Please explain building placement in tutorial!

[Grannyweatherwax]

Dear developers,

I am stuck in the tutorial, because I have trouble placing the buildings. I skipped part of the tutorial because of that and now I am stuck in the next part again with another building. I keep getting error messages like „invalid rotation“, „outside the placement area“, terrain editing failed“…

I realize that I can turn the building with the y button, but how do I see where the entrance should go? How do I solve this issue with terrain processing? What do the settings on the right "Angle alignment", "Flatten terrain", "Highlight hidden barriers" mean? Should I perhaps change them? Would a different resolution help? What is the best perspective? I tried right in front and from a bird's eye view, but I have to mess around forever for every building without understanding why placement sometimes works or doesn´t. It's really frustrating.

Please explain in the tutorial what I should do in order to be able to place a building!

 

[LN]

Angle Alignment: The angle to align.
Flatten terrain: Flatten terrain when placing
Highlight hidden barriers: Show habitat barriers.

invalid rotation: You can not do that rotation you just did.
Outside placement area: You are trying to place something outside the recommended area. Try again inside the area.
Terrain editing failed: You want to edit terrain, but may not. (usually this happens because "flatten terrain"is on).

Some of thes things are quite self-explanatory.

Resolution, perspective and or birds eye view, do nothing at all with these settings, but that should be quite clear too.

 

[Grannyweatherwax]

Thanks for the swift response! I moved on to Franchise mode and placing buildings there works fine. Also, I really enjoy Planet Zoo.

But I would still like to let you know that placing buildings in the tutorial is quite difficult, because you are introducing several new things at the same time without really explaning them. I got stuck in part 2, Madagscar, silver, placement of research center. I had to place the building inside a cover structure and add it to a group for the first time. When I got a blue outline, I left-clicked to place the building. It got stuck in the ground. It was inside the cover structure, but below road level, not conected. There was no explanation what had happened, only a help text with a list of comands. One was to use shift and arrows to move the building up and down. So I did that, but the building wouldn´t move. Why? Because I had to press „m“ first in order to be able to move the building and then use „shift and arrows“ to move the building up and down.

I finally found that out on my own, but I think a tutorial should explain such things. Tutorials should make learning the game controls easy, shouldn´t they? It would be nice if there was one part showing how to move and turn buildings in all directions and another part about groups.

 

[LN]

It's difficult in the Tutorial, because you can only fit buildings in the designated area in one particular way.

Once you are out of the Tutorial, it's as easy as A-B-C.

 

[shirandhak]

Yes, in the beginning I was totally confused and frustrated because the tutorial demanded me to do things it didn´t explain how to do them to non-planco-players. I nearly dropped playing the game.

 

[Lea_G]

I agree that the tutorial isn't really useful. Or rather, I always believed that only the first one in Goodwin's Zoo actually was the tutorial and the rest the "normal" campaign levels - because at the end of the Goodwin thing the guy says "now you can follow the campaign or just start your own zoo" or something along those lines, sounding as if the tutorial part was over. Only when I decided to look at the campaign, I found out that the following levels would have taught me quite many basic things So yep, need for improvement - the lack of guidance might frustrate people right at the beginning. I'd recommend watching building/starter tutorials on Youtube, that helped me a lot.