How to affect Hotel location rating?

[sissyfuzz]

I give up.

All hotels are located in deep green luxury area.
same goes for surrounding attractions (one of each type). Distance to port / airport is optimal.
All workers are jumping for joy.
Quality ratings on all buildings are between 70 and 90.
All my other tourism indicators are benign.
YET:
the location rating always slumps around +/- 20
even seen it as low as 7 in this environment.
doesn't really matter since the yanquis are pouring in -
but it's bugging the crap out of me...
What to do?

[sissyfuzz]

I know. Just to make it clear - I'm talking about the relative location rating (3rd of 6 on the tourism rating page). Cheap hotels only maxes out at 10 and Luxury maxes out at 25 it seems.
I've even surveyed the individual tourist's preferences and finetuned attractions accordingly
As I said - all the other ratings are off the scale.....
the relative rating stays maxed at 25. Windward / Leeward makes no difference, neither do ugly buildings in sight etc...

...we seem to be chasing each back and forth  between this forum and the scenario editor forum, Coco

[Junta_Joe]

I've found that the depth of the water around hotels are important.  

Beachfront hotels rate better next to very shallow water.

I've also found that large fountains and the white trunked palm trees raise the location rating as well.

[el_malo]

  I tend to get a little carried away with the large fountains.   IMO, it seems that they do not actually do much for happiness, but do contribute towards respect.   You can get away with a lot of "evil" stuff... if you keep the respect level up.

Sorry for the interruption... Joe's post brought it all to mind   .

[sissyfuzz]

I'm sorry - I'm not running the English language version.

Let me try to restate my problem again - it's not the hotel quality rating.
If you click on your 'yearbook' - the statitistics chart-
go to the very first page (overview) and click on 'tourism rating' (or whatever it's called in English).
The first statistic gives you the overal hotel quality rating.
The second gives you the overall 'holiday region' rating.The third one is my problem.
It should be called  something like "Relation - Hotel - Location".
I can get all other indicators to show 90+ easily - but this 3rd indicator would rather drop further than increase.

I drew up another test: Nothing but beach villas this time. Resort on windward beach,
infrastructure behind a gently sloping hill. plenty of grass. Distances to port/airport optimized. Entertainment of all categories. fountains and palms abundant, crime very low. Workers in tourism industry were paid a minimum of 30(!) pesos. US Relations euphoric. Not a shred of waste on the island.
the entire resort area (including yacht port!) was deeduh_doh_duh_doh green for luxury. All quality ratings were >90, hotels even 99.
my 'relative location' rating on the statistics page was at 10!
I edicted a pope, a tv-documentary and ran a tourism ad: the rating dropped to 4 - and went down to 1.

I thought it may be due to the fact, that so many ppl want to come to this island, but there are so few accomodations. I played around with building additional hotels in the area, and my rating did increase slightly - despite the increase in traffic and crime.

While I still don't know WHAT exactly this 3rd rating measures, it almost seems as though lower means better.
Trouble is: I ran one and the same setup for various hotel types.
sleazy peaked at 10
luxury peaked at 25
and beach villa - at 1 (!)
 

[Brf]

I think that number is just an adder...it doesnt go to 100.

[Junta_Joe]

Did you try using the editor to make the beach water shallower?

At this point I'm just guessing now.

[sissyfuzz]

 
wOW cOCo !
Thanks for all the typing trouble you went to...

"Site Impact on Raw Hotel" is the issue.
I am completely aware of all the detail indicators on the following pages. As I said -They're all benign.
The Popup-help reads (my guess at translation):
"If the site rating is above 70, the quality of the hotel located on that site will improve. If it is below 70, the quality will decrease".
Might be just a bug in my copy.

I mean, if everything is Dark green as far as the eye can see & all indicators are >80 ........

What kind of site rating do you guys have?

And junta: I've been guessing at this so much now - painting beaches and elevation included. I even hacked the bldgtype.dat and set several hotel base quality rates near zero (with a good surrounding, the quality should have improved after all). No avail. I'll just ignore it until someone figures it out now -sigh- .
Thx 2 u all

[sissyfuzz]

"popup" is the wrong word I guess. If you mouve your mouse over the "Site Impact" line, a short help text description appears at the bottom of the screen.
Your theory makes a lot of sense - but the 'help' text says "is site impact >70, hotel quality is going up, if it is <70 it's going down".
My guess is you're right and some programmer messed up... happens to the best of us.  
Pretty useless indicator anyway.

