River cruise (idea)

[cy087]

Having said that let me now ask this!

What I want to do is to develop a "river cruise".  This would just take pax up and down a river (and generate a lot of income of course).  The pax would ideally not leave the boat but I think I need two stops, one at either end of the cruise.  In order to get the Simuls to embark upon this wonderful leisure time activity I need some things on the river that would "attract" them.

After that discussion, I now realise that this is not going to be as simple as I thought. But maybe some of the brains trust can help here again.

The plan was:
1) to build several "attractions" in the river as "cur" items with no graphics and location=water.  For example "Petticoat Falls", "Alligator Creek" etc
2) have a waypoint at each of these which would presumably generate income if the simuconf.tab pay_for_total_distance = 0
3) various other things I haven't thought about yet.

The problems are:
1) will this work anyway?
2) how can I make the income high enough? I mean this is a tour with all the expected luxuries like overpriced food and drink, bas service and snide comments from the staff.  It needs to be much higher than the normal pax transport rate.  Is this possible somehow?

CY

[Ters]

Passengers are bound to and from a single attraction (or factory or another building). As such, you will have fewer and fewer passengers aboard after each attraction visited. If both ends of the cruise are connected to cities (directly or indirectly), you might have a more stable number of passengers as you pick up new passengers going from the attractions to the second end. However, routing might mean that one end is more popular for starting and ending the cruise than the other. Passengers are not interested in a round-trip. If you have a route going repeatedly A-B-C-D-C-B-A, passengers from B to A won't board a vehicle on the A-B-C-D leg, but wait for a vehicle on the D-C-B-A leg.

Passengers also need a stop in order to visit the attraction. Just a waypoint won't do.

Nice idea, but pleasure cruises is not quite what Simutrans is designed for. It's about getting people (or goods) from A to B as fast and cheap as possible. Some people like to use it more like a sandbox, but I think the visual appearance is what counts then, not making money (or even transporting thing).

[Sarlock]

In order to make such a route more profitable you could take the source code for the boat and change its operating cost to $0/km.

There are a few ways you could make this work but as Ters says, it wouldn't be a round-trip for passengers.  They would disembark at point B and new passengers wanting to go to point A would board the ship.

Having cities at each end would work: you also don't need to put the cities right beside the docks, you could create a shuttle service to/from the cities to the two docks and then have the ship as the only transit option between point A and point B, thus forcing the passengers to take the river cruise as their connecting transportation.