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Well, this is the most important money making part of your park. Get it wrong and no one will come to your park or you just don't make much money. So it has to be just right to get that cash in so you can develop your ski area.
As a guide line, the weekly ski pass should be five times that of the day pass, no more. This gives week visitors an extra two days so your guest will be happier to stay longer. Just think of really life ski resorts. As for the day pass, well this depends on the types of ski runs you have and the total length. The best bet is to keep increasing the day pass by 10 until the guest start complaining about the cost. You need to do this slowly (every minute) so to find the peek rate you can get away with. Now that sounds easy doesn't it, well theirs a catch. The cheaper your lift pass is, the more guest you will attract, so its a balance between making as much money as possible and attracting loads of guests. Me personally, I go for the most money, since at the start I'm not worried about the number of guest, just the money to develop the park.
The table below gives a guide line to how much to charge depending on the downhill total run length. Cross-country runs add a whole new problem, for that, just keep increase until the guest complain.
Total Length (meters) | Day Lift Pass |
435 to 531 | 50 |
895 to 998 | 60 |
1024 | 70 |
1256 | 110 |
1452 > | Max |
These are one of the most important things in your park, since this is what the guest are really after. There for they need to be right or else guest will be unhappy and your will have a lot of injuries.
The key to down hill run is the max gradient and the severity of the run. General run is never put a tight corner in the run after a very steep bit. This causes the guest to fly off the run. Also smooth out the run the best you can using the then landscape option. The best way is to build the run and the smooth it out. If your not happy with the smoothing, press 'e' to reset. After smoothing out the run, delete the markers and re-mark it. This enables you to find the maximum gradient of the run.
The following table gives a guide line to the classification of the run. This is only a guide line and if you have steep sections running into tight corners then you might have to upgrade the classification of the run.
Classification | Max gradient (degrees) |
White | 20 to 30 |
Green | 30 to 40 |
Blue | 40 to 55 |
Red | 55 to 80 |
Black | > 80 |
A very important not is to not have any flat sections. This causes the guest to pole which is a very bad thing. Even with the correct gradient, they might pole if the snow cover is not good. Use snow machines to increase the snow cover. As a rule, never let the gradient drop below 10 degrees.
You can always modify the smoothness and width of the run after build, which some times is very useful if the run get very busy. With a bit of practice, you can also use the manual landscaping tool to adjust the gradient of the land, but this get very complex and difficult since the landscaping too is not easy to use.
When build runs at the start of the game, make sure you have at least one green run, since all guest can use this run. The last thing you want is a starter on a blue run and crashing which raise you injuries, and gives you a bad park rating.
The runs you build need to be as long as possible since guest prefer to use the lifts as little as possible. With long ski runs handling more guests, the lift supporting it does not reach maximum capacity as quick since the guest spend more time on the actual run. So, if you can build a runs which are 1km long you will have less lift problems early in the game.
Now, these are very important to you park, since they attract families and guest which stay for a week. When building a cross-country ski run, try and make sure you don't put any hills on the run. If you do, set the difficulty quite high so that you have less accidents on the run. Un-like downhill runs, cross-country runs do not require snow, which is a god send on some levels.
Now to supply your downhill runs, you are going to need a lift to get the guests to the start of the run. As a general run, don't build drag lifts since these have a very low capacity and limited queuing space. Your better off build a small ski lift and setting the number of places to 3 and speed to 1 m/s. This will have a low running cost and the capacity of the lift can be increased easily. When building a lift, make sure you have space to double up the lifts, so when the lift gets extremely popular you can add a new lift without having to destroy the current lift. Always build a resort map and toilet at both ends of the lift. Just like in a read resort, everyone wants the toilet before or after a ski run and also want to know where they are.