Good excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings are directly tied in with our getting the best prices for our rides. It also contributes to the reasoning behind the prices we charge for park entrance tickets, and supports higher prices being charged at stalls and facilities. If we can balance these and run a beautifully managed park we’re well on our way towards a good park rating and a park that is profitable.

Park Admission

In a park that requires finance, if the setting for free rides has been flagged and one wants to charge admission to their park, a good formula to begin with for park admission is to charge £25 per 10 attractions in the park (e.g., 5 tracks + 5 flat rides = 10 attractions). If you have a good park rating and there are lots of stalls & facilities present in addition to a great deal of scenery in a variety of themes you might like to start out with £40 or even £50. If many of the tracks follow a good excitement, intensity, and nausea formula, more can be charged for entry into the park. Guests will pay fabulous admission prices to enter a spectacular park that’s totally switched on.

If after you've done the above you notice a lot of people are entering your park at your starting price you may increase what you’re charging by £20 and observe if the park attendance levels out in a few weeks of game time. If the guests are still pressing into your park at that price you can safely put the price up by another £20 and give that a try for another few weeks, and so on.

Do remember that guests won’t enter a park where the admission price is set too high so if after starting out with your estimated admission price you find that no one attends your park then you’ll need to lower your entry price.

How Many Attractions?

In Atari’s Campaign scenarios, if a VIP needs to visit three animal viewing galleries and you’ve built three galleries for the same enclosure, after he has visited each the VIP is satisfied he has visited three galleries, so we can assume that each animal viewing gallery counts as one attraction. Park guests do comment on and notice the condition of animals inside enclosures even if there aren’t any viewing galleries so we can assume that the enclosure itself also counts as an attraction.

Guests occasionally remark how much they enjoyed one of our pool slides in addition to commenting on how “great” or “pool-tastic” our pool is so based on this it would probably be safe to assume that a pool complex which includes three water rides & slides would count as four attractions. So from this we can deduce that a park with

►

one animal enclosure,

►

two animal viewing galleries,

►

one pool complex,

►

two pool complex water rides & slides,

►

two coasters, and

►

two flat rides

holds ten attractions, so giving us a starting figure with which to use above formula to determine our park entrance charge.

The maximum price chargeable for park entry is £100. It’s a good idea early on to find out the average cash per guest so you’d know what the maximum amount is that you could charge for your own park’s admission under any circumstances. For example, if your park has 10 coasters & 10 flat rides it will do no good to follow the formula in the first paragraph above and price park entry at £50 if the average cash per guest is £40. In this example hardly any guests will enter your park because almost everyone who approaches your park entrance won’t have enough cash on hand to pay for park admittance. In this situation you’ll need to strike a balance as to how much income you want from park entry compared to the number of guests you’re not going to get any income from who are turned away at the gate because they can’t pay the price of entry. In such a park you’d need to make the most of your income from stalls, rides (if you may charge for rides), and other attractions.

ATM’s are handy to have just inside the park entrance for those circumstances where the guest has spent nearly all his money to gain entry into your park and has very little money left after that.

EI&N – The Holy Grail

Everyone in the community is fully aware that the main requirement for track building is to increase the excitement rating while moderating intensity and keeping nausea at a minimum. But beyond sketching out our track and experimenting with track parts while building, just what is it that we can do to kick up our track building skills to another level? Let’s explore the three factors that make up EI&N:

Excitement (increases return riders, higher is better)

The excitement level of the track is its dominant statistic. Guests will almost never complain about wanting to get off a very long track that's extremely exciting yet will be more likely to complain about wanting to get off a less exciting track that's shorter.

A handy way to get the excitement up on one ride is to place another ride in addition to buildings & scenery in a coherent variety of themes very near to that ride. Track sections built out over water, near waterfalls, and beneath terrain also add to the ride’s excitement. Paths built near or through areas of the track, turns of 270 degrees or more (tracks that turn over themselves), different areas of track that pass beneath or over each other, tracks built with a large number of special elements, synchronized coaster stations, and a 'dueling' coaster layout are also beneficial.

Slow loops and slow inversions add to the track’s ‘air’ time and to it’s excitement rating but do keep in mind the difference between exciting air time and nauseous air time.

A long track also increases excitement but if your track is too long excitement will decrease while increasing intensity and your guests will become dissatisfied with their ride experience and want to get off the coaster. If you don’t want to shorten such a track you can minimize the amount of time guests spend on your track by making your lift hills faster, and to add speed at the start of, and then brakes to the end of your longer straight sections.

Block brakes should be spaced as evenly as possible about your track or your guests will become dissatisfied with their total track experience if they need to wait in stationary coaster cars for too long in a single spot on your track. For the same reason your trains should leave the station promptly after becoming full.

