How Much Can You Charge For Your Shops in RCT2?
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- čas přidán 27. 08. 2024
- How much is a balloon? Or a hamburger? In this video we find out!
Deurklink's guide to shop prices: forums.openrct...
Shop prices spreadsheet: docs.google.co...
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Thanks for the shoutout Marcel! Something which I found out after writing the guide is that there's actually a line of code that prevents guests from buying ice cream when the temperature is below 12 degrees.. So their cold weather value is actually never used! The same goes for sunglasses as well.
so charging the price of the normal conditions it is!
I can’t believe in all my years playing this game I never considered that the in-game temperature would affect how much guests would pay for certain food. I always thought all food types were basically the same and the different types were just for theming.
It's amazing, seeing how much thought and attention CS put into the different systems in the game, and how we're still learning about them all today!
@@naibakie8519 If you really want to see how much thought and attention he'd put into his games, you just need to look at his first game. Transport tycoon.
Its kinda sad after making these two masterpieces he has turned to mobilegames.
Funny thing is I'd always try to imagine what kind of food would be good in certain environments. For example I already assumed people in a snowy park wouldn't want to eat ice cream and would rather have something like hot chocolate to warm them up and crave their sweet tooth. But that was moreso with the obvious shops, and I didn't think it legitimately effected the sales and pricing. It was more so just me role playing and trying to inject some realism into my parks
@@Gameprojordan same!
Different types of food also affect guests in various ways too. For example, popcorn will make guests thirstier and thus more likely to buy a drink.
I still can’t believe Chris Sawyer put this much thought and detail into his games.
His hard work really paid though, considering how we’re still talking about it 20+ years on.
Incredible game!
A lot more detail in mechanics than most modern games with a big budget.
He did it all in x86 assembly too. Which is just masochistic.
@@NolePTR thats exactly why. He basically built a car from scratch so he set everything out the way he wanted to along the way.
@@NolePTR I know he did transport tycoon on assembly, but rct2? Was that also assembly? Sounds crazy.
@@your-mom-irl sounds crazy yet it's all completely true. Chris was a genius madman
I keep being amazed at how detailed Chris Sawyer made these games. There are so many tiny things I would never have noticed so Im happy that there are people like Marcel who shed light onto these things.
He has some stuff in common with the dwarf fortress guy
Honestly, out of all items with varying price with respect to temperature, tentacles are the most unexpected one.
I always chalked this up to my limited knowledge within US parks, but are tentacles a not-so uncommon thing to be sold elsewhere? And is it truly reasonable for this to be temperature-dependent? And are we talking tentacle bits similar to fried calamari, or more of a “octopus-on-a-stick” product? The questions are seemingly endless for my limited vantage point here in the US…
My personal guess is It's because the tentacle drastically increases guests thirst level, I'm pretty sure it's on par with or worse than pretzel stalls. So a guest wouldn't be as compelled to want to eat something that would dehydrate them that much in a hot environment
@@Gameprojordan easy fix: add beer cheese dip like they do for pretzels! 😂
But that reasoning makes sense to me. RCT devs definitely put a lot of depth into these dependencies, so it isn’t far-fetched.
@@hunterwylie6969 mmmm cheese..... haha but yeah seriously the developers of this game were thinking really far ahead with all of these features. It's insane how innovative games were decades ago compared to now, no soul left in modern gaming companies
Cmon now, that isn't exactly fair. I mean, I dislike most modern games, but there's still some soulful bangers getting released, mostly by small teams and indie devs. But you know, if you're talking about studios with thousand person teams and shareholders the publishers gotta answer to, then yeah, the soul has been mostly stripped from those.
Also advice for getting the most items sold - always try to sell them right after the exit to a good ride. Guest happiness is almost ALWAYS highest right after they get off a ride, slowly draining until they get on (and then off) a ride again. I've been doing this for years and there is a NOTICEABLE difference. Parks use this strategy IRL as well.
Out and about on paths, the majority of things that affect guest happiness impact it negatively, and the things that positively affect happiness hardly move it at all. Meanwhile a coaster ride can take them from 25% to 100% easily.
