Honestly I am deeply concerned for management in this game

After I played beta I can say that game really look amazing graphically and for builders but unfortunatelly I have flash back on Planet Coaster regarding management. I don't want to attack anyone for that, after all it's on developers to estimates how deeply and mature they wanna go with challenge and tycoon part in these kind of games. Just I need to express my worry for it cause I had hope it will be more deeper and it will matters more for gameplay and it will makes you to think twice before you make a move.

Guest AI is simply bad for making you challenged properly. They are very easy to satisfy. They don't have level of excitement like usually people should have. E.g. you build some habitat, place donation box and wait for money. There's no matter how complex you build that habitat or what conservation status animal have, guests see that animal and start pouring money into the box. You just sit and wait to get money and later start to build your zoo. Or guests getting thirsty and then pass soda shops while they still whining for juice or water.
Stuff AI is in the same situation. I'm aware it was beta and everything was in development but they need to doing their jobs how your zoo would function well.
I know this is a zoo game but shops should really have weight in your park managing. You need to supply them with food, drinks, souvenirs and you need to have a word in that. The market should change and with that your decisions. Also that should be taken for animals food. Not just make food a prepare for eating. What should happen if you can't purchase on right time the meat from your suppliers? Some consequences your animals and zoo overall must have in that case.
If animal escapes that should be big warning for guests, you need to feel how your reputation goes down, your guests should run away from your zoos and you should be tracked with bad reputation for long and to work hard how you would change that. Also there need to be levels of danger when animal escapes. It can't be the same for ostrich and bear.
Maintaining a zoo should be complex and expensive, especially if you don't drag right moves. The most zoos don't buy animals but they get them from other zoos, and in that part with your idea for conservation points you git it right. Great idea I must say, but what about other stuff like maintaining exhibits and animal housing. That should matters the most and have a large impact on your finances.

Don't take this post like some attack or rant cause I have no bad intentions, just have a wish from this game to be more complex and to actually have a feel of a game not just beautiful and powerful building tool which I know already it won't dissapoint in that part. I even don't know how the final version will be, just I felt I should voice my concern about management part, complex management, after I played and saw all complaints during the beta. Yes animals are beautiful and building a zoo it is fun, but just I have a feel it have potential to be more then that. To feel like one complete game who will last a decade from now. I really would like that.
 
All I know is, that it was said at least some animal features were left out of the beta for giving the devs more time for development. I don't know if that's the case as well for the management aspect, but it could be.

To be honest, I'm not a manager. I just want to be creative and tell stories with my zoo. I will play most of the time in sandbox with unlimited money. But I know that especially management players have concerns and I really get them. Planet Zoo does speak to a huge player base with countless types of playstlyles. Some playstyles will definately not be catered, but all in all I think Frontier is doing a great job with keeping the game interesting and fun for a huge base. And they have been awesome with listening to feedback during beta. I sure hope for you and other management players that your playstyle will be catered better in the full game and that you can happily play it the way you like. You explained really well what is missing for your player base - I trust in Frontier, that this will help.
 
Having only played the Beta very briefly (I didn't want to suffer from burnout). From what little I have seen the management section is a mass improvement on Planet Coaster which is a major plus as a management fan, but until I have fully played the campaign I am holding out judgement at the moment. A game like this has to have both fun building and semi decent management aspects which is hard to get it right especially in something like a franchise mode.
 
Play any management game, and as soon as you have everything well managed and under control, management becomes easy. No matter what game it is.

I'm not too worried about that. It's something every management game has troubles with.
Although Planet Zoo has more features to focus on compared to Planet Coaster. So there is already more management.

Even more management, and I'm actually concerned that takes my fun away of building and maintaining my zoo.

That said, It's not that I disagree with OP, I just have a different view of it.
 
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I agree with others I think the management aspect of the game is fine as is, especially knowing it was an unfinished version of the game. I'm sure there will be certain scenarios in the campaign that are incredibly challenging to satisfy players after that type of gameplay. I don't want the baseline difficulty/time spent doing things other than building exhibits and focusing on animals to increase much as it would really lessen my enjoyment of the game. Too much to worry and fuss about isn't my personal idea of fun.
 
After I saw Planet Zoo first trailer I started become more interested in people who stands behind this game and I saw a tons of posts and threads where people arguing that management in their other games are almost none exsistent or it do not have any value for the gameplay.

After I watched dozens of videos during beta I can be sure that this game have very good ideas over challenging aspects and some pretty neat mechanics to it. The problem might be just balancing and tweaking some things like e.g. that time flow in the game. I believe they will tweak a lot of things and they will take a lot of feedback into consideritation for final release. And game when it's out it will be pure enjoyment from both building aspect and management.

There are already tons of new things they added it to the game comparing to previous titles and also the whole mode to that, Franchise (both online and offline) which isn't planed to be piece of cake.

I'm fully confident this will be their game that management matters the most, cause they already implemented tons of stuff just need some more balancing and finesses to be done.

And don't forget these developers stand behind Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 which was according to masses one of the best management games who was in the same time both fun and challenging, so these guys know how to do it when they want to.
 