Riders will pay more to ride a more exciting ride so the excitement level of the ride is the single most important feature in pricing it. The ride’s excitement rating also goes some way towards determining your park admission prices, identifying whether you should take on the expense of promoting it in an advertising campaign, and assessing its suitability for a long queue. Of course, you will remember there should be one entertainer in every long queue that is busy.

Another way to look at the excitement rating is to consider it as the ‘fun’ rating. A track with a low excitement rating has a high boring-ness rating to your guests. The higher a ride's excitement rating the more likely it is that it will become a guest favorite.

Intensity (desirability depends on the target audience, determines ride quality)

Intensity is the sense of danger that gives thrill seekers the ability to enjoy rides. Because a ride with a high intensity is specifically aimed to park guests that prefer an extreme experience, the intensity level of a ride will affect its popularity. Extreme rides will not be popular built in parks where there are few guests seeking an extreme experience.

Coaster cars create excessive G-forces when they hurtle along tracks built with turns that are not banked. Such tracks will quickly rack up the intensity value and are the single most common fault of the newbie track designer. However, coaster cars quickly slammed from a level position into banked turns add to the intensity so when including banked turns in your track design, do ensure that your coaster cars enter and exit banked turns at a reasonable speed. Your coaster cars shouldn't catapult out of banked turns into flat track sections because those will count negatively as additional drops. High speeds through small loops, around tight turns, and along steep dips in your track will also create excessive G-forces and make for a rough ride. Coaster cars that hurtle up steep slopes ejecting their passengers up against the seat restraints during the ‘air’ time over the top not only makes for an overly intense experience but will induce nausea. Nausea will also be induced by suspended swinging and slide-type coaster cars that continually roll back and forth on the track, pendulum style, due to a thoughtless combination of speed and turns.

Depending on the coaster and what else is going on in the track design, high track sections could be seen as either exciting or intense. The higher the ride’s intensity the lower it’s excitement will be due to the discomfort those G-forces will cause your guests, therefore a higher intensity rating will directly bite into a coaster’s excitement rating. Guests will ride or not ride a coaster based mostly on its intensity rating. An intensity rating above 10 suggests physical discomfort or danger to your park guests so your intensity rating should remain below 10 so as not to turn away your guests and unnecessarily deflate your excitement rating. Because they suggest that guests will be jerked and slammed about the coaster cars, excessive lateral G-forces are the biggest cause of guests choosing not to ride an otherwise excellent coaster.

You might like to think of your intensity rating as an idea of how well your coaster design team has designed your coaster for guest comfort. Ask yourself if your guests are focused on how hard they’re being pressed against the seat restraints, if they are unduly worried about where they are on your track, or if they’re focused on and feeling positive about the total track experience you’ve created for them. We should POV each track we build at least once near the end of it's construction and ask ourselves how we'd feel about our travels along the different sections of our track.

Nausea (decreases return riders, lower is better)

A high nausea rating is rarely in itself enough to discourage riders all on its own. However, nausea ratings are easily magnified by an excessive intensity rating along with a low excitement rating.

Nausea is mostly a result of excessive vertical G-forces. On a badly designed track, extended periods of low or negative G-forces will also add to the ride’s nausea rating. Such a track will add to park guests feeling that your track is ‘unbearable.’

A nausea rating that's too high can indirectly affect you, the park manager. It will:

►

result in increased vomits at the ride exit,

►

increase the number of benches needed at that ride exit,

►

necessitate the hiring of a janitor for clean-ups at that ride exit, and

►

and, of course, increases the likelihood that a guest won’t want to ride the ride again.

Benches are a necessity at the exits of rides with high nausea ratings because a good park manager would want his guest decreasing their nausea gradually by sitting on a park bench, rather than instantly by hurling a vomit.

So as you see there are a number of points to take into account when building a stellar track that won't scare off our park guests. What else might we consider as we go about applying this information to our track building?

How To Apply This Information

►

G-forces become unbearable when your coaster cars are traveling in one direction while your guests are severely jerked in another direction against that in which the coaster car is traveling. These forces should be kept to within tolerable levels.

►

Positive and negative lateral G’s are essentially the same thing except that with one the rider is being thrown to his left and the other the rider is thrown towards his right. In RCT3 positive and negative lateral G's are both combined into a single rating. Lateral G's directly affect the ride’s intensity. If high lateral G's seem to be unavoidable on the track type you’ve selected to build from, as a general rule of thumb your lateral G’s should be no higher than 3. Helixes or forty-five degree banked turns will minimize lateral G's by transferring some of those lateral forces into positive vertical G's on each turn where they're used. On track sections that include them, ninety degree banked curves will eliminate lateral G's altogether.

