Why Is It So Hard To Fail?

[Cody]

So, I've been playing on franchise mode. I'm finding that I always have endless amounts of cash. So far I have 4 animals in my zoo. All have grade 3 food, all staff members (19 of them) are maxed out skill wise, and I still have endless cash coming in.

Is it even possible to fail?

[Captain Callum]

Yes its quite easy to fail, all you need to do is to buy a very expensive to feed animal without the financial support to maintain them. Buy some lions or polar bears for example as a small zoo and you will lose all that profit in an instant.

The more likely one however is hiring too much staff and training them to a level you don't need when you grow your zoo from small to medium size and the problems of maxing out everything will begin, all it takes is one habitat to have welfare issues you can't seem to solve, then it leads to protesters leading to loss of guests and a downwards spiral from there.

[wpegg]

A good example of a failing zoo is the Safari one (Crater Lengths?) on career mode. If you don't do something about the cashflow there it very quickly drains all your money.

If you just make your own zoo, and follow the basics of putting down donation boxes and keeping a halthy ticket price then it's incredibly hard to fail. It's not really the challenge in the game.

[grampers62]

Also, there are three levels of difficulty one may play at. The easy mode is just exactly that, too easy. The medium or default level has some amount of challenge but as we figure out management it too is fairly easy to sort out. The difficult level adds more financial difficulty as well as making guests more difficult to please. The level requires players to have a good understanding of how the management system works and how to keep everyone happy. It can be easy in a well set zoo but it can also be nearly instant failure for a poorly set zoo. At any rate once that hard zoo reaches a certain point it too can be made self sufficient needing only marginal input from the player to correct issues that arise.
In sandbox the difficulty must be selected at the setup of the zoo, although players can change settings to over ride many facets. In franchise it may be changed during the zoo operation through settings.

[Sarsgamer]

Originally posted by wpegg:

A good example of a failing zoo is the Safari one (Crater Lengths?) on career mode. If you don't do something about the cashflow there it very quickly drains all your money.

I was probably 200k negative when I completed it on gold medium. My second try I just bought everything I was going to need asap and just waited and final things needed were bought with CC or something so yea.

Maybe I'd know what I'm supposed to do now, but that one sucked.

[Sarsgamer]

I find it gets harder when or if you try to do large zoos. My first zoo had up to 9600 guests, plenty profitable and it plummeted under 7k and going bankrupt, as I kept expanding, and was still going down, on medium. I switched to easy and was easier, but still couldn't get back up to 9k guests. My guess is that guests wanted to see animal A, animal ZZ and animal EE, which would be in all different areas of the large zoo thus it hurt their happiness, even with a couple rides not enough to satisfy them.

Also if you do get lions and unable to keep up on their food costs you can hold them in your trade center and your money will go right back up. They've almost bankrupted me a couple of times.