Conny Express train ride pricing

[bullybeef]

Hi all.

I have four Train stations around my park simply for transportation purposes. The game instructs you to charge each station price separately. So I have one station in which guests are queuing (bunching) for the actually queue - demand is high. So naturally, I increase the price for this station to see if it reduces the queue size and ease the burden on this station.

After a month passes I check the earnings for each station in Park Management - all four stations have made the same - my price increase on the one busy station hasn’t been factored in.

Incidentally, all four stations were in profit at around $400 - three stations had a $2 ticket, and the one busy station had a $10 ticket. Plus, the $10 increase to my busy station didn’t alter the queue size.

So, I wondered whether I had to set the same price on all the stations for any increase to be factored into the accounts. So all changed all four stations to $10 a ticket. The month passes and although the queuing on the busy station remains the same, the other three stations are now very quiet. So the monthly accounts now show a loss of $300. A $700 monthly loss.

Why would the instruction and ability to price each station individually not increase the income of separate busy stations - or is this a glitch?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Knightguard1]

Ok, it never said that I had to price stations separately, I have no clue what's going on. Also it's spelt "Connie".

[bullybeef]

http://s1101.photobucket.com/user/bullybeef73/media/Connie%20express%20prices_zpsfktizmie.jpg.html

As displayed in Park Management, it lists each train station pricing separately. I hope that helps. Apologies for the misunderstanding

[bullybeef]

It seems my problem is very different from just the pricing of each train station. The reason I wanted to increase the price of my busy station, was obviously because it was busy. As I mentioned, hundreds of guest were bunching up just before the entrance of the station. I first thought they were queuing to get into the actual queue.

But it seems they are stuck. I increased my queue length by a huge margin, and although many guest enter the queue as normal, there are still hundreds who refuse to join them, they just complain about the size of the queue.

I guess I'll try closing this station down for a month to see if this resolves the problem. If anyone has any ideas it would be appreciated.

[scottd]

You probably have a path error. Try deleting your path and rerout, or at least redo your path. Make sure your exit and queue lines are correctly placed. If a regular path gets placed in the middle of a queue path it can cause major problems.

[bullybeef]

Thanks. Yes I suspect the same. It is strange that although the actual queue still works for some guests, many remain unable to join the queue, and it was this reason why I didn't think the pathing was the issue at first.

A quick search yesterday seems to flag up grid paths as a possible reasons, and this train station is linked directly to a grid 'marquee' path.

My guess is, since I created the grid path, I’ve removed and relayed it, and perhaps the pathfinding screwed up some guests route to the station.

I’ll play around with the pathing and hopefully resolve the problems.

[McDread]

It might be something to do with the train already being full when it arrives at the station, with nobody getting off because they are headed to another further along the track. Have noticed this can be a problem on lines with more than two stations.

[bullybeef]

OK, so I've been playing around with the pathing: separating the the Grid path from the path leading to the entrance of the problem station; closing the station; deleting & reinstalling the station, but it didn't seem to resolve the bunching near the entrance and what seemed to be stuck guests.

Bearing in mind my park is quite compact yet has over 8000 guests, so after much tinkering, including realising I can move the seemingly stuck guests (like you can janitor/staff) who have yet to enter the queue, and ultimately extending the entrance queue to the station to an outrageous length but re-establishing the priority queuing, the bunching has calmed down.

I guess it's just case of massive numbers of guests and when certain guests have decided to go home, they want to use this particular station which takes them to the Park Entrance/Exit. I also presume when you have a full queue and start deleting and reinstalling paths, the despawned guests eventually reappear and remain single-minded to use this station.

However, all this being said, there is still confusion with how the game calculates prices and income for each train station. Like I've mentioned before, I charge $30 (the maximum) for this station to take advantage of it's popularity and to reduce queue size, and my other four stations charge only $2.

Yet, if I view a guest before they enter the busy station, there aren't charge $30 - in fact, they are only charged what money they have left. I haven't found a guest yet who has $30+ left before they enter the queue, but if a guest has a few pennies, that's all they pay.

According to Park Management and Station Overview there's a miscalculation. My $30 station had 332 borders in it's previous month & should have received $9360 at $30 a head, which would’ve covered the costs of all stations even if there were free. But the ride record a $82 loss.

If anyone else noticed discrepancies of ride takings and further help would be appreciated.

