General Transportation Question

[jamie.santavy]

So I've been playing a while and at this point the only part of the game that doesn't make much sense is setting up transportation routes. I've been playing Dollarington I'm struggling to keep visitor numbers up. Hiring limos is easy because you don't have to manage a route, but it doesn't seem like that's enough on it's own, I had about 8 at one point and was still pulling in low visitor numbers.

So how do you guys set up your shuttle routes? I've never felt a noticeable gain from them but so far I've tried direct shuttles where the route is usually 2 stops. I'll set one up for the train, the airport, and hotels throughout the city. The other thing I've tried is picking the furthest point away and setting up three or four stops on the way to the casino. Either way I haven't had much luck, any advice?

[LAURELINAD]

I finished almost all objectives in all maps, and I've never used transportations to my casinos. The key point is buying all available advertisements, after you have enough advertisement you'll never have visitor problem, a lot will come. I agree with you about shuttle route business, it's confusing. But if I know well you should put routes from airports, hotels and other crowdy places.

[jamie.santavy]

Well thanks for the response, right now I've beaten every map but Dollarington but I found I needed to keep back up saves in order to complete a lot of objectives. The inherent flaw in several mission objectives is that they can punish you for being successful and leave you in situations where the only way to complete them is to lets say close down all your entertainment buildings or food / drink vendors before completing your previous objective so your goal becomes manageable, or run your competition out of business.

Dollarington is interesting though, and the game stresses transportation as if it's some kind of hint to success. I noticed from sending my own cheats to rival casinos that the travel time accross town is VERY long. I also remember it saying something about only certain types of visitors are willing to walk that far to your casino. What makes Dollarington so much more difficult is the fact that your side of town has the worst visitors. It wasn't until I started hiring limos that I started to see some delegates, socialites, or high rollers. I had no problem creating a profitable small casino with a couple table games, a large stage, and food / drink offerings but I found over time I started losing visitors per day even with at least 7 limos and 5 shuttles active and I gave up after a while in frustration.

If you keep salaries in control building a solid cash supply in the beginning seems to be very doable. When I try it again I think I'm going to try and save enough money to buy a second location on the other side of town closer to the competing casinos and see if I have any more luck. When it comes to shuttles I'm going to actually look around town instead of the map and try and find the highest concentrated streets (likely where the high star advertising is) and send shuttles there, as well as try and watch some shuttles on their routes to try and figure out if they're actually doing anything.