Franchise gets overwhelming

peachiekeen

P
I've finally got my zoo to a million dollars, woo hoo! all because of my beautiful 200+ animals.. but now the game is just extremely overwhelming & frustrating. I can't go 20 seconds without a notification about something happening. I guess this ties in with the timescale? everything happens way too fast. i was excited to add animals to my zoo, but now i can't enjoy any of them. also, I wish there was a way to mute certain notifications, such as stressed & hiding animals.

you'll get a notification for an animal about to mature.. ok! better watch them so the others don't start fighting because of overcrowding.. oh, the water filter is failing. better send a mechanic! oh, an animal is stressed out and hiding.. let me check? ah yeah he's fine. oh.. oh my tigers are killing each other because he's been matured for 10 seconds. ugh..

any suggestions on how to still have a good zoo for breeding & releasing, without getting drowned in notifications?

as a side note, is the 'zoologist' achievement on steam in one zoo? & do i have to have all the research done for every single animal? i'm not sure i, or my computer, could handle being overwhelmed that much, lol.
 

Agathorn

A
Yes it does very much so. I have just shy of 100 animals right now between two sections for Asia and Africa in my Zoo. I can barely keep up and II am sort of dreading expanding much more even though I want to start on the New World section.
 

peachiekeen

P
Agathorn said:
Yes it does very much so. I have just shy of 100 animals right now between two sections for Asia and Africa in my Zoo. I can barely keep up and II am sort of dreading expanding much more even though I want to start on the New World section.
Click to expand...

that's what i did! my opening area was all north america animals in the new world theme, then i made an indian themed section with all animals from india. once i started to make the african area, everything went insane. most of those animals are herd animals so it was just notification after notification.. it's too much to handle..

edit: i just want to add that i've been playing most of my game paused.. and never used fast forward. this is just too fast to do anything! i really hope they fix the timescale..
 
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Agathorn

A
The time is part of it but there is more to it than that. In my opinion the game just doesn't scale well and I question if anyone at Frontier ever actually PLAYED (not tested) the game with a large franchise zoo.

Off the top of my head...
  1. You don't have enough tools for proper staff management. You can't assign workers to shifts, nor can you set up any sort of schedule for your staff to complete tasks. All you can do is set general frequency that things should get done at. But in reality as you scale this really all falls apart and you end up having to simply keep throwing staff at the problem. Its drives me crazy that I can't better manage my staff in a management simulation!
  2. The sheer "Mental Overhead" of keeping track of the state of every animal in every habitat gets to be overwhelming. Habitats aren't and can't be, static. Animals age, give birth, need to be rotated out, etc and keeping track of all of this all the time is just too much given you have essentially zero tools to help with this.
  3. Security, Mechanics, and Caretakers don't seem to do their jobs very well. Constantly trolling my zoo for vandalized items so I can click on them and then click replace is NOT fun gameplay.
 

jooxis

J
Yes, it's an issue. I think it can be fixed by 2 things - make time go by a little bit slower AND give us the option to have some sort of assistant manager(s). We can pay them A LOT as that would be fine with me. Then we can assign specific tasks to them and detail how we want them carried out. Tasks like - separate fighting animals by moving the younger/older to the trade center. Move newborn exhibit animals to the trade center so you can manage them from there. Call mechanics when something breaks. Provide the player with weekly reports on the important stuff that's going on. etc.
 

Agathorn

A
jooxis said:
Yes, it's an issue. I think it can be fixed by 2 things - make time go by a little bit slower AND give us the option to have some sort of assistant manager(s). We can pay them A LOT as that would be fine with me. Then we can assign specific tasks to them and detail how we want them carried out. Tasks like - separate fighting animals by moving the younger/older to the trade center. Move newborn exhibit animals to the trade center so you can manage them from there. Call mechanics when something breaks. Provide the player with weekly reports on the important stuff that's going on. etc.
Click to expand...
Or they could actually give us proper ways to manage our management sim. But then if we can manage properly the game will be too easy, but as with most modern simulation games, they rely on micromanagement to make it hard. I love the graphics and technology used today but I really miss the simulations of the 90s.
 
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