Animal feed cost explosion

[Wolfen75]

That's a bug, IMHO.

I've lions, bears, different kinds of tigers, elephants and a lot of other animals (it's currently a 7000+ visitor zoo). And for my whole zoo I don't come close to the cost that some people here mention.

(In line with this, I got two million $ in the bank and I assume that's quite normal for a zoo that has the age & size of mine.)

I had 35+ habitats, 300+ animals too in my first zoo.
Was running 50 years, hat 2,5 million $.
Then the food cost fluctuation got so annoying that i closed it.

I found a way to reduce costs to a few thousands tho.
I removed all enrichment and food bowls except for one that holds a lot of food. atm all four bears get enough to eat and the costs dont explode..

I think too its mainly because the game can't handle the enrichments.
Still it can't be a way to let the welfare drop because of that on the long term.
It is sad enough that you can give your animals the best food grade in a full zoo but the disgusting, greedy pigs (aka "guests") eat and drink like there's no
tomorrow.

I am not far away from deleting the whole franchise bullcrap and play sandbox without smelly visitors.

 

[marcnesiumHH]

Another footage (31 December) from my game, being another 5 years in game.
1. The costs of the Bengal Tigers (two habitats with one male/ female adult each) differ a lot, while there is the identical number of feeders.
2. The habitat cost overview does not update itself within one year, even if you significantly reduce the number of animals in an habitat within this year. Which at least makes the 'management' of these costs hard.

Conclusions after many ingame years (approx. 100):

• mid/ endgame (having at least 15-20 different species) seems unbalanced because feeding costs are disproportionate to the number of animals of each species.
• I.e. reducing the number of animals of each species towards the number of the specific minimum requirement can make your zoo profitable overall.
• Thus, having an attractive zoo with e.g. 8 Elephants or Orang Utans is not rewarded economically.

 

[marcnesiumHH]

It's getting ridiculous - just five day later (5th January) the costs of Makake rose by 25k (!), just being on play. Not only that the costs are high, it's impossible to track them.

 

[LN]

"Running Costs".

What are the costs that are allocated to this category?

Not only food I presume?

And is that monthly/yearly or total over it's life period?

 

[Wolfen75]

"Running Costs".

What are the costs that are allocated to this category?

Not only food I presume?

And is that monthly/yearly or total over it's life period?

Repair costs for the habitat, maybe a few hundret $ on a huge one.
(and it is yearly)

The problem here is the inability of the game to calculate prices.

Look at this bullshyt, the lions produces twice as much food costs as the rest of the zoo.
4-5 lions eats 2x - 3x as much as 7 Komodo Dragons and 4 Saltwater Crocodiles.
(edit: non-food running costs of that picture was 105.60 $ and 95.50 $ for repairs)

ps: that is food grade 1

bollockz

 

[LN]

Repair costs for the habitat, maybe a few hundret $ on a huge one.
(and it is yearly)

The problem here is the inability of the game to calculate prices.

Look at this bullshyt, the lions produces twice as much food costs as the rest of the zoo.
4-5 lions eats 2x - 3x as much as 7 Komodo Dragons and 4 Saltwater Crocodiles.
(edit: non-food running costs of that picture was 105.60 $ and 95.50 $ for repairs)

ps: that is food grade 1

bollockz

You are talking about food costs, but all I see is "Running Costs"

I'm not saying you are wrong, but the way you describe it is not what I see.

I'll look into my zoo once I get home, so far I don't recall having such high running costs.

Is there any possibility that anything linked to this habitat/animal (information board, speakers, etc) is added to these costs?

 

[Wolfen75]

You are talking about food costs, but all I see is "Running Costs"

As i wrote, the "running costs" combines out of food costs and repair costs.
You can see the costs listed when you click the habitat itself.
My repair costs was roughly 100 $ for each of my 2 lion habitats, the rest was raw food cost.

 

[LN]

As i wrote, the "running costs" combines out of food costs and repair costs.
You can see the costs listed when you click the habitat itself.
My repair costs was roughly 100 $ for each of my 2 lion habitats, the rest was raw food cost.

Okay, that clears it up for me. Thanks.

 

[benmrowe]

I'm seeing this issue as well. Just sudden massive explosion in costs. One extra elephant took food cost from about $10k to $60k. Bizarre.

 

[Wolfen75]

Its not all bad that explodes... i had this for the first time.
I change nothing in this year.
I didn't had more or less visitors than before, had 5 stars since 5+ years, no other animals, no other personal... the only different thing i bought was a second staffroom, but i doubt th at was causing this.

