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Stay, I was wondering if you had any insight into whether station placement might have an influential effect on how customers interact with the stations.

For example, I want to build a Flower and an Herb Garden, both expansions within the Nature line.

Should there be any difference whether I build them right next to each other on an eight-port station or if I build them on opposite sides of the station?

When customers are generated by the game, is their appearance location always random?

I've also noticed that customers get in each other's way often, causing a delay at best and losing the customer at worst.

Thanks again!

You are asking all these questions that I've been dying to know but haven't quite had the words (or time) to formulate.

I'm extraordinarily interested in those effects (since I still haven't tried the guns on opposite sides thing in Survival and the like). Consider my interest peaked.

hah I'll add another question to the pile:

Are costs averaged evenly throughout the appeal/power slider?

For example:
Let's say you have Power Supply A and it's min is 0 and its max is 100 and it has five slider settings: 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%.

The costs for 0% is 0 and the costs for 100% is 10.

In OKX,
Does 25% cost $2.50, 50% cost $5.00, 75% cost $7.50, etc...

or

Does 25% cost $1.25, 50% costs $5.00, 75% costs $8.75, 100% costs $10.00

Well... I don't care enough about perfectionism to actually want to go and research this lol but seeing as how the scale for the power generators is a non linear scale I'm guessing a lot of the rest of the game isn't.

The FAQ on gamefaqs says the "sweet spot" is around 75% with everything but I haven't found that to be the case. Maxing out everything (both cost and appeal) had the best results for me. I would think you also have to consider the parking availability of each building. Maxing out appeal at the cost of price might not be worth it for a cheaper/smaller building but if you don't max out appeal for a larger building, you won't maximise your earn if those slots aren't filled as much as possible.

Im sure there is someone out there who will go and spend the time to test this stuff out and reverse engineer the game formulas.. but that person is not me lol.

I know this is a bit of an old thread. I have a few comments.

1. Sometimes the game behaves differently than I would have expected. I *think* 80% is the sweet spot for appeal, and plenty of people agree with me, but there may be some additional upside to maxing out appeal that results from complex things like traffic patterns and whatnot.

2. One possibility with traffic is that putting same-category expansions on opposite sides of the station is a good thing, because when visitors arrive at random points they spend less time on average finding what they want.

3. Attackers, on the other hand, do not arrive at random points! They arrive near weapons and attack weapons before moving on to non-weapons. This may argue for clustering weapons so that while the attackers are taking shots at one weapon, the other weapons around are all blasting away at the attacker at once. Clustering weapons is the approach I take. It also makes it easier to turn a bunch of weapons on and off quickly. One argument for putting weapons on opposite sides of the station is that when the attacker destroys one weapon, he moves on to fight another one, which means he's got some travel time to put in. But placing weapons on opposite sides seems unlikely to be a valuable strategy, since that situation (losing a weapon) is not nearly as frequent as taking out an incoming attacker.

Thanks for the comments, Stay, it's always good to hear from you!

Regarding attacker spawn locations being near the weapons: If I have 2 bays of 4 guns on opposite sides of the station, when it's time for a group of ten attackers to appear, will they appear evenly split? Or is it a random assignment, as long as it's near a weapon?

Regarding your statement, "when visitors arrive at random points," does this imply visitors always arrive at random points? Or are there only certain circumstances in which they arrive at random points?

It seems, to me, that if all visitors are random, then having 2 Nature Expansions on opposing sides of an eight-side building would be the most benefical placement money-gathering wise. Does anyone know how to mathematically prove that concept? I'm curious to know, probably because I'm watching Numb3rs right now lol.

If someone was willing to sit on a sandbox and test out appeal settings, how much data woud one have to collect to get reliable data? In other words, how much time would you have to let pass before you should believe your results?

Sometimes, there are flags in front of my buildings, but sometimes not. Sometimes a customer will sit on a flag and it will be gone when he leaves, but sometimes not. What does that represent and why do they appear and disappear?

Do repair driods ever interfere with station business?

Since, I don't mind running Sandbox scenarios while posting messages or what-not, I'll start a post to compile information. I'll keep editing the post as I get more info.