A real life track made up of nearly all positive lateral G's or nearly all negative lateral G's will feel tedious to riders. As RCT3 doesn't differentiate between the two it probably makes no difference to RCT3 guests or to the track's rating. For appearance's sake it’s fine to have the direction of lateral G turns repeated a few times but your track will appear less monotonous and look like you put more effort into building it if you alternate the direction of turns on which your guests experience lateral G's.

►

In RCT3, negative vertical G Forces indicate upward acceleration which occurs when coaster cars travel over track peaks. Negative vertical G's represent air time because they lift the rider away from his seat. When designing negative vertical G's into our track design we need to be sure they give the impression the guest is floating rather than his being ejected from his seat. Positive vertical G forces represent downward acceleration. This happens when coaster cars travel down one hill and immediately up another with the rider being pressed down into his seat. A guest who weighs 200 pounds experiencing a positive vertical G value of 2 will feel as if he weighs 400 pounds at the positive vertical 2G point in the ride. Conversely it only takes a small increase in negative vertical G to make a rider feel weightless. Vertical G's are the 'fun' g-forces and reasonable levels of vertical G-forces designed into the track contribute directly to a ride's excitement.

►

The tolerance threshold and desirability for vertical G’s is much higher than that for lateral G’s. Depending on the track type you’re building, the outer thresholds for vertical G’s should be no higher than a negative 2 to a positive 4.

►

If the ride’s intensity is too high but the G-forces are within reasonable levels it is likely the track has too many inversions and drops. You should also consider that the ride time may be too long or, conversely, the track may not include enough straight, flat stretches to offset the number of turns & special elements that you've included in your design.

►

When editing your track, to lower the intensity you’d want to look in the track’s performance graph for sections with high lateral G’s. To lower the nausea you’d want to look at the same graph for areas where the track has high vertical G’s. Combinations of high vertical G’s plus high lateral G’s along with a high speed all in any single area of one's track should be of particular concern to the track builder. We'd want to moderate such areas of track so they're not so rough on our guests.

►

Several rides and coasters at a variety of intensity levels should be placed about your park so as to meet the needs of the maximum number of park guests. Less intense rides should be placed near the park's entry areas with high intensity rides being placed at the difficult to reach areas of the property. Moderately intense rides should be placed as a ‘divider’ between your high and low intensity rides. However, if you plan on operating your park for several seasons this won't matter as much as it would in a new park that's only going to be operated for several months.

Some park guests who have low tolerances for intensity will ride a coaster of medium or high intensity if that coaster is placed near low intensity coasters and gentle rides.

While teens usually prefer an intense ride experience, ultra intense rides should only be added to the park if it is expected that a large number of our guests will prefer an extreme experience. Otherwise, such rides won't be ridden that much.

Achieving The Best Possible Combination Of EI&N

This requires striking a balance between the track design you've dreamt up with all the features you want in it, and what you actually build in your park. Do be sure and design the tracks in your park with:

►

banked turns at moderate speeds,

►

slow loops,

►

slow inversions,

►

reasonable speeds through any dips in your track,

►

gentle speeds over track peaks during ‘air’ time,

►

an adequate number of that track’s special elements which give variety in track shape throughout travel around the track,

►

moderating your drops, e.g.:

►

build three 30 meter drops rather than one 100 meter drop, or

►

step your drops with short slopes interspersed with short level areas which will add to air time,

►

a no more than sufficient number of flat, straight sections to compensate for a high number of the track's special elements, or to offset an otherwise high level of intensity, and

►

enough brakes to gradually get your speeds down where slowness is required.

Out of the track types that come with RCT3 typically it is roller coasters that offer the greatest potential for high excitement ratings. Unless one builds with a CTR, it is very challenging to get a coaster with an excitement level of over 10.

Some coaster types built with the exact same track design will display different levels of intensity. Traditional coasters such as the woodie are best built with high drops, long straightaways, and lots of speed along those features – you’d want your woodie to sedately swan around most of its curves and loops. Advanced coasters such as the hyper coaster will flog around sharp corners with a minimum of G-forces inflicted on the guests so you’d be able to utilize many such special elements in such a track.

Some of the in-game flat rides such as Sky Sling have an E of 5, an I of 5, and an N of 5. While as human beings we might look at those three 5’s and believe this to be an undesirable combination, this isn’t a formula that seems to present any issues to the park guests who fill the queues to ride these rides. If we found we had built a track with an EI&N all at 5 we’d naturally aim to make the E closer to 10 while pushing the N down towards 0. In view of that a ride with an E of 9, an I of 5 and an N of 1 would likely be an exceptional ride.

So remember to save the unrealistic tracks for forum contests! For our individual park needs the bottom line is to build realistic tracks that will be ridden by our park guests, that will encourage our guests to ride again, that will bring in good prices for the ride, and that will add to our guests' total park experience, to our park rating, and to our parks' profitability.