Yeah I remember an in-game loading screen tip saying to put Hat and T-shirt stalls outside your best rides because happy guests are more likely to buy extras like those and on-ride photos
Just be sure to put those food and drink stalls at the END of a ride... If you put them at the entrance, expect the ride exit to become a puke carpet.
your advise doesnt work for every ride. a lot of guest feel sick directly after a ride and will buy NOTHING at all, untill they got some rest in form of a bench or first aid. but your tipp does help with min/max playstyles in which you build no "spinning/high nausea" anyways. which btw would be a good video topic for marcel. rides with high nausea are in general less popular AND make your guests sick.
'Hello and welcome to another video'
I was just imagining Marcel doing an April 1st joke where he uploads a duplicate video from the day before, but only changes the intro to 'Hello and welcome to the same video'
The tentacle one confuses me because I never thought about whether it was a hot or cold item
did you ever heard about boiled octo?
and did you ever heard about ice cream octo?
I always try to go with this logic more or less
@@wisniamw octo icecream does exist in some parts of the world :P
Also I have not heard of boiled octo but fried octo, which tends to be rather hot, like all fried foods.
And on that note, in some hotter parts of the world, they eat a lot of fried food, so the temperature apparently does not bother them in this regard.
I always thought tentacles were hot!
.... Wait, wrong subreddit hahahaha
@@Gin-toki never heard of octo ice creams, wonder how they taste :D
But still, its fried so expect ,,hot" shop
the table states the price of tentacle drops when it's hot and when it's cold. but it loses most value when it's cold outside. maybe a dish that's best enjoyed on a neutral day? lol
Chris Sawyer and his truly tiny development team seriously deserve major commendation for the level of depth that the first two RCT games have. It's actually pretty absurd how deep they are, yet they're also developed in such a way as to not make you feel overwhelmed as a newcomer. It's an incredible feat of development.
You might be interested in a talk that award winning game designer Ben Brode gave lately. He talked about exactly what you're describing: Games with lots of depth, think replayability and mechanics you can min/max, with a small amount of complexity, the amount a player needs to learn to understand how to play the game effectively.
Thanks for the tutorial on how to make me feel like Disney upper management!
Charge anything close to Disney prices, even adjusted for inflation over the last 20 years, and nobody will buy a thing lol
Well, except for Umbrellas
Speaking of details in stalls, I would like to know the differences in satisfying hunger and thirst for the various food and drink stalls. For example, ice cream has a nice ability to satisfy both hunger and thirst while popcorn can make guests get thirsty faster due to how salty it is.
It’s stuff like that which make the stalls even more interesting.
So the ice cream is more of a milkshake then?
@@Toonrick12 - Not exactly. It satisfies thirst by either decreasing it slowly or just pauses it from going down. I forgot which is the case.
Hey just chiming in to mention that Marcel did a video in which he debunked the "salty foods" belief, and said that no food makes guests thirsty faster, IIRC 🙂
"this video is heavily based" - marcel
7:13 at the same time, the random chance also accounts for those people that you said may have a set limit of how much they want to spend but then redecides later if they would rather go a little over their set limit :D
I'd like to know this in RCT3. The inspector is constantly pestering me by saying "The prices at [insert stall here] are too cheap". However, customers aren't as willing to pay high prices as they are in the first two games. It's especially annoying in sandbox mode where money doesn't matter.
Turn off the inspectors thoughts, put him in a deep hole and cover it up
@@richardg6983 You can also just tell the inspector to not check stalls.
@@richardg6983 Silence his thought crimes
Back when Corkscrew Follies came out I got a strategy guide for RCT. For years I thought it was a pretty comprehensive guide. This channel has bit by bit completely destroyed everything in that book! XD
Now I wish I could get an updated book with all this info.
i would totally fund a 2000s style strategy guide made by marcel, theres such a charm to them even if the information is useless to experienced players
@@esotericpince Agreed. I have an RCT2 guide that has a LOT of bs information and strategies directly contradicted by Marcel and experience. I love rewatching these videos, and a companion book would be awesome.
