I love a good game of micromanagement, but as the zoo grows bigger and bigger and more animals with more enrichment items I am losing the out on the fun of the game which is adding animals to the park and decorating the habitats and zoo. My guests are complaining the zoo is too small because I dont have time to grow because I am constantly repairing and replacing. At least with more skilled workers, mechanics can keep up with repairs, HOWEVER, Keepers are not swapping out for different enrichment items to keep animals satisfied automatically and I don't have the time to go into EVERY habitat and delete every old one and replace it, or re set it all the time, or put something else in. there HAS to be a better way
TOO much micromanagement----(Manual Erichment Item Replacement-really?)
- Thread starter BarnebyJones
- Start date
I really hope they add an option to send exhibit offspring directly to the trade center by toggling a setting on each exhibit you want. That's my biggest micromanagement complaint about the game right now. In a similar fashion to how "about to mate" and "expecting offspring" notifications are now turned off for exhibits, this can also be done exclusively for exhibits, as developers have already noticed micromanaging exhibits is quite tedious. I think it is a plausible change, even if it requires the next visit of the keeper.
I seriously hope they give keepers the ability to replace enrichment items, because in a big zoo with almost every animal and heavily decorated exhibits, finding every single enrichment item and manually replacing it is like finding a needle in a haystack. There was a small ball in one of my enclosures that for the life of me I couldn't find. I never found it until I completely emptied the enclosure during a move.
Also I don't know if it's a bug or not, but animals never seem to be able to get the same satisfaction from those items again once they get tired of it. If a species has a limited array of toys and you used them all to get 100% enrichment, by the time they're all replaced it can never seem to get higher than 70% or 80%.
Also I don't know if it's a bug or not, but animals never seem to be able to get the same satisfaction from those items again once they get tired of it. If a species has a limited array of toys and you used them all to get 100% enrichment, by the time they're all replaced it can never seem to get higher than 70% or 80%.
That would be great. In a similar fashion to what I recommended about exhibits, these could also require keeper visits. Frontier could think instant or in other words "wireless" actions would be too easy and overlook these suggestions, but the keeper visit requirement for both would actually make them plausible.
Do you replace the same enrichments with just newer versions? That won't work. If you rotate the enrichments, only have the mid bath for example and after a while only the ball, and when you swtch to the mud bath again and it's not 100% again, then I'd consider it a bug.
This is the exact reason that the game is playable while paused. Pause in this case is a main feature. The buildings and decorations are very intricate and really need their own attention, it's pretty much impossible to do that properly and manage everything.
Pause is your friend
So true! I'm always building while paused. I also do regular checks about the animals in pause-mode. Every once in a while, I sort the animals tab by age and put exhibit offspring to the trade center, put habitat offspring on contraceptives etc. Every 1-2 ingame years, I do an inventory/stock-taking (not sure about the word) by really going through my animals species for species and deciding whom to sell and whether I allow breeding and where I might have to buy a new partner from the market etc. That really keeps it manageable for me.
As for the enrichment rotation, I have never in more than 200 ingame years replaced one single toy and the animals just deal with it. There should be a way to automate the rotation, but I didn't encounter any problems by just ignoring it.
Yeah, I use different ones. Some animals need multiple different toys to get to 100%, which makes them get tired of a majority of them quick. Once I swap out for the few they didn't use, and they get tired of those, the toys never seem to have the same effect unless it's a new animal entirely. (IE: one from the market that's never been in the enclosure)
Fully agreed. I asked about something similar a while ago, but there's still SO much micromanagement. Dealing with all the animal and exhibit births, vandalism, AND enrichment items puts an upper limit on how many animals you can have in your park before you are only dealing with micromanagement when the game is unpaused. These things should have an option to be managed by the staff like keepers, vets, and mechanics so we can focus on building the park and enjoying the animals. As it is now, I avoid playing the game because all that micro ruins the enjoyment of being creative and building an awesome zoo - especially in franchise mode.
The main problems are that there aren’t even enough unique enrichment tous for some species to get up to 100% when you use only half of the available toys so you can rotate them and that you have to search for the placed toys for quite a while in a nicely decorated habitat, or simply just plop them down in a row so you can easily find them later. I would already be happy if a) more toys would be added (particularly for the poor giraffes), and b) all currently placed toys could be individually selected on the enrichment tab and removed with one click via that tab.
I have to disagree. I actually really enjoy all the little things to manage. It adds depth to it for me. I think the real problem is the frequency of it happening. I think this problem really relates to how fast time in this game passes. It's too fast, so it feels like lots of things are being thrown at you every few seconds.