RollerCoaster Tycoon

hey! thanks! If you have the mode set to Powered Launch the train should arrive safely at the station when it comes in backwards. It has been a while so I re-made the ride to check. I was using the Corkscrew Coaster: https://imgur.com/a/DLC1MoY

There’s been a few good micro park posts on reddit recently, both done in OpenRCT:

by Thundergrunge

by  christophersveum

In RCT2 the Dinghy Ride has both the open and closed tube, and I decided to test to see if it had any effect on the stats of the ride.  I built a short ride in both open and closed tube type.

As you can see it makes no difference which style of tube you use.  This is actually really helpful as closed is easier to deal with, since the boats cannot fly off the track.

I also tested a neat idea I saw on reddit, having two stations.  The idea is that there is the primary station where the guests load into the slides, and this is at the highest point on the track.  Then at the bottom, the boat goes into another station where the guests get off the ride.  The empty boat then goes on a lift hill back to the first station.  The advantage is that the boat is empty while it travels back up to the start of the ride, the longest and most boring part of the ride.  This lets your guests get back into the park to spend money earlier.

This is the ride I made to test that. Each station can hold the 12 boats.  The problem is that both stations actually have to be the same length, as the boat capacity is based on the smallest station.

The first thing I did after beating the scenario was delete some of the clutter I created to gain enough guests to beat the scenario. It was mainly in the bottom left corner of the park.  After doing that, I wanted to help guests get to the back of the park, a very serious problem with large parks.  To do so, I decided to make a Miniature Rail transport ride.  It has three stops, all at ground level, and starts a few rows back from the entrance of the park.  I really like how it fit in the upper right corner of the park, where there's a lot of Wooden Roller Coasters.  The paths are a bit messy in that area, which I might work on later.  I also might change to have the stations at track height, rather than ground height, and have paths go up, rather than the trains.  The trains go really slow up hill, and dont really utilize that potential energy coming back down.

My next step was to create some rides in this newly opened area at the back of the park. I wanted to also help guests be attracted to the back train station, and have something to do when they got dropped off there. I decided to build two Wooden Roller Coasters and have them as intertwined as possible. I built these at the same time, building about 5 pieces of one and then switching to the other. I'm really happy with the first few turns of the Black coaster, and I like how the Red one fits in so neatly, but I'd really want both of them about 1,000ft longer. To do that, I'd need a much taller lift hill, currently they're both 10 units high, and fitting both of them in that area would become much more difficult, but that's my goal for this long term park.

Also you might notice that I went from 2500 guests to around 2300, this is because I deleted many extra rides and paths, most of those rides did not attract many guests, and had high monthly costs (some of the Wild Mouse rides cost $200 or $300 per hour, but only have about 500 riders)

My next move might be removing the log flume, while the guests do like it, it's in a bad spot for expanding the right section of the park. I might build another nearby, but I'll probably load up on some more Woodens, as I really enjoy building them.

I resumed playing early in Year 4, I decided to build a Log Flume, they are usually great for getting a lot of guests, as they can have many boats and have a fairly long ride duration. This one turned out decent, I really only expected an Excitement of 5, but this one was 5.87, which is pretty great for a Log Flume, the problem is the ride duration is almost 4 minutes, a bit longer than I normally would want.

I tried to build another compact Wooden between the really awesome blue\black Wooden and the Log Flume I just made. It was more limited by space, and I was starting to be limited on time (only 3 months left to get 500 guests) so it ended up being fairly short (2,000ft). Luckily it was adjacent to a lot of other items, so the excitement was 6.68, enough for guests to enjoy it. However after I built it, I realized I made a bit of a mistake.

I forgot to leave room for the guests to walk between the coasters, and had to build a walkway underground. Luckily it worked out nicely, usually it doesnt happen so nicely.

I went over to the other side of the park and built a few rides underneath the roller coasters. I had built on about 3/4ths of the park so far, and was starting to think about building compactly.

