Before we dive into the process of building rides in Planet Coaster 2, it’s important to understand how exactly rides work and what you need to do to keep your guests happy and entertained.
Excitement, Fear & Nausea
Excitement, Fear, and Nausea are three key values that determine a ride’s prestige.
- Excitement – generated by g-forces on your coaster, adding direction, inversions or speed changes, or by making trains pass close by underneath track parts in a “head chopper” moment.
- Fear – generated by pushing the coaster to extremes in g-forces. As g-forces approach and exceed a threshold, they contribute to a greater amount of Fear. A Fear rating of 5 is juuuuust right, as any higher becomes uncomfortable for your guests and lowers ride prestige.
- Nausea – generated through inversions and excessive and prolonged g-forces. Brief inversions will provide a positive boost to Excitement and Fear, with a little Nausea, but longer inversions will ramp-up the Nausea gain. Lateral g-forces can also cause nausea to increase especially fast.
All these values reduce over time while riding the coaster if there are no g-forces or variations in g-forces being experienced, so a coaster should be designed to consistently re-engage your guests by creating a variety of sources of Excitement, Fear and Nausea.
All guests will have their own preferences for the levels of Excitement, Fear and Nausea they want to experience on a ride. Building a variety of rides offering different experiences is a great way to ensure that there is something in your park for everyone.
Did You Know?
G-Forces
G-Forces are experienced on any ride. G-Forces are needed to generate excitement and fear, but excessive g-forces can cause rapid nausea and fear to build-up.
Lateral forces push guests sideways, vertical forces push them upwards or downwards, and longitudinal forces push them forwards and backwards.
G-Forces can be viewed in real-time in the ride's info panel, or through heatmaps in the Ride Testing Tab.
Ride Prestige
Prestige is the appeal and value of an attraction to guests. Simply put, guests will pay more for attractions with a higher Prestige.
The Prestige of a ride is calculated using the Ride Experience, a reflection of the ride’s Excitement, Fear and Nausea scores, along with the Scenery Bonus provided by attached scenery items.
The higher the Prestige of an attraction, the greater number of guests that will be attracted to it and the more they’ll be willing to pay to ride.
How-To Increase Ride Prestige
Increasing the Prestige of your rides and attractions is a great way to encourage your guests to come back for more! Ride Prestige will contribute to your overall Attraction Prestige, one of four metrics that affect your Park Rating.
There are three things that will affect your Ride Prestige:
1. Ride Reputation
Without making any adjustments or additions to your ride, its Prestige will increase slowly over time as it ages and it gains Ride Reputation, becoming a Classic, Iconic or Vintage ride.
Once a ride is Old your guests will consider it outdated, and it will no longer contribute to Ride Prestige. You can combat this by replacing or refurbishing older rides.
2. Scenery Bonus
The fastest way to increase Ride Prestige is by increasing the attraction’s Scenery Bonus.
Add scenery pieces to your attraction by selecting the Scenery Group for the ride and attaching scenery objects to coaster cars, the queue areas and even entrance of your attraction.
Check out our Ride Customisation guide for more information about decorating your coasters and flat rides.
3. Ride Experience
The second way to increase Ride Prestige is by making adjustments to the Ride Experience. This score is calculated based on the ticket price, queue time and your ride’s stats for Excitement, Fear and Nausea.
For detail orientated Park Managers, managing these stats is a breeze with Dynamic pricing, which will adjust the ticket price of your attraction based on popularity and queue times.
If profits aren’t your main focus, you can set pricing to Budget (or even free!) to gain a quick boost to your Ride Prestige.
You can decrease queue times by adding the maximum number of coaster cars or by creating an attraction with a short ride time.
Shorter rides won’t create as much Prestige as longer rides. However, attractions with really long ride times can reduce your turnover and increase queue times!
For custom rides, use the smoothing tool in the Ride Editor to create the best experience possible for your guests. You want your ride to be exciting without creating too much Fear or Nausea. If these stats are red in the ride info-panel then your attraction won’t appeal to the majority of your guests.
Did You Know?
Ride Reputation
The grand opening to any new ride is a thrilling moment for any Park Manager, and guests will be just as excited to go on the latest and greatest rides.
Over time though, rides will become dated and guests will be less interested in buying a ticket.
But you can't keep a good coaster down for long. If your ride is great enough, it will become a Classic and guests will come from far and wide to ride a part of coaster history, happily paying more to ride.