Hello all, this will be a bit of a ramble (and a similar one to things I've posted on Reddit) but a good ramble is always fun. Anyway, let us get started!
Currently, the game's exhibit design has a fairly stable meta for how to design a space-optimised exhibit.
-Choose a starter species.
-Create an exhibit for it.
-Fill the exhibit with as many Liked species that they won't murder as possible, with as similar needs as possible.
-Add one Neutral species and fill the exhibit with it, with as many similar needs as possible.
Let's go through two examples-
-Pick Deinonychus. He likes 27% Forest, 7% Water, and 67% Open Space in his exhibits. He has 32 Attack and 14 Defence, and will generally not attack animals with higher stats. He likes Compsognathus and dislikes Carnivores.
-He likes Compsognathus, but will murder it. Add nothing.
-He'll refuse to attack small armoured herbivores that are much stronger than him. Herbivores with superior Attack/Defence, minimal Foliage requirements, high Open Space requirements and low or minimal Forest requirements will get along well with him. This is basically just Pachycephalosaurus and Chungkingosaurus.
-Pick Huayangosaurus. He likes 31% Ground Leaf, 63% Open Space and 6% Water. He likes sauropods, ornithomimids, pachycephalosaurids and hadrosaurids. He dislikes Dr Wu hybrids, ceratopsids, ankylosaurids, and other stegosaurids.
-Sauropods share his list of liked animals, making them a go-to pick. He wants one that likes middling amounts of Tall or Ground Leaf, lots of Open Space, and minimal Forest. The closest is Apatosaurus, who will add a relatively high quantity of Forest for other animals to share.
-All three other types like Sauropod, Ankylosaurid and Stegosaurid, so you can pick precisely two of these, with Apatosaurus skewing the exhibit towards preferring middling Ground Leaf, Forest and Open Space. This is Pachycephalosaurus, Struthiomimus and Stygimoloch.
Ultimately, the system as it currently functions results in highly optimised, highly stable, very dense exhibits with little room for chaos and naturally-emerging similarities across parks.
Firstly, this significantly reduces replayability- once you learn what to look for, you'll naturally gravitate towards similar combinations of animals whenever you make an exhibit, prioritising which dinos to add to your exhibit based purely on the overlap of their environmental needs. When you get a Deinonychus in the park, you'll probably have either Pachy or Chungking available, and you'll likely beeline towards them to make the exhibit more appealing at minimal cost.
Secondly, you're making Malcolm cry, you monsters. Stable, low-chaos exhibits being the only viable meta? In my Jurassic World? Clearly the inferior meta compared to a less predictable, more chaotic one!
I'd like to suggest adding mechanics that allow for an 'alternate' meta, encouraging you to try and predict the behaviours of your dinosaurs to create more space-efficient exhibits at the cost of less predictability. This already exists with small carni/small herbi exhibits (since you need to predict which herbivores are tough enough to be safe), but it's ultimately minor and still rather space-efficient. Adding more ways to make less-predictable exhibits would help a lot, I feel!
For example-
-You could alter the Likes and Dislikes of various animals to allow for similar carni/herbi exhibits as can be done with small herbivores and small carnivores. For example, Qianzhousaurus and Baryonyx are both not particularly well-adapted for killing large animals; if the Dislike system didn't block them from coexistence with- say- Stegosaurus, you could use your knowledge of their stats and behaviour to create Stego/Qianzhou or Stego/Bary exhibits in the same way you can make a Deino/Pachy or Deino/Chungking exhibit.
-You could add numbers to cohabitation-relevant systems such as (sprinting) Speed, Stamina and Cohabitation, in the same way you can see Attack or Defence. This would make gene mods such as Tolerance or Fitness more viable- such as picking an animal for whom Tolerant brings their Cohabitation over 50% so you can have two Neutral species in the same exhibit, or stocking a predator's exhibit with prey who have much higher Speed and mod-boosted Fitness to minimise the chances of them getting a kill.