I started building another Wooden, when I realized it was September and I still needed 400 guests by the end of October. I didn't have many options at this point, so I turned to advertising. I really don't like doing this, as it's basically turning money into guests, but it was so late in the scenario I didn't have much choice.

I finished up the other Wooden, much like the previous one, it was very short, and I'm really not happy with the end bit, but I wanted to finish it and get on with other rides. Probably will either update the end or just delete this whole ride later.

Back to the other side of the park, I just started pumping out cheap gentle rides and making as many paths as possible. I'm still not sure exactly what the coorelation of paths to guests is, but I've noticed that more paths also helps get more guests into the park. Around October 15th I noticed that my Park Rating was taking a dip, usually it just stays maxed at 999, but it rapidly dropped to 900 and looked like it was going to keep going. I wasn't quite sure of the reason, but it was obviously something pretty bad.

I missed one tile of path on the exit of the last Wooden, causing guests to become stuck. The number keys are toggles for show\hide different things in game, and are very useful for stuff like this, and fixing broken park benches. Also you can see, I just barely broke 2500 guests, with a few days left in October.

This is the beginning of my Fungus Woods long term park.  My initial goal is just to beat the scenario, have 2500 guests by the end of Year 4.  I started out by deleting the Merry Go Round and its path in the middle of the park, and setting up some gentle rides by the entrance.  Looking back on my first attempt at the scenario  I thought I should make a wooden roller coaster first, rather than bigger gentle rides (log flume, transport rides, etc).

This Wooden Roller Coaster was very short, only 1,700 ft, but because it was very compact, and had a water splash, had a very good excitement rating for its size.  To keep down on running costs, since this scenario is a paid entrance (free rides) park, I opted for a smaller station, limiting the ride to only 2 trains (over the maximum of 3 trains).  Since there would be less trains, I wanted to keep the ride time shorter so that the queue would not be too long.  At just under a minute, one train comes and picks up 24 people every 30 seconds, which is a very fast queue time.

Continuing on with more roller coasters, I built a Wild Mouse (this one is the Mine car version).  I'm still not too good at making ones that look interesting, but like the Wooden, it is a short ride with fairly medium stats, and a very low build cost.  At this point I was charging $35 for the entrance, and had 300 guests, so build cost was very important.  A few months after this I would raise the entrance tickets to its final price of $40, as the guests entered with money ranging from $40 to $70.

One of my main goals for this park is to build a lot of Wooden coasters that intertwine and look awesome, so that was my goal for this next roller coaster.  This is also a short length, short duration, 2 train coaster.  I am very happy with the first half of the ride, however I couldn't figure work out the end very well, and did not want to spend too much time making it look pretty, as I needed to build many more rides before Year 4.  I think this will be one of the first rides that, after I beat the scenario goals, I'll go back and edit.  For now, I think it works, and the guests love it.  It also raised the excitement of the first coaster by .37!

I started feeling bad for the other side of the park, so I built a few more gentle rides and then plopped down another Wooden.  This one had surprisingly low ratings, I think caused because the speed is fairly slow.  I'm pretty happy with the way it looks, and the guests turned out to enjoy having a medium intensity ride.

Back to the other side, I built another Wild Mouse ride, but it didnt turn out too good.  I utilized the space well, however has very few cars, making  the queue back up.  Wild Mouse rides can really pack in the cars in such a small area, and I should of made the station one or two pieces longer to accommodate the track length.   Luckily the ratings are good, so I'm not too unhappy.

I built another Wooden on top of that Wild Mouse ride, and was very happy with the ratings.  This ride basically just spirals around itself after having a big drop, and I was very happy about getting it back to the station neatly. This ride is a bit longer (2,400ft and 1m13s) but I still kept the two trains, as three seemed excessive for any ride under 1.5-2 min long.  At this point I was really raking in the cash (mainly because my lack of bathrooms makes the guests leave faster), but it was nearing the end of Year 2 and I had 1250 guests.  This is really right on track to making it to 2500 guests at the end of Year 4, but I always like to have a little extra for buffer room. I wanted to make a lot of new rides during Year 3 so that Year 4 could be a little bit easier.