[sissyfuzz]

Case solved. Was a faulty translation then. Thx so very mucho, Coco  
I'm surprised, since quality game translations are few and far between - and the German Tropico is one of best translation jobs I've seen so far (I'm a translator myself).
The original English makes it clear, because it employs consistent terminology:
Contrastive back translation:
(Original)                           (German back-translation)
Raw Hotel Quality              Raw Hotel quality
Site Score                          Global tourism quality
Site Impact on Raw Hotel  Relation - site - hotel

The status text says:"If the site rating is above 70...".
Since the term "site" is only mentioned in the last of the three indicators - and there is no talk of  "site impact" you're misleaded into thinking that this rating should be >70.
Now I can go back to my bldgtype.dat and reset that 95 quality base rate and +10 beautification factor for sleaze motels I had put in for testing -sigh-.
I'll miss my "Roach Royal" lol.

[Coconut Kid]

Sorry, this is one of those threads from which I deleted all my posts. 

Cross reference to a later thread:
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=10971.msg208110#msg208110

Sadly, sissyfuzz was looking for something without a clear definition of what it was.

[Coconut Kid]

There are three pages in the Economy Section of the Almanac which provide a lot of information on your tourist industry. You use the links to get to the second & third. They are updated annually, and show the year of the data.

Clicking on the Economy Tab of the Almanac opens a page with a list of income and expense items. In that list is an item, "Tourism & Entert." which is a link (the manual says Hyperlinks) -- Any item in the Almanac that is written in yellow text is really also a link to more detailed information about that item. This link takes you to the first page on 'Tourism'.

# of Tourists (for year reported)
Tourism Rating (link - second page)
Spending Per Tourist (average?)
Tourism Revenue (line 1 x line 3 or
actual accumulated?)
Dock/Airport Fees
Banking Fees
Local Entertainment (accurate?)
Wages (negative)
Maintenance (building, negative)
TOTAL (which carries over to previous page)

The second page is important rating information:

~ Tourism Rating ~
> Raw Hotel Quality
> Average Site Score (From Third Page)
> Site Impact on Raw Hotel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Trailing Tourism Rating
> Projected Tourism Rating
> Combined Tourism Rating

On the second page, Tourism Rating, the link to the third page is Average Site Score.
Third Page is base information:

~ Tourism Hotel Sites ~
> Environment (Score x 1.75)
> Crime Safety (Crime Score adjusted by Police Presence)
> Tourist Attractions¹
(Including those in the 'Entertainment' group
when placed in proximity to a hotel)

} Global tourism adjustments
> US Relationship Adjustment
> Political Stability Adjustment
> Your Character
> Miscellaneous Adjustments
>> Total Global Adjustments

} Average Site Score

¹: This is the average of attraction scores. Unfortunately, what attractions are included has not been defined, nor do we know if the average may be weighted for distance from accommodations. I opine that there is a distance relationship for attractions from an accommodation and it is based on a system like the "construction priority zones" of 25 tiles. Besides, it is best not to waste the Tourist's time with walking just to satisfy some esthetic placement of buildings. So build attractions within 25 tiles of accommodations, e.g. a Scenic Overlook does NOT need anything to "overlook." Minimum number of attractions per hotel recommended:

• Luxury = 5
• Regular = 4
• Cheap = 3

The manual seems to indicate that as a tourist visits an attraction, that counts as a 'hit' or 'score' assigned for the computation.
Each of those scores is based on:

• The base 'entertainment' value of the building
• An adjustment up (or down) based on the options setting different from the default
• An adjustment up as the building employee(s) gain in skill
• An adjustment down if a skilled employee is replaced with one new to the occupation
• An adjustment up or down based on the tourist's preferences (repeat visits are not good)

[Coconut Kid]

... "Site Impact on Raw Hotel" is the issue.  ...  The hoverover help reads (my guess at translation):
"If the site rating is above 70, the quality of the hotel located on that site will improve. If it is below 70, the quality will decrease". ...

I think I finally have it figured out. Sissyfuzz was all bent out of shape over trying to change the wrong number. It is not the line "Site Impact on Raw Hotel" that is going to be +\- 70! It is the previous line, "Average Site Score" that registers a number on a 1 to 100 scale. The algorithm then tests that number against the "Raw Hotel Quality" (which may also be an average if there are several accommodations) to derive the "Tourist Rating" which drives the number and type\characteristics of the tourists who will arrive next.

The purpose of the "Site Impact on Raw Hotel" line is to imform the player of the number which is added to or subtracted from the "Raw Hotel Quality" so that the player can judge if the resources being used - especially the number and quality of attractions - are excessive for the result produced. Naturally Cheap Hotels max out at 10 and Luxury Hotels max out at 25. Those are the numbers added to the adjusted (raw) quality of those buildings to establish the "Tourist Rating" for the island. So placing "one of each" tourist attractions around a Cheap Hotel is way overkill for a Slob tourist site.

Although this particular line in the Almanac is somewhat less than intuitive, the issue is about the huge number of variables which are difficult to scope out in rigid detail. It is far more beneficial to enjoyable gameplay to try to understand the general philosophy of the design rather than trying to fight the designers as if they were the tax collectors at the IRS.