My Thoughts and Critiques of The New DLC and update

[Flishster]

This is all gonna be kind of just as I go, so apologies if it feels a little all over the place.

Overall I'm really liking the DLC, the aesthetic changes you can make with the DLC are fantastic, and it feels very nice to have lots of different challenges encouraging me to use animals or play with certain decor more.

However some of the challenges feel almost... too easy. Particularly the guest count one. This one seems to pop up relatively frequently and on lower ranks is just free stuff because your guest count will reach what they ask for very fast.

Other issues I've had with the new challenges:

-Science can be given as a reward before you can unlock anything with science (unsure if this makes it go to waste or not)

-You can get breeding requests long before you can actually breed an animal (got a breeding request for Midas cichlids at the beginning of rank 4, long before flat surface is available to breed them)

I really am liking the architecture challenges, though. I think they are by far the best challenges in the update because they are pretty much totally unique in what they ask for.

I will say some of the other challenges are a bit extreme it feels? For example, got a challenge to use the pitted column in a tank with 280 science and 280 ecology. Which doesn't sound like a lot at first, but with the overall nerfs everything got to how much science/ecology they give, it ended up literally only being possible by loading the tank up with anemones or corals to cover the majority of those, and then carefully selecting exactly how many of each fish I had in the tank so that I could get my ecology just barely over the edge once everything was finally fully grown. Another one that felt a little insane was a science poster one that wants me to have 700 science from a poster, which is 14 traits (!) I think honestly at the time I got it only was able to even get a max of 13 in one tank, and even then it would have been extremely difficult because it would have required me to have side-necked turtles, sunshine plecos, and butterfly rams in a tank together.

Also, not sure if it's a bug or not, but got the same paint challenge multiple times, like literally 6 or 7 times for the same paint, even after declining it the first time, which says it will be "gone forever" evidently not. :P

I do have some thoughts on other things besides the missions, however, specifically balance of the new DLC.

It's kind of... extremely OP to use anything in the DLC. The paintable variants of a lot of different items are just straight upgrades from their base form, I think the only one that isn't is the bench and only because each piece is the same price as one basic bench. But the trash cans are just straight upgrades from the regular bin, except maybe the wall bin because it only has one access point. I'd like to see them cost a little bit more and/or unlock a rank or two later or something, because as is they just are straight upgrades.

Some of the animals feel extremely OP for the ranks they unlock at, namely the mantis shrimp, who is also ludicrously expensive at rank 4 because of its supplement and crab diet. Overall they all seem to give more prestige and science/ecology than any other animal at their ranks, and often introduce foods and/or traits that prior to this DLC did not unlock until much later. It makes them feel a little less like official animals and is honestly my biggest critique of the DLC.

Sort of similarly, I feel bridges are unlocked a little early for how expensive they are. I find that usually you don't have much more than like 6-7 k lying around and most bridges cost somewhere in the 3-5 k range, so you're taking a huge bank account hit that is usually not worth it in my experience. Also, I suspect it is not possible, but it would be immensely helpful if bridges could have trash cans place on top of them, as right now, the center of the bridge can never be covered by trash cans if it is a max size bridge and thus often accumulates trash.

The themed bathrooms are slightly shorter than the walls which means if you have a roof that is touching one of them there is a gap, which is a bit nitpicky I suppose but it was something I noticed :P

I do like that the decorator crabs walk slowly. I had noticed in FF that the panther crabs kind of zoom, so seeing this attention to detail again feels nice.

The needs soft coral trait feels a bit... wonky? You need 1 coral for 1 decorator crab right now, but you also only need 1 for 50 decorator crabs. I think it's probably intended to function more similarly to the aquascaping traits?

Definite bug I encountered: you can place FF sunken tanks over the tunnels. They clip significantly :P It'd be cool if placing a sunken tank next to a tunnel added a window for viewing, maybe, but having the guests walk partly through the bottom is a bit different. :P

Less about the current DLC and more about something that became more pronounced from the update, but hybrids are like, super OP. Before they were usually only slightly better than higher rank animals but now that prestige is lower overall for a lot of animals, I'm making 221 prestige from guppy hybrids with tinfoil barb as my second most popular at 80. It just feels a little silly that the prestige difference is so great.

Something else I noticed, guests are still blocked from viewing a tank if there is a wall in front of it, even from a bridge, despite the bridges being higher than the walls. Would be a nice change if they could see over walls if on a bridge. :)

But yeah, I think that's everything I've got to say about the DLC and update? Overall super awesome stuff.

[fubberpish]

wait the mantis shrimp unlocks at rank 4? that's a lot earlier than i thought

[fubberpish]

another thing i find odd is that the napoleon wrasse can eat fish, and large fish at that! i've seen them housed with small fish at many public aquariums with no issues. they eat invertebrates, not fish

[Twice Circled]

Thank you for all the feedback. Here's a few comments:

Originally posted by Flishster:

-You can get breeding requests long before you can actually breed an animal (got a breeding request for Midas cichlids at the beginning of rank 4, long before flat surface is available to breed them)

If you accept the objective, they will actually give you a flat surface (or applicable breeding aquascaping) which will appear at the end of the message. This is hinted at in the text: "I can even help provide any specialist aquascaping that's required".