@@esotericpince Can we make this happen?
Do you know the name of your book or where I can find a PDF of it? I'm morbidly curious.
I love when game designers have attention to detail like this
@@8LegoVogel8 No, it was a general statement.
@@8LegoVogel8 So maybe you still didn't get it, what they wanted to say (I'm assuming), is that they like attention to detail in general, in any game. Not just this one in particular.
@@8LegoVogel8 "Or is it that's there's a general love for attention to detail, applicable to all sorts of games, like mind-games?"
Yes, this one I think. It's really not that complicated :)
Although the example of mind-games confuses me again. Just video games.
@@8LegoVogel8 Wtf are you talking about?
Short video idea: Jumping fountains plus other interesting notes from Chris Sawyer’s website. I really love finding out more and more about the mechanics of a 20 year old game.
i always put souvenir stands (especially balloos because they can be bought multiple times) in front of exits of popular coasters
the extra happiness that the guest will have due to riding a ride will make them easily pay much more
The level of detail of this 20 years old game never cease to amaze me
I still remember the neighbors letting my sister and I borrow the cd for rct1 back in 1999. I asked my parents for RCT the next Christmas. Then corkscrew follies was released and my sister got it for her birthday. The game blew my 6 year old mind and its still amazing 20+ years later
I always wished that RCT was a bit more like Bullfrog's Theme Park, in that in Theme Park you could adjust the salt on food, ice in drinks, caffeine in coffee etc., so you could end up making your guests all hyper, salt their food so they're desperate for drinks and such. You'd make bank, but with the downside that they were much much more likely to vomit everywhere. RCT is a great game, but I do wish it leaned a bit more into dark humour sometimes.
"caffeine in coffee" Is everyone drinking decaf in that game? :D
I don't usually comment on these but it's absolutely fascinating how in-depth you go with some of the aspects of this game. For a long time I always wondered if I was overpricing or underselling the shop items/food and this video answered pretty much all of those questions very thoroughly, thanks a bunch.
Hi Marcel, any chance you can do a video explaining how ride popularity works? I always thought that excitement rating affected how popular a ride would be, but I believe I recall you saying that it has no effect whatsoever. Whenever I create dueling coasters, even though they're the same type and have nearly identical stats, 1 seems to be a lot more popular than the other. I've been wanting to understand exactly how ride popularity mechanics work but haven't found a thorough explanation so far. Thanks for all the great RCT2 content!
Maybe you can do one on guests stats and how they impact/relate to eachother?
Happiness stat is an important factor for many things, and knowing Chris' eye for detail I wonder if energy/hunger/thirst has any influence on that happiness stat.
Guests do sometimes “complain” about not being hungry or thirsty after approaching a shop. Wonder that influences their mood.
Hi Marcel
I LOVE your Videos and your streams :)
Thank you so much for giving us all this ;)
I always charge $4 for souvenirs, shirts, hats, photos, and umbrellas (to make it harder for me). I always place these stalls so the guests run into them as they exit a ride, like a IRL gift shop and it works great. $2 for all drinks, and $2.50 for all "dinner" food. $1.50 for maps, balloons, ice creams, cotton candy. I also zone entertainers around food stalls, which I place near ride exits, so guests are happier and can find food faster.
Yep, I like to place hat/shirt/souvenir/etc stalls near the exit of my few best coasters. Happy guests almost always buy after a good ride (unless they get sick) and they can buy something to go with their overpriced on-ride photo 😁💰
That's wild that the temperature matters - I never would've thought of that!!! Thanks for the video!!!
Thanks. I finally beat some of my scenarios thanks to watching your videos. Your thoughts really help my progress.
Im a big fan of this game and love your channel.
Do different foods refill hunger differently? Does coffee give the guests more energy? These are my questions
You are great, Marcel. Thanks for another informative video
The thing I look forward to the most in your videos are the beautiful looking park snapshots you use for b-roll while explaining a concept.
It's great to see creators credit other creators for thier work. You are so wholesome!
Dang!! I never knew the temperature affected the way guests buy things. What a great detail for a 1999-2003 game. I’m still learning new things about this game LMAO.
