Those things in the game that I feel could be worked on.

[Mainframe_x]

Lets start with time. Sometimes it just feels too fast. Even on the normal mode its just a bit too quick I think. Kind of just doesn't leave you with much time to actually enjoy your zoo cause you're constantly having to go over and check on this or that or prep to move whatever animal is about to mature so it doesn't get beat up by the current alpha in the habitat. But pausing to enjoy just kind of looses a lot of the appeal ya don't get to watch the animals move about. Be nice if there was a slower option so you could watch your zoo for a bit and not have to deal with all the micromanagement.


Terraforming, its great for smaller projects. But oh boy if you come up with this bright idea to terraform your entire block you're in for a rough time. The brushes just aren't large enough for any grand scale terraforming. It'd take forever it feels like to get much done. And good luck trying to build yourself a nice soft hill in the distance its not going to be so simple. I think the brushes aren't large enough personally and I believe that the smoothing brush really needs to be stronger than it is. I just find the terraforming a bit annoying in general. Feels more like a battle to get something how you'd like it to look than an enjoyable experience. But that might just be me I don't know. I also really only find myself using a few of the brushes and kind of find the rest to be about useless. Mostly I raise flatten and soften. I just haven't really found a good way to even use the others. I'm sure there are ways I just haven't personally found them.


Keepers and caretakers. Man do they need to go to school to learn better time management. They're just not very good at their jobs, I've tried various things and nothing really seems to get them to do what you'd prefer them to do. I've had multiple keepers with sets only doing food and others only cleaning and others only tending and it still seems like sometimes the place is always dirty and their food trays are always empty cept right before they're starving. It'd be nice if say you had a habitat with 5 animals in it you could have each keeper only focus on that specific animal and their specific food trays for example. Also why do mechanics always wait till the toilet or atm's are broken to bother going to do their job. Preventative maintenance.


Vandalism, the hell's wrong with people. Swear my zoo is linked to some prison community full of delinquents. Doesn't seem to matter how many security camera's i have or guards I have people break stuff. Who vandalizes a zoo anyways? Just seems an oddly annoying mechanic to the game really. It'd be nice if you could say set mechanics so that they would repair the benches, maybe they're suposta? I don't know but again my staff seem to really hate their jobs and rarely do what I'd like in the first place. Either way something could be done here to make that well less annoying than me having to pause and go through and click a bunch of whatevers to replace them. It just gets tedious and a little annoying after the 20th time or so.


General Micromanagement, It would be nice if you could set some If statements here to help control things so you don't have to do it all yourself. Lets say you're breeding Peacocks for example. Those things breed like bloody rabbits. So maybe you could set something so that once said peacocks become of age they are instantly placed either in the market at X value or their default or released to wild or say have Half go to market and half released to wild. Or anything of that sort would be nice. That way you can still let them go to market but you can focus more on your more valuable species of animals. Currently I've just stopped breeding certain species just cause its become too time consuming to try and keep track of everything.


The Trade Depot... The lag there is horrible, half the time I have to click a button it feels like 10 or more times just to get it to register. I'd rather you just push it once it says Loading. Then Loads. I'm ok with a little loading timer or something of that sort, but that whole not knowing if the button worked or not thing drives me up the wall. Anything that removed that annoyance would make me a happier camper.

I think thats all that comes to mind right now. Might be others that pop up after pondering a bit more. I like the game quite a lot actually. Its fun but I think it could be a lot more fun with well those things I listed above tweaked or fixed. But yeah thats my two cents on what could be done to make the game better.

 

[Dr4gon]

Nothing in your post that I didn't agree with. Most of the problems you mentioned are time related. It takes several weeks for a keeper to go to his only enclosure, and than he goes away to the keeper hut to fill a bucket. "Oh, are you hungry? I'll be back with your food in a month or two, so hang on tight, okay?!"

I noticed that they do more things running lately. I wished I could train them better and give them raises, but money is tight as it is. In my first few zoos I was way to generous with the training and the raises. I don't seem to get that right. Give a each habitat a lvl 2 keeper, and let him do that one alone, and it works good enough.

I never seen the point in training vet. A single vet can run a whole zoo doing his job at lvl 1. There is so much unbalance with that. A player should be forced to train his staff, and it should be cheaper too. I can't afford a keeper for 5.5K. Their AI is not good enough to guarantee a better performance.

The AI should have some priorities. Currently it's like this: "Oh, are you starving? Sorry, I need to have a coffee brak now and be back in a month and see if you are still starving." No keeper feels any responsability when an animal is hungry or starving. On the other hand, when an animal is sick or injured, I bet you a 1000 dollars that your lvl 1 vet is on the way. I thing the vet AI is written on a Monday and the keeper AI on a Friday. The vendor AI is probably written after a night of drunkenness and a hangover.

 

[Mainframe_x]

I oddly don't have any money issues. The only time I had a financial crisis was when I decided to close my zoo that was a horrible idea and goofed everything up don't do that for record. Closing your zoo apparently goofs something up cause before I closed it I was making a decent chunk of change. After I reopened it, it never caught back up for some reason which caused me to start over which wasn't a big deal something was annoying me anyways. My current zoo has lets see.... 24 keepers and 9 vets all at 3 stars or better. I probably don't need that many vets but now and then my stupid birds all decide to catch the flue which causes a mess if I don't have enough to pull them out or I'm not paying attention and don't put them in quarantine fast enough. Think currently my zoo's making 40k or there about a year. I was making considerably more but I hired a ton of staff for this giant africa project that was a complete bust. I think I currently have over 1.2 million dollars. Most of that income comes from vendors and those little blue things you stick out for donations I believe and the fact I'm now charging like 50 bucks a head to get in the zoo.

About the failed Africa project, basically I was trying to stick all the savanna herd animals in one very large exhibit. That didn't work, even with 10 keepers dedicated to the one habitat I lost nearly every animal in the exhibit due to starvation in the first year and there just wasn't anything to be done to stop it really. I saved the large species by sending them to trade center and released a bunch of others into the wild but no less they would have died without me doing that. It seemed that the keepers only wanted to give the warthogs food and were down to let the rest starve even though each species had 1 food enrichment item and 1 tray available for them. It just didn't work what so ever. Seems if you go too big it just confuses the AI least that was my gathering of it. Could have also been the fact that the habitat was something like 13k sqm maybe it was just too large not sure. They seem to be doing fine scaled down to 11k sqm and just my Giraffes and African Elephants currently, planning to add some zebra's there or something as well but I think i'm going to stick with three it seems safe its what I have on my india side.



Vendors.. I was going to bother trying to keep those open at all times then quickly gave up that idea. It seemed like they all wanted to work the same hours and refused not to or something I don't know. Wound up firing them all and hiring new ones so it was back down to one per shop. I think it'd be handy with them to just be able to click on the shop and hire for that specific shop and then just have this option to go you work these hours, that other guy works those or something I don't know. Something could be done there I'm sure to keep them going better.

Also, is it just me or when I set my staff rooms to something do they just always reset to nothing for everyone else?


Another thing I remembered though that bugs me. So you have these different biomes, however you don't have a way to change your terrain painter to other biomes. It'd be nice if that were possible so my savanna could have a different ground grass than my north american section and so on and so forth. Not a huge thing there but would be nice no less.

The most annoying thing has to be the trade depot though. The amount of times I have to click the button in order to get it to filter or unfilter is the most annoying thing.