Yeah for some strange reason frontier thinks its a step in the right direction to make „simulation“ and guests more realistic. In fact it just decreased guest numbers compared to how many rides you have. Nothing realistic about that tbh. I have about 20 attractions in my park, still cant hit more than 8k guests so at least 2 of my main coasters always have empty queues. Realy dont understand these design decisions.
Uhm. Yes and no. I would say it is realistic. Before the guest count was a bit crazy, especially in the lower numbers, while changes in the higher numbers are smaller the impact is there.
The impact factor is parkrating.
The most hindering number is unique attractions, at top numbers probably Park Reputation, cause a stable 5.0 is hard to achieve.
To get the 5 Star rating in unique attractions you need 25 attractions.
So let's take a look at the real world: Phantasialand has 30 Attractions, Europapark 100 Attractions according to Wikipedia.
While Europapark roughly pulls 15-20k guests / day, phantasialand seems to pull 6-10k guests per day. (these numbers are hugely inaccurate since i only got a few numbers and it was attendence by year, which i roughly divided by 300).
So from a realistic standpoint i feel it is corect.*
For Queues, etc. here it gets messy, because the game doesn't run in real time, but it also does. Many things are calculated in gametime and should be commondated to that, but the coaster cycle actually doesn't, but it is not realistic either since dispatches are way too fast comparing to real time.
Now let's run some maths: 18 minutes are roughly 1,5 hours. (=one game hour= 12 minutes). This are queuetimes probably reserved for your one-two top dogs. So now let's queue your topdogs: a 20 seat coaster where you dispatch a train every 30 seconds. 18*2*20=720 * 2. Now you have 1440 guests basically trapped in your queuelines.
Now let us go to the majority of guests: Most crowded areas in most parks are probably the food areas and normal paths, so let us populate them: 30-40%.
3000-4000 + 1440 guests are gone: so know you have 5000 guests gone. And 23 rides to go. How do you disperse them? evenly? this leaves us 220 guests per queue. (which isn't that much, especially if you are left with some coasters and then you need to keep in mind, if one ride has a more peeps in the queue it gets subtracted from your main queues) not from the 30-40% traversing.
The major issue is, that most attratcions are capped on the prestige and it is somewhat hard to get a decent ride hierachy (Main attractions = 2, Support cast 4-8, Filler = 16), but also you need to plan your park accordingly: Having more than 2 Maincoasters is pretty unrealistic , and you need to plan your queue lengths accordingly.
Gamedesign
Balancing the game is hard, not for the game itself, but for the playerbase. We have the normal player, who probably struggles a bit with scenery rating and we have the builders, who struggle with the ceiling of the scenery rating. So if you raise the scenery expectations (making it harder for builders to reach the ceiling) you kill the casual players, people who doesn't want to spend more than 20 hours with their park. So yeah, one way or the other you punish one your playerbases and the skill gap is pretty huge.
Tl;DR: The new system is way more better and realistic than the old system. It is a much needed change for the management and makes small parks and expected crowds way more realistic. 5-6 Rides shouldn't pull that much of a crowd. Also balancing your own park is important, the tea cup ride is needed as much as your top dog coaster. So yes, all in all this was a right step in the direction of park management, though there are still a few steps to be done.
* yes, there is small asteriks, since waterparks are part of the game: they also need to be accounted for and also we have a lack of small attractions in the game. Somewhere down the road, i think we should get a scenario editor like pc1, where you can adjust a bit those things.
