Large Habitat Upkeep...
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Good to see a few days off and the community is becoming more toxic. We get it you like love the game and don't like hearing people with real issues voicing their opinions. Remember they paid for the game too and their views are just as valid as yours.
What? So everything is on a popularity vote, where a clique could basically veto anything. that is a very bad place to go to and would essentially kill off the games community and the game itself in the long run.
The game is a sandbox game, in planet coaster you could make a ride as long as you want there was no restriction that I ever found. But here we are finding a restriction. Who here has run into the cleaning issue with 20+ peafowls? Well if you haven't, I suggest you try it. no matter what setting you put the keepers on they cannot keep up with the cleanliness. This game is a zoo game where a big mechanic is breeding releasing and selling of animals. So a flock of 20 Peafouls isn't anything extreme.
What people here have been ashing for is quite reasonable the ability to assign several keepers to a enclosure, and the can work concurrently. This simply isn't a massive rewrite of the code as some have made out to be. Let the devs speak as to the actual work as they are the ones with the knowledge.
If the devs can give us this option it will make the game far more flexible, and workable for the entire community. If your fine working with the current constraints it won't affect you in the slightest. But that group is a subset of the entire playerbase.
What? So everything is on a popularity vote, where a clique could basically veto anything. that is a very bad place to go to and would essentially kill off the games community and the game itself in the long run.
The game is a sandbox game, in planet coaster you could make a ride as long as you want there was no restriction that I ever found. But here we are finding a restriction. Who here has run into the cleaning issue with 20+ peafowls? Well if you haven't, I suggest you try it. no matter what setting you put the keepers on they cannot keep up with the cleanliness. This game is a zoo game where a big mechanic is breeding releasing and selling of animals. So a flock of 20 Peafouls isn't anything extreme.
What people here have been ashing for is quite reasonable the ability to assign several keepers to a enclosure, and the can work concurrently. This simply isn't a massive rewrite of the code as some have made out to be. Let the devs speak as to the actual work as they are the ones with the knowledge.
If the devs can give us this option it will make the game far more flexible, and workable for the entire community. If your fine working with the current constraints it won't affect you in the slightest. But that group is a subset of the entire playerbase.
Fair point well made. Really not a fact of 'I love the game' if you refer to my other posts you will see I am more than happy to post negatively about the game. My point is that I run several large and pretty complex zoos, with multi species exhibits in all of them and I dont find feeding them an issue, in fact I dont find feedings or cleaning any of my habitats an issue. The game already suffers from pretty serious performance issues due to the AI, that can be seen from running any zoo with over 6000 guests. I have a zoo at the moment where I gain 20 fps if I drop my guests from my max of 9000 to 6500. As I have said, I have no issue with the idea just think that it isnt a priority for the majority to warrant the additional load on AI. Please note, I do have a certain knowledge of AI and game development, I am not pulling this from my wazoo.
Where did I say anything about voting or vetoing? I'm pretty sure no one other than the devs gets any vote regarding what does or does not get implemented in the game.
My comment had nothing to do with voting or vetoing...and everything to do with supporting the right of everyone to express their opinions in this, a public forum. You seem to think no one should be allowed to do that unless they agree with the OP. That's not what a discussion is and would also make for a ridiculously boring forum. Threads would consist of the original post and a bunch of "Me too!"...
I indicated that I actually agree with the OP of this thread at the end of my post. But I do NOT agree with the concept that anyone who doesn't share my opinion should be quiet. A community that has dissent is not "toxic" ...it's active and robust. Trying to silence people who disagree with you and saying "shut up"...now that is toxicity.
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Been pondering about this one today, and there could be a solution which wouldnt effect load. If it was set that if x number of different main feeder are in a habitat that need food, then an additional keeper is sent, it would be a one off call. Something like that could work. Seriously, not against the idea, just got an idea of the complexity of breaking out habitats into elements with different tasks. If there was a simpler solution to achieve the same goal it could work.
The focus here seems to be primarily changing the keeper AI. What if the problem was approached from the other side?
Part of the problem seems to be that keepers only start thinking about feeding animals after they are already hungry, they only feed as much as their flawed AI thinks the animals will need, and the keepers select which feeders they will fill, giving the player very little control over the important decision of where and when animals are fed. Frontier even recommends using feeders to attract animals to a certain area like a viewing window, but if there is more than one feeder in the habitat, we have no control over which are filled. For a game that is supposed to be about player freedom, this is understandably met with frustration.
