Does your zoo run with few visitors?

Hi there,
I would be interested to know if you can have profitable zoos, even if the visitors are reduced.

Are there any people who only play with 500-1500 people?

How is your zoo designed so that it remains profitable?

Can you afford expensive animals?

Gabi
 
In my biggest franchise I tried to reduce the number of guests when I ran into to much lag, but after I went below 7k guests I started to loose money. So I guess it all depends on how big your zoo is, how many animals you have, how expensive they are too feed and how many personal you need to keep it going. Maybe with a tiny zoo with very few, cheap animals you can make it work with 500-1500 guests, but not sure, haven't tried it (I usually don't experience any lag as long as my guest count are below 4500 guests)
 
Maybe with a tiny zoo with very few, cheap animals you can make it work with 500-1500 guests, but not sure, haven't tried it (I usually don't experience any lag as long as my guest count are below 4500 guests)

Just to clarify: I assume cheap animals does not refer to their purchase costs, but feeding costs, correct? Because the higher your animals appeal, the more donations you get.

I usually restrict the guest number dynamically, i.e. I increase it once the zoo expands and offers all the necessary guest facilities. Your zoo can become overrum with too many guests that will only clog all the shops and create endless lines and very unhappy people.

And you don’t need as many guests if you keep your guests very happy and well educated. My income from shops and particularly donations from happy guests can be over ten times the income from zoo tickets. I.e. to break even, I could survive with one tenth of the number of guests. But of course, those numbers fluctuate and you do need profits to expand your zoo. This is just to show that you can have too many guests in your zoo that actually cause you to lose money (currently, with refunds deactivated, this effect might not be as strong as previously, but unhappy guests still donate less), and that it’s generally more important to have happy, educated guests than high numbers of guests.

Guest numbers/zoo size/guest happiness needs to be well balanced. You’d have to experiment with your specific zoo setup to find out what the best balance is. It could very well be less guests than you currently have. But if you keep expanding your zoo, you will also have to increase the guest number at some point.
 
There's no way to keep a zoo with only 500-1500 guests profitable once it reaches a certain size. Doesn't matter if the guests are happy and donate more if there aren't enough guests you won't get enough donations and shop profits to feed all the animals and pay your staff.

My largest zoo in franchise has about 30 different habitat species and lots of staff (fully trained 'cause in my experience that's cheaper than tons of untrained staff) guest happiness is constantly between 93-96% and no matter what I do if I go below 7k guests I start loosing money fast. 'Cause less guests doesn't just mean less ticket income but less of everything else, too.

In short the only way to actually play like that is in sandbox where money is no issue and you can limit guest count as much as you want without consequenzes. At least until they finally come up with a way to balance out the whole guest count = income thing.
 
Yes, I did not mean the purchase price, but the feed costs.

I actually mean zoos that are permanently limited to a maximum of 1500 visitors.

I had to reduce the number of guests in my franchise zoo, I wanted to breed the gorillas at that time to get this price.

After that I was bankrupt.
It was similar with the cheetahs.

But there were also the constantly erupting animals and co.

Now I'm in the sandbox.

Only I would like to know if it is worth designing a zoo that is bigger, even if there are so few visitors.

Or whether I should rather stay in the sandbox until at some point there is a possibility that I no longer have to reduce it so violently.

And I find the experiences of teammates very interesting who have to deal with such restrictions.

I am aware that purchases and donations make more than the entrance fee.

Only it makes a difference whether 500 people donate and make purchases in the park, or whether there are 7,000.

Maybe that will balance out somewhere. And larger zoos are possible.


If not, it is a pity that you will be punished if the computer performance is not the best.

You can't build much, you can't make big money.
 
Most RL zoos depend on large donations of millions of dollars for their expansion plans. Just living off small guests donations wouldn’t be enough. Maybe Frontier could indeed implement something like this that larger zoos can get huge donations for reaching certain goals so that we can limit the number of guests once the zoos get too large and need too many guests to survive.

But Sandbox is always a good alternative, particularly since you now can also limit or increase the money you have to your liking - or needs. You can have a zoo completely without guests and focus only on setting up a great zoo until it’s ready for opening day.
 
In the zoo where I wanted to limit the guest number due to preformance issue and I started loosing money below 7k guests the guest happiness was between 95-99% and education 99% (with 9.5k guests), so happiness and education wasn't the problem. But i had over 400 animals in well over 30 habitats, so the cost of the animals and staff was just to high, I needed over 7k guests to make up for it
 
I have about 200 animals and 21 habitat species plus a few exhibits. This is divided up into five sections, each section has a food court with shops. The size is quite small, I don't have a picture at hand right now. It runs very well and makes profit with a guest limit of 3000. I have quite some species with high feeding costs, so I can't reduce the guest number much more. I think it is possible to run a small zoo with cheap animals, but I guess it's gonna be hard with only 500 or 1000 guests.
 
Hmm, thanks.

So for better or worse I will only have the sandbox.
3000 guests are clearly too many for my computer.

Too bad, I like a bit of a challenge where you can go into the red if you do the wrong thing.
But I don't want a tiny zoo.
And I want to be able to house every animal where I want.

One must die a death.

Then stay with the sandbox.

Nevertheless, if someone has such restrictions, I would be very happy about pictures and stories, how you master it.

I will probably also design a small zoo.

Just to see what could be possible, but only when a few updates have been released.
 
I have a pretty small zoo that I use for breeding. 1300 guests, 2 habitats with cheetahs, 3 with wild dogs and 2 with flamingos. Only 1 habitat of each animal is visible. There's 4 exhibits and it's a 4.5 star rated zoo. I don't remember the income but it's positive cash flow and I'm at $1,000,000.00
 
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