Pax time issue

[Monarchco]

Train line from Albuquerque to Denver
Even using the fastest vanilla train, and exceeding the automatic speed setting(315 pushed to 345), it takes an hour and 40 minutes to travel.

Pax are expecting to go from Albuquerque to a station CONNECTED to Denver central in an hour and 46 minutes.

So ignoring the connection to a subway line, if the pax even waits for 6 minutes in Albuquerque, then they've exceeded their travel time expectation.

This is insane.

For reference, IRL it takes United an hour and 27 minutes to fly from kabq to kden. And they only have 3 nonstop flights the entire day.

IRL, I wouldn't expect any means of transportation to get me there in under 2 hours(airport security, baggage, boarding, etc). a less than 6 minute margin on the fastest train in the game is absolutely absurd.

[Monarchco]

Additional note.

One of these pax expects to go from Albuquerque to Fort Collins in an hour at 56 minutes.

It takes a train an hour and 40 minutes to go from Albuquerque to Denver.
It takes a train 19 minutes to go from Denver to Fort Collins.
Because both use the fastest train, and Fort Collins is directly north of Denver(if you flew like a bird from ABQ to Ft Collins, Denver would be in the way)....
This means that even if the train picks up the pax as soon as he enters ABQ station, and then there's a train waiting in Denver the second the first train arrives...

The pax is expecting to arrive ***faster than physically possible***
Even the most perfect timing possible, the pax expects to arrive 3 minutes sooner than that. Fix this.

[Weird and Wry]

This is by design. Pax ignore your network when calculating their ideal time. To compensate for this, they are ready to pay an order of magnitude more than real life (so maybe 2x faster time than real life but happy to pay 10x more than real life). This is also not an all or nothing aspect. If you provide a trip which is 2x slower than their ideal time but make them pay "only" 3x or 4x than real life prices they will be happy. Basically pax have very high expectations, but they are also very rich and very forgiving.

[Monarchco]

Originally posted by Weird and Wry:

This is by design. Pax ignore your network when calculating their ideal time. To compensate for this, they are ready to pay an order of magnitude more than real life (so maybe 2x faster time than real life but happy to pay 10x more than real life). This is also not an all or nothing aspect. If you provide a trip which is 2x slower than their ideal time but make them pay "only" 3x or 4x than real life prices they will be happy. Basically pax have very high expectations, but they are also very rich and very forgiving.

How is this being calculated though?
My route is *very* close to as the bird flies, and maintains a speed of 345 the entire route.

Is the time "expectation" an unreal objective simply showing the absolute best possible outcome?
Also perhaps a change in language might be beneficial. As a newcomer to the game I interpreted the "neutral" tooltip as they reach a neutral mood if they exceed EITHER the high price, OR exceed that posted time.
e.g. I interpreted exceeding that "expected" time as failure.

[mattb1212000]

Originally posted by Monarchco:

Originally posted by Weird and Wry:

This is by design. Pax ignore your network when calculating their ideal time. To compensate for this, they are ready to pay an order of magnitude more than real life (so maybe 2x faster time than real life but happy to pay 10x more than real life). This is also not an all or nothing aspect. If you provide a trip which is 2x slower than their ideal time but make them pay "only" 3x or 4x than real life prices they will be happy. Basically pax have very high expectations, but they are also very rich and very forgiving.

How is this being calculated though?
My route is *very* close to as the bird flies, and maintains a speed of 345 the entire route.

Is the time "expectation" an unreal objective simply showing the absolute best possible outcome?
Also perhaps a change in language might be beneficial. As a newcomer to the game I interpreted the "neutral" tooltip as they reach a neutral mood if they exceed EITHER the high price, OR exceed that posted time.
e.g. I interpreted exceeding that "expected" time as failure.

The game basically takes the arrival station and the departure station and finds the distance between them. It is done with a straight line method. The game does not factor in waterways, rivers, roads or any thing else that may cause the line to take longer than a simple point A to point B trip. So the straighter your rail, the faster the train can go and the likelihood of making the expected time increases.

That being said, the odds of making the expected time are close to impossible as you said. That does not mean that you failed if you don't get them there on time, it just means you cant charge them as much. I have one of those near 350 km/hr trains going from Houston to Dallas in my game and I can usually hit the time. This means I can charge the customer about $1000 dollars for the trip and they will not get upset. However, if the trip took longer than the expected time, I would end up with refunds and compensations. To get away with charging large prices, you have to have high speed trains. that go from point A to point B. if you cannot get someone directly to a point on a high speed rail, do not charge them the maximum amount. If you charge them less, they will be fine if the target time is not hit.

So for your game I'd recommend charging close to the full amount on that high speed rail because it is close to the expected time. If you have enough trains to hit that 6 minute wait time, that is an easy $1000+ a trip per passenger. If you are not willing to spend that kind of money on that many trains, just decrease the price and most customers in game wont mind waiting.

[patrickov]

IMHO it would do if Weird and Wry could explain the distance-time-price-satisfaction mechanism more precisely in a manual. He mentioned "real life prices", but even that vary a lot across countries. Rail fare in China, for example, is considerably lower than that in Japan or Great Britain (not including those advance discounts that is).

Meanwhile, even if the "expected time" is more assertive (as many of us believe), I think calculating it through a straight line is not an issue, if the expectation somehow flats out at about 100km/h. Only immensely long and tall mountain ranges like the Himalayas would pose a threat then.