Dropping Profits In Planet Zoo

[Malibu Man]

So I have been working on a new zoo for about two weeks. I have a specific kind of system I employ when beginning a zoo, in that I run a very simple zoo and build up my cash, so I can design my zoo as I like without worries of money. I don't bother growing my zoo, I just want the cash. I slow down aging, and primarily use elephants (I have another system in which I build Conservation credits, so I don't worry about costs for elephants). In this way I can speed up time and even leave the game running over night. Earning money in this game is relatively easy.

I was going to post a screenshot of my game as it is right now, but I don't think it is optional. At any rate, I have about $47 million in cash, and 70,000 CC. All with nothing more than elephants. It takes patience, of course, and in the beginning I don't do a lot of designing of my zoo. I don't use vendors or anything else. I just make a stockpile of cash, and it is worth it, when you don't have to worry about money when you decide to begin designing your zoo. And once you develop this stockpile, and more guests come in because of it, you find that your designing of the zoo doesn't impact your bottom line too much anymore. It's a halfway decent system I think.

Anyway, I have begin to seriously begin designing my zoo now, incorporating new animals, really enjoying the freedom of having the money to design this zoo in any way I wish. Once I had a nice stockpile of cash, I could afford to lose money by hiring a dozen mechanics and vets to research the workshops and the animals, so all that is done now too. It's basically sandbox mode, now, but in franchise mode. It's very liberating.

I am explaining all this because something happened today that I can't explain. After achieving the $45 million mark, I began losing money -- hemorrhaging money. Nothing had changed. Education was fine. Guest happiness was fine. Vandalization was under control. I had trained all of my workers to five-star, and everything was great. No litter, no destroyed benches. There was nothing different than any other day. But I got up this morning after leaving the cash to build overnight, and i found I was losing money at an alarming rate, and the guest number had dwindled. Again, I had been running this zoo for a couple weeks in just this way, except for the new stuff i was adding to it, and I made share to match the biomes and continent to my animals.

I was averaging about 3000 guests, with my elephants and a couple of other animals, and a lot of designing. I was charging about $50 per adult, with absolutely no issue for a long time. Then suddenly, it all began tanking. Immediately. For no reason at all. Some will say that my ticket prices were too expensive, but again, I'd been running this exact setup for weeks, and I always averaged about 2500 guests.

My theories are that once I had gotten to a certain cash level, my zoo became more difficult to maintain cash-wise? There is no other reason for it, because nothing had changed from the previous week to this morning -- except for my designing. Work zones were great. Buildings were adequately spread out. Caretakers were routed along strings of ATM machines in a separate zone so there was no litter at all in my game.

So can someone PLEASE tell me what happened. I would be grateful. Feel free to ask questions. Thanks in advance.

Malibu Man

[grampers62]

The first thing to do is open the finance tab of the zoo overview to get an idea of where the funds are going to and coming from.
Sudden loss of income can be difficult to determine but expenses are quite clear and can be dealt with in some way.
It does seem that a franchise zoo that is stagnant, Hasn't changed for a while, can indeed lose some guest draw but that usually is so small it really isn't noticed.

[swskydancer]

I agree with grampers62 to check your finance tab but have a couple of thoughts that might help. It stood out to me that you hired a dozen each of vets and mechanics and have them all trained to the five star level. If you've only got a few habitats, it sounds like you could fire some staff now that you have completed all research and then hire new, as needed. That would reduce salary outlay.

You also mentioned that you don't have any vendors, which indicates you don't have any shops. Guests need souvenirs, drink and food availability to remain happy. I often see guests just entering zoos who are hungry and/or thirsty who want food or drink before viewing any habitats. It would seem you could add at least one drink, food and a souvenir or info shop to help. You can check guests thoughts to see what is the most pressing need to keep them happy. It probably wouldn't hurt to start a marketing campaign to attract guests to the park, if you haven't done so.

To help with income you can also add a couple of exhibits and sell excess critters. Some of them breed rapidly and some of them sell for exorbitant amounts of money, lol. The zoo ticket price is also important. Check the thoughts of entering guests and adjust based on what you see. You want them to be thinking that the zoo price is fair. I had a zoo the other day that started tanking after a false escaped animal notice. Suddenly the guests were thinking tickets were overpriced. All I had to do was reduce the cost by a dollar to get it turned around again.

Without having played the zoo, I'm not sure any of us can tell you for sure why this happened. We can only point you towards using the zoo overview information to get the zoo back to profitability.

[Varick]

I suspect the elephants opened a Swiss bank account.... :)

[Jaggid Edje]

Elephants are expensive to feed....did you start to accumulate more and more elephants in your trade center over time, perhaps?

Regardless, @Grampers62 has it right. Your finance tab has the answers.

Regarding the ticket price, even with no change to what exhibits and habitats you have, the guest's tolerance of the entry price will fluctuate based on the specifics of the animals you have in those habitats and the overall rating of the zoo.