So what if for every feeder we could select the refill frequency. The default could remain for the keepers to fill as they see fit, but players could also set for keepers to automatically fill every 3, 6 months, etc. I would like to see this trigger the keeper AI to prepare food before ever entering the habitat, which should also greatly increase their efficiency (rather than walking in, looking around, walking to the keeper hut, and then walking all the way back).
The primary goal of many of the feeding mechanics currently in the game seems to be to save players money by not overfeeding animals (erring on the side of underfeeding them). This is a management game; if the player chooses to prioritize feeding and efficiency, over cost saving, then they should be free to make that management decision. We may even find out that we are not as smart as we think we are and go back to letting the keepers half-starve animals because feed costs are bankrupting us, but that is the whole point of management game - we make decisions that create consequences, and those consequences alter our next decisions.
Part of the problem seems to be that keepers only start thinking about feeding animals after they are already hungry, they only feed as much as their flawed AI thinks the animals will need, and the keepers select which feeders they will fill, giving the player very little control over the important decision of where and when animals are fed. Frontier even recommends using feeders to attract animals to a certain area like a viewing window, but if there is more than one feeder in the habitat, we have no control over which are filled. For a game that is supposed to be about player freedom, this is understandably met with frustration.
So what if for every feeder we could select the refill frequency. The default could remain for the keepers to fill as they see fit, but players could also set for keepers to automatically fill every 3, 6 months, etc. I would like to see this trigger the keeper AI to prepare food before ever entering the habitat, which should also greatly increase their efficiency (rather than walking in, looking around, walking to the keeper hut, and then walking all the way back).
The primary goal of many of the feeding mechanics currently in the game seems to be to save players money by not overfeeding animals (erring on the side of underfeeding them). This is a management game; if the player chooses to prioritize feeding and efficiency, over cost saving, then they should be free to make that management decision. We may even find out that we are not as smart as we think we are and go back to letting the keepers half-starve animals because feed costs are bankrupting us, but that is the whole point of management game - we make decisions that create consequences, and those consequences alter our next decisions.
Again in principle it is a solid solution (100% better than we have now) but the AI currently runs a very linear path.
- Habitat need attention (either via game or manual trigger)
- Keeper assign to habitat
- Keeper visits habitat assess what needs doing
- If feeding required keeper goes to hut
- Keeper makes food and returns to habitat
- Keeper feeds based on priority of feeder (enrichment first)
To put this another way, I think if you asked the majority of players if they would prefer more optimised AI = better performance or more complex AI = even worse performance, the results would be interesting.
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For the record, I never said people couldn't express their opinions. If you simply don't agree with the idea because you have a legitimate concern such as performance or whatever, sure, give your opinion, if it's constructive. I wasn't complaining about THAT, but instead the people telling me that my concerns do not matter because others do not have the same issues and I should "just work within the constraints of the game as is" instead of suggesting new features. People essentially telling me that I shouldn't be suggesting this at all because people should just all shut up and deal with the game as-is and never suggest quality of life features that would make the game more fun for a subset of the player base who may like to play differently to others.
People telling me that, if I'm struggling to maintain a large habitat, that my habitat is just simply ""too large"" and I should shut up and accept that instead of making suggestions to improve the game for people who enjoy playing with massive habitats.
It's literally a case of, "you don't play the same way I do, so your opinions and feedback is invalid. Play the way I do instead."
People telling me that, if I'm struggling to maintain a large habitat, that my habitat is just simply ""too large"" and I should shut up and accept that instead of making suggestions to improve the game for people who enjoy playing with massive habitats.
It's literally a case of, "you don't play the same way I do, so your opinions and feedback is invalid. Play the way I do instead."
Sorry that you took my post tone way wrong; you focused way too much on the one thing I said in the first paragraph and ignored the 2nd based on how you interpreted the message.
I wasn't telling you to stop making suggestions; I was suggesting that you be less focused on it it and understand that there are limitations and we sometimes have to live within them, because you seemed legitimately upset about the issue. You use the term "aggravating" in your OP even. My point was to advise you to stop trying so hard to pound a square peg into a round hole and just use the round peg for now...while holding out hope that they will make the hole square down the road.
As I said....I actually like your idea. I too would be happy if they implemented it. But I'm not going to be aggravated or annoyed over it in the short term because, as with any game, I took the time to learn to play successfully within the constraints presented me.
Suggestions are good, keep giving them....but don't have expectations that they "need" or "must" be implemented. The game is already solid, and fun; you're just hurting yourself if you focus too much on the limitations where they exist instead of the good stuff where that exists.
