Forgive me if this has been mentioned already but park management wise it would be really good to have some sort of management system for the shops where you can either select the products they sell and the quality of the produce they sell, I've seen in other games you can set the food quality but I'd love something a bit more indepth than just low, med high quality items ... perhaps make it so you have to work your way up somehow to the higher end items?? I don't know exactly how it would work but it would great to have something that you have to really work for instead of just plopping a shop down and that's it. [big grin]
Shop Management Depth
- Thread starter HunterSThompson
- Start date
This doesn't really interest me, I would prefer different shops that are higher or lower quality levels i.e. burger bar vs steak house.
I think the game will have enough to do without worrying about merchandising this is a theme park sim not a retail store sim after all.
I think the game will have enough to do without worrying about merchandising this is a theme park sim not a retail store sim after all.
Couldn't disagree more. The whole point of a tycoon game is a manage things as you play. In order to move forward from the tycoon games of the past, you have to innovate. Being able to change the quality of the food and items sold is moving forward.
For example, there has been a bit of stink caused by cinemas over charging for food, that is pretty generic and low quality, with a £5 mark up. I think that should be reflecting in-game too, if your park has hyper-inflated low quality products, then your guests should be able to reflect that.
I don't think the majority of players want an easy game, easy games get boring. You spend a few days designing a park that looks amazing, then what do you do after that?
The whole point of these games isn't to sit in sandbox, It's play with objectives and scenarios, beat the challenges to then build your amazing parks.
I would really like it, if you could set up a menu for your food stalls. Give us a list of meals to select from. Tell us some basic info about each item (like nutrition value, production cost) and then let us set the price. Potentially also let us set the overall quality for the food stall. Maybe there could also be a trade-off. Provide too few options and people would complain about the lack of choice, provide too many and people would have to wait longer as food stalls would get less efficient.
This seems like a brilliant idea. It would add a lot more depth to the shops to be honest. What would also be good is if you had the till area as it is in the little area but then you could have the items in display & racks you could place to make an actual shop floor that visitors could walk around before going direct to the till or at least look like they could anyways.
Meh, i'm fine with having a general quality and pricing strategy in your park but micro managing individual stores would be an epic waste of time.
surely this is something that could be achieved as a best of both worlds. Most if not all other types of sim games have differing levels of realism
I seem to remember a game (might have been a theme park game - maybe even the original Theme Park) that required the restocking of shops etc. In my opinion it got old and boring really fast and detracted from the game. I'm sure a lot of people really dig it
Not everyone wants an ultra challenging, ultra detailed game all the time. Personally if I put a shop down I don't want to have to take time out of building rides and coasters and designing all the scenery just to have to sped x amount of time restocking shops that I have. that's why I hire staff to do that job for me
Maybe just have different (I'm loathed to use this word...) difficulty levels in game, so at the basic level you don't need to worry about it and at the advanced level you do. Or maybe a check box on gameplay options that will turn on or off the need to restock shops
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what you do after that is re-theme, build new rides that are unlocked through R&D, replace old rides, expand park boundaries, run ad campaigns etc. The objectives that we used to have in previous RTC games were all on the right track and kept you in a park and developing a park for quite a while
One thing I personally don't want to do after spending a few days designing my park is to have to sit there and only have "manage shop stock levels" left to do. I want to monitor what's going on with them of course, but only so I can decide whether the staff member I've hired to manage the shop (inc. restocking etc) is doing a good job, or they need either retraining or the sack
I seem to remember a game (might have been a theme park game - maybe even the original Theme Park) that required the restocking of shops etc. In my opinion it got old and boring really fast and detracted from the game. I'm sure a lot of people really dig it
Not everyone wants an ultra challenging, ultra detailed game all the time. Personally if I put a shop down I don't want to have to take time out of building rides and coasters and designing all the scenery just to have to sped x amount of time restocking shops that I have. that's why I hire staff to do that job for me
Maybe just have different (I'm loathed to use this word...) difficulty levels in game, so at the basic level you don't need to worry about it and at the advanced level you do. Or maybe a check box on gameplay options that will turn on or off the need to restock shops
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what you do after that is re-theme, build new rides that are unlocked through R&D, replace old rides, expand park boundaries, run ad campaigns etc. The objectives that we used to have in previous RTC games were all on the right track and kept you in a park and developing a park for quite a while
One thing I personally don't want to do after spending a few days designing my park is to have to sit there and only have "manage shop stock levels" left to do. I want to monitor what's going on with them of course, but only so I can decide whether the staff member I've hired to manage the shop (inc. restocking etc) is doing a good job, or they need either retraining or the sack
I feel the way it would work and you could look at is like this;
You would have 3 levels of items for say merchandise from the gift store. Within each level there are 3-5 items.
