Please slow down the time speed of the game.
- Thread starter SleepyEngi
- Start date
+1 time needs to be slowed down a little it moves too quick especially with all the population-micro-management you have to do with offspring in larger zoos.
It really does suck. I thought it would be okay but it's literally two-three times faster than it should be.
"cool, an animal is pregnant"
*looks away for 5 secs
"wow I have twice as many animals as before.."
I'm amazed that they thought this was the best speed for a game about life-cycles... Pausing is not a solution to this! I get they want the management to be challenging, and I'm good with that, but atm we simply have to pause the game CONSTANTLY to deal with everything. It would be so much nicer if we didn't have to pause and could actually allow the simulation to run while we click buttons.
honestly, WHY ARE THERE FAST FORWARD BUTTONS?!?!? How could you possibly play this game any faster than it is at default??
"cool, an animal is pregnant"
*looks away for 5 secs
"wow I have twice as many animals as before.."
I'm amazed that they thought this was the best speed for a game about life-cycles... Pausing is not a solution to this! I get they want the management to be challenging, and I'm good with that, but atm we simply have to pause the game CONSTANTLY to deal with everything. It would be so much nicer if we didn't have to pause and could actually allow the simulation to run while we click buttons.
honestly, WHY ARE THERE FAST FORWARD BUTTONS?!?!? How could you possibly play this game any faster than it is at default??
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I agree with reservation. I think a slider or something to adjust time just as you want and need it would be nice.
I'm rather annoyed at the speed of my peacocks with which they are shooting out babies. Reminds me of the speed my rl guinea pigs build up running towards food and literally inhaling it.
I'm rather annoyed at the speed of my peacocks with which they are shooting out babies. Reminds me of the speed my rl guinea pigs build up running towards food and literally inhaling it.
A slider would be a dream, but I don't think that is possible, since the animations that run in the game, are tied to the speed. You speed it up, they all move faster. You go back to normal speed, they slow down. So if you have a slider to set it to 'slower than normal' all your animals and staff will walk slower, too and that would kinda defeat the purpose a little, because I doubt anyone wants a slow motion zoo, we just want time to enjoy our zoo.
Honestly, I also think that part of the often mentioned lack of social interactions is tied in with the fast running time, too. There are more important things for the animals to do, like eat, poop, sleep, mate. So they do all that and by the time they are done, it's already time to pop out a baby and start again. Now I'm hungry, now I'm tired, now I'm pooping, now I'm ... oh no. No time for social interactions, need to eat. And so on. They prioritize life sustaining activities over social activities. Which makes sense, but Frontier is taking its own work and hides it behind the fast pace of the game, because now, people can't enjoy the social interactions. Or only rarely get to see them. You have to literally sit on top of an enclosure and watch until the animals have done all the important things and get to run one quick social interaction before going right back to eating and pooping. XD
Honestly, I also think that part of the often mentioned lack of social interactions is tied in with the fast running time, too. There are more important things for the animals to do, like eat, poop, sleep, mate. So they do all that and by the time they are done, it's already time to pop out a baby and start again. Now I'm hungry, now I'm tired, now I'm pooping, now I'm ... oh no. No time for social interactions, need to eat. And so on. They prioritize life sustaining activities over social activities. Which makes sense, but Frontier is taking its own work and hides it behind the fast pace of the game, because now, people can't enjoy the social interactions. Or only rarely get to see them. You have to literally sit on top of an enclosure and watch until the animals have done all the important things and get to run one quick social interaction before going right back to eating and pooping. XD
+1 please slow down speed.
Please please please slow down time, or allow an option to change how fast time goes by! I want to have some time to just enjoy watching my peafowl.
I said the same in another thread. People complain there’s no social interactions, but there is! Problem is they trigger so rarely that you can only see about one a year or so. And they never trigger because the animal is to busy staying alive (including having fun, that in this game is, by design, a solo activity) so they don’t get the chance to interact with others often. The time goes to fast and their needs are always decreasing as result.
I personally have troubles following population. New babies seems to appear out of nowhere and I didn’t see any notification because I was 5 seconds on camera mode keeping an eye to a baby that have to grow soon. And I swear my exhibit animals just banish from existence and the game doesn’t bother telling me or it’s too fast.
Animals keep being born and dying left and right and I can’t find a moment to cheer or mourn them.
People worried about sliders being impossible:
There's two different things to consider here, and that's game speed vs time speed.
Time speed is what most of us are talking about, and that's how long each day lasts for. From a programming POV, this would just be a variable they would have to change so the game knows to wait 'x' seconds before moving to the next day. This has nothing to do with how fast the animations and such move.
Game speed is how fast the game plays at. The regular speed is x1.0. If you press the fast forward button, it would change the game speed to say x2.0. it's essentially like pressing the fastforward button on a movie or video; everything moves at double the speed, including animations and such.
So changing how long a day lasts, at its core, would not change the speed of animations and such.
Here's the issue with a slider:
The reason it works in Sims is because their days are moving at a fixed rate. No matter how long or short your Sims can live for, it does not change the rate at which in-game minutes go by. All it changes is how many days will pass before they die. Nothing else needs to be balanced around this number.