Overcharge too much and the guest won't only complain, their happiness decreases too. So it's best to keep the overcharge acceptably within range of the normal happiness value of 128. That way more people will buy and you'll turn a better profit.
Personally I round it up to the next .00 or
.50 from the initial pricing. (＄1 for ice cream, park maps, ＄1.50 for cold drinks, ＄2 for hot drinks and food. Some food even for ＄2.50 (burgers/chicken/fries) or ＄3 (pizza, tentacles))
That’s what I’ve done too, I always make maps super cheap though to encourage guests to not get lost (don’t know if it does anything besides send them to different rides throughout the park though)
@@roddydykes7053 funny I make them .80ct because they all want a park map to not get lost 😄
My strategy is always .10 or .20ct above standard price and then sunglasses, toys shirts etc go up with .30ct
Can you please make a separate video about weather. That has been the topic so often now and sounds interesting. It has so much influence. It's fun to watch you. Thank you
The funny thing is, it's actually better to have sunglasses when it's raining because it protects your eyes when you're on the rides (depends how hard it's raining of course; if it's a deluge and everything's closed then obviously that's an exception :p)
Mind blown!! Love it. Also, still hoping you do a video about litter bins!
How long does it take for them to be full and in need of a staff member to clean it out?! Employees for 5 years can have 7 emptied litter bins or so??
And then there's me placing bins after ever 10 tiles so there's no trash
Ignoring the weather factor, you can find the optimum price using the chart at 4:22. Just multiply each "Extra Price" entry by its corresponding percentage, e.g. $0.20 x 0.75, 0.875, and 1.00. Whichever is the highest result is the most profitable "Extra Price". So assuming happiness is always over 180, the extra price of $1.90 x 50% = 0.95 is the highest value on the chart.
Wondered about this since I was 4 years old, thanks Marcel
Love the RCT umbrella mechanic. I was 8 years old and my games were teaching me price gouging for kids.
Been on a kick watching your videos and it makes me want to pick up the game again. I played it in the fall last year and had a roaring good time, even though I knew nothing about the mechanics of the game (I only learned this year, when I'm 27, that you can stack decor items and raise them up, like the walls and roofs. There's no in-game tutorial for that when I started playing the game 20 years ago!)
I'm not into the super-optimization and so I want to try building a park that is both aesthetically pleasing to me and functional for the peeps! Thanks for all the resources.
I'm always learning new things from your videos.
Thanks for the work put on it and sharing!
The tentacle stand is so goddamn weird.
The weirdest part is that when they consume the tentacle the animation makes it look like they're drinking out of it.
I have been to several theme parks, and never once have I seen any stands selling tentacles, tbh. Definitely not for me
I could image theme parks in Japan or other places being much more likely to sell them.
Marcel, thank you for this
There was much more to this game and how to play it better than I thought when it came out. A lot of math went into this game. It’s gonna take me sometime to better understand this game
Hooray! Marcel listened to my idea
Thanks. Should have known beforehand when it comes to the temperatures and climates per scenario.
Next, you should do one about what food/drink stalls are most profitable and recommended without impacting guests other needs. For instance, the Pizza Stall is a great price to construct and have multiples of and about the most profitable of any food stall - which can guarantee the player a Best Food Award; and how the Exotic Sea Food Stall on the other hand is very expensive to build than most other food stalls and has a terrible profit and that tentacles cost exactly $1.10 per supply - more than most other food stalls, and how food stalls like them are the last you would need in your park up to completing or should only be built post-completion per scenario.
I would love to see you revist this video and actually find the optimum price for every item and every scenario. When I play, I HATE having to manually change prices to fit the temperature.
Charge 20 for an umbrella + rain = stonks.
It is a good way, as guests normally don't go on rides when raining. If you charge for the rides, umbrella is the best way to break even or earn more. :D
Another reason this game is so amazing. The attention to detail with gameplay is bonkers
Man I used to play this game on an IBM desktop running Windows 98. Real cache of nostalgia. I need to find my discs for RCT 1 and 2. Its been so many years since I bought Triple Thrill Pack at Wal-Mart.
