Resort Ratings: Keeping Old Regions Relevant
Once a new region opens, the old ones used to become irrelevant. Resort rating stars give every finished region a reason to grow – and a full rebalance made later regions deliberately harder instead of accidentally easier.
Playtesting revealed a classic idle-game problem. When Monte Fiocco opened, Silberkamm stopped mattering. Its production was tiny compared to the new region, so nobody ever went back. With six regions, five of them would eventually be dead screens.
Stars for a finished resort
Once a region reaches its last phase, a new card appears below the last business: the resort rating.
At first it is locked: Unlock every business of the resort to start its rating. Progress: 11 / 13 businesses. Only when every business has at least one unit does it turn into the real rating with stars. A star is earned when every business of the region reaches a unit count: 100, 250, 500, 1,000 and 2,500.
Each star brings two things:
- a big regional multiplier (the highest star counts: ×10, ×100, ×1,000 …), so the old region becomes relevant again;
- +10 % production everywhere, so investing in an old region also helps the newest one.
The thresholds match the game's milestones on purpose. Milestones double a business's profit at 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500 units and so on. (The 200 and 2,000 milestones became 250 and 2,500 the next day because round-looking numbers feel more natural.) A star never asks for a count that is not also a milestone.
No empty stars
The first design showed five empty stars per region tab. It looked like a list of failures. Now a region tab shows its phase dots until the first star, and from then on only the stars reached: ★, then ★★. No empty outlines.
The painted rosette icon for the rating took three attempts. The first one "I do not like at all", the second "better but not quite", and the third stayed.
Regions should get harder, not easier
While building the rating I asked for a table of how prices and production scale per region. It revealed an embarrassing fact: production grew faster than prices from one region to the next. Later regions were, mathematically, easier than earlier ones.
The fix was a clear rule: per region, production grows by 0.9 times the price factor. If prices are 2,000 times higher, production is 1,800 times higher. Every region is a little harder than the previous one. Rate goals for phases and unlocks follow production, so they scale with it.
The simulation then showed:
- Silberkamm: about 1.5 hours
- Monte Fiocco: about 2.75 hours
- Val Céleste: about 6 hours
- Frostridge: about 14.5 hours
- and the last two regions: days.
That curve is intentional. Idle players who reach the Japanese and Swiss regions are playing a different game: they check in a few times a day, and every visit should show progress, not completion.
Build times
Build times were identical in every region, which made later expansions feel cheap. Phase 2 now starts at 4 minutes in Austria, 15 in Italy, 30 in France and grows from there, while phases 3 and 4 keep their tuned times.
Crystals were too generous
Finally, an uncomfortable calculation: between region discoveries and phase rewards, players earned enough crystals to finish almost every construction instantly. That turned the crystal button into a "skip waiting" button, which makes builds meaningless. The price curve became steeper, especially for short remaining times, which used to cost almost nothing.
The old reputation reset was switched off the same day. With ratings, resets would have destroyed exactly the progress the stars reward.