The Micro Coasterball is the most overpowered coaster in RCT3
Introduced in Wild Expansion Pack, the Micro Coasterball is the most broken ride to exist in terms of how much you can make with such a simple design.
At just a mere 4 tiles excluding the entrance and exit, this design is even more space efficient than the RCT2 Micro Corkscrew
This design costs a mere $854 to build, and attracts 95 guests to this tiny little ride, but that's not all, take a look at the stats of this coaster (set to operate at 126km/h, for 2 laps):
5.25 excitement, 7.26 intensity with a mere 2.77 nausea, with a ride time of 3 seconds, the debug value suggests charging $5.07 as the optimal price ($5.00 rounded down)
The stats requirement for the coaster are as follows:
It needs to have at least 2 drops
A minumum drop height of approximately 5.85 meters
Presumably a minimum speed of 40.95km/h (which is the requirement to avoid all stat penalties)
Not only that, the ride is incredibly versatile as you can make variations of it, at a cost of throughput - setting the ride to 2 laps at 51.48km/h launch speed allows you to build this design that lasts for 7 seconds, which gives you an incredibly low nausea rating ride (if you want to save costs, this design is available for $748 instead of the standard design)
If you want a design that is a single lap, meet Coasterball Thumb (it is shaped as a thumbs up like), this variation takes 2 seconds for a single lap, as compared to the original at 3 seconds.
This variation costs approximately 33% more than the square variant, and you can't really charge much more as compared to the square - but how much better would this design fare?
To illustrate the effectiveness of the coasters, I've built a Coasterball Square, Thumb and the smallest full loop inverted impulse with 8 trains - the Coasterballs each charge $5, the Impulse Coaster charges $6
This is the impulse coaster I'm using - it costs about 4 times of Coasterball Square, and takes up 3 times as much space
Based on testing after a single month, it is clear that the Micro Coasterball isn't as good as making money as the Inverted Impulse in absolute figures - but if I were to calculate based on profit per tile, time to return on investment and guest attraction per tile, the Coasterball wins by a massive margin
Coasterball Thumb vs Coasterball Square, which design is better?
The answer is, The Coasterball Square in terms of Return on Investment , despite Coasterball Thumb being marginally better in terms of weekly profit and guest processing rate
Realistically, it may be difficult to always get a full queue in scenario play, and even then, it is luck dependent on how fast the vendor processes guests (or investing in training a vendor fully) - as such, the $300+ in premium for Coasterball Thumb is not worth the cost
What about Coasterball Negative? This design you can see it starts at the top and then goes down and makes two complete loops - while you might think you can save like $100 (costing about $760 excluding support cost adjustments), this coaster when built on flat ground, costs three elevated path pieces for guests to access, which either costs money to landscape or paying extra for elevated path pieces - while it have a noticeably lower intensity than the original design with similar excitement, it is just not worth considering as you can just lower the launch speed of Coasterball Square to lower the intensity rating
