Since a new player franchise starts off with barely any CC, the idea was for fledgling zoos to buy a few animals with cash, foster breeding programmes for the endangered ones, and release them for CC. Animals can be listed for sale either for a cash price, or one in CC. It runs on two currencies: money, and conservation credits (CC), which represent your good standing internationally, and which are earned through the release of captive-bred endangered animals. PZ's animal market simulates the way real zoos swap animals, in order to keep gene pools diverse when trying to breed rare species for reintroduction to the wild. You can see my first mesa here, with the staff area in the centre, surrounded by two-tier enclosures, and the public path round the outside. I'm doing a second attempt at my mesas design, but starting a bit slower this time. For anyone who cares by the way, this is my new zoo. I've had to piece this all together from observations, deductions and a few forum posts over the weekend - but I think it makes sense. And I stress "think", because economics is never an exact science, and I'm rubbish at it anyway.
Now, unfortunately, economics has happened to Planet Zoo. But any attempt to simulate an economy risks also simulating economics, which is what we call it when millions of individual, rational decisions act together to create utter madness on a grand scale. It was working just fine when I reviewed the game. The root of the current crisis, as is so often the case when weird metagames emerge from massive multiplayer systems, is Planet Zoo's simulated economy: the animal market, which lets anyone online buy and sell beasts from each other. It's very much a case of Go Pig or Go Home, and here's why.
And you'll be seeing a lot of them, too, because grinding out millions of them is currently the best hope of you've got of getting other animals. Because, for anyone starting a game right now, that's pretty much all you can expect to see in your zoo for a good, long while. Well, warthogs, ostriches and Indian peafowl, to be precise. But, in the game's franchise mode at least, the promise of "build your own zoo, with whatever you like in it" has quietly been phased out for "in the grim darkness of the international animal trade, there is only warthogs". I think it'll be fixed easily enough, possibly even today, and I'm still having fun with it as it is.
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