 

[Fortunanovesia]

That's a bug, IMHO.

I've lions, bears, different kinds of tigers, elephants and a lot of other animals (it's currently a 7000+ visitor zoo). And for my whole zoo I don't come close to the cost that some people here mention.

(In line with this, I got two million $ in the bank and I assume that's quite normal for a zoo that has the age & size of mine.)

How is your zoo running? Performance i mean.

 

[peon2t]

How is your zoo running? Performance i mean.

Generally good (no constant "stuttering" or something like that) but I eventually have "stutter spikes".

 

[Dr4gon]

There is definitely something wrong with the food prizes. First I noticed that I was suddenly making a loss of 40K in one year. So I decided to cut back on expenses, removing animals that weren't very popular and I had to many of them anyway because of the community even. I sacked their caretakers and corresponding mechanics as well, but it still didn't help.
Food was high, but not alarming, but still I switched back from grade 2 quality to grade 1 quality. I broke even after that, and than I saw the graph. Because of removing the animals and lowering the quality the cost was going down. But at a certain point the cost went up again. The animals that I removed have no habitat in my zoo. They are permanently gone, so that can't be the cause.

So basically it only went down when I'd cut the cost, but went gradually up again. I am in a loss.

Also is there some hidden cost to trading with other players on the market place? Transport costs and taz is almost null. Every time when I trade I go down a few 1000.

 

[Dr4gon]

I released more animals, and now I'm more confused. A year later. More lay-offs and more holes in my zoo.

If not getting positive figures now, I guess I have to stop this zoo and be more shrewd. And I think it's the lions and bears who eat that much. They are the ones who I removed mostly.

 

[marcnesiumHH]

I have been testing and reviewing feeding costs again - another 10 ingame years. They remain kind of predictable and unstable for some species. In my zoo, this especially applies to apes and elephants. However, my best guess is that a large rise from one year to another is mainly based on new offsprings.
However, it is not possible (with a specific combination of animals - especially with elephants, apes and crocos - in a zoo) to keep it profitable.

The only current solution, which worked out very well, is to lower the food quality to level 2. This reduced the feeding costs for the related species by approx. 1/3. Five years after the applied cost reduction I did not notice any impact on life expectancy and/ or health.

AND THE BEST ADDITIONAL EFFECT: Since then, no feeding or thirst problem has been occurred!

 

[JPrin]

Hey guys after dealing with this myself, and reading the posts in this thread I think I've kindof figured out the issue. It could be a bug, or working as intended depending on the POV, but I personally believe it's a bit of both. Which could be why it's so difficult to track down.

I think the problem comes with growing our franchise zoos too fast, or another way to put it, is growing them too fast for the mechanics of the game.

PS TLDR at the bottom for those that don't want to read my novel.

The problem comes from bringing in too many of the big ticket species before your zoo and guests are ready for it. I know in my experience I had a couple different exhibits with african and american herbivores and combined a hundred or so animals, and when babies were born I'd move them to another exhibit to grow them out and when they grew up I'd sell them for CC and strategically replace the parents (females with my babies, and new fresh males from the market) to keep the genetics pure and produce better animals. Basically I was farming them, (whatever you think about the ethics of this has nothing to do with it, I wanted CC to get big ticket animals in other zoos) it was working fine with herbivores and I had a 200,000+ CC. I wasn't making a lot of money but I wasn't losing any either.

Then I thought Lions go for big CC and they can survive with 49 females and one male. I thought I can bank off of this! That is when it all went to crud! One problem is herbivores = cheap food and carnivores = expensive food. The other problem is I didn't have the donations from my zoo to support a large amount of Lions. By the time I got 20ish adult lions in my zoo and about 20 babies in a sister exhibit, it was too late, I had 30k in donations a year and 85k+ in food costs one year up to 120k in food costs. In another zoo I saw the same thing when I tried to farm the grizzly bears for the franchise community goal. When I got significant numbers of adult and baby bears my budget tanked before I could get the babies grown out.

Additionally when I started to get rid of the lions in the first zoo to find the problem when I got them back down to 3-4 lions the budget stabilized but the damage was done as I was 1mil in the hole. I could have eventually bailed myself out by farming and selling animals for cash but it was easier to start over.

