So what's up with the western chimpanzee sex ratio problems in the game?

[Roxxsmom]

In the zoopedia it says that you can have up to 15 chimps in a mixed sex group with up to ten of each sex, not counting juveniles. This strongly implies you can have more than one adult male chimp in a group. AFAIK chimps do live in groups with multiple animals of each sex, though there are dominance hierarchies. But mating is promiscuous, and they don't form "harems" with just one adult male and multiple females the way gorillas do.

I looked up group dynamics in captive chimps and found this paper, which states that group affiliation is actually stronger when there are more males in a group. The general recommendation of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums is that larger group sizes are better in captive chimps, and the paper cited below appears to confirm this.

Does group size matter? Captive chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) behavior as a function of group size and composition​

So why are my male western chimps having dangerous fighting with more than one adult male in the group? The habitat is much larger than the required size for the number of animals as well, and they are all enriched etc. and not stressed. So why are they acting like gorillas or mandrils?

 

[Spiderhawk]

id like to know myself. Can never get a straight answer.

 

[Roxxsmom]

What's interesting about this issue is it just goes on and on in the background. The alert is constantly on, but it doesn't seem to have much consequence. After years of game time, none of the animals have killed one another, and I've only had one actual injury that required vet attention. So I do my best to ignore it.

Contrast this with my gemsbok and ostriches, where they are constantly fighting and hurting one another (and getting me fines), even in a large enclosure with the correct sex ratio >.< Oh, and getting sick too. The gemsbok get sick constantly, even with good food, clean water, and all of them having healthy immune ratings.

And the escaping binturongs. Keep getting the notice that one or another has escaped, and they always are still inside their enclosure, levitating through the air, head down, near the barrier.

I know the game is doing a lot with different kinds of animals and their movement and animations, but I do wish they'd fix the escaped animals that haven't actually escaped.

 

[jcp011c]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was confused by the zoopedia. I've never had problems understanding any of the other animal group ratios. But the chimpanzee one reads very confusingly. Months ago I had the issue where I put in one male/one female as is my standard for just about all habitats. Too few animals in their social group. So I added in another female and it was still too few, after looking at the zoopedia I thought, oh it looks like I can have more than one male as well as there's a maximum of each gender. So I added a second male and it was a fight right away. After discussing on a facebook group, it's that you can have only one male with the maximum of females without it being an issue (for the males, it's not an issue with the females), but if you have only one gender, you can have the maximum allowed - 10 males and 0 females is not an issue. 2 males and 10 females is. But it just doesn't read that way in the zoopedia.

 

[XT]

I think the game doesn't really follow specific species group behaviors much. All male animals are larger than females, which isn't always the case (I think the only one they have correct is the hyena, where the females tend to be larger and fill the same role as 'alpha' males in most group animals). Chimps and bonobos have hierarchies but do not have the same sort of alpha behaviors we associate with canids and hoofstock, male elephants generally cannot be kept in a herd with females, etc. I suspect that the reason is they've duplicated behavior scripts indiscriminately rather than develop unique scripts for each species. It's a bit of a bummer, since it would be one way to 'realistically' increase difficulty for some animals (elephants for example). It would, of course, require a bunch more programming time for relatively minor details.

This doesn't even get much into the fact that much of our imagination of 'alpha males' in wolves and deer and etc turns out to be more wishful thinking on the part of (generally male) zoologists rather than actual behavior.

Not to be another, 'why doesn't Frontier love us' post but I suspect that the game that most of the developers personally like/enjoy is Elite, and most of the other games by the company are various ways to diversify the money stream, so there's not as much attention to details as there could be.

 

[Firestar97]

It seems to be normal for male Chimps to try a lot to get the Alpha Status but as I wrote here after some Research
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/fighting-chimpanzees.574806/post-9166011
Fighting is only a small Part of the Behavior that they use for this. Also the Western Chimpanzee is the least aggressive Subspecies and I think someone also wrote that they almost never hurt each other seriously in those Fights. It also seems like only the Alpha can breed (even though the compare Mates Menu shows it different). I first needed to temporarily move the other males for my Favorite to breed.

Also while we are already talking about Primates, why did they give the Chimpanzee, Bonobo and Japanese Macaque a realistic male/female Ratio but then give the Ring Tailed Lemur (a Primate that normally lives in Groups with the same Amount of males and females) Social Requirements that are similar to those of Baboons?

 

[Roxxsmom]

I think the game doesn't really follow specific species group behaviors much. All male animals are larger than females, which isn't always the case (I think the only one they have correct is the hyena, where the females tend to be larger and fill the same role as 'alpha' males in most group animals). Chimps and bonobos have hierarchies but do not have the same sort of alpha behaviors we associate with canids and hoofstock, male elephants generally cannot be kept in a herd with females, etc. I suspect that the reason is they've duplicated behavior scripts indiscriminately rather than develop unique scripts for each species. It's a bit of a bummer, since it would be one way to 'realistically' increase difficulty for some animals (elephants for example). It would, of course, require a bunch more programming time for relatively minor details.

This doesn't even get much into the fact that much of our imagination of 'alpha males' in wolves and deer and etc turns out to be more wishful thinking on the part of (generally male) zoologists rather than actual behavior.

Not to be another, 'why doesn't Frontier love us' post but I suspect that the game that most of the developers personally like/enjoy is Elite, and most of the other games by the company are various ways to diversify the money stream, so there's not as much attention to details as there could be.

I think you're right in the case of the chimps, though they seem to have done okay with bonobos. Also the capuchin monkeys, which have a dominant male but are also promiscuous breeders seem to be doing fine in the game with multiple adult males in their groups. I don't think I've ever had a dangerous fighting alert for capuchins in the game.

All they had to do was apply that behavioral program to the chimps, but it appears that they used the one for gorillas instead. I'm no coding expert, but I can't imaging this issue would be hard to fix.

Canids have rather varied breeding systems, but they imposed a wolf pack dynamic on all of the "doggies" in the game so far. At least they at least didn't impose the wolf one on chimps, since monogamous chimps of either species would be laughable. They do still use the outdated "alpha" designation for the breeder wolves, but those symbols are probably so it's easy to see who the breeding wolves are in the group.

I've noticed that the forums default to Elite Dangerous when I log on. It's funny, because I play fantasy and SF RPGs and 4x type games and other strategic games as well as simulation type games, but I've never even heard of Elite Dangerous. With the name, I assume it's some type of combat shooter? The only frontier game I'd heard of prior to playing PZ was PC. I never tried it, maybe because theme parks aren't as interesting to me as zoos. I can see why Planet Coaster had the popularity it has, though, as the ability to build and design things adds extra depth to the games.

Combat shooters are a very active and loyal gaming group, but as I understand it the fastest growing markets are among "non traditional gamers," so it's definitely smart of a gaming company to diversify and reach out to different player bases.