I'd love to see a detailed analysis of the atm machine, I imagine it's similar to this complexity
Your videos are so great. I wish RCT3 had a Marcel as well
To a whole universe pf pixel thrillseekers, Chris Sawyer is a genuine god, complete with free will, the inability to communicate with the deity, arbitrary rules, smiting, and the ability to create side-gods.
I completely forgot this game even had a temperature display, I never knew it did anything
There’s an in-game loading screen tip that says guests get thirstier in hotter parks (ie the desert one) but I never thought that’d go beyond drinks and ice cream!
I remember playing iceberg islands on loopy landscapes and guests would more frequently buy coffee/hot chocolate vs the regular drink stall. It's such a cool little detail that the guests preferences change with the weather
i always up the default by 30 cents for EVERY shop. i know it is not perfect whatsoever, but it works and is easy to memorize. that includes toilets for 30 cents.
Hey Marcel, great video! Well made and presented. Question for you…
Other than keeping guests happy, are shops even worth the time? I feel like 1 mediocre coaster makes more money than several shops and stalls, so in scenario play I usually only build the bare minimum of shops and stalls to keep guests happy. Of course info kiosks with €20 umbrellas are an outlier, but typically rides are a FAR better investment than shops and stalls. I just don’t waste my time building extra shops and stalls beyond keeping guests happy unless it’s for aesthetic/realism purposes.
This game has more detail and care than many new triple A games
2:51 is what the Marcel Vos veterans are looking for...
Food stalls! I've been curious about this for a while
Cool video and kind of goes with what I always assumed about the hot drinks but didn't think much about when it came to the food. Would love to see a video about scenario weather generation and typical temps/weather conditions. I noticed in Bumbly Bazaar you mentioned that rain was rare, so I'm guessing it's done by landscape (Desert, Forest, Beach, Islands, Icebergs, etc.)
With this information in hand, I wonder which stalls are the best and worst? A guide on the best and worst food, drink, and merchandise stalls would probably be quite interesting to watch.
I noticed there's a satisfaction percentage that varies among stalls. I always consider that to reflect how appropriately priced the items are, considering food and stuff don't really have stats other than their price. Is that something related to pricing?
You can max out the price they're willing to pay but the satisfaction rate will go below 75%. Like toilets, you can ask more than 0.20ct and they still pay but 0.20ct is the max you can ask and still keep 75% satisfaction.
Never compromise with umbrella ;)
A way to estimate if it is worth it to overcharge, at least for items that are bought multiple times per guest, is to take the profit at the base price, and compare it to the profit with overcharge multiplied by the purchase chance. So e.g. if you overcharge 70 cents on hot chocolate, that brings the profit per item from 1.60 to 2.30. With very happy guests, that 2.30 is multiplied by 87.5%, for an "effective profit" of about 2.01. Otoh, with only medium happy guests, that chance is 62.5%, and your "effective profit" number is only 1.44, lower than the base price value of 1.60.
Finally a shops and stalls video yay!
"If you keep your guests very happy, you can get away with overcharging"
*Disney has entered the chat*
You could micromanage the shop prices depending on the day/season to ridiculous levels to maximize profits.
Delightful!!!
Coming from a tropical country, seeing 21°C be described as "hot" made me laugh a bit lol
Around here, "hot" usually starts at 27°C
My secret to success with amity airfield was always to put a T shirt stall facing the exit of every coaster and charge 5-6 a shirt.
All those guests who think ice cream is better when it's hot out are getting ripped off. The best time to eat ice cream is when it's cool, so that it doesn't melt before you get to eat it.
Chris Sawyer: "We must have a perfect simulation of how guests will pay for items."
Also Chris Sawyer: "Cutting the grass and watering the plants will do nothing, but the handymen will spend most of their time doing those jobs!"
I found your channel in the recommended but I ended up binging your content
You should look up the idea of emergent complexity. It's great for highlighting these sorts of things. Where many individually simple rules interact in increasingly complex and unexpected ways.