This could be by design to keep us from "farming" animals for CC. But I think there is a bug in the way the food is calculated. As stated numerous times in earlier posts that the cost is per kg of food and not per feeding as noted in the UI. Maybe the balance here was calculated based on feeding numbers but when you get to feeding significant amounts of kg of high cost food, it skyrockets. If you only keep a pair of Tigers or a Pair of Bears or a couple apes, you might not see the problem or even notice. By the time you get rid of the babies a couple years later your budget can absorb the additional costs and your fine. But when you try to keep significant numbers of big ticket animals that eat lots of food the balance issues show itself and we have these issues. If you look at the screenshots above you can see they the issues are higher numbers 5+ of big ticket animals.

If you don't get big numbers of the big ticket animals (I'm looking at you Lions, Tigers, Bears, Big Apes, Elephants, etc.) but when you do, the balance is off, at least in my opinion. You could fix this by making the cost per kg of these foods cheaper for the big ticket animals and this could alleviate this issue. However maybe this is by design as feeding 40 lions, or 20 elephants, or 10 Orangutans, is going to be insanely expensive. And a smaller zoo just can't handle it. Maybe we should start with lower numbers of herbivores then grow that to larger numbers that can support the big ticket animals. Maybe farms are bad. I dunno.

If the price of feeding is truly per kg the cost per kg of feed should be the same for Elephants and Springbok, it's just hay and grain after all. The difference is the amounts you feed. Does anyone know if the price per feeding in the exhibits for these two animals are the same or different? If it's the same, and we do really pay per kg and not per feeding, then there is your problem. Change the UI to say per kg and make them the same and just feed the elephants more. There is your bug.

Anyways just my two cents, but there you go.

TLDR: When you get large numbers of carnivores/apes/elephants the costs get so high that smaller zoos can't keep up and costs get run into the ground. Large amounts of food is needed for larger animals and when it is priced by kg instead of by feeding adds up big time. Maybe we can adjust the per kg cost of food for larger animals or maybe it's by design. Maybe feeding 20 elephants or 40 lions shouldn't be cheap. However there could be a bug if we are priced per kg and not per feeding. Price per kg for Elephants and Springbok should be the same (grain and hay), but the quantities should be vastly different. This is where the bug could be, if it was balanced on price per feeding but it's really price per kg, an adjustment needs to be made.

 

[benmrowe]

Hey guys after dealing with this myself, and reading the posts in this thread I think I've kindof figured out the issue. It could be a bug, or working as intended depending on the POV, but I personally believe it's a bit of both. Which could be why it's so difficult to track down.

I think the problem comes with growing our franchise zoos too fast, or another way to put it, is growing them too fast for the mechanics of the game.

PS TLDR at the bottom for those that don't want to read my novel.

The problem comes from bringing in too many of the big ticket species before your zoo and guests are ready for it. I know in my experience I had a couple different exhibits with african and american herbivores and combined a hundred or so animals, and when babies were born I'd move them to another exhibit to grow them out and when they grew up I'd sell them for CC and strategically replace the parents (females with my babies, and new fresh males from the market) to keep the genetics pure and produce better animals. Basically I was farming them, (whatever you think about the ethics of this has nothing to do with it, I wanted CC to get big ticket animals in other zoos) it was working fine with herbivores and I had a 200,000+ CC. I wasn't making a lot of money but I wasn't losing any either.

Then I thought Lions go for big CC and they can survive with 49 females and one male. I thought I can bank off of this! That is when it all went to crud! One problem is herbivores = cheap food and carnivores = expensive food. The other problem is I didn't have the donations from my zoo to support a large amount of Lions. By the time I got 20ish adult lions in my zoo and about 20 babies in a sister exhibit, it was too late, I had 30k in donations a year and 85k+ in food costs one year up to 120k in food costs. In another zoo I saw the same thing when I tried to farm the grizzly bears for the franchise community goal. When I got significant numbers of adult and baby bears my budget tanked before I could get the babies grown out.

Additionally when I started to get rid of the lions in the first zoo to find the problem when I got them back down to 3-4 lions the budget stabilized but the damage was done as I was 1mil in the hole. I could have eventually bailed myself out by farming and selling animals for cash but it was easier to start over.

This could be by design to keep us from "farming" animals for CC. But I think there is a bug in the way the food is calculated. As stated numerous times in earlier posts that the cost is per kg of food and not per feeding as noted in the UI. Maybe the balance here was calculated based on feeding numbers but when you get to feeding significant amounts of kg of high cost food, it skyrockets. If you only keep a pair of Tigers or a Pair of Bears or a couple apes, you might not see the problem or even notice. By the time you get rid of the babies a couple years later your budget can absorb the additional costs and your fine. But when you try to keep significant numbers of big ticket animals that eat lots of food the balance issues show itself and we have these issues. If you look at the screenshots above you can see they the issues are higher numbers 5+ of big ticket animals.