[DizTheWarlock]

At least you can get guests to ride your train...I have built two different versions of a transport train and can not get a single guest to go into the que...have looked on many forums and seems to be a problem with most people...Gratz on getting guests to enter your que at all1 :-)

[Time_Child]

Originally posted by DizTheWarlock:

At least you can get guests to ride your train...I have built two different versions of a transport train and can not get a single guest to go into the que...have looked on many forums and seems to be a problem with most people...Gratz on getting guests to enter your que at all1 :-)

The AI for stations is actually one of the more 'realistic' situations in PC. The people in your park need a reasoon to take the transport rides, if you make the area of your second station more appealable and give the peeps a reason to travel there, they will fill up your queu.

[Bandit17]

I have never had an issue getting peeps to use my train.

I do see the same issues the OP is having though. A busy park (about 6k+) will create a blockage at the entrance of the queue to transports even when the queue is empty. I believe it has something to do with balloons. So you could try closing all balloon shops and see if that helps.

What I did was create more stations and add more trains to help spread people out but it adds to the cost of running the transports and you can still get bloackage.

In my new park I kept the population lower (about 5.8k) and used the monorail which due to it's speed is more efficient. I will still get a blockage sometimes but it luckily relieves itself quick enough.

There is also a problem with peeps thinking the queue to my monorail and a couple of my rides is full and complaining about it when all my queues have plenty of room. So there are some bugs and path issues for sure in this game.

[bullybeef]

My reason for creating the stations was because I wanted to try food/shop courts/areas rather than a scattergun approach. And I placed a station/Food court near to rides with high prestige. But this does cause stampedes and a lot of guest to just hang around.

Placing two out of four stations next to plenty of shops creates huge demand, much more than I anticipated, but that has led to other issues.


Since I last posted I have also identified many guests entering the Train Station queues without paying the full ticket price - still haven't understood or solved this problem, and now I've got my Train ride making money, I've stopped checking now.


In order to remedy my stuck guest issue, I closed my park (I did save first). It took six in-game months to reestablish my capacity and I lost the majority of my shop staff, but new employees saved me a fortune on wages, and I was making money quickly again.


It does seem gift shops (Balloons,Hats,Mementos) are overriding the guests' desires over and above more vital desires, like thirst, and ATMs aren't as useful as they perhaps should be.

And guests aren't aware of prices/queue lengths until the arrive at the ride/shop, so they can wander around endlessly without spending a penny. When I realised this, and once I had enough rides, I put an admission price on my park ($40) and made the majority of my rides free.

But this causes High Prestige rides to become overwhelmed, so I charge guests for them - they would queue to get into the queue and bunch around the entrance. I think this is what I was seeing as stuck guests. Obviously, this unruly bunching to get into the queue meant you couldn't see how many guests were there because the all merged together.


The game is playable, but as you play on, glitches do drive up my OCD meter.

[Bandit17]

Originally posted by bullybeef:

Since I last posted I have also identified many guests entering the Train Station queues without paying the full ticket price - still haven't understood or solved this problem, and now I've got my Train ride making money, I've stopped checking now.

It does seem gift shops (Balloons,Hats,Mementos) are overriding the guests' desires over and above more vital desires, like thirst, and ATMs aren't as useful as they perhaps they should be.

The game is playable, but as you play on, glitches do drive up my OCD meter.

You're right the pricing is off sometimes. In my old park my Ironhorse was losing a ton of money even though I was charging $30 a head and had over 3k riders a month. One thing to keep in mind though is that there is operating costs per train and having different stations with different prices can make it tricky to figure out how well they are doing when the profits/losses are all lumped into one number.

Once guests get their gifts though they return back to a "normal" state. I think the problem with thirst is that different guests (kids, teenagers and adults) prefer different drinks and you add in long queue times with peeps standing in line thirsty you'll have some thirst no matter what you do. My beef is why do people throw litter next to empty bins and vomit next to free First Aid stations????

[bullybeef]

I was so perplexed with my issues, I registered to the forum, which is pleasantly objective, and was advised that guests behaviour resets itself every time you reload your save.

I qualified this after seeing guests with balloons in another balloon shop queue buying more - but they still leave with one! Obviously you can make shops more expensive, but because guests don't have prior knowledge of shop prices, even if you sync them, they will wander to each shop looking for a price/queue size that their tolerance will accept, and be constantly unhappy if nothing pleases them, even refusing to use an ATM.

Obviously, it's tough to lose money for an unsolvable problem, but if you manage to make money with these issues, there's not much of a challenge to solve.

I have tonnes of room left and apart from coasters, I've run out of basic rides to add, and apart from foliage, I'm not as creative as I thought.