--For example, with both changes above combined, you could mod a Ceratosaurus to be Tolerant and add some Stegosaurus and Dryosaurus. The stegosaur and dryosaur Like each other, the stegosaur's high stats protect him from attack, and the dryosaur's high Speed and Stamina combined with good exhibit design (such as putting their food and water in a 'sanctuary' area behind some rocks) can result in very low mortality rates. But if you get it wrong- say, you pick Albertosaurus, who's also relatively tolerant by medium carnivore standards but very fast, very powerful, and has a chance to be Strong and Fit- you might have the dryosaurs get picked off, or an outbreak of violence between the stegosaurs and albertosaurs. This would require nothing but some UI additions and a few category selection alterations to the dinosaurs, resulting in a lot more creativity for relatively little cost.
I feel that the real value is to be found in changes to the Cohabitation system. Currently, as exhibit time increases, overlap percentages approach 100%- panic, jeep-chasing, and lost combats all result in animals charging around the enclosure, so the only way to make an exhibit that isn't in intervals of 25% Cohabitation is in making exhibits large enough that you can plan around 100% 'charging around randomly' exhibit size. For everything other than small ankylosaurs, their normal sprinting distance makes this completely non-viable, since they can fill spaces many times their space requirements via charging around randomly; the whole point of sharing an exhibit is to reduce space needs via cohabitation, but this just doesn't work if you have to assume that any reasonably-dense enclosure will have all animals' territories filling 100% of the enclosure for long enough to cause illnesses in their cohabitants. For ease of reference, I'll call an exhibit designed to contain multiple partially-overlapping territories a 'safari exhibit', and one stacked, current-meta pile of 100% overlap a 'dense exhibit'.
-Treating the symptoms would help- you could remove the ability for animals to create territory while panicked or aggressive, and change the AI so they return to their territory once they've calmed down. Canonically, Isla Sorna's layout suggests that carnivores move between hunting grounds and their nesting sites in the interior of the island, so this would make sense from a canon perspective, and would significantly shrink the effective area of a species' territory such that safari exhibits would be less absurdly-large compared to dense exhibits. From what I've seen of dinosaur behaviour, animals generally stay in reasonable areas if they aren't panicking or chasing something, so removing those behaviours from influencing animal territory would make safari exhibits a lot easier (while still giving room for chaos such as an animal getting thirsty and establishing a territory at a rival's watering hole, or getting injured due to running into a Disliked species' territory).
-However, the root cause of the problem is that once an animal gains territory, it effectively doesn't lose it. If an animal likes a watering hole, getting its ass kicked won't remove it from said watering hole, resulting in everyone getting the sniffles and needing to be put into dense exhibits for their own health. More problematically, the way that Cohabitation is set up means that there's effectively no chance of a breakout from poorly-designed safari exhibits even if territory creation was fixed to accommodate for panic and aggression. Your dinos will simply stay at- say- 95-99% comfort until it gets a cold, and either dies from the illness or is put into a dense exhibit. If animals with high Cohabitation removed territory, this would solve both issues. They would fix their own Cohabitation by decaying back to their Cohabitation thresholds, resulting in any colds being cured, and if something goes wrong and their territory decays too much then Cohabitation + Small Territory = Low Comfort = Escaped Dinosaurs = Vindicated Ian Malcolm = Chaos. I could see two ways this could be done- either a simple 'Territory Decay reaches visible speeds over Cohabitation limits', or a more complex 'fight/scare away other dinosaurs to shrink their territory and raise your own'. Both setups would have their advantages- the first would make it more likely that something big and angry breaks out instead of just shoving everything else to the margins (as well as being easier to code), while the second would be easier to use constructively, by making sure that you put animals in places they can defend their territory from interlopers.
TLDR;
-Currently, only one type of exhibit (25% Cohabitation) is viable, with very limited combinations being viable in Challenge Mode (small herbi/weaker small carni with significant needs overlaps, Self/Liked/Liked/Neutral or Self/Liked/Neutral setups which all have significant needs overlaps, and big carnivore exhibits).
