Financial Data

As earlier indicated there are three spreadsheets that accompany this financial summary:

1

Rides & Tracks

2

Food & Drink Stalls

3

Merchandise & Guest Services

Rides & Tracks, 1, and Food & Drink Stalls, 2, are self-explanatory.

Under the Merchandise & Guest Services heading there are a variety of attractions and facilities. Within this spreadsheet are:

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Information stalls,

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Toilets,

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A.T.M.’s,

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the Souvenirs stall,

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the Balloons stall, and

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the Elevator Banks.

Because Information stalls, Toilets, and A.T.M.’s are facilities they’re included under this heading. While Souvenirs and Balloons are stalls they offer merchandise instead of food & drink so they’re also included here. The two Elevator Banks in this park are made up of six elevators, none of which has been placed specifically as a ride so they’re considered to be facilities. Facilities are conveniences offered to our guests as park services.

1 Rides & Tracks

Financially, the park has been divided into three sections with all the rides and tracks being placed into one of these three groupings.

Harbor Rides

With nine rides & tracks the Harbor Rides were the biggest earner for our park although, of all three areas, it earned us the least in average earnings per attraction. In this area of the park Monorail was also the highest priced ride in the park, pulled in the most in ticket sales, and except for Double Carousel drew the most customers. Of all the rides in the park Monorail rates the highest as guests’ favorite.

North Side Rides

There are six rides & tracks in this area of the park with Turbo Bikes being our star attraction in addition to its being our highest earner. The most favored attraction in the North Side was Steelie.

East Side Rides

The East Side is also known as Kiddie Korner because all our junior rides are located here. This section of the park was our second highest earner but made us the highest average earnings per ride, with each ride achieving a median value of £2,380 during three seasons.

2 Food & Drink Stalls

Refreshment stalls have been set up into five groupings as can be seen in the following composite image:

Food Court West earned the highest average profit per stall in addition to drawing the highest average number of guests per stall.

Mini Food Court East was at the other end of the scale as far as average customers drawn and average profit per stall. Conversely Mini Food Court East had the highest levels of all five groupings for popularity and satisfaction with Drinks Island coming in at a close second for popularity and satisfaction.

3 Merchandise & Guest Services

These were widely spaced about the park and were dotted about as islands rather than grouped into courts. We'll recap our park tour with images showing the locations of the attractions under this heading.

There are three toilets along Entry Walkway’s descending stairs. The three entrances to the upper bank of lifts are just off the left side of the image. The park entrance is at the upper left behind the path support column next to Toilets 05.

At the bottom of Entry Walkway is the Main Staircase. It was a bit of a challenge getting an unobstructed screenshot of these stairs that included all of the facilities located on it. As it can be difficult from this viewpoint to tell the staircase apart from the other paths a line upwards has been drawn in blue along the stairs. Apart from a twenty meter length at the bottom this staircase is pretty much a spiral with square edges.

A top view of the main staircase follows. This view clearly displays the staircase’s central support system.

We’ll move on past the Main Staircase, take a right, and continue onto Walkway Bottom, North. The entrances to the lower bank of elevators can be seen along the lower left of this image.

Up ahead and around the corner along Bottom Walk, West, are three additional facilities.

Once we leave the bottom walkways the park’s layout opens up which gives a clearer view of the remainder of the facilities. This next image displays all the centrally located facilities minus those just shown on Walkway Bottom, North, and Walkway Bottom, West.

Our East Side facilities are displayed next.

The only food court in which merchandise is available is Mini Food Court, South, with the merchandise there being balloons. In this food court there are also two stalls offering treats in addition to a drinks stall so this mini food court is more like a pleasure court.

General Observations

Just like Vanguard West the financial reports of this park make it evident that it’s not necessary for every single ride, attraction, and facility to make a profit in order that the gamer have a financially successful park. I’ve also noticed this time around that some attractions that lost the park money at the beginning ended up being profitable later on. I’ve seen park updates so many times on the forums where individual community members have posted an update of their park and have indicated they’ve removed a track or ride after two months because it didn’t make their park money. My experience shows that these same attractions if left in place longer would likely have eventually turned around and become money makers for those same parks from which they’d been deleted in such a hurry.

This park’s East Side is an excellent example of this. With this park not following the standard of good park design with gentle rides near the entrance and exciting & intense rides near the back of the park, in spite of the fact that the gentle & kiddie rides in the East Side were in the area farthest from the park entrance the East Side was financially the second most successful of the three park areas with it’s attractions averaging the highest in ticket sales.The Food & Drink stalls in the East Side also gave the highest readings for popularity and satisfaction.

I’ve also noticed that parks and the guest flow within them don’t become settled until after a season and a half or maybe closer to two seasons. Rides and attractions should be given at least this long to get established within your park before they’re deleted. I believe it best that we cultivate and fine tune our parks before opening, then allow them to run their course for a minimum of two seasons prior to large-scale alterations and deletions. The park itself should be allowed a similar amount of time before we make major changes based on financial reasoning.

Awards

Hillside On The Lake has won the following awards:

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Best Roller Coasters

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Best Reliability

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Most Beautiful

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Safest Park

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Best Toilets

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Best Food

The Best Roller Coasters award is likely based on the number of tracks in the park with an X excitement rating. For the first time I observed in this park that the more exciting a track was the more likely it was to become a guest favorite.

Before I started this park I wasn’t entirely sure what would be the cause of receiving a Most Thrilling Award. Turbo Bikes at 7.84 has the highest intensity of all the rides in this park, followed by Fabbri-MegaDrop with 5.26. While adjusting this terrain to make it ready for Hillside On The Lake, in Scenario Editor I had without thinking about it set the guests’ intensity level at 50% which turned out to be unnecessary because I intended to use guests who were all generated by Peep Factory. The settings for intensity in peep factory were my usual:

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25% gentle

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25% normal

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25% wild

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25% crazy

With the maximum guest attraction level for this park being maintained at 2,200 guests, if we take 2,200 and divide it by four this would indicate that there were always around 550 guests in the park who preferred a wild intensity and about 550 guests in the park who preferred a crazy intensity. Considering that there were always some 1,100 guests in the park who preferred an intensity level higher than normal I have to conclude that the Most Thrilling Award is given to a park with X number of rides in it that are over Y intensity level. As this was a small park with hardly more than twenty assorted rides & tracks the park probably fell short by the number of intense rides required for this award.

Having not used any CSO’s in Vanguard West and with only vegetation for scenery with very few buildings there I hadn’t missed not receiving the Most Beautiful Award for that park. In Hillside On The Lake V.I.P.’s and guests frequently commented on the great scenery.

No fines were levied against this park.

This Park’s Future

This park is an excellent candidate for expansion north of Hillside Slide where I could add another path north of the slide to join the park’s North Side with its East Side but that would have required a few more flat rides, perhaps another small coaster, and additional stalls and facilities and I did want this park to remain a small property. Perhaps I might expand this park at another time. Having chosen not to expand the park in this manner I was concerned that guests had to walk off the main paths, follow another path and then queue for our wooden coaster. Another path from our North Side to our East Side would have eliminated this concern but in spite of not expanding or building this path our Woodie did turn us a profit.

The paths and queues I’ve built throughout the property represent the farthest I can take path design at my current level of park building skills. I’m very pleased with the results of my efforts with Path Creator and with the path and queue infrastructure in this park. As the park stands I’m satisfied with the way it turned out and with what I’ve learned while putting it together.

If you would like to make your own paths and queues, our excellent HowTo article The Compleat Path Creator lays out all the information you'll need.