An improvement to challenge mode

[Existentialist Knight]

Dear developers and fellow zookeepers,

I have enjoyed Planet Zoo for almost half a year now, and the game offers so much content I haven’t been able to discover all of it yet. Up till now, I’ve mainly played the campaign scenarios to learn about the game mechanics and gather inspiration. After completing the scenarios, I continued the zoos in challenge mode to experiment further ideas, and eventually started my own zoos in challenge mode.

To me, the greatest strengths of challenge mode has been the animal market. The animal market because you had to “work” if you wanted popular animal or a specimen with good genes via CC. Also, not every animal is available all the time, and the overall quality of their genes are very varying.

Now that I purchased the majority of the DLCs, I have found this strength diminished by a large amount.

The animal market capacity has become far too small to present you a sufficient and interesting choice of species and their individual specimens, just because the general amount of species has increased by such a lot. It can take enormously long until you can purchase a certain animal, just because no specimens are available for a longer period of time. As I like to build more “regional-focused” zoos, it is frustrating to find a huge number of polar bears on the market, but no African ungulates for my safari park. Similarily, I don’t have any use for a wide and varied selection of elephants if I just want a grizzly bear for my taiga nature reserve, and there is just none to be found because the elefants dominate the market capacity.

Don’t get me wrong, I explicitly like that the animal you want may not be directly available, and maybe you have to settle for some less than optimal genes. But when I have to wait for over an hour in real-life time just to get a second specimen of one species (and I am not even taking the correct gender or the quality of it’s genes in account), the animal market is neither fun nor a fair challenge anymore.

As a solution, I propose that the general capacity of the animal market in challenge mode should be adapted to the number of animal species the player currently has in his game. This should probably be rather easy to implement, and would make the feature I like most about this game mode enjoyable again.

I cannot stress enough how greatly I would appreciate a solution for this problem in the coming patches. Thank you for listening, Frontier.

Also, I’d welcome any discussion with other forum members what their perspective on the issue I presented is.

Kind regards

 

[Roxxsmom]

This is a major reason I haven't gotten into the challenge mode.

 

[XT]

... I think the limitations in challeng are intentional, just like they limit the species type that show up in a particular challengs. By delaying the appearance of a desired animal, it forces you to maintain the challenge zoo for x period of time.

 

[Existentialist Knight]

Thanks for the replies.

Concerning your remark, XT, I hope I could stress sufficiently that I like this limitation to the animal market. It is the major reason I prefer it over sandbox, and why I like challenge mode itself so much.
My impression is only that this system of having to wait for certain animals was balanced for the base game, but has never adjusted for the additional amount of species that were added via DLC. When I only owned the base game, this system was quite enjoyable, it only got annyoing when I purchased the majority of the DLCs.
It often seems as if the game tries to not have more than two pages full of different specimens in the animal market brwoser, regardless of wether you own only the base game or any amount of DLC.
That is why I would like to see an increase of the market capacity for every DLC purchased. A few slots per DLC would already suffice, I'd just consider it as an adaptation to the current state of the game.