I played 10 hours of challenge mode (before the latest patch) and got a park to 5 stars on medium difficulty. Here's some feedback based on that.
I'll start with the staff. First of all the overview that lets you see what different staff types are doing (how many are working/resting/idle) is really helpful for managing staff amounts in your park so that you don't have too few or too many of any staff type. Really good addition.
Another addition I liked were staff thoughts, mainly telling you how far they need to go to get to their workplace from the breakroom. Very helpful when designing an efficient park.
On the topic of breakrooms, I have been asking for such a feature for a while. They fit the game quite well and let you distribute your staff across the park much better than previously. Since staff just goes between work and break rooms. By having breakrooms evenly distributed across the park you can help parks efficiency.
Somewhat related are the shorter treatment times for animals, they no longer spend half their life in the quarantine bay when they get the flu. It makes the gameplay much smoother and diseases requiring quarantine are less punishing while still engaging and fun.
I'll also insert that the new plants look great, keep em coming.
When it comes to the new loading bays I was quite sceptical at first, I was mainly worried that it would be an annoying system that would add too much micro management. I have to say I wrong. In the early game you engage with them a decent amount, but it's done in a way that simply adds a bit more management in a very manageable way. The system didn't feel overwhelming and the game gives you enough down time to engage with it. In the late game you can just get 2 loading bays and send them to get all resources for 12 months and just not care much. Not sure if that is intentional but it feels like a good end game for the system. Where you do more other things in the park but don't have to worry as much about the loading bays
#U17 Challenge mode testing feedback.
soft dawn
Basically evening out the gameplay loop.
One thing I am not sure is intentional with the loading bay is that they have seemingly infinite capacity. But since you end up having only a few loading bays you still need storage to distribute resources around the park.
Before I get to my last point, that being money I will quickly go over completion. I still with there was a better way to see what you do and don't have in the park, mainly I think the nursery menu should show how many individuals of each species you have in the park. Just a small number under their portrait. That would make it much easier to track which species you have in the park and avoid maybe accidentally making duplicate exhibits. And maybe having a filter in the excavations menu that only shows you digsites you haven't completed yet would be helpful too. Especially in the large digsite clusters in North America and Eastern Asia it's easy to overlook a digsite you have yet to explore or fully dig out. That would especially helpful when attempting an all species park.
And now comes the money. Especially towards the start of the game but it kept on happening into the midgame I kept going into negative balance. Mainly at the start of the month, maybe it's my playstyle as I try to keep growing the park which causes me to float around 0. So it might be my fault for expanding the park any chance I get. One thing that I foung especially annoying was the notification that a science team cannot continue their project because they don't have the money for it. It's not a bad notification but I only need it once, currently you get a new of these notifications every second or so and it absolutely floods the notifications board preventing you from seeing other important notifications. It also felt like income happened in burst, with periods of low income interrupted by periods of high income. Not sure what that was all about.
I just remember diseases. Overall on top of treatment being faster, I also like that the high level diseases can't happen immediately when starting a park, making diseases challenging and requiring quick responses and researching any new disease that shows up but it isn't impossible to save your animals. I had very few close calls and no animals died. So that felt nice.
If you want any specific feedback or some elaboration on my feedback feel free to ask.