4:25(ish) - also known as the Disney Effect-- keep guests Happy, so theyll Spend More Money
Here's a tally of how many stalls do better in each temperature:
Hot: 9
Warm(Base): 0
Cold: 15
No Change: 7
Not Hot: 0
Not Warm: 0
Not Cold: 3
Needless to say, if stalls are your cash cow; choose a cold climate.
Something interesting is that most foods become more expensive in the cold, and all meat foods become more expensive. I suppose this makes sense, seeing as these foods, especially meats, are served hot, so it would be helpful in the cold.
Love these videos, make me think differently about how to price things
You can tell this game was made by a Brit since 21°C is considered hot...
The best part is that theme park food in RCT is cheaper than IRL theme park food which can be at least $10 for a basket of fries with a burger or chicken tenders on top, for example.
It also has to do with inflation. RCT is over 20 years old. Prices in fast-food have doubled since than. I pay more than double at MC Donalds now compared to 20 years ago.
@@notmyrealnameify Ah yes, inflation is definitely a thing. RCT2 is based off 2002’s economy, one thing i took away from 1999’s RCT1 is that the staff paychecks went up by a bit
I find it interesting that umbrellas will sell for more money when it's cold and sell for less money when it's hot. That doesn't seem quite right as honestly I'd expect umbrellas to sell more when it's hot as people would use them to shelter themselves from the direct sunlight and give themselves some shade. I honestly see more umbrellas out on a hot, cloudless, sunny day than on a miserable, dreary, rainy day.
I bet it depends in what part of the world you live in. People over here will look at you strangely when you're walking with an umbrella when it's sunny 🤭
@@ArtSMRdianne True but umbrellas selling better when it's cold is definitely weird. I can't imagine why someone would want umbrellas when it's cold out. I could understand if it was cloudy but simply cold doesn't make any sense.
Maybe it doesn’t rain as much on hot levels? I’m pretty sure it rarely rains on desert levels like Dynamite Dunes. Maybe that makes them less interested in buying umbrellas.
I forget which game, but I remember an RCT game where you could sell very very cheap fries with a ton of salt and then overcharge massively for soda and make a fortune.
A video on optimal shop placement throughout the park would also be awesome
I've found that it makes more sense to put food stalls deeper into the park than at the front. People don't show up hungry, they only get that way after moving around a lot
The video I’ve waited years for
I didn't realize the temperature changed the prices of things so drastically!
Quit STALLing and tell us the price already! ;)
a table of production costs and/or the items base _profit_ would've been a great addition to this video but otherwise great as always!
Been waiting for this one
i cant believe how many little 'hidden' features there are that i'm still discovering. i would have never guessed temperature was a factor
Man the details in this game never stop amazing me. Especially because it would have been super tedious to program this game because it was done in Assembly.
One thing I'm curious about is how much the proximity of food stalls to rides with high intensity and nausea matters. It's recommended to keep food stalls far away from roller coasters and such, but there comes a certain point where that's almost impossible without either micromanaging like crazy (and having good enough terrain to do so) or having too few shops or rides.
My idea is that nauseated peeps will not eat but are more likely to buy a drink so I'll try and take that in consideration by placement
As a rule of thumb I just always add 30 cents to each shop item. Works well!
One man. One man programmed this game.
I usually use the total profit, selling drinks for a minimum $1.00 for drinks, $1.50 for food, $2.00 for souvenirs. Balloons and cheap food 0.60. Umbrella always $18 profit. Toilets 0.30.
This game still blows me away
They predicted the price for ice cream in 2021 quite well :D
The temperature ISN'T cosmetic?!
I'm interested in crunching the numbers with a bit of programing :)
I would like to know if average temperature of levels are known and if the amount of rain is known (frequence and duration in average)
If both are known I think it's possible to help the community a bit :)
Man, I wish I liked in a place where 21°C is considered hot. The heat index here hits 40°C during the summer.
Remember when 70°F was considered hot? RollerCoaster Tycoon remembers.
Me: "man I need to get busy, I have work I gotta get done, things I want to learn"
YT: "how much can you charge for your shops in RCT2?"
Me: "well, damn. Guess I'm not getting anything done"