I really like this idea. Since the first day I started playing, when I tried to add a second keeper gate to a large habitat, being able to maintain and keep my animals fed and the habitat clean when there are a lot of animals in an enclosure has been something I've wanted more control over. It's not like the current keeper AI does a good job of food control anyway, as a lot of the time a ton of it still goes to waste and spoils.
I see nothing wrong with a re-write of the AI to do things as you suggest, and more player control over the mechanics of it in this kind of game is always a good thing.
It doesn't solve the issue of habitat cleanliness though. And for me, that's a way bigger issue than feeding. I have never had animals starve, even with 30 or more in a single habitat. What I have had is frequent cleanliness warnings and disease outbreaks. @Ashen Shugar touches on this above with the 20+ peafowl example. I've never been able to keep a peafowl habitat clean once it breaks around the ~20 to 25 animal mark. Have had the same issue with Reindeer in the arctic pack with just the 10 reindeer in the first career scenario, once they had babies.
Honestly though, cleaning has an even easier fix than feeding. Let us set the frequency of keeper visits for cleaning and for feeding separately and allow the frequency to be higher than 1/month....problem solved.
I think I even cracked how to get more than one keeper into a habitat cleaning at the same time yesterday with those reindeer, as I saw it happening more than once....didn't help, it still got dirty and I got diseases before keepers were cleaning it, simply because the duration of 1/month was too long regardless of how many keepers go to clean once that threshold was hit.
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To be fair, i think we went back to civil already.
Really good point about increasing feeding frequency. Another fix, based on VetGirls idea above is a checkbox on either habitat or feeders to keep them filled, meaning the keepers will fill them regardless of need. Both would work and require very little overhead.
Really good point about increasing feeding frequency. Another fix, based on VetGirls idea above is a checkbox on either habitat or feeders to keep them filled, meaning the keepers will fill them regardless of need. Both would work and require very little overhead.
The problem again arises with the feeders.. Cost of food.. It is a revolving door.. Food pricing needs to be brought back to a realistic pricing.. We are seriously spending to much on food at base cost.. Things have to work hand in hand.. just like it would in a real zoo.. even though this is a game..
You can't have a game that doesn't base itself off something.. And even with other games that do base themselves around things in the real world.. most of them don't work without remembering what real world is.. You can't just throw this together with fiction and pray it will work.. Zoo's are money driven, pure an simple.. (which is just about everything in the world is money driven outside of what you find in real nature)...without an income, a zoo won't make it.. but in order for a zoo to be stable, money and cost's have to fall above what one would call even.. Right now more then half the zoo's we are hearing about, through the forum, can't stay above. Most are sinking.. And that in itself is screaming that mechanics need to be changed.. (and even in these circumstances people are telling them that the mechanics are fine, that there doesn't need to be changes, and that if they can keep a stable zoo person should create their zoo based on this and this.. and this.. What people fail to realize is that some of us are not working with the same skill sets or desires. The reason for the forum is to expand the game for all options..)
As far as habitats and exhibits go, they need to change a lot with this too.. There are zoo's around the world that keep animals in more then their recommended habitat space. Problem is, the game is limited on what it allows.. This is a game and not nature, after all.. However the coding has to be done with nature in mind.. One of the major problems with large habitats is that the animals tend to have social issues more then it even seems they would in the wild.. People tend to forget that herds tend to stick together unless threatened.. then they scatter and run. But at this rate, the game is constantly stating that animals are low on social.. This is just one problem that large habitats are creating.. One of the others is that the keepers can't get to everything in a timely manner, and trust me when I tell you they complain madly about it.. (had an enclosure that was as big as the one for our giraffes.. for zebra, Thomson gazelle, Sable antelope, and African buffalo. populations where normal but they all complained about social. And the keepers complained that they were overworked.) See the mechanics do not work correctly. The habitat should be humane but the space provided is up to the creator.. not the game base in retrospect to what they think is appropriate.. This is about the animals..
The other problem we have is the exhibits.. without saying this to many times.. The exhibits as they currently are, they are to small.. We should have multiple sizes.. not just one single solitary choice.. One of the things I have notices is that they don't look at the whole animal when it comes to exhibits and they should.. And if they decide to keep things the way they are, that is fine, but at least gives us choices on the sizes of exhibits we use.. Because as it stands, the sizes we currently have are not good for anything more then showing.. If you breed, space becomes an issue.
Sorry, i went kinda off in a rant.. to much all at once in my head..
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