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I would say this was a beta - Frontier know that Guest desires in relation to food drink umbrellas etc works they have proven it in planet coaster so its a waste of time and effort doing it in Planet zoo Beta - so turn off guest getting hungry they will still walk around the park but in BETA we can build habitats and staff buildings as much as we want and prove that works without worrying about the guest experience

they have proven most of that in PC
 
Also if you include a feature like franchise, you'll need a decent management portion to back it up.. To me, franchise & management is very much connected.

I like a good challenge but I understand a lot of people just want to have fun with their animals/zoo... They've already talked about different options for sandbox..
I hope sandbox gives them the 'less-management' needs they want.

Someone else mentioned taxes on the financial sheet, which weren't implemented in the beta. I'm really interested how much this will influence the management/cash flow..
 
Maintaining a zoo should be complex and expensive, especially if you don't drag right moves. The most zoos don't buy animals but they get them from other zoos, and in that part with your idea for conservation points you git it right. Great idea I must say, but what about other stuff like maintaining exhibits and animal housing. That should matters the most and have a large impact on your finances.
I agree. The upkeep costs only pertain to certain items, like the heaters in exhibits are still negligible. The exhibits themselves should have an upkeep cost (real zoos are constantly having to replace the foliage to keep them up to public standards, routine maintenance, etc.) Feed costs should have a far more significant impact on the zoo budget; this is one of the biggest ongoing costs for real zoos.

I also found that the zoo finance page was shallow and non-interactive. We need to better information on the incomes sources and ongoing costs in our zoos. We should be able to drill down in each category to an individual exhibit, shop, etc. Right now there is no central way to access this information.
 
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As long as I saw exhibits will need some kind of maintenance as animals could brake them or the fences will collapse from time to time. I don't know if there will be some extra costs for that though?

As for costs for every individual exhibit I could agree, it could add some interesting options with that.
 
I can completely see where you're coming from. And yes I'm in the same boat as you.

With that being said, we were missing animal diseases for a start which will bring a whole new level of managing diseases, making sure they're in quarantine and stuff. It's a case of how deep do you go. Do we focus mainly on the animals, or do we focus mainly on the money making? If we have both I can garuntee that it'll just be a hellish nightmare of literally micromanaging and at that point it might as well be like a football manager sim where you don't see the games and spend all your time in a menu ordering and satisfying needs with no time to enjoy what you've created.

I do however see room for improvement and I'm sure it'll come its just a case of how to do it in a proper way that isn't overwhelming.
 
I think PlanZoo has better management challenges than PlanCo. Remember guests also has education needs.

Animals also have more management requirements (food, social, terrain, shelter, plants, genetics, diseases, temperature) than say, a coaster in PlanCo (we also have rides in PlanZoo that needs to be maintained, aside from power and water facilities).
 
In my opinion, "management" isn't the issue, but AI is a big one. Animals ignore food, keepers ignore animals, guests ignore food stalls, etc. The most common issue people had with the beta is all of the AI would ask for certain things (be it water, food, enrichment, viewing areas, etc) but would then ignore any solutions put in place. This would often lead to many franchise zoos failing within a matter of hours. The game's management systems are very in depth, the issue is they are very unbalanced. Its hard to sit back and enjoy my animals if they are constantly dying due to starvation, my mechanics aren't fixing the constantly breaking water filtration systems, etc. If you play this game for the animals/building, you'll be very happy provided sandbox has toggles to ignore any issues. But for a realistic simulation game, it can be incredibly frustrating.
 
There were so many things not in the game, that saying there were balance issues, cant be confirmed. Once all the bells and whistles get put in, it may be pretty darn close. It may be WAY off. We dont have enough info. There were some bugs with the staff. Some bugs with the animals. All of which, Im sure they will have ironed out by launch. I just think this whole topic, jumped the gun. We are not going to be playing The Beta.
Plus, there was those of us who could manage to get most of the alerts settled down, after a while. Guests were starting to use the drink/and food, once the park was big enough.
For a challenging, simulated zoo, it fit the bill. (In Beta)
 
Zoo Tycoon 2 had some great missions in it like having to take photos of animals and animal swaps with other zoos. I am wondering what else is going to be in this game other than the management and the zoo creation. Are we going to have missions to do to keep this interesting?
 
Are we going to have missions to do to keep this interesting?

I hope the core of the game will be sufficiently interesting, so they don't feel the need to add extraneous goals. Ideally it's a compelling zoo simulator, not a dull zoo simulator with some of the mechanics of Pokémon Snap duct taped onto the side.

I seem to recall an announcement saying the market will be the only way to trade animals - if I'm right that means no swaps, but anything's possible.
 
The real problem with food and drink was that they were giving the notifications on wanting them early. There was a minimum time in zoo or minimum animals seen or similar requirement before they would visit food and drink vendors. Once I had 3 enclosures plus some of the small exhibits set up they started buying food and drink. After I crossed that threshold my cash income shot up dramatically as well.

Something else I did was occasionally check the guest thoughts as they were coming in. The entry ticket is underpriced. The price is great. These are signs that you should be upping your price. I stopped raising my price when they started thinking the price was good. That exact word, good.

I honestly think it was entirely possible to make a highly profitable large zoo. We just need to learn the quirks of set up on how far the various services have to be after visiting however many enclosures and so on. Channel 5's zoo looked great but I bet he couldn't make money because when those switches for needing a service were being flipped the guests were too far away and ended up leaving.
 
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