I have many zoos that I've operated without changes for 100's of game years, and I assure you there is no game code that makes changes just because the zoo is getting older.

[swskydancer]

LOL, Varick! When "zoos give you lemons, make lemonade, or simply inject humor".

[johnthepatriot]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

Elephants are expensive to feed....did you start to accumulate more and more elephants in your trade center over time, perhaps?

Animals accumulate in the trade center overnight without a player taking them out of the habitats and putting them in the trade center?

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by johnthepatriot:

Animals accumulate in the trade center overnight without a player taking them out of the habitats and putting them in the trade center?

NOTHING happens overnight without the player actually being in the game playing...which means that's not when whatever caused this issue even happened. So exactly what is your point?

The simple fact is that feeding costs are the first thing I'd consider looking at in a zoo centered around one of the most expensive to feed animals in the game if it suddenly became unprofitable.
Particularly when he also said ticket prices had a shift. One of the things that can cause a shift down in viable ticket price is having animals mature and get removed from a habitat. Animals maturing also increases the cost to feed them. So it certainly seems worth taking a look at that.

[Malibu Man]

There are some great answers here. I should clarify a few things. I said I had about 20 mechanics and vets, but I didn't clarify that this was just to get all of my research out of the way and to have access to all workshop content. Once I'd accomplished this, all of them were fired. And I did it when I had a lot of cash, because I knew that their salaries wouldn't hurt me all that much. The actual number of workers were about two of each staff member, for running of the zoo.

So what I did was just fired everyone, and deleted every single building I could, while maintaining the elephant habitat. Then I hired the bare minimum to run the elephant habitat. By the way, I chose the elephants when I had enough money because taking care of them was always negligible compared to guests visiting, meaning I always made money, regardless. I routinely had an average of about 1200-2000 guests, which easily outpaced elephant care costs. Also, elephants have a long lifespan, so I could leave the game running overnight, and not worry about waking up the next morning with an empty habitat.

But despite going to the extreme of deleting every building and firing the staff, I was still losing money. The guests weren't coming. And I knew it wasn't the elephants. Then I figured it out.

I'd built my entrance away from the default building. I hate that building, and in franchise mode you can't do anything with it, or delete it. So I built my entrance on the opposite side of the game area. I spent a lot of time designing the entrance, bit it is still only temporary. Anyway, I had also placed my guest spawn plates on the extreme left and right of the entrance, all the way down to the ends, and ran gridded paths to my fancy entrance. Why? Because I wanted the impression that the guests were arriving from "somewhere else", I didn't want the spawn plates anywhere near my entrance to the building. So I put them at the extreme left and right of my entrance, and my guests would have to walk all the way from the left and right of the game square to get to the entrance to the zoo.

In the beginning this worked great. I was averaging about 2000 guests and I was earning a good income. I mean, I had $47 million at this point. But as I have said earlier, one morning I woke up and I was losing a lot of money. I didn't care, I had plenty to spare, but I had to find the problem and to fix it. As it turns out, for some reason the long walk to the entrance was discouraging my guests. Once I had moved the spawn plates to the actual entrance to the zoo, the problem stopped. I tested this theory twice, and the result was the same. Why it was working in the beginning I have no idea, but now I can't have such a long distance for my guests to walk to the entrance to my zoo.

And I notice that i lose money sporadically. If I do, I delete the shops and the vendors and kill off any unnecessary expenses that I can. Once I'm earning money again, I plop down shops again. I think this is only because I am focusing more on designing of the landscape than introducing more animals. Now I am taking care of elephants and west African lions. I average about 1500 guests at all times. I keep my staff to the bare minimum.

I now have $53 million and about 100,000 CC. Designing the zoo while the zoo is open is no issue. The elephants provide halfway decent CC, but the lions are great. I breed the best, and store them in my trade, then I breed those with non-family others of high genealogy (this is now during this game, during the running of the zoo). I breed the best and then sell them in trade for about 3000-4000 CC. The 100% all the way down I sell for about 7000 and sometimes 10,000. It's rare that I get such high prices, but that's okay, because that just means that when their time runs out for trading, I just use them to breed more high cost lions.

Thanks for all of your comments and suggestions. You guys are great. I know who to come to when I have any other questions. Feel free to ask anything you wish of me, and I appreciate your time and patience.

Malibu Man

[Jaggid Edje]

Was there a game update overnight too or something? They do tend to make tweaks to the guest pathing AI in a lot of updates without really mentioning it in patch notes. It's just odd that suddenly the visitors changed their behaviour in that respect if there was no update.

But then, visitors often behave oddly in the game...