So it's actually a way to get a little bit of breeding going early. (Let me know if that's not working, it was last time I checked).

Originally posted by Flishster:

I will say some of the other challenges are a bit extreme it feels? For example, got a challenge to use the pitted column in a tank with 280 science and 280 ecology. Which doesn't sound like a lot at first, but with the overall nerfs everything got to how much science/ecology they give, it ended up literally only being possible by loading the tank up with anemones or corals to cover the majority of those, and then carefully selecting exactly how many of each fish I had in the tank so that I could get my ecology just barely over the edge once everything was finally fully grown. Another one that felt a little insane was a science poster one that wants me to have 700 science from a poster, which is 14 traits (!) I think honestly at the time I got it only was able to even get a max of 13 in one tank, and even then it would have been extremely difficult because it would have required me to have side-necked turtles, sunshine plecos, and butterfly rams in a tank together.

Noted. The sandbox challenges have gone through rigorous testing but because of the semi-randomised nature, things can slip through. I'll take a look at both those examples.

Originally posted by Flishster:

Also, not sure if it's a bug or not, but got the same paint challenge multiple times, like literally 6 or 7 times for the same paint, even after declining it the first time, which says it will be "gone forever" evidently not. :P

Noted. I can fix this.

Originally posted by Flishster:

Some of the animals feel extremely OP for the ranks they unlock at, namely the mantis shrimp, who is also ludicrously expensive at rank 4 because of its supplement and crab diet. Overall they all seem to give more prestige and science/ecology than any other animal at their ranks, and often introduce foods and/or traits that prior to this DLC did not unlock until much later. It makes them feel a little less like official animals and is honestly my biggest critique of the DLC.

I appreciate your feedback on this, how things feel is important. But just to throw a couple of stats at you:
- The Mantis Shrimp and Picasso Triggerfish are available at rank 4 and are worth a maximum of 8 Prestige. At the same rank Volitans and Panther Grouper are worth 7 when fully grown, so it's only 1 difference.
- In fact, I just checked through all the ranks and the AC animals are worth at most 1 more than the highest prestige animal in the base game at the same rank. And from rank 7-12 they are worth less.

I'm glad that the AC animals felt powerful to you. That's totally the intention, but they're not actually super OP looking at it from a Prestige POV.

You're right that they can be tricky to look after, I guess it's a personal preference thing. I quite like having to get my best feeder on supplements to keep that Mantis Shrimp going at rank 4! ;)

Originally posted by Flishster:

Definite bug I encountered: you can place FF sunken tanks over the tunnels. They clip significantly :P It'd be cool if placing a sunken tank next to a tunnel added a window for viewing, maybe, but having the guests walk partly through the bottom is a bit different. :P

Will get that fixed ASAP, thanks for letting me know.

Originally posted by Flishster:

Less about the current DLC and more about something that became more pronounced from the update, but hybrids are like, super OP. Before they were usually only slightly better than higher rank animals but now that prestige is lower overall for a lot of animals, I'm making 221 prestige from guppy hybrids with tinfoil barb as my second most popular at 80. It just feels a little silly that the prestige difference is so great.

I do think it's nice that you get rewarded for breeding all those guppies, but I'll take another look at it. Thanks for the note.

Originally posted by Flishster:

Something else I noticed, guests are still blocked from viewing a tank if there is a wall in front of it, even from a bridge, despite the bridges being higher than the walls. Would be a nice change if they could see over walls if on a bridge. :)

I'll take a look. :)

Thanks again for all the feedback!

[BlueFire]

Originally posted by Twice Circled:

I do think it's nice that you get rewarded for breeding all those guppies, but I'll take another look at it. Thanks for the note.

I think the guppies are fine, they take a lot of time and micromanagement to properly breed several combinations. Currently my 56 hybrid guppies gives me around 18 prestige per guest.

[Flishster]

Thanks for the feedback, Tim! Really enjoying the DLC overall, even if it sounds like I complained a lot. :P

[BlueFire]

So, I actually did a LOT of test with the guppies and theres currently a total of 28 guppies of which 27 are considered hybrid. You get 1 prestige for each unique guppie you have in a tank for a grand total of 27 prestige per guest if you are able to get them all.

It doesn't really matter the total number of guppies you have in a tank. Only matters the number of unique colors you have. I really think they are balanced, it was a LOT of work to get them all.

EDIT: Did a few more test and looks like never got more than 10 guest of 87 to give me the guppy hybrids prestige, for the guppy as species was around 22 people. I wonder if having more than 1 of each color can rises the chance...

EDIT2: Did more test, I didn't really notice a change with 2 of each variant, was around the same number of guest seeing them.

[Flishster]

In that aquarium I went through and tested with, I only had 22 of the guppy variants (so majority but not all) and was making around 400 prestige from them. The next closest animals were making just under 200, and it was things like sharks, spider crabs, etc. Things that you expect to be the big draws of an aquarium.

If we were talking the angelfish or discus I'd agree breeding them is hard but... The guppies take 1-2 hours tops to breed every variant and I wouldn't really consider them "work". Just put some floating cover in, every so often go in and purge the duplicates, rinse, and repeat. In the past I've gotten every guppy without putting the effort in to focus on it really much at all. Only really the discus and to a lesser extent the angelfish really require you to keep a good eye on them to make sure they're functioning well.