Try $38 on your Track Rides

[VegasKeVa]

This Game really should be called Planet Track Ride! [wacky]

Right now my park has 7 flat rides, 4 coasters, and 4 track rides, plus 1 log ride.

The 4 track rides (2 magic Katz 2 go Kart) and log ride are together at the farthest point from the park entrance. All had over an hour queue. Meanwhile, I am getting constant popups of 'Guests are thirsty... Guests are Hungry' - yeah - everybody waiting in the track ride lines!

My most frustrating thing is a dinky track ride with an hour wait - specs - 3.5 / 2.17 / 1.23... Meanwhile a coaster almost next to it with 6.58 / 4.86 / 0.94 specs has ZERO people in queue! ZERO!!

So I started playing with the track ride costs. For me the sweet spot was $38. I made the track rides and log flume all $38, and there is a constant, but smaller queue of under 10 minutes to at most 1/2 hour. No more constant "People are thirsty" popups! There are even a few people riding my coaster next door (it's only $10).

Sure, it looks like alot of my guests are leaving after they have ridden 2 of my track rides, but on the up side, profits are up! [happy]

I vote for rebranding and rereleasing the game under the name "Planet Track Ride". If I have to charge people $38 for a track ride just to get them to ride my other rides priced at $5-$10, then yeah, this is honestly Planet Track Ride.

 

[jamesviago]

#PlanetTrackRide.
Interesting.
If you build none, what happens then?

 

[breezerHOG1]

Heres the problem

Scenery for flat rides increases Prestige which causes guests to pay more, but scenery is only counted for the queue of flat rides

Track rides and coaster rides have scenery for the queue AND for the track, but adding scenery to a flat track ride is much easier than adding scenery to a tall coaster. Guests are also currently programmed to be more drawn to simple rides with less fear, just based on the average guest. And since track rides are much slower, they overflow with queue times.

Scenery effects prestige too much, and it doesnt make sense. If I build an Insantiy with 5x default animation sequences it has EFN of 5.5, but setting the animation sequence to only 1x the excitement actually goes up even though prestige goes down. Excitement should not be going up with less sequences and less prestige.

I think the effect that scenery has on rides should be reduced, maybe they could allow scenery to effect flat rides beyond just the queue.

 

[AUS_Twisted]

Flat rides like the Victory are pretty much useless in a park with other flat rides that have prestige of 600 - 1100, highest I could get the Victory with 100% scenery the last time I did a lot of testing was around 350 which is low and price has no effect on whether people will ride it or not even for free (only for the rides that have higher prestige that the guests actually ride)

 

[xnode]

I will have to do some testing, atm I have a duel wooden coaster I based off of six flags american eagle. While my Q has fantastic scenery and some of the ride goes over that, Most if not 80% of the ride goes over nothing but blank land and that rides prestige is off the roof in the 1000's.

I do have a really detailed station and again the Q, but that's it. So the thought here of track rides vs flat and scenery placement will need to be tested more, I don't know if it really has to do with the actual track vs the type of ride. Because again, all my scenery is at the start with 80% or so on blank land. I will provide some screen shot below.

As you can see , only at the start and my stats in general are off the roof, now i don't know about excitement etc, that seems to cator to the actual ride more then the scenery. At least sense building parks that's been my experience.

 

[breezerHOG1]

The game only calculated so much scenery, at a certain point you can keep adding more scenery but you can't raise the rating past 100% and your queue building = 80% already even if you say its "mostly just the queue" its still around the track too

 

[xnode]

Hmm ok, didn't think about it that way, so what is beleived is tracks allow for a higher score due to having basically double the ride count because the track and station are counted and not just a "station" or in this case a "flat ride" ? I get what they are saying, but I don't know a flat ride that will ever be more exciting in real life compared to any flat track ride or coaster. You just get a bigger bang out of them for a different reason. I feel at this point it is almost nit picking.

 

[Coastergenius100]

Addressing the issue that guests will be pay $40 for a track ride, but complain about $25 for a B&M or Intiman big ticket coaster:

I think that guests will only pay that much if its extremely well themed. If its not themed, you can barely get them to even go on it. And this is actually a reflection of reality... unfortunately. Yes, coasters are the only thing that people care about at parks like Six Flags or Cedar Fair, but people seem to flock to Disney, Universal, etc. in larger numbers, will travel for them, and will pay a lot more money. At Disney, people don't even seem to need coasters at all. So a heavily themed water ride with audio, animatronics, and a story will be a bigger draw (if parks charged per ride, could cost more) than an outdoor, mostly non-themed coaster to the general public.

Addressing the issue that coasters will never have lines:

I chalk this mostly up to capacity. If you're whipping through three train operation with 32 people per train, the game isn't going to give you customers fast enough to build up a line. This is even kind of true in real life. You rarely see three train ops with 32 people per train get much more than a 20 minute wait if they hit their blocks. In contrast, flat rides and track rides are inherently going to have limited capacity. I guess if you want longer lines for coasters just have one train ops.

 

[Joël]

Please be aware that the previous post in this thread is from 13/05/2017.

 

[breezerHOG1]

Please be aware that the previous post in this thread is from 13/05/2017.

its still valid though, the devs havent changed the balance on prestige, scenery, or pricing of rides

thats why Coastergenius100 bumped this thread, probably because he was searching for a discussion

but as we all clearly know around here, management balance is not a concern of the devs

 

[Joël]

I did not mention anything regarding the relevance or validity of the necro reply. My reply was merely meant as a notification.

Please do not criticise my post.