I'm using the following controls in this sandbox appeal experiment:

Town Sandbox (Small) Scenario.
The only active building is the one stated.
A Garage 1 has been built and is glitched using 2 droids to maintain the building in pristine state.
No power beyond that which the station provides is in use, unless otherwise stated.

Flower - Appeal: Flower Food (60%)
$250 to $3055 = $2805 profit
in 30mins game-time
Special Nutrients (80%)
$589 to $5212 = $4623 profit
in 30mins game-time start @ 3:30min
Ultra Soil (100%)
$2719 to $6952 = $4233 profit
in 30mins game-time start @ 26:15min

Is it a faulty assumption in this particular scenario that customer appearance is equally random through the entirey of the time range?
In other words, am I corrupting the data by not testing in the exact same time range, everytime?

Boy, this is deep stuff.

Yeah, I *think* if 10 attackers appear, they're randomly divided among the weapon locations. This might be easy to check visually.

About flow of visitors: It does depend at least partly on the complexity of your station. The more parking you have, the more visitors come (it's not a one-to-one thing, but it does affect the number of visitors in the level at any given time). We may have never mentioned this before...

Yes, I'm pretty sure all visitors (except attackers) arrive at completely random points around the radius of the station. Sometimes a batch of visitors of the same type will arrive all at once (they're friends travelling together! How sweet!).

Visitors leave at points depending on where they are in their life - if they enter and there's nowhere to park, they fly around the station and leave at the opposite point.

If they've been parking for a while and are finally full and ready to leave, they'll fly straight away from the station (from wherever they are) and leave there.

This matters, because the quicker a visitor leaves, the sooner a new visitor arrives. The flow of visitors is limited partly by how many total visitors are in the scene, so getting visitors in, happy, and out as fast as possible is key. This is a good reason for having the right expansions nearby when they arrive, which supports the opposing-sides theory of building two same-category expansions.

Flags: These mark where someone is planning on parking. Ships get to reserve parking spots, and the flag marks this reservation. When a ship flies up to a flag, the flag should disappear. A lot of flags showing on an expansion means that visitors are on their way to park there.

Nearby ships get to preempt far away ships in parking reservations. This helps keep the flow going - if a guy is far away and wants a parking spot but a nearby guy decides he wants it, he gets it, and the far away guy has to find another option or leave.

Repair droids do have a physical presence, so technically they can get in the way of other ships and slow them down (while they fly around the obstruction). This seldom happens because the parking droids are smaller and a little faster, and they tend to fly around the arms of ports near the station rather than out in the are where the other ships are.

I see other problems with accurate testing of the profit to appeal ratios.

1: What is your station rating?
-If you have a higher or lower rating that is sure to affect traffic which in turn ultimately affects earn/profit. Maybe try to max it out to 5 stars and THEN run the tests?

2: How many parking spaces are available in your entire station?
-Stay has mentioned that the more parking available, the more visitors you will have so this also needs to be a controlled variable.

And then of course, (as already mentioned) the randomness of the visitors' needs.

Tough to reverse engineer this stuff. So, stay...gonna give us the formulas? (As if it was that simple. )

Having tried to test some of the appeals myself it seems that you should also take into account the number of visitors as this can vary with the randomness especially considering at the beginning of the test visitors will take different amounts of time to first reach the port and at the end when visitors may have just arrived and not had a chance to give the money available.

I've only tested this briefly as it seems that in the missions it is easiest to max out appeal and price to get in money as quick as possible so you can build the next item as once visitors are there they seem to stay the same amount of time once they arrive, unlike the other 4 types of stations where visitors stay longer if the appeal is higher which negates being able to alter the price charged.

That brings me to the point of an accurate test which would be basically impossible to do on a visual basis as you would ideally need to measure exactly how long visitors stay at a station as well because if there are multiple ports that they are interested in and ports are full on their favourite they leave a lesser port as soon as a space is free.

On a visual basis you would probably need to do a lot of samples at each setting to get a reliable average, money intake has a range of about 3-400 in just a minute and a half on one station. Anyway i seem to have found a strategy that works for now and look forward to taking all the #1's possible.

A classic summation!