--Making pursuit stats (Speed/Stamina) visible would make exhibits with slow carnis and fast prey herbis easier to design, and encourage use of the Fit trait in such exhibits.
--Making Cohabitation numbers visible would encourage use of the Tolerant trait, adding Self/Neutral/Neutral exhibits to the list of 'meta' combos that can be identified using in-game knowledge.
--Making Dislikes more granular, particularly in regards to medium carnivores, would add a third 'medium herbivore/weaker medium carni' meta exhibit. Adding Likes to prey species (e.g Likes Small Herbivores for medium carnivores or Likes Ornithomimids to small non-pack-hunting carnivores) would stack well with more visible pursuit stats, allowing for a carni/defensive herbi/prey herbi exhibit combo.
-Cohabitation exhibits, which lack 100% overlap and go over 25% cohabitation, have three major flaws in the current build.
--Firstly, panicking and pursuing animals cause so much territory to be taken up that there's no way to expect anything other than ankylosaurs to have a reasonable territory size, making such exhibits massively space-inefficient. Panic and pursuit need to be removed from the territorial equation, or to have counterbalances to rapidly remove territory if we ever want reasonable territory sizes.
--Secondly, the comfort loss from cohabitation is so low, and territory so long-lasting, that an animal will die of a cold or have its issues fixed long before it ever goes on a rampage. Ways for cohabitation to spiral into higher comfort drops- such as making animals lose territory- would result in much more exciting outcomes.
--Thirdly, animals need to be able to manage their Cohabitation if the player designs their exhibit well- if they don't pack themselves into a space, it'll always be much more efficient to create small, dense, stable exhibits than large, unstable and creative exhibits. Increased rates of territorial decay when losing territorial fights or when overcrowded seem like the easiest way to implement this, which coincidentally would both help with point two as well.
TLDR of the TLDR;
-The current game has one meta of creating dense, samey exhibits in every park. I hereby recommend, in the name of Ian Malcolm, changing the game so that more types of more chaotic exhibit are a viable (and potentially more explosive) alternative!
Currently, the game's exhibit design has a fairly stable meta for how to design a space-optimised exhibit.
-Choose a starter species.
-Create an exhibit for it.
-Fill the exhibit with as many Liked species that they won't murder as possible, with as similar needs as possible.
-Add one Neutral species and fill the exhibit with it, with as many similar needs as possible.
Let's go through two examples-
-Pick Deinonychus. He likes 27% Forest, 7% Water, and 67% Open Space in his exhibits. He has 32 Attack and 14 Defence, and will generally not attack animals with higher stats. He likes Compsognathus and dislikes Carnivores.
-He likes Compsognathus, but will murder it. Add nothing.
-He'll refuse to attack small armoured herbivores that are much stronger than him. Herbivores with superior Attack/Defence, minimal Foliage requirements, high Open Space requirements and low or minimal Forest requirements will get along well with him. This is basically just Pachycephalosaurus and Chungkingosaurus.
-Pick Huayangosaurus. He likes 31% Ground Leaf, 63% Open Space and 6% Water. He likes sauropods, ornithomimids, pachycephalosaurids and hadrosaurids. He dislikes Dr Wu hybrids, ceratopsids, ankylosaurids, and other stegosaurids.
-Sauropods share his list of liked animals, making them a go-to pick. He wants one that likes middling amounts of Tall or Ground Leaf, lots of Open Space, and minimal Forest. The closest is Apatosaurus, who will add a relatively high quantity of Forest for other animals to share.
-All three other types like Sauropod, Ankylosaurid and Stegosaurid, so you can pick precisely two of these, with Apatosaurus skewing the exhibit towards preferring middling Ground Leaf, Forest and Open Space. This is Pachycephalosaurus, Struthiomimus and Stygimoloch.
Ultimately, the system as it currently functions results in highly optimised, highly stable, very dense exhibits with little room for chaos and naturally-emerging similarities across parks.