I built another Wild Mine ride and a Reverser Roller coaster on the right side of the map, and both turned out pretty well.  I was aiming to have around medium ratings, as most of the other rides nearby were gentle rides.  I don't make many Reverser roller coasters but I was really happy with this, especially having 2,200ft of track in a fairly small area with a simple ride (no banked turns or other special track pieces).

Guests kept complaining about it being crowded, so I built a ride that could hold a lot of them, and move them to other parts of the park.  I chose the Tram ride over the train just because you can have many more trams than trains (but trains can have more than 2 cars).  It was a simple two station between the left and right sides of the park, and I tried to keep the track as close together as possible to limit the amount of space it required.  I also made sure to build it 4 units high, which allows a lot of space underneath for other rides.

I then created this Wild Mouse ride, however was never really happy with it, and it took a lot longer than I wanted for it to be finished.  The station platform was definitely too long, but my initial plan was that the coaster was even longer than this one, however the mouse cars lose a lot of speed.  After spending too much time, I just decided to finish it as quickly as possible, so this ride is also tagged for improvement after Year 4.

By this time, it was nearly the end of Year 3, and I had around 2,000 guests and basically unlimited money.  Each month I was earning around $9-11k in entrance tickets.

I wanted to make another roller coaster quickly, and I noticed that the left side Tram queue was usually empty, because guests weren't getting that far back in the park, so I chose to make another Wild Mouse ride on the lower left side.  This one looks pretty cool, and the ratings aren't too bad, and I finished it very quickly.  My only goal was to make a ride to attract more guests to the back area of the park, so this was definitely a success.

There was a little area where the left side Tram station turns around, and I wanted to build a real roller coaster here, rather than just more gentle rides.  I decided to try and build a very compact Wooden roller coaster, and this is what I came up with.  It's got a length of 3,000ft, which I was very impressed with, and looks like a pile of snakes.  I'm really impressed with the way this looks, and it's got pretty good ratings as well.

I'm starting a long term map on Fungus Woods.  First goal is to complete the scenario (2500 guests in 4 years).  After that I want to expand and have loads of Wooden roller coasters that are twisted around each other.

Rainbow Summit is the last scenario in RCT2, it is a 4 year paid to enter park.  The only constraint is that you cannot build anything over 6 units high above the ground.  This eliminates several thrill rides, and almost all roller coaster inversions, removing many good rides from the scenario.  The scenario starts off with a fairly good Wooden roller coaster and a really terrible Tram ride.

I started building rides at the front of the park, and figuring out which rides were short enough to pass the height limit.  To my surprise the 3D Cinema does work, even though it looks very tall however the Enterprise is too tall.

Since this is a paid entrance park, it is important to charge the most you can, the earliest.  I watched the guests coming in and they usually were loaded, anywhere from 60 to 90 dollars so I set the entrance to 50, and then a few months later turned it up to 55.

Feeling bad for the Tram riders, I built a Monorail above it, which held 100 people.  The guests loved it.

I built some rides in between the two Monorail stations to help get guests away from the park entrance.  I had just finished researching the Roto Drop, and I was very surprised I was able to build it, I was only allowed one vertical piece, but it was enough to get surprisingly good ratings for such a short fall.

I built some more rides near the entrance and a Chair Lift, these guests really liked transportation rides, and since I did not need to generate money from the rides, they worked perfectly.

At the end of Year 1 I was seriously rolling in the dough, averaging around $8k from entrance tickets every month because of the lack of bathrooms (a great way to get people out of your park, but still have them happy).  I also had 1,200 guests, basically halfway to the goal.  However I was running out of flat usable area. 

So I decided to start building underground.  I built three shuttle loop coasters right next to each other.  Nothing too special, but the guests really enjoy these.  I put them in the corner of the park to help convince guests to walk around the park a bit more, and the Monorail was dropping loads of people off right there.

I ended up building a 4th Shuttle loop.  Then I built a Junior Coaster that was all underground, I wanted to have an exciting ride, so I had a big drop at the beginning to get it going fast, and then just tried to make the ride as long as possible without going too far into the mountain.  I think it worked out alright, it would of been nicer to have a bit higher excitement, but overall I think it was good.

