Let the party know the basic style enemies they'll be facing, like I would say Oh it's all elves, but say it's not orc/goblin enemies.
Maybe allow retraining of favored enemies per Ultimate Campaign?
I think the retraining idea is your best bet, so that you don't have to ruin the surprise but the ranger can still adapt and remain effective.
Another option is some sort of "divine clue" like having the PCs subjected to a Harrow reading or having a seer catch a glimpse of the PC's or PCs' future(s).
Maybe suggest the guide archetype.
Creative Director
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Rangers, more than any other class, can be impacted unintentionally in this way. For our adventure paths, we pretty much lay out the best 3 to 5 favored enemy and favored terrain choices. There's a certain amount of "spoiler" factor there, yes, but less than you get in a typical movie preview.
In fact, a certain amount of spoilers can go a LONG way toward not only getting your players interested and excited about your game, but can help them in making appropriate characters for what you have planned. It's MUCH better to have players who are happy with their characters, since a player who becomes frustrated with a character is more likely to miss sessions or just leave the game.
So yeah. Come right out and tell the whole group "you'll be facing a lot of aquatic humanoids, magical beasts, animals, and outsiders with the water subtype (or whatever) in this game, so plan accordingly." It's even fine to get more detailed and say "sahuagin, sharks, and water elementals are big themes in what I've got planned!"
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I totally understand why you might want to keep the enemies secret but you should probably give him some idea about possible enemies if you want him to enjoy the game and think that having a primary class ability be mostly useless would upset him, it would be something like letting someone play a cavalier and the game being mostly underground caves for example. Player enjoying his character the whole campaign > keeping a cool reveal from them for a little while imo.
Favored enemy bonus is a major part of the rangers class features. Once he can cast Instant Enemy it is less of an issue, but Instant Enemy is a 3rd level ranger spell which he doesn't get till level 10. Although he can use a wand of it, it will cost him almost 16,000 gp to get one. Which is a pretty significant portion of wealth until level 13/14, and unobtainable before level 7 (and then all your wealth would have to go towards it).
You should tell him either the most common types of enemies expected to be present, which is what published Adventure Paths do for instance. Yes, it gives away a little. The cat is out of the bag. But, if you don't his class features will likely be a waste until level 13 or 14.
The other option is to encourage him to try the Freebooter archetype. It gives a reduced bonus +1 instead of +2, and increases by 1 at 5th level and every by levels. This bonus also applies to allies within 30ft of the freebooter when activated, but requires a move action to designate a target. This is called freeboter's bane and replaces the normal Favored Enemy.
There is a slight problem in that some class features like Quarry and Improved Quarry don't technically work without Favored Enemy, which the Freebooter doesn't have. However, since this is a home game the quickest and most reasonable method to fix that is to say that anything that functions based on a Favored Enemy can instead funciton if the freebooter uses his bane ability on it.
I will gladly jump on the 'favored enemy shouldnt be allowed to go to wasted' bandwagon. You can either do this by telling him the most common enemies to come OR you can do this by allowing him to change it after the big reveal that X are the real bad guys. Either way its basically a requirement for the ranger to get to use his favored enemy fairly frequently, or else the class is really kind of meh.
If you really dont like either of those options, there is a 3rd party product, knacks of nature that let you customize your ranger by trading out specific abilities for different 'knacks'. One of the things you can trade out is favored enemy. If you dont want to give away the coming enemies you could strongly encourage the ranger to replace favored enemy with something more universally useful.
Point him to the Guide archetype maybe? You trade away favored enemy for a smite-like ability.
Players need to know the basic premise for a campaign to make a viable character. If I make a character that really wants to get vengeance against orcs and the DM doesn't give us any orcs to fight my character would be really out of place.
You should tell the ranger's player about the enemies they are going to be facing.
You should tell the ranger's player about the enemies they are going to be facing.
I will also agree with this. It's a significant class feature, and really.. the character lives in the campaign world, he should have some idea of what enemies are common anyway. You can wait till a later level to "reveal" the best one if you must; as long as the one he picks at level 1 is still fairly common, it's not going to waste. If you wait till beyond level 5 to let him discover the most common type of enemy, he'll no longer have a chance to max out that particular favored enemy (at 5th level you get a new one and can add +2 to either the old one or the new one; all FE choices past 5th level miss this +2 so it's impossible for them to ever reach the highest FE bonus you can get w/o retraining).