the win. Optimize the life. Score! All that being said then, this episode is
sponsored by Call of Dragons, an MMO Fantasy Conquest game set in the mythical realm of
Tamaris. A world that faces complete destruction since the heavens fell, releasing a new race of
evil known as the Darklings. It's now up to us to bring together the once warring factions of the
realm in order to fight off the massive threat. And I do mean massive because while you set out
to explore this vast land full of volcanic wastelands, lush forests and icy tundras.
You might come across giant monsters known as behemoths. These things tower above everything
in the game and take a heck of a lot to take down. They vary from giant bears to lightning
fast thunder rocs to the titular dragons. You might be a mystical elf for an overpowered orc,
but that won't be enough to take down these massive monsters.
You have to form alliances with your fellow players if you want to succeed. And if you
do succeed, you get yourself more than just the bragging rights of, Oh, I took down a fricking
dragon. The behemoth will actually join your alliance, helping you to clear the path with
its flame, breath or destroying a massive group all at once with their incredible strength.
And I got to say, it feels pretty cool to roll up with the bear the size of Godzilla behind
you. I have loved using all these awesome creatures inspired by mythology and history
to decimate my enemies. It is like the most epic game of Pokemon ever, but it does take a lot of
hard work to try and get all of the behemoths. And while I certainly love that stellar game,
I can always spend a week binging and then claiming it as research. So I started to wonder.
If I were to focus my efforts on just getting one epic, massive behemoth beast, which one would be
the best? if this were in fact a real army using real resources, which one would be giving me
the most benefits and the fewest drawbacks? Using a combination of history and science,
could I possibly figure out which of these big beasties would be my best buddy in the
long run? Grab yourselves a staff and a bow theorists because it's time to hunt
ourselves a theory. And this one's a biggen. Let's start by deciding which behemoths are
going to be used in our little experiment. Because let's face it, if I did this with every
single one that exists, this would be an hour long video. Instead, I'm just going to narrow our
choices down to three. And they're actually the three that I mentioned earlier, the Giant Bear,
the Thunder Roc and the Dragon. All three of them are currently available in the game,
but they also represent three core animal groups: mammals, birds and reptiles.
This should mean that the majority of the tests that we do today could then
be applied to other behemoths in the game. A giant bear is probably going to fare very
similarly to a dire bear and a hydra would likely be similar to a dragon. So today we're
just going to stick to those. But who knows? Maybe if enough people subscribe to the game,
we're going to be able to do a follow up video where we talk about some other of the behemoths.
Also, I just want to make it clear at the top here, this doesn't have
anything to do with the actual stats or abilities of the characters in the game,
this is just a fun thought experiment saying, Hey, if there were giant eagles and lizards
and bears running around the world, like which one would I want as my personal pet?
A man's got to know. All right, so with all that being said, let's begin. First of all,
is it even realistic to use a giant creature in battle? Aren't they just going to stomp over
all your troops or burn them all with their fire breath? Well, you'd think so. But we as humans are
a determined bunch, and we've actually utilized weird and wonderful creatures throughout history.
Case in point, in the second century BCE, there was a Carthaginian general named Hannibal.
Not that Hannibal. This one was famous for taking North African elephants over the Italian Alps to
fight the Romans. I don't think I need to point out that elephants are not suited to
narrow alpine paths, so why bother through all the hassle of bringing them in the first place?
Morale. While the image of an elephant is certainly familiar to all of us today. For
most second century B.C. Italians, they knew nothing about these creatures. And if you see
some that you don't recognize, well, that is going to be scary. As one Roman historian Livy put it,
quote, Moreover, the elephants towering aloft at the ends of the line, terrified the horses,
not only by their appearance or by their unaccustomed smell and created widespread panic.
I think it's safe to say all of our potentials would do that job. Sure, a bear is a little more
normal looking than a freaking dragon, but if a bear the size of King Kong showed up at your door,
I think you might be having yourself a bad time. But while elephants are certainly real
life behemoths that were captured and trained for war, are you able to do the same thing for
a giant bear, a thunder roc or a dragon? If we don't take into account their sizes
and instead look at them for what they really are: Mammals, birds and reptiles,
suddenly we start to see the turn of these guys from foes to friends might be a bit complicated.
Let's start with the giant bear, shall we? You may have seen bears tamed throughout history.
