More Thoughts on Dinogenics

 

1 Triceratops, 3 T-Rexes, 1 Velociraptor

What you see above is a second-place park. I'd gotten the ability to get dinosaurs more easily than my competitors.... and wasted my time getting T-Rexes. See, each unique species of dinosaur you have in your park nets you another three victory points. This subtle but powerful rule allowed my competitor to beat me by a large margin, with less resources. This allowed him to focus on his park more, creating a more balanced experience than my threadbare, if impressive, park.

Also: he was a rotten snake a bit better than me.

Each park is a story. The story of the above park isn't just a failure, but the tale of a start-up that was doomed from the start. When your competitors are making more species more quickly and cheaply than you, and you stumble acrost T-Rex DNA? You clone it. Immediately. Damn the fact that we don't have fences, it's a big island, how bad could it-

Knocked over the Triceratops fencing, you say?

The Triceratops knocked over more fencing, destroyed our state-of-the-art cloning center, and made Timmy Smith (all fatalities in my Dinogenics games are the ten year old Timmy Smith) a bloody jam on the pavement? Which the T-Rex ate with a spoon because surprise T-Rexes are surprisingly cultured?

At least it wasn't the T-Rex that killed him!

You'd think if they had the ability to clone faster than anyone else the company would scrounge up the cheapest dinos they could, right? Nope. It was all about the T-Rexes. And y'know what? It wasn't the worst strategy in the world. Combined with a few other animals they had the most entertaining animals, by the metrics. 

But the rest of the park? That was a different story. Beyond private exhibitions the park only had one hotel and a crummy T-Rex statue. Gotta keep with the theme and all! No efforts were made for improve infrastructure beyond the bare minimum, even after an unexpected infestation drove the few guests they did have off the island. But the park engineers were unfazed; they wanted more T-Rexes.

No one saw the merger coming. The buyout was too good! The other island had better infrastructure, more dinosaurs, and overall better PR. Of course the owners sold out. They didn't care about the art of it all. Philistines.

Every park tells a story. The next one will be as different as the park. 

I love that about this game.