Prices and Wages

[JCFast]

I was wondering, how much do the prices affect the amount of people travelling? What are the effects of having the price on different shades of green or red or just in plain white in the number of people using your services? Any rough estimates?

Second question is about wages. Has anyone calculated when it's more profitable to keep your employees with a green smile on their face and when it's not when comparing the amount of reputation increased from happy employees from which new passenger will come against the saves made in wage costs?

 

[unmerged(273151)]

I've had bus prices well into the red, 12/13 and above, and still had stops with lines of people waiting at em.

 

[unmerged(224028)]

Same here. At first I was cautious about raising prices since I was afraid to drive customers away but I realized people don't care about the price! This game is the arcade version of traffic giant

 

[unmerged(273319)]

Same here. At first I was cautious about raising prices since I was afraid to drive customers away but I realized people don't care about the price! This game is the arcade version of traffic giant

Really? And here I was, lowering the prices of tickets until they were "green".

 

[unmerged(273659)]

brb, increasing ticket prices.

 

[eagleFMJ]

I am curious about this also, I constantly make sure to never get into the red, and try to keep it in the green b/c I was under the impression that green drew more customers?

I have found myself needing to raise the price to white 1 click under red to try and keep from going in debt. I can't say i noticed a difference when changing the price.

Anyone have any official info about the tickets prices & employee wages?

thanks,
eagle

 

[unmerged(273151)]

Employee wages does seem to directly influence your approval rating.
I would assume the ticket prices do as well but didn't really notice any change in the rating bar when changing them.

 

[Gummi]

If you go overboard with the ticket prices, the customers will scram. But you can have the prices at 99.5 for a while as face no consequences. Especially nice if you have a nasty 600 people jams in a metro stops just hit the ticket price to 99.5 for a month or two, you'll get rid of the line and make some 100k

 

[unmerged(269609)]

If you make the Price like 90€, most of the People won't pay the Price when entering, because they dont have enough money for that. At least thats what the developers say. Because this "bug" was removed since final i thought.

 

[regis888]

so how to never get in red , or have loss every month.... ?rise prices= customers won't pay , low wages= less reputation , low maintenaince= more frequently broken bus/trams etc... who had the right way to never get in loss ?

 

[unmerged(224028)]

The ticket price issue is really stupid I think. Some of the early buses cost 200$ and if you set the price to 20$ you've paid your bus in 1 stop. I know I'm repeating myself but the devs could really hire someone from Jowood to teach them about economics.

 

[Ciaphas Cain]

I know I'm repeating myself but the devs could really hire someone from Jowood to teach them about economics.

The Jowood that went bankrupt a few months ago?

 

[unmerged(109203)]

I have not raised ticket prices to 90+, but I have raised them way into the red with very little impact. I was doing this to address the over popularity of some of my stops. It seems that the new higher prices will influence the number of new people coming to the stop, but it does not seem to deter anyone already waiting for service. If they are already upset why not get $$$ off them?
I have used this to clear out the huge waits on some of the stops….still even using this method it can take awhile to clear a stop of 140 people.
It does seem to me that the payment of workers influences popularity more.

 

[unmerged(224028)]

The Jowood that went bankrupt a few months ago?

You got me there, I hadn't heard about that! Though that means some of those guys might be looking for a job

More seriously, if you check out transport giant (very similar game, just more recent than traffic giant) you'll see that prices were abstracted but still made sense. A truck was much more expensive than its fare, and a train was more expensive than a truck. But a train carried more stuff. Rails were more expensive than roads, and you had to think very hard before investing in something. In CIM bus stops and buses cost next to nothing compared to the fares. Tram tracks are surprisingly inexpensive and the only thing preventing me from replacing all my buses by trams is that I can't be arsed to lay down tracks millimeter by millimeter (dodgy pathfinding). And trams have the same capacity as buses, so there's no real choice between them.

Also, many vehicles have very similar specs. And newer vehicles aren't always more interesting. In transport giant there was always a "better" vehicule for the job. Some were faster for long distance, or hauled more stuff for bulk cargo, or had better acceleration for windy roads/tracks. When I have to choose a bus in CIM I look at 4/5 specs and go "Meh". They're basically the same with a different skin.

 

[unmerged(272700)]

Meh, the proportion of scale doesn't really bother me. The most important thing is balance. As long as those elements of the game are balanced, then I don't care about the relative proportions of the numbers. It just doesn't really bother me. I don't look to these games for pure, absolute realism. I'd hate to seem them fuss about fiddling to get that proportion more "life like" only to damage the balance in the game.

 

[unmerged(224028)]

My point was exactly that there's no balance. Right now you could remove either buses or trams from the game and it wouldn't make any difference. You could also remove half the bus models from the game and nobody would notice. How is that balanced ?

Also the scenario objectives are pretty naive. They give you 3k to make a bus line from A to B and all you have to do is put down 2 stops (cost 50$ or something) and pull a bus from another line for 10 seconds.

 

[JCFast]

Just got my best start in Berlin campaign. I took out all the loans and built as extensive metro-network as I could. Didn't build much anything else. Made huge profits thanks to the customers paying my fares that were often at 20. People kept coming I could pay off my loans rather quickly. And the funny thing was, I wasn't even moving That many people around and yet there was no traffic on the streets what-so-ever. Then I built a tram-line to complete that one mission, boom, traffic everywhere eventhough I didn't change anything else.