He's right in that it's not like the first game. The concept is the same: you put amenities down where guests will be drawn to them, but you have to pay attention to the potential guest count number that is shown. And the modules within them are different too. You don't just choose the most expensive item for every amenity like in the first game; you have to cater to guest types and those types will be different depending on what attractions are around, i.e. luxury or adventure, etc. If there's a tour nearby or dinos with high infamy you're going to need to cater to adventure guests. Hotels around? Luxury guests. The sliders give you an indication and sometimes the most profitable is not using all three slots.
It's really not hard to make money at all. For example, in the first Jurassic Park CT I opened the park with just 7 million remaining of the 21m you start with. Before I got to 3 stars and 6 species I was back over 22 million, even after completely redesigning my power grid and moving all my staff/infrastructure buildings to make more room. I was contemplating starting over because I was playing it like the first game and it was a frustrating mess. But I just paused and starting moving things around. One of the things I did was this: The entrance area wants amenities because it has high foot traffic, but they weren't making much money. They had low guest counts. So I moved my movie theatre up there and suddenly they started to fill up. I also moved a hotel there. I then reconfigured their modules and they were overflowing with cash. And the amenities I moved the theater from were fine after I reconfigured their modules because they still had dinosaurs to attract guests to them.
Basically, it's more nuanced than JWE1 and you have to unlearn what you have learned.
I would say it needs to go a step further.
The star rating of dinosaurs is still overwhelmingly carnivore heavy, most of the herbivore don't do crap for your rating. The real profit is in carnivores which causes a real disconnect with guest types. The lack of interactive attractions is what is really making this wonky and harder to grasp. Why would a park tour cater so hard to Adventure guests, its a basic tour experience? Only reason that can be is because there isn't another attraction that could occupy that spot, we just don't have the kind of attractions to actually lure specific guest types to our parks, instead we are micromanaging them in amenities and using the most basic aspects of a park.
A hotel, park tour/gyrospheres, module attraction building, etc. these are basic things you would expect, if they cater to any, it should be General Guests; or even better, its the bare minimum for all 4 guest types. Add in foot traffic and this system can really mess with people, earlier I was complaining about the system and the difficulty earning money, but that is a result of my fighting this system. You don't get any reward or consideration for decorative purposes, you really need to go for carnivores to make some good cash, and your park designs are heavily limited by standard inside the box designs. A standard custom mode would help alleviate this; however, the point stands the system is barebones and desperately needs fleshing out.
It's very much manageable, I just hope this better expresses what I and others might be having more of an issue with when it comes down to it. The balance between herbivores and carnivores is also a problem, making the star rating based on your income was a nice change, but not when it comes to the appeal they create. The herbivores are heavily outclassed and generally way cheaper, so people use them more as starting dinosaurs. This means you will attract a lot more nature guests with ease, and struggle with adventure guests until you are pulling tons of adventure guests due to the income shooting up drastically with the general appeal of carnivores. Frontier has been loathe to commit to this rebalancing, we might have to rely on modders to fix this issue in the future unless we have more control to make each guest type feel more valuable/necessary.