 

[Ramm]

I'm happy I live in a country where you pay less than $38 to enjoy an entire day in the entire park.[wacky]

 

[KickAir8p]

its still valid though, the devs havent changed the balance on prestige, scenery, or pricing of rides

thats why Coastergenius100 bumped this thread, probably because he was searching for a discussion

but as we all clearly know around here, management balance is not a concern of the devs

Good point. There are plenty of "more important" issues from this timeframe and earlier still unresolved, and good reason for why track rides rely so heavily on scenery (it's pretty much what they're for), but this still causes problems with gameplay. If the devs don't wanna do anything about it (or can't -- I sometimes wonder if this bug was caused by a ham-handed fix attempt) they should give us the tools to do it ourselves. The Scenario Editor was promoted as giving us access to all aspects of gameplay, but one of the most requested (prestige calculations) was excluded except for a blunt-instrument Easy-Medium-Hard switch.

 

[TheQuixote]

Seems like the solution should be along the lines ( excitement - nausea ) * scenery score = base desirability.

As long as the scenery score doesn't go above 3 ( 1 point for queue , 2 point for track and area ) it should provide some balance between themed track rides and a hard core coaster. It would also mean that themed coasters will be the killer app of the park.

The other problem that I think is related is transportation rides. My guess is to get sims to use transportation they used a quick and dirty solution of just giving transport rides a topped off track scenery score instead of working with a cost vs. the amount of reduced distance to the destination. This leads to some bizarre behavior like sims getting on a train at the entrance, getting off at the next stop and walking back to the entrance and taking the train again. Also, having to get off at the next stop makes them even more useless as transportation. Just kind of a cheap easy money makers.

 

[Coastergenius100]

Seems like the solution should be along the lines ( excitement - nausea ) * scenery score = base desirability.

As long as the scenery score doesn't go above 3 ( 1 point for queue , 2 point for track and area ) it should provide some balance between themed track rides and a hard core coaster. It would also mean that themed coasters will be the killer app of the park.

The other problem that I think is related is transportation rides. My guess is to get sims to use transportation they used a quick and dirty solution of just giving transport rides a topped off track scenery score instead of working with a cost vs. the amount of reduced distance to the destination. This leads to some bizarre behavior like sims getting on a train at the entrance, getting off at the next stop and walking back to the entrance and taking the train again. Also, having to get off at the next stop makes them even more useless as transportation. Just kind of a cheap easy money makers.

Yeah, I'm not sure how far along their AI is. It would be nice if the sims were smart enough to be able to look at a map, see a ride that they want to ride, and make a decision between walking to it, riding rides along the way to ride it, or using public transportation to get to it. I think that the logic problem in PC and RCT is that guests pretty much only think about riding a ride when they pretty much bump into the entrance. It seems like they use the same logic for the transportation rides. They're generally not trying to get somewhere, they're just taking it because they're at the entrance and it looks exciting enough.

 

[AaronTuckwell]

I posted a really long bug report and behaviour analysis on the Bug Forum a few months ago, basically stating that you can achieve 1600 prestige with a track ride with a queue capacity of 8000 guests... This meant that the guest at the back of the queue would take something like 13 hours to process, which given that a guests is designed to only be in the park for 1 1/2 real-life hours creates a serious economy problem for the game. The solution I proposed without requiring a complete hard-wire was having a prestige slider where we can still kit out our flat rides to the max but re-adjust the prestige so that it doesn't cripple our parks...

Essentially, as it sits right now, the Dev's have spent a very long time designing and implementing something very beautiful but ultimately worthless in the game as it is right now.

 

[TheQuixote]

... I think that the logic problem in PC and RCT is that guests pretty much only think about riding a ride when they pretty much bump into the entrance...

From their behavior I'd say they randomly pick a ride, travel there, and then decide if they want to ride it. But I've also seen them ride the same train station over and over while passing a bunch of non themed coasters on the way back to the station. So probably a mixed bag of methods.

My guess as to the problems with transportation rides is path finding and decision making are probably in different threads, so it might be a lot of work to get sims to make ride decisions based on shortest routes.

 

[Coastergenius100]

I think that after playing around with it, I've found that its most practical to spam theming for the queue line for coasters, and anything past 100% doesn't really help obviously. It won't really help the excitement rating, but a great coaster with 100% scenery will put you in the stratosphere for your prestige, people will pay a ton of money, and the capacity of a coaster will make you tons of money. My record so far (without cheats or mods) is 700 customers in a month. This was for a B&M hyper with three 40 person trains, operating with a MCBR, and no stacking. It was in sandbox mode, but it had a 8.50+ excitement and the prestige was in the 1200's. I can't imagine how much money that would have generated in a scenario.

The big challenge in PC (assuming that you're actually playing the game and not just designing coasters for your own purposes) is balancing keeping the ride fast and low to the ground for its duration, and the pragmaticism of needing some lulls to get the three trains running, and also dealing with friction that hits you like a brick towards the end of the ride. A big complain on my part is that the game engine doesn't reward you enough for 4,000+ foot coasters, and rewards you too much for 2,000-3,000 foot rides. You should get extra points for figuring out how to keep it moving 4,000 feet in.

A conclusion on my part is to mostly stick with two train ops, and only go for three if its a coaster with some speed, and you can design it appropriately to minimize the lulls. One thing I found recently as well is that blocks still count even if you decrease the deceleration to 1 m/s, and that will barely touch the speed. And, I may opt to only have one block at the end as well to decrease the lull. Its kind of a cheese, but its a stretch that I use considering how unfair I think it is that guests are so draconian about not accommodating brake runs (after you'd be waiting an hour for a ride in real life, I think its weird that a guest would downgrade a ride for a 5-10 second lull). But I give kudos to the game for appropriately downgrading your ride for screwing up the blocks and/or stacking and leaving riders stuck waiting for the next block or station to clear. That's a fun and interesting challenge to master, and realistic.