[swskydancer]

@Malibu Man, I'm glad you've got it sorted out and am also glad that you took the time to let us know what was happening. Some players ask questions, then get their issue fixed but forget to come back to the forums with an update. When it's a case like yours where you figured it out yourself, it's beneficial to others to know what happened, since nothing that was being suggested was a solution to the cause. You've already helped others with your post for an area to look at, with a sudden profit drop, so thank you.

Like @Jaggid Edje, I'm also curious as to whether or not it's possible a game update installed overnight. It does seem like updates often contain what is intended to be helpful pathing tweaks that might have affected guest's behavior. LOL, also agree that guest behavior is sometimes just odd.

[Malibu Man]

Originally posted by swskydancer:

@Malibu Man, I'm glad you've got it sorted out and am also glad that you took the time to let us know what was happening. Some players ask questions, then get their issue fixed but forget to come back to the forums with an update. When it's a case like yours where you figured it out yourself, it's beneficial to others to know what happened, since nothing that was being suggested was a solution to the cause. You've already helped others with your post for an area to look at, with a sudden profit drop, so thank you.

Like @Jaggid Edje, I'm also curious as to whether or not it's possible a game update installed overnight. It does seem like updates often contain what is intended to be helpful pathing tweaks that might have affected guest's behavior. LOL, also agree that guest behavior is sometimes just odd.

[Malibu Man]

Originally posted by Malibu Man:

Originally posted by swskydancer:

@Malibu Man, I'm glad you've got it sorted out and am also glad that you took the time to let us know what was happening. Some players ask questions, then get their issue fixed but forget to come back to the forums with an update. When it's a case like yours where you figured it out yourself, it's beneficial to others to know what happened, since nothing that was being suggested was a solution to the cause. You've already helped others with your post for an area to look at, with a sudden profit drop, so thank you.

Like @Jaggid Edje, I'm also curious as to whether or not it's possible a game update installed overnight. It does seem like updates often contain what is intended to be helpful pathing tweaks that might have affected guest's behavior. LOL, also agree that guest behavior is sometimes just odd.

It was interesting. I would have thought people would have been more interested in how the hell I have $53 million and 100,000 CC. Lol. And this zoo MAY be three weeks old. Lol. I would suggest that anyone take a few suggests. I first created a single habitat for lions. And just kept flipping them over and over. If they inbred, it didn’t matter, it was still something. And I forgo the hard shelter. You aren’t penalized or protested for not having one. Get about 30,000 CC. Then destroy the zoo and build a zoo with elephants. That’s it. Nothing else. And just keep collecting the money. It’s cyclical, I guess. But now I can build and tweak and improve with the zoo still open without having to worry about anything. I still make CC and cash. Non-stop.

One other thing I do is put my lion cubs in the trade building if they have high green marks. I don’t worry about inbreeding because I have so many high green lions in there that I only need to get a single male from FRONTIER every so often. And I keep breeding 100% greens, and then selling them in the trade for about 2000-3000. Sometimes higher just for kicks. If no one buys then, it doesn’t matter, because I’ll eventually need them anyway.

I figure I’ll have about $100 million in a week. And maybe about 150,000 CC in two weeks. Then I’ll relax and really start not worrying about anything but detail in my zoo. Right now I design, but not to the level I want to. It’s a time consuming thing, the way I do it. I like detail. And I want to make sure I have a bottomless resource with which to do it.

Not to mention I still have the CC when I start a new zoo.

[NanoGrrl]

Well, there's clearly more than one way to skin the Franchise elephant! I've been able to design to my heart's content once I got around $1M, more or less, with about 25K CC, and the zoos have been self-sustaining and very ...normal? ...in set up! XD Like, a variety of animals and exhibits that churn out sellable babies, one ride system, bunch o' vendors, the usual. I just conservatively managed the zoo until it really got rolling, and then I could fiddle about as I liked afterwards. Most of my dozen or so zoos are like this.

I did have one very profitable zoo go toes-up on me very mysteriously, and I believe it was after an update, like 9.x or something. When you get the zoo to certain places--like insanely profitable--you may hit programming walls that just nobody else gets to! Or at least that we know of, as it's really rare. Or under-reported.

I gotta say, the Elephant and Lion Preserve sounds like the OP has got some serious chops for tweaking this game to its limits. Isn't it cool that we can play it so many different ways?!

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by Malibu Man:

It was interesting. I would have thought people would have been more interested in how the hell I have $53 million and 100,000 CC. Lol.

I'm going to guess you haven't been playing very long if you thought folks would really react to that. I can make over 100,000 CC a day without really trying and any well designed zoo easily brings in a lot of $.

[Varick]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

Originally posted by Malibu Man:

It was interesting. I would have thought people would have been more interested in how the hell I have $53 million and 100,000 CC. Lol.

I'm going to guess you haven't been playing very long if you thought folks would really react to that. I can make over 100,000 CC a day without really trying and any well designed zoo easily brings in a lot of $.

Very true Jaggid Edje. :)