You automatically have Level 1 unlocked at the start of the game and then the R&D team would need to research level 2 & Level 3.
Each level increases the quality of the item and thus can increase the maximum return of the item being sold.
Within the shop menu you can click on each item that you wish to stock with a maximum of 5 different items stocked in one store. With your Market Research team it would indicate what is selling well, what isn't and how visitors feel about prices. With this info you can adjust your sale price and switch locally at each shop what is being sold.
It may be that gifts that are themed and located in the themed area of the park would sell better than in the general park area and thus you want to try and match these up and research one particular theme to maximise profits and then when you add another themed area you research those ones for instance.
It would make the shops more interesting to add some slight micro management but also not be taxing on the casual player. I don't see any benefit of having stocking levels though, you don't need it telling you to order more product as this should be done automatically by the store attendant you hire.
Regards,
Adam
You would have 3 levels of items for say merchandise from the gift store. Within each level there are 3-5 items.
You automatically have Level 1 unlocked at the start of the game and then the R&D team would need to research level 2 & Level 3.
Each level increases the quality of the item and thus can increase the maximum return of the item being sold.
Within the shop menu you can click on each item that you wish to stock with a maximum of 5 different items stocked in one store. With your Market Research team it would indicate what is selling well, what isn't and how visitors feel about prices. With this info you can adjust your sale price and switch locally at each shop what is being sold.
It may be that gifts that are themed and located in the themed area of the park would sell better than in the general park area and thus you want to try and match these up and research one particular theme to maximise profits and then when you add another themed area you research those ones for instance.
It would make the shops more interesting to add some slight micro management but also not be taxing on the casual player. I don't see any benefit of having stocking levels though, you don't need it telling you to order more product as this should be done automatically by the store attendant you hire.
Regards,
Adam
For you it might be an "epic waste of time" but some of us would like this functionality.
I know Frontier did something similar to this in RCT3 with the ability to make the items being sold "higher quality" by adding "extras". You never needed to do this but the game gave you this option. Something like that could be a nice balance between super micro-management and ease-of-use for the casual player.
I don't think anyone wants to restock and collect cash - That's RCT4 Mobile. That's why you employ staff to do restocks. Also no one mentioned anything about restocking anything. What was said is the quality levels of a items needs to be able to be managed in a way that reflects the quality of your company.
Not everyone can start out with amazing quality food, drinks and souvenirs, starting a park shouldn't be super easy, you gotta do things on the cheap for a while. If after you've got a few years on you, and your park is raking in money, but you're still selling low quality food, your parks reputation should reflect it.
It's also a great way to make people learn to budget properly, rather than just buying a certain place that Costs X, out of your Total Money Y. Going all in with amazing quality food, not so great staff, not much of an amusement park because you spent too much in others areas would have consequences, It's a bit of a noob trap too and will help people learn to play differently than all in sandbox.
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It should work the other way round, too. If you put in amazing food stalls at extremely cheap prizes so you barely get away even this should attract more people to your park by the literal "word of mouth" 
Indeed it did, I had the original Theme Park on the Amiga and actually thinking back it was actually ahead of RCT1 in quite a lot of ways. Things like:
- Negotiating staff salaries (trying to get the hands to shake each other before the biscuits run out)
- A stock market and being able to buy shares in other parks (never understood that as a kid though)
- Being able to adjust things like salt in food to make peeps
- Having to restock shops manually (I do remember that being fairly tedious though)
- Being able to balance research priorities with sliders
(I think some of these things might have only been on certain difficulty settings)
RCT3 added some things like being able to give options of toppings on food and things I think?
I think there is a balance between being realistic and tedious though, even on the hardest difficulty setting. Hopefully they will make the base game and scenarios challenging and varied enough that it takes a while to complete them 100% in hard mode.