They were trained to dance in circuses. There are tiktoks of people playing with
bears. Even one family in Russia keeps a bear as a pet. So you'd be thinking that this is
clearly possible for our giant bears today. Except you wouldn't be considering the whole
story there. The most effective way to tame bears is to start their training when they're
just a cub. That's what that family in Russia did. They adopted the cub when he was three months old,
which meant that he grew up around humans. He grew up with them, providing his food,
and now he's docile towards them. But in Call of Dragons, though, we're not talking
about just a bear cub, we're talking about a fully grown monster when we decide to fight
it. Circuses were known to train adult bears, but the risks involved were incredibly high.
They were tamed, mainly using fear and pain to punish the animal, which I suppose we've
done just by destroying it in battle. But it doesn't feel like the steadiest of alliances,
does it? It would just take one bad day for it to turn on me and then wipe out my entire army. Maybe
we'll have some better luck with the thunder roc. A roc is a creature from Middle Eastern mythology
usually described as a giant form of eagle. And that's good news for us, as eagles can not only
be tamed, but are specifically chosen to be trained once they turn to adults. In short,
we haven't missed the training window for this one. Training an eagle is also
much easier compared to other wild animals. Mainly it just involves lots of talking to it,
petting it, and then rewarding it with food when it completes a task. It’s kinda like training a
dog. The dragon meanwhile would be similar as reptiles can also be bribed with food. However,
unlike eagles, it's much harder to wean them off of this food based
reward system. According to Dr. Denish from Rhawnhurst animal Hospital in Philadelphia,
reptiles can grow accustomed to an individual, but it's a different kind of bond than you might have
with a domesticated animal like a dog or a cat. It's one of survival and habit rather than an
actual special bond. Offer them food and they'll pretty much do whatever you want them to do. But
it might start proving challenging to get your dragon to obey you without the promise of a snack
afterwards. So technically, all of our options can in fact be trained, but one of them is definitely
easier than all the others, which means that that is one point going to the thunder roc.
So congratulations. You've now trained your behemoth with varying degrees of difficulty.
It's time to take them into battle. You might think that this is all about strength or magical
powers like breathing fire. But actually the biggest battle you'll have to overcome isn't
one of strength, but rather a battle of the mind. The intelligence of these behemoths are
going to play a huge role on the battlefield. Animals like horses, Elks and wolves. They all
have handlers. They can literally be steered in whatever direction they need to go. The behemoths,
though, they're riding solo. They don't have anyone steering them so you need
to be able to trust them to act somewhat autonomously, which requires a degree of
intelligence beyond just simple taming. This should be an easy category, right?
We literally use the terms bird brain and lizard brain as insults. But as you'd expect
from this channel, things are never quite that simple. Bears are pretty smart. The U.S.
Parks Department regularly struggles to find clever designs for their trash cans because,
as one Yosemite Park ranger put it, there is a considerable overlap between the intelligence
of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourist. But the bear is by no means the smartest of our
trio here. Some bird species can actually show incredible levels of intelligence.
In fact, a Canterbury University study of a parrot-like bird native to New Zealand,
the kea, was found to score higher in some levels of intelligence than a gibbon. But even the
intelligence of the gibbon has its limits. For a long time, people believed that the
larger an animal was relative to the size of its brain, the dumber that animal was. But
that doesn't seem to tell the whole story. Dr. Suzana Herculano-houzel of Vanderbilt University
has herself a theory, a scientific theory! She argues that the body size isn't actually
important because it actually has to do with how densely packed the neurons in the brain are.
That means that large creatures that we've previously considered to be rather unintelligent
may in fact have been far smarter than we gave them credit for. Specifically,
she called attention to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which she calculated would have had itself a
neuronal density equal to that of a baboon, which would therefore put these giant lizards above both
bears and gibbons on the intelligence food chain. This round seems to go to the dragon. But like I
said, these battles are battles of the mind. And one of the biggest things great tacticians have to
bear in mind is location, location, location. Not every battle you're going to be having is
going to be on your home turf. Sometimes you're just going to have to make your way
into the unknown, [*sings* Into the unknown]. And if you take a look at the map of Tamaris,
the unknown has itself a lot of variation. It's covered in forests, icy mountains, wasteland,
basically every environment that you could possibly imagine, which makes for great gameplay.