If you don't get big numbers of the big ticket animals (I'm looking at you Lions, Tigers, Bears, Big Apes, Elephants, etc.) but when you do, the balance is off, at least in my opinion. You could fix this by making the cost per kg of these foods cheaper for the big ticket animals and this could alleviate this issue. However maybe this is by design as feeding 40 lions, or 20 elephants, or 10 Orangutans, is going to be insanely expensive. And a smaller zoo just can't handle it. Maybe we should start with lower numbers of herbivores then grow that to larger numbers that can support the big ticket animals. Maybe farms are bad. I dunno.

If the price of feeding is truly per kg the cost per kg of feed should be the same for Elephants and Springbok, it's just hay and grain after all. The difference is the amounts you feed. Does anyone know if the price per feeding in the exhibits for these two animals are the same or different? If it's the same, and we do really pay per kg and not per feeding, then there is your problem. Change the UI to say per kg and make them the same and just feed the elephants more. There is your bug.

Anyways just my two cents, but there you go.

TLDR: When you get large numbers of carnivores/apes/elephants the costs get so high that smaller zoos can't keep up and costs get run into the ground. Large amounts of food is needed for larger animals and when it is priced by kg instead of by feeding adds up big time. Maybe we can adjust the per kg cost of food for larger animals or maybe it's by design. Maybe feeding 20 elephants or 40 lions shouldn't be cheap. However there could be a bug if we are priced per kg and not per feeding. Price per kg for Elephants and Springbok should be the same (grain and hay), but the quantities should be vastly different. This is where the bug could be, if it was balanced on price per feeding but it's really price per kg, an adjustment needs to be made.

A well thought out post, and I'm sure it answers many of the questions and concerns people have, but it doesn't answer the circumstance where things have ticked over nicely for 3 or 4 years, no new purchases, only one or two babies born, and feed costs treble or quadruple. It's all a bit strange.

 

[marcnesiumHH]

I think the problem comes with growing our franchise zoos too fast, or another way to put it, is growing them too fast for the mechanics of the game.

It's hard to tell if and what parts are a bug or an unbalanced gameplay. I think the majority of the problem, it's the latter.
In my opinion, it's fair that e.g. elephants cost a lot of money like IRL. And it's also fair that you cannot grow the number of a species endlessly. But on the other hand, the game suggests it otherwise (like having up to 500 Flamingos).
Why do I think it's unbalanced: I got a profitable zoo nearly right from the start. Then I reached 10-15 different species (approx. 6k visitors) and the problem started by getting Apes and lastly elephants in my zoo (grwoth up to 8k visitors). But the income stayed at the approx. same level I had with 6k visitors.
But who wants to stay having a zoo with only 10-15 different animals? And the economic related ingame overviews and settings give you little advice and possibilities.
Maybe some part of this is related to the maximum budget and visit time every visitors seems to have (that's at least what the game help says). And one grows its zoo but the spending of the visitors is capped.

Guidance of the developers would help here!

 

[Indiglow]

All my animal feed is level 1. Literally nothing changed in the last few years. I was making 50, 70, 90k a year, more and more every year. Then BOOM. It's only September and I'm over 150k in animal feed and losing 30k and rising.

Same exact problem here.I was making like $25,000 a year. I built a safari ride and suddenly I'm -$15,000 a year due to animal food. Everything is level 1 food.

The food explosion is making me want to close my zoo. I'm in year 56.

 

[Dae]

[...]
But who wants to stay having a zoo with only 10-15 different animals? [...]

I think JPrin has a good point there, saying we grow our zoos too fast for the game mechanic. The market gives us the false impression that we are free to do as we want with our zoo and big tickets animals are too tempting. I started a 2nd zoo after the first one went bankrupt, I'm at 19 species, a bit of population control but not that much and see my finances:

I just keep increasing my profits, even when my costs are higher than usual.

But I proceeded completely differently, instead of purchasing whatever species I wanted to see in my zoo, I sorted the animals by habitat size requirement to start with the smallest and progressing in sizes with very few exceptions (I did get giraffes when I set up my African habitat to get along with smaller animals). I don't know if it will still be profitable once I get to the biggest animals, but it's definitively not an issue of number of species.

The problem here is that this process suited well with my zoo design, but the game mechanics doesn't allow the players a real freedom to choose how they start and what they put in their zoo since small animals are mandatory to support bigger animals.