How much to charge?

[Guest SilverbackRon]

Hi all, new guy here!

 

I have spent the past few days combing through the topics here and have found a lot of useful info. For example the pinned topic about being able to jump the admission prices up to $29 and yet the guests don't notice the difference. That has helped a lot.

 

And it leads me to wonder if there are other situations where you can raise prices on services or attractions without negative repercussions. For example, the Animal Theater, Gift Shop, Gift Cart, or Restaurant. Or the various food vendors.

[Fern]

I usually increase them all by a couple of dollars. When configuring a building there is a cost section.

This is one example. They are different per building.

cDefaultCost = 12.00
cHighCost = 22.00
cLowCost = 5.00
cMedCost = 12.00

With this the building is automatically set to $12 when you place it. I suspect if you set the rate to $22, which is the highest this one can be set, the guests might complain.

[Fern]

From Jay:

 

"Here are excerpts from economy.cfg in config.ztd:
cAdultAdmission = 49
cAdultAdmission = 29
cAdultAdmission = 19
cAdultAdmission = 9
cAdultAdmission = 0
cChildAdmission = 19
cChildAdmission = 10
cChildAdmission = 5
cChildAdmission = 0
...
cCreateGuestChanceVeryLow = 3
cCreateGuestChanceLow = 5
cCreateGuestChanceMed = 25
cCreateGuestChanceHigh = 30
cCreateGuestChanceVeryHigh = 40
...
cItemCheap = 0.5
cItemExpensive = 2

So that article about admission prices is close, but not quite right. According to the above, $9 would be a trigger rather than $.25. Also, as the above shows, adult admission price triggers are different than child admission price triggers. But the only thing I can say about these triggers is that they would show a message if a price is set too low or too high. That does not necessarily mean the ranges are used to determine how many guests will show up. For example, $20 might get more guests than $21, even though they are in the same range. I don't know. Only BF would know, since that would be inside the ZT program itself. The formula certainly takes other things into consideration in addition to admission prices. The amount of marketing is one. Also, somehow what is in the zoo is another trigger. (To me, it seems like more guests come when new animals occur.) As for stand prices, that is the same as for any other building with an admission
or that is selling something. That is what the last 2 lines above indicate. If I understand those 2 lines correctly, guests will say a building is cheap if the price is less than half of the cMedCost price and will say a building is expensive if the price is more than double the cMedCost price. The cMedCost price is $10, so that means guests would not complain a price is expensive until it reaches $20. The guests do not actually pay for a building until they go inside. So it is possible to get more money from them by raising the price to the maximum once they enter a building. But I don't know how fast you would have to be, especially with grandstands."


This is what I was trying to say with the above:
1. The file economy.cfg inside the in-game file config.ztd has the settings that determine what is too cheap and what is too expensive.
2. The zoo admission price can probably be increased to a certain amount (possibly 29 for adults) before having negative repercussions.
3. For buildings, stands, carts, vending machines, and attractions, the fees and prices can be increased a certain amount from its default before guests complain about it. That certain amount will be different for different buildings.
4. Since we do not know the details inside the ZT program, I do not know if there are other negative repercussions to raising prices. My guess, though, is there are no other negative repercussions if the guests do not complain about the price increase for buildings. As far as I know, the guests will not complain about zoo admission prices being too high. There will probably just be fewer guests.
5. Although I have increased prices, I never did so as part of experimenting to see how far one can increase them without guests complaining or to look for other negative repercussions.

- Jay

[Guest SilverbackRon]

Excellent, thank you very much for your advice and info!