But ain't so great when you've got yourself a giant animal that's evolved specifically for a
certain habitat. For example, reptiles are cold blooded. They are going to struggle in those
icy mountains. Technically, they can survive colder climates by going through a process
called diapause, which slows down all their body processes almost to a stop. While they certainly
won't die. They're also not going to be fighting much. So the dragon. Yeah, that's super helpful
in all those icy tundras. Fortunately, giant bears and thunder rocs are a lot more versatile.
Brown bears and bald eagles have both been reported living in almost any environment
from the snowy plains of Alaska to the fringes of deserts in Arizona, which means that Thunder
Roc gets itself another point, and the giant bear made itself onto the board. Admittedly, I'm not
sure either would be particularly happy about getting forced to fight in such harsh climates.
But you gotta do what you gotta do to get some of that sweet, sweet reward food. Which actually
brings me to my final point. Animals aren't cheap to look after. They require feeding
just like any of our soldiers. But the amount they require can vary wildly from species to species.
Bears typically need to eat around 16% of their body weight every single day, and so there's no
official size for the giant bear in the game. You can get a pretty good idea of what a giant
bear might look like thanks to our own history. Arctotherium Angustidens was a huge prehistoric
bear that grew up to 14 feet tall and weighed in at 4,000 lbs. 16% of 4,000 would mean it
needs to consume 640 lbs of food every day in order to survive. If a normal livestock
animal like a cow weighs roughly 1,400 lbs on average and 63% of that is actual edible meat.
It makes it about 882 lbs a day. That would mean that this giant bear eats one entire cow
every one and a half days, which adds up to a lot of cows very quickly. That is 265 per
year. I had hoped that the Dragons would actually cost me a little less, as lizards
are known to be great at conserving energy. One of the largest lizards in the world,
the Komodo dragon, eats about 30% of its body weight in a single sitting, but the bonus
is that it won't need to eat again for another month. It's a pretty good starting position,
but our dragons are a little bit bigger. So how much food would they likely need? Unlike the bear,
we actually get a shot of how big the dragon is. In the opening cutscene of the game we can see the
dragon standing in front of our heroes. Given Walder here in the middle is a human, I assume
that he's the height of an average male or five foot nine inches tall using pixel measurements.
Then we can estimate that the dragon is about 13 feet tall. A Komodo dragon standing on four legs
is about two feet, meaning this dragon is six and a half times bigger than the usual komodo.
So he just needs six and a half times the amount of food, right? Ehhh not quite. Because thanks to
the Square Cube law, his weight isn't actually six and a half times bigger,
but six and a half to the third times bigger. If an average Komodo weighs 200 lbs, our dragon is
clocking in at a hefty 54,925 lbs. Do not even get me started on whether this thing could fly.
If it needs 30% of its body weight per month. That is 16,477 lbs every 30 days,
roughly 18 and a half cows every month, which equates to one cow every two ish days, which is
just slightly more efficient than our giant bear, something that I was absolutely not expecting. The
winner of this round, though, is undoubtedly the thunder roc. While eagles certainly eat a lot.
They're opportunistic eaters, meaning they can actually survive on a whole lot less. Bald eagles
can weigh up to 14 lbs, but they only need to consume about 1 lb of food per day. That said,
they can also stretch that limit. Bald eagles have something called a crop,
which is an expandable part of their esophagus where they can store food. About 1 lb of
food per day gets stored there so the eagle doesn't need to eat for another day or two.
But just like with bears and dragons, the roc isn't the size of the normal eagle. The roc
from mythology has actually been compared to the extinct Haast's eagle, which could weigh
in at a whopping 33 lbs and had a wingspan of ten feet. That is pretty darn huge for a bird,
but it's not big enough for a thunder roc. According to the Thunder Rocs in-game description,
we see that this thing is large enough to blot out the sun, so that ten foot wingspan? That ain't
going to cut it. How about something with the wingspan of 35 feet though? that feels more
like it. So allow me to introduce you to the pterosaur. Pterosaurs only weighed in at about
500 lbs. So if this thing's like an eagle and only needs to eat 7% of its body weight every 72 hours,
that means that the Thunder Roc is consuming 35 lbs every three days,
or about 11 and a half lbs every day if you spread it out evenly. That is so much less than both the
dragon and the giant bear that it's not even a competition. It would take roughly 76 days for
this thing to consume one entire cow. Plus, eagles eat rotten meat so you wouldn't even have to worry
about preserving it. Meaning the winner of the round and the entire contest is the Thunder Roc.
