Any tips for managing money?
I seem to be really bad at managing my money. Things go really well for a while and then often times when I build a new habitat, I still have a lot of money, but then my cash flow starts falling drastically. I can go from having like $80,000 to -$10,000 so fast.
I try sitting up shops and donation bins and vending machines and education places and everything, I raise praises, and yet it still happens. I don't understand.
What am I doing wrong?
16 Replies
If this is franchise then your problem may be with staff costs or food costs having big animals such as cats and meat eaters it can cost a lot during feeding times, unhappy guests may not be willing to spend money. Things to try is set up shops at lower prices at the start and always make sure the price of tickets make the guests say fair price to maximise money .
^^ agreed. and even habitat sizes could be playing a part
Yeah that makes sense. Having wolves and bears and leopards and crocodiles at the beginning might be part of the issue.
uh…
definitely
😭
i recommend starting with ungulates or birds
even warthog or peccary
anything but carnivore
honestly
I was just going with whatever animals the game let me have.
yeah that’s fair! i recommend looking at the zoopedia and getting a decent sized herd of a type of ungulate
they’ll breed pretty good too
i hope i didn’t sound rude in my first response!
i just reread it and realized it didn’t look the best😭
I didn't think about how meat is more expensive than plant food
yep! and size of the animal is also factored in
if you wanted a carnivore i’d get something smaller
but i definitely recommend my original advice!
Probably not wolves and big cats and bears and crocodiles then.
Yeah having Bison was part of the problem then.
It's the Canada level so the animal choices aren't great.
Best animal to begin with depends of the persons, but Meerkats (with Sulcata Tortoises added later) are one of the best money makers. Good appeal, small habitat, cheap to feed.
Late to the party - but having exhibit animals and auto-selling their population can be a huge money maker. Butterflies especially.
Selling them manually is more money-effective, but really annoying in a large zoo. So yeah, auto-sell is certainly better!
Why is it more effective?
I'm very new to this game and I'm still on the Maple Leaf Wildlife Park level in Franchise.
I've restarted it 3 times because I kept going super broke. So I've been working a lot on figuring out how to balance my money so that doesn't happen.
Right now I have over $100,000. So it's going a lot better.
I might just go until I get a gold star and then I'll move on
Then again. I unlocked a lot of new animals that I'd like to put in the zoo.
I want to build a savanna habitat with an overlook for giraffes and zebras
I figured something else out.
It helps to keep an eye on the cash flow and making sure to balance everything out so your income is higher than your expenses so that the cash flow is going up not down. That's helpful to know if you're actually making a profit or losing money.
This is helpful for real life, I gotta be honest. I'm terrible at money management irl too.
I also figured out that you don't need so many employees. They are way more productive than I thought, so I was paying an exorbitant amount of money on my staff.
That turned out to be my biggest problem
I had like 2 or 3 of each kind of staff member per habitat and I had them all assigned to a work zone each dedicated to a habitat.
That's way too much many and turns out that the work stations aren't very helpful. It's much more productive to just let your employees go where they are needed.
So yeah. I had to fire more than half of my staff. Oopsie poopsie
oh yeah you can use 1 staff for like 3 habitats
especially if you train the staff up
You have a limit of earned money if you do it with auto-sell. That limit doesn't exist if you do it manually.
Yeah, I forget that this game is not realistic.