Firstly, this significantly reduces replayability- once you learn what to look for, you'll naturally gravitate towards similar combinations of animals whenever you make an exhibit, prioritising which dinos to add to your exhibit based purely on the overlap of their environmental needs. When you get a Deinonychus in the park, you'll probably have either Pachy or Chungking available, and you'll likely beeline towards them to make the exhibit more appealing at minimal cost.
Secondly, you're making Malcolm cry, you monsters. Stable, low-chaos exhibits being the only viable meta? In my Jurassic World? Clearly the inferior meta compared to a less predictable, more chaotic one!
I'd like to suggest adding mechanics that allow for an 'alternate' meta, encouraging you to try and predict the behaviours of your dinosaurs to create more space-efficient exhibits at the cost of less predictability. This already exists with small carni/small herbi exhibits (since you need to predict which herbivores are tough enough to be safe), but it's ultimately minor and still rather space-efficient. Adding more ways to make less-predictable exhibits would help a lot, I feel!
For example-
-You could alter the Likes and Dislikes of various animals to allow for similar carni/herbi exhibits as can be done with small herbivores and small carnivores. For example, Qianzhousaurus and Baryonyx are both not particularly well-adapted for killing large animals; if the Dislike system didn't block them from coexistence with- say- Stegosaurus, you could use your knowledge of their stats and behaviour to create Stego/Qianzhou or Stego/Bary exhibits in the same way you can make a Deino/Pachy or Deino/Chungking exhibit.
-You could add numbers to cohabitation-relevant systems such as (sprinting) Speed, Stamina and Cohabitation, in the same way you can see Attack or Defence. This would make gene mods such as Tolerance or Fitness more viable- such as picking an animal for whom Tolerant brings their Cohabitation over 50% so you can have two Neutral species in the same exhibit, or stocking a predator's exhibit with prey who have much higher Speed and mod-boosted Fitness to minimise the chances of them getting a kill.
--For example, with both changes above combined, you could mod a Ceratosaurus to be Tolerant and add some Stegosaurus and Dryosaurus. The stegosaur and dryosaur Like each other, the stegosaur's high stats protect him from attack, and the dryosaur's high Speed and Stamina combined with good exhibit design (such as putting their food and water in a 'sanctuary' area behind some rocks) can result in very low mortality rates. But if you get it wrong- say, you pick Albertosaurus, who's also relatively tolerant by medium carnivore standards but very fast, very powerful, and has a chance to be Strong and Fit- you might have the dryosaurs get picked off, or an outbreak of violence between the stegosaurs and albertosaurs. This would require nothing but some UI additions and a few category selection alterations to the dinosaurs, resulting in a lot more creativity for relatively little cost.
I feel that the real value is to be found in changes to the Cohabitation system. Currently, as exhibit time increases, overlap percentages approach 100%- panic, jeep-chasing, and lost combats all result in animals charging around the enclosure, so the only way to make an exhibit that isn't in intervals of 25% Cohabitation is in making exhibits large enough that you can plan around 100% 'charging around randomly' exhibit size. For everything other than small ankylosaurs, their normal sprinting distance makes this completely non-viable, since they can fill spaces many times their space requirements via charging around randomly; the whole point of sharing an exhibit is to reduce space needs via cohabitation, but this just doesn't work if you have to assume that any reasonably-dense enclosure will have all animals' territories filling 100% of the enclosure for long enough to cause illnesses in their cohabitants. For ease of reference, I'll call an exhibit designed to contain multiple partially-overlapping territories a 'safari exhibit', and one stacked, current-meta pile of 100% overlap a 'dense exhibit'.
-Treating the symptoms would help- you could remove the ability for animals to create territory while panicked or aggressive, and change the AI so they return to their territory once they've calmed down. Canonically, Isla Sorna's layout suggests that carnivores move between hunting grounds and their nesting sites in the interior of the island, so this would make sense from a canon perspective, and would significantly shrink the effective area of a species' territory such that safari exhibits would be less absurdly-large compared to dense exhibits. From what I've seen of dinosaur behaviour, animals generally stay in reasonable areas if they aren't panicking or chasing something, so removing those behaviours from influencing animal territory would make safari exhibits a lot easier (while still giving room for chaos such as an animal getting thirsty and establishing a territory at a rival's watering hole, or getting injured due to running into a Disliked species' territory).
