First of all: Some of the advice in this thread is plain wrong. A fear rating of 5 is great as most people will like the coaster but the effect on excitement is pretty low unless your fear ramps up to levels of >~8 or <~2. If it stays between those two values it won't impact excitement a lot. Fear doesn't go up if you are close to scenery, pathways, other coasters or terrain. (i know this is not realistic but it could be abused EASILY by just placing terrain anywhere a bit of fear is needed <.<) Scenery rating (the on in the results category) doesn't have ANY impact on excitement. It does change how much guests want to pay though! If you compare a coaster without scenery and a coaster which "very high" scenery rating you can often ramp up the price by at least 50%. Queue scenery on the other hand has a high impact on how likely it is for guests to queue for the ride but doesn't affect the ticket prices as much as coaster scenery does. (you can still get a few more bucks per ticket with a 100% queue scenery in most circumstances though)
You have to focus on the things the coaster you selected is made for! A wooden coaster is not made for lateral forces for example and hence you need to avoid sharp turns and use 30°-60° banking depending on the size of curves and the speed of your train. If you don't know which kind of elements will be good for the coastertype you selected you can always use the live data of the lateral, vertical and forward g-forces to see which one creates most fear, most excitement and most nausea and then balance your coaster around it. As someone else already said: You can't build your inverted like your giga or hypercoaster (equalizer focuses on those things and that's why the way you built it means good values - if you did inverts and sharp curves instead like you would with many other coasters it would get horrible values!) If you build a coaster which focuses on inverts and spins and build huge drops and unbanked turns instead of inverts and medium speed helixes then your guests will hate it. And don't forget that most family coasters will create higher excitement at lower nausea and fear values than the adult/teen only coasters because kids don't want too much fear and nausea while especially teens love high nausea and fear rates. (this is true in real life, too - some types of coasters are MADE to be not as scary and nausea inducing to allow younger audiences to enjoy them) Some coasters are even made to have high fear and nausea combined with high excitement because there are people who actually like to feel dizzy. If you pick one of those coaster types you obviously won't be able to keep fear below 6. Some guests won't visit coasters with low nausea and green fear numbers because they are not hardcore enough for them! You need to realise that a high fear/nausea rating doesn't mean the coaster is bad - it just means it is better for a specialized audience. (if you have many teens in your park for example due to ad campaigns) Guests in your park will all have different values for that, too. You can select a guest and read it for yourself by hovering over nausea or fear preferences. For example some might only drive coasters with 4-7 nausea and 7-9 fear. --> High fear and nausea are not always bad! Some others may even want fear to be BELOW 2 (mostly family groups but as in real life some adult and teen groups prefer rides which are not scary) Fear at 5 just means that most people will like it. (as most of those from x to y rating values include 5 - 1.7-5.2 or 4.6-7.9 for example) It means if you have 33% of each guest type (adults, teens, families) you will have the highest number of people who want to ride it at 5 fear. If you FOCUS on just two or even just one type of guest a fear of above 7 or below 4 could be the perfect value instead! Same for nausea - teen groups often like to have HIGH nausea above 3 which the game says wouldn't be a green value. That's because having 33% of each guesttype would mean that the largest portion of people will prefer nausea below 3. It doesn't mean EVERYONE likes low nausea. The only thing everyone likes is excitement. The trick is to always find the perfect fear to excitement ratio for the type of coaster you are building with! That way all your coasters will have 7+ excitement but all of them will have different values for fear and nausea depending on their type and the audience you build them for. Don't forget that some coasters might have nausea and fear drop faster than excitement with specific g-forces while others might be pretty hard to get down after they reach a high value and will only slowly degrade in fear and nausea.
The seats of the coaster are the main culprit in real life when it comes to g-forces preferences btw. Most inverted will break your shoulders when you have a large drop with a steep curve at the bottom. [yesnod] That's why reallife coasters designs highly depend on the coastertype and seats used for it! Your coaster is just not realistic at all because noone would use that type of coaster with that design. The design needs to be different for it to gain great values in the game and this is realistic as your design would be horrible in real life. (unless you changed the coaster type due to other seats etc.) The way you design coasters is perfect for hyper, giga and wooden coasters - that's why you think that those would be easy to create. As I said - I don't have issues to get good values for any of the coasters.
If you use the correct coastertype to recreate reallife coasters they generally have great values, too. [yesnod] A well made recreation of the Goliath from Six Flags Magic Mountain I saw had 7 excitement and 4.7 fear. And it was built like the real life counterpart, including breaks. (it didn't slow down as much as the real one at the breaks though)
And to answer your last question:
Why should I build long coasters?