But in PZ, feeding rates, how fast things break down, etc all would have been balanced around how fast the days move at. So changing the time speed would, inadvertently, also change a lot of other things in the game. So if it was a slider, they'd have to make sure the game is balanced for all the different options in the slider.
So at the end of the day, I do believe it's possible, it would just take time and work to make sure it's all balanced, and it's up to Frontier to decide if that time would be well spent working on that or not. Hopefully it would be.
There's two different things to consider here, and that's game speed vs time speed.
Time speed is what most of us are talking about, and that's how long each day lasts for. From a programming POV, this would just be a variable they would have to change so the game knows to wait 'x' seconds before moving to the next day. This has nothing to do with how fast the animations and such move.
Game speed is how fast the game plays at. The regular speed is x1.0. If you press the fast forward button, it would change the game speed to say x2.0. it's essentially like pressing the fastforward button on a movie or video; everything moves at double the speed, including animations and such.
So changing how long a day lasts, at its core, would not change the speed of animations and such.
Here's the issue with a slider:
The reason it works in Sims is because their days are moving at a fixed rate. No matter how long or short your Sims can live for, it does not change the rate at which in-game minutes go by. All it changes is how many days will pass before they die. Nothing else needs to be balanced around this number.
But in PZ, feeding rates, how fast things break down, etc all would have been balanced around how fast the days move at. So changing the time speed would, inadvertently, also change a lot of other things in the game. So if it was a slider, they'd have to make sure the game is balanced for all the different options in the slider.
So at the end of the day, I do believe it's possible, it would just take time and work to make sure it's all balanced, and it's up to Frontier to decide if that time would be well spent working on that or not. Hopefully it would be.
+
It wasn’t until I looked up and realized how overwhelmed I was with the avalanche of babies to sell from exhibits and basically blindly selling and releasing massive blocks of animals every 15 min and pausing while I was doing it! It was a great way to generate leaf bucks but jeepers... I barely take time to watch my animals and enjoy them because it’s a never ending list of things to do and manage with overcrowding. I want to watch my park be alive not unpause it to race to do things just to pause it again. I’ve thought of only using long life span animals just to keep the game fun. Right now I feel like I have to be the fastest clicker in the west to get what I need accomplished and then try to find space to pause and add another habitat. I almost feel paralyzed from adding much more to my small park or just give up on breeding in general.
Alternatively, there's the opposite side of this discussion, and that's about animal deaths.
I built my first franchise zoo up pretty quickly because I knew how the mode worked, so within the first few in-game years I had an entire section done with 6 habitats.
I had started working on the next section when suddenly almost all my other animals were dying from old age. It was really stressful to have to buy a bunch of animals to repopulate them, while also trying to manage the market for my new animals. I think a lot of this came from the current filtering system, because every two seconds I was having to change filters to find the animals I wanted (and with the lag time with the online market, it meant I spent way too much time managing all that)
I built my first franchise zoo up pretty quickly because I knew how the mode worked, so within the first few in-game years I had an entire section done with 6 habitats.
I had started working on the next section when suddenly almost all my other animals were dying from old age. It was really stressful to have to buy a bunch of animals to repopulate them, while also trying to manage the market for my new animals. I think a lot of this came from the current filtering system, because every two seconds I was having to change filters to find the animals I wanted (and with the lag time with the online market, it meant I spent way too much time managing all that)
yeah especially the conservation credits... at this speed of the game i generate about 10k conservation credits per hour with just 2 habitats... thats insane.
This is true for some animals, so assuming that the female is in season, I could believe that she got pregnant on the first day the male was introduced. Use cheetahs, for example - you keep the male and female in side by side enclosures for a few weeks, wait until she’s displaying receptiveness, introduce them and get lucky the first day. Even in this situation though, the pregnancy is so damn fast! Or it’s too easy: we shouldn’t always immediately get 100% success.
Most animals though would need time to socialise before mating, regardless of seasonality. It would include some inevitable punch-ons too. Think of lions: you introduce a male and the female is going to fight him off until she accepts him. That should take at least a week in game. Then there are more socially complex species like chimps - the male would have to be accepted by the female troop before breeding, which should take in game weeks to months. Wolves in a pack (I know, that’s still an issue in the game) should have to figure out their pack structure and who the breeding pair are before mating takes place.
A lot of animal species are far more picky than humans in terms of breeding, and need a lot of time to adjust before mating. There’s also a good risk of injury or death if the animals don’t accept each other.
In any case, regardless of species, the animals should settle in to their enclosure for a couple of in game weeks before they think of breeding, this being especially true for female animals.
I definitely agree, time goes by way too fast to sit back for a minute and enjoy what we’ve built. No time to watch the new little baby animal that was just born, go on patrol with the security guards for vandals, watch how the rainstorms affect the animals and guests and environment, etc. None of this can be done on pause. Building and micromanagement, yes. Overall enjoyment, no. Please slow down the time. I mean, I knew I was in trouble when I loaded my first game and hit pause almost immediately and was already at day 13, lol.
Plus One More - I agree with slowing it down.
I hadn't noticed just how fast it all was until I happened to notice that the current in-game date was my birthday. By the time I casually mentioned that to a family member, three days had gone by. I previously knew it was fast, but I just was so engaged in everything, I didn't stop to realize just HOW fast! I'd love if there was something to configure the time.