-However, the root cause of the problem is that once an animal gains territory, it effectively doesn't lose it. If an animal likes a watering hole, getting its ass kicked won't remove it from said watering hole, resulting in everyone getting the sniffles and needing to be put into dense exhibits for their own health. More problematically, the way that Cohabitation is set up means that there's effectively no chance of a breakout from poorly-designed safari exhibits even if territory creation was fixed to accommodate for panic and aggression. Your dinos will simply stay at- say- 95-99% comfort until it gets a cold, and either dies from the illness or is put into a dense exhibit. If animals with high Cohabitation removed territory, this would solve both issues. They would fix their own Cohabitation by decaying back to their Cohabitation thresholds, resulting in any colds being cured, and if something goes wrong and their territory decays too much then Cohabitation + Small Territory = Low Comfort = Escaped Dinosaurs = Vindicated Ian Malcolm = Chaos. I could see two ways this could be done- either a simple 'Territory Decay reaches visible speeds over Cohabitation limits', or a more complex 'fight/scare away other dinosaurs to shrink their territory and raise your own'. Both setups would have their advantages- the first would make it more likely that something big and angry breaks out instead of just shoving everything else to the margins (as well as being easier to code), while the second would be easier to use constructively, by making sure that you put animals in places they can defend their territory from interlopers.
TLDR;
-Currently, only one type of exhibit (25% Cohabitation) is viable, with very limited combinations being viable in Challenge Mode (small herbi/weaker small carni with significant needs overlaps, Self/Liked/Liked/Neutral or Self/Liked/Neutral setups which all have significant needs overlaps, and big carnivore exhibits).
--Making pursuit stats (Speed/Stamina) visible would make exhibits with slow carnis and fast prey herbis easier to design, and encourage use of the Fit trait in such exhibits.
--Making Cohabitation numbers visible would encourage use of the Tolerant trait, adding Self/Neutral/Neutral exhibits to the list of 'meta' combos that can be identified using in-game knowledge.
--Making Dislikes more granular, particularly in regards to medium carnivores, would add a third 'medium herbivore/weaker medium carni' meta exhibit. Adding Likes to prey species (e.g Likes Small Herbivores for medium carnivores or Likes Ornithomimids to small non-pack-hunting carnivores) would stack well with more visible pursuit stats, allowing for a carni/defensive herbi/prey herbi exhibit combo.
-Cohabitation exhibits, which lack 100% overlap and go over 25% cohabitation, have three major flaws in the current build.
--Firstly, panicking and pursuing animals cause so much territory to be taken up that there's no way to expect anything other than ankylosaurs to have a reasonable territory size, making such exhibits massively space-inefficient. Panic and pursuit need to be removed from the territorial equation, or to have counterbalances to rapidly remove territory if we ever want reasonable territory sizes.
--Secondly, the comfort loss from cohabitation is so low, and territory so long-lasting, that an animal will die of a cold or have its issues fixed long before it ever goes on a rampage. Ways for cohabitation to spiral into higher comfort drops- such as making animals lose territory- would result in much more exciting outcomes.
--Thirdly, animals need to be able to manage their Cohabitation if the player designs their exhibit well- if they don't pack themselves into a space, it'll always be much more efficient to create small, dense, stable exhibits than large, unstable and creative exhibits. Increased rates of territorial decay when losing territorial fights or when overcrowded seem like the easiest way to implement this, which coincidentally would both help with point two as well.
TLDR of the TLDR;
-The current game has one meta of creating dense, samey exhibits in every park. I hereby recommend, in the name of Ian Malcolm, changing the game so that more types of more chaotic exhibit are a viable (and potentially more explosive) alternative!