PRO
1. If you have two rides with the exact same values in fear/nausea/excitement but one takes 30s to finish and one takes 60s then you will be able to increase the ticket price of the longer coaster to a higher value compared to the short coaster. (we are talking about time here, but a longer distance to travel normally means more time for the ride to drive around the track) --> money
2. The park rating goes up higher with the more expensive ride if both rides have the same excitement/fear/nausea values (and more expensive mostly means longer). --> park rating (which means more guests in your park)
3. If you build your long coasters in a clever way to have no stopping times at block sections while having enough trains to always have one train refill at the station but no trains waiting you will earn more money per time with it as the running cost doesn't go up as much as the extra cash from tickets you earn by having trains filled nonestop without pauses. --> even more money if you combine it with the higher ticket costs from point 1
4. Less rides/coasters to check for your engineers. --> you can hire less engineers
(5. If you are playing sandbox long rides are more fun to do onrides in as you can use a lot more triggers and scenery compared to a small ride)
CONTRA
1. You need to have a lot of money to build a large coaster and hence you might just not have the money to finish it. In your early game you might just not be able to build one. --> can't build a huge one early in the game
2. Breakdowns are a lot worse when you have many trains running. As far as I've seen there are no break failures right now though. That means this could be ignored. But it still means MORE people waiting in the track and loosing their funlevel fast. --> if a ride breaks down a lot more guests will be angry compared to a small coaster or ride breaking and your income might crash during that time
3. Guests might have to wait too long in the queus if you only have a few large rides compared to many small ones --> MIGHT have a negative impact on your guests happiness (but it is mostly countered by having a longer ride time and hence a longer time of 100% happiness)
4. A lot harder to build if you go for blocksections and additional lifts. And if you don't time them right you might end up destroying your scores. You need to completely avoid any waiting times while always having a train refilled at your station. If you take the easy route and instead build a large station to have more trains without block sections and lifts you will increase your running cost A LOT. --> it is hard to time block sections and lifts
5. Due to the test system not sending trains nonstop and instead just sending as many trains as there would normally be it can be time consuming to wait for the real time testresults each time you change something --> until they finally fix the test system to spawn infinite trains it can be very time consuming to check your current excitement/fear/nausea values if your coaster reaches a certain length
Long coasters have a better cost/profit ratio compared to short coasters and rides. But they are timeconsuming to create and it can be hard to time the different block sections and lifts in a way which doesn't create waiting times while keeping an eye on good excitement/fear/nausea values at the same time. But the main issue is their initial cost. In most scenarios you can't afford anything which costs more than 10.000 and after you reach a point to finally build something that costs 15.000 or more you will most likely already have a great income. But in scenarios with the ability to take loans those large coasters can create enough income to get rid of all money problems. Monolith takes less than 30 minutes to complete if you prebuild a huge coaster and place it at the start by taking loans and place some scenery to increase the queue and ride scenery rating. I managed to gain more than 4000 monthly profit in the second month by doing that on monolith before unpausing the game. [rolleyes]
If you use the live data for g-force and other values it is rather easy to create a coaster with great values. Take the stingray coaster I created as an example. I just tried out which kind of movement works best to gain good values. But you could use the heatmaps instead for lateral/vertical/forward g-forces and compare them to excitement, nausea and fear heatmaps to find out which values work well for it. That way you can focus your efforts to create those kinds of g-forces and to avoid the "bad" g-forces for the type of coaster you picked. You will find out that circlemovement combined with consistent inverts will work well. (basically a horizontal helix going in circles and changing direction from time to time to be less repetitive) And you want to keep the forward g-forces low. (--> no long and steep drops)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=808347986
It's the first stingray coaster I created and it ended up as the stingray coaster with the best values in the workshop right now. Many people seem to be like you and just think that they could follow the same build pattern of a hyper, giga, dive or wooden coaster. [rolleyes]
If you use the live data, think logical and know the basics of physics and g-forces you shouldn't have ANY trouble figuring out how to build ANY of the coasters by just trying out all different possibilities for banking, curves, loopings, other inverts and drops - all at different speeds.
The coaster above is just an example for the stingray. You can easily achieve values like those with all caosters. (unless they are coasters which specialize in high or low fear/nausea - those have their highest excitement/fear and excitement/nausea ratios at different than the green values and might drop in excitement heavily if they are not within those fear and nausea values --> they will still easily reach 7+ excitement but do so at yellow levels of nausea, fear or both)
This is still a game though and hence doesn't reflect the g-forces and the nausea/fear/excitement of real life coasters perfectly. The values are close to reallife with some of the coastertypes and further away from real life values with others. But all of it still follows logical rules which makes it easy to create great coasters if you understand how g-forces would feel in reallife. Some people don't even use banking for curves. Most coasters (there are some exceptions) are not made for lateral forces and hence will have bad values if you don't bank curves accordingly. This game might encourage ridiculous designs but it works great with realistic ones, too!