Its food efficiency and environmental adaptability make it the easiest choice. It's also easier to
tame than the other two. And while it might not be the smartest. It's not that far off,
which makes it the perfect companion to charge into battle. Personally,
I expected the giant bear to do a bit better, considering it was the closest
thing to animals that are still alive today. But then suddenly my first light bulb went
off. I didn't take into account one of the biggest issues facing these monsters: humans,
us. It's all well and good figuring out which is the best choice for me, but I'm not the one
trying to tame these behemoths. The world of call of dragons is full of other players, all of whom
want a behemoth of their own, sometimes multiple. Sure, there's plenty to go around right now,
but that's not always going to be the case long term. These creatures aren't being raised as
pets. They're being actively trained for war. And war means casualties. If they die in a battle,
you're going to have to find and train another one. There are over 150,000 people playing this
game at the time of me writing this episode. And if they're all losing behemoths in battle
regularly, well, we run the risk of just running out of behemoths entirely. Typically,
you'll find that there are much fewer big animals out in the world than there are
smaller ones. A major reason for that is that big animals have much longer gestation periods
and small guys. The brown bear can give birth to 1 to 3 cubs every eight months, which isn't low
enough to fear species extinction normally. But if you're losing a giant bear every few
battles, all of which can happen over the course of a week, that eight months isn't
going to be short enough to keep up with the demand. Our giant bear is also much bigger
than a normal bear and bigger animals have lower birth rates. Elephants, for example,
can only give birth to one calf every 22 months. The same goes for the dragon. While most reptiles
lay a lot of eggs, larger reptiles like crocodiles and Komodo dragons will only do so once a year.
And if we look even further back, scientists believe that some of the biggest dinosaurs,
which would have been much closer to the size of our dragon, may have laid as little as one
egg every year, which just isn't enough. What about our winner today? Our shining
beacon of hope, the thunder roc? Well, it too, shares the same fate. The biggest bird egg on the
planet is the ostrich egg. And a single ostrich can lay around 18 of them annually. Sounds pretty
good. But once again, the amount of eggs laid per year goes down as the bird gets larger.
If the bird is the size of a pterosaur, then there's a chance that it would lay eggs at a
similar rate, only two per year. In summary, While yes, some behemoths may be more beneficial to have
as allies than others. Ultimately, none of it's going to matter in the long run because humans
are just going to doom them all to the same fate as the prehistoric giant animals of their past.
They are going extinct, baby. I guess it goes to show that size sometimes doesn't
matter. But hey! that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.
And thanks one final time to call the Dragons for sponsoring today's episode. You guys know how much
I love games that involve actually using your brain rather than just mindless button mashing,
having to tactically consider not just which behemoth is best for my army, but everything else.
Like what faction is going to serve my playstyle best, what my playstyle even is. Do I want
to focus on magic or physical power? All of this stuff is perfect for me, and even though
I'm normally more of an RPG guy Call of Dragons even through some of those elements in here too
,allowing me to choose what heroes I upgrade and what skills I upgrade first, it's almost like this
game was specifically built with me in mind, and this is literally just scratching the surface of
all the awesome stuff that this game has to offer. It's got beautiful cinematics, it’s got full
voice acting, it's got epic music and so much more. Sadly, I just can't sit here gushing over
every single feature, so you're just going to have to go and download the game for yourself
to find out what else there is. So use the link in the description or snap the QR code that you
see on screen right now to head on over to the App Store of your choice and download the game on iOS,
Android or PC today. And while you're there, make sure you tell them the game theory sent you by
using the code TGTPlayCoD, which not only gets you a special bonus, but it also makes a massive
difference for all of us here at Team Theorist. It means they get to see how awesome this
community is, how active you guys are, how positive you are. It also means that they
can then keep sponsoring us, which means I get to keep making great content for you. It is a
win win win for everyone. So thank you to Call of Dragons for sponsoring this video
and thank you as always for watching. Remember to check out the link down
in the description below. And as always, I'll see you next week.