I had built far enough underground that I was starting to run into the Wooden coaster, so I decided to just raise the land up in the lake to make more room.  I loaded it up with all the flat rides that I could.

And then I did the same with the front section of the park.  And feeling bad for the front, I built a Shuttle Loop underground there too.

I built a Corkscrew over by where the Wooden coaster is, because I had pretty much just left that park empty until now.  This coaster drops and does a corkscrew and then has a lift hill, which worked out pretty good.  It doesnt have many inversions, and it is a slow and short track, but I think it worked great for an all underground coaster.

I was just starting Year 4 and only needed 100 more guests to complete the scenario, and had loads of cash.  

I then built up the area around the Corkscrew coaster, and went over 2,500 guests. At this point I stopped making new rides.

In previous scenarios I noticed that sometimes building new rides did not seem to attract new guests, however expanding the park into new areas did.  My hypothesis was that paths had something to do with it, and new guests would not come if it was too crowded.  To somewhat test this, I stopped building new rides, but built a ton of new paths.  I gained about 200 guests by doing this.  I'm not exactly sure why, but I do believe that it has something to do with needing a certain amount of paths per guests, otherwise new guests will not come to the park.

The end of Year 4 came and I beat the scenario.

I'll quickly talk about the shops in this scenario, because they ended up bringing in me loads of cash throughout the 4 years.  Several of the food stalls were bringing in $500 an hour, which turned into about $2000 over the 4 years.  What I did was build at least one food and one drink stall in each section of the park.  It just depends on how the paths work, I put around one pair of shops per screen, however if you have complicated pathing, you'll want more, as the guests get confused very easily walking to the nearest shop.  Also I had 2 balloon shops, and while they don't usually make too much money (about $100 an hour), they do make it look like your park is happier.  Because the shops usually make very little compared to rides, I only put them in single squares that I would be unable to use otherwise.  I then put as many park benches nearby as possible, as guests need to be seated to enjoy their food the fastest.  I also usually double up on Handymen in these 'food court' areas to help pick up all the trash, and a clean park means no broken park benches.  Also, in this scenario I had no Restrooms, which made guests leave the park after their Bathroom meter filled up.  When a guest leaves the park, the game creates one to enter in their place, and with a paid entrance, you want guests leaving so new guests can come in as fast as possible, while still being happy.  Having no Restrooms is the best way to do this.

If you played through RCT1, you'll recognize this level.  It is basically Leafly Lake, but with a different goal.  This level is fairly laid back compared to most of the previous Expert scenarios, you just need 2,100 guests and you have unlimited money.

You start out with a few guests, and one giant ride that goes around the whole park.  At first I was going to delete it, but I had to keep the Park Rating above 700, so I needed to make sure the guests had rides that would keep them happy.  I did put down some no entry signs to prevent the guests walking around the whole map.  The guests dropped off via the Mine Ride would either get back on it, or make the walk back to the front of the park.  I made a Merry-Go-Round, a Twist (the only decent Thrill Ride available), and a Motion Simulator.

After getting a few rides to keep the guests happy, I created two Shuttle Loop roller coasters on the lake, nothing too spectacular but a great way to get people into the park.

Next to those two Shuttle Loops, I built a Floorless, which turned out quite well.  I really expected the excitement to be lower, as there is nothing too exciting about this roller coaster, but it has several inversions, fairly lengthy track, and a decent air time, which all added up to a 8 excitement.  If this was a money scenario, this would of cost a fortune because it is over the water.

The water adds cost to each piece of track because of the additional height, which also causes some of the smaller coasters to be extremely limited because of their low maximum height.  I'm surprised this scenario was an unlimited money scenario, as having money would have made it way more difficult.

I then built two more Shuttle Loop roller coasters, and did some pathing and shop work to help the guests out.  I knew this area would become crowded so I connected the left and right sides with a path that went over the top of the first two Shuttle Loops, and put the shops up there.  This also helped preserve space for rides.

I was up to nearly 1,000 guests, and still had a lot of room in the park, so I made another Floorless.  This one was much shorter, but still had almost the same excitement, which was my goal.  It also left room for another roller coaster to the right.

I added another shuttle loop, and some pathing that connects the middle area of the lake.  I was a little worried about overcrowding, and having enough shops to keep the guests happy.

The next roller coaster I built was a Mine Train in the upper left corner.  I didn't have much room to work with because it was right between the original ride and the Floorless I built.  I was really surprised with the ratings on this one because of the short ride length, but I think I had enough helixes that it became a decent ride.

I then did basically the same thing on the other side of the park, a medium length Mine Train roller coaster.  This one was a bit longer, and had a larger lift hill so I got the ratings that I was expecting.  I also built up a shop area in this corner of the park as well.

I went back over to the left side of the park and built some flat rides and shops, as I was trying to get guests to start spreading out, to combat overcrowding near the entrance of the park.  You can see in this screenshot that I still have a No Entry sign preventing guests from going farther.

I built a Wooden roller coaster, and my main goal was to try and keep it as compact as possible, but still have a good ride time and length.  I was really impressed with the way this turned out, because there is a lot of adjacent track.  The intensity turned out a bit higher than I wanted, but the guests were fine with this.  I really would try to do this again, as it worked out much easier than I was expecting.

At this point I had 1800 guests, and I removed the No Entry signs and let the guests finally walk around the entire park.  To help them manage the long journey I built some flat rides, as well as a shop area at the very bottom of the park.

I knew I would still need to build at least one more roller coaster to get to 2,100 guests, so I decided to make a quick Floorless coaster again.  This one took a bit longer to make than I expected, because the first test it did not make it through the second loop, so I had to do a little bit of adjusting to get the extra speed.  I also wanted to use more half loops, because they are a great way to turn the track quickly, and I used two in this coaster.

I started building a Dinghy ride as the guests started trickling in and it only took a few days before I got to 2,100 guests and beat the scenario.

Ghost Town is an expert scenario that is a paid rides park.  You start out with a medium sized empty park, the goal is to have 10 different types of roller coasters that are each 3,937ft long and at least 7 excitement.  Considering the size of the park, and the fact that half of it is mountains, this goal is quite ambitious.

Since I knew building 10 large, exciting roller coasters would be no small, or cheap, task, I started by building a solid base of thrill rides.  It also turns out that most of the guests had very low intensity and nausea tolerances as well.  In the bottom right corner of the screen shot above, you can see I put a one way sign, keeping all the guests in the upper half of the park.  I did this to eliminate the need to staff the lower half of the park until I started building rides there.

After spending half of Year 1 building the north end of the park, I moved down to the south end, and built that up with thrill rides to bring in additional guests and increase my income.  I knew I would need at least $10,000 to build the first ride so I could use more guests in the park generating money.  Towards the end of Year 1 guests start getting hungry and thirsty, and as you can see I built a strip of shops for them to access.  I spent a few months researching shops because I did not have the Cash Machine, or more than two different drink stalls, however after a few months of no results, I went back to only researching Roller Coasters.

As you can see, I finished the first roller coaster halfway through Year 2, I was limited by how much money I had, and I did not want to have to take out a loan to pay for it.  It is a fairly standard looking Wooden, I made the Station big enough to hold the maximum number of trains and cars, to help maximize the profit.  Even though there was a minimum length requirement, I tried to keep the overall size of the ride down, to allow the other 9 roller coasters ample space.  I think it was successful because the majority of the ride is very compact and in a corner of the park that would be hard to utilize.  Since the excitement was so high, I could charge a lot for this ride, however I decided to charge $6.  One reason I didn't charge more was because of the lack of Cash Machines in the park.

Guests really liked the Wooden coaster and it started generating tons of cash, which allowed me to get started on the second roller coaster.  I chose to do a Floorless because it has become one of my favorite types.  I had similar goals as the previous coaster, try and keep the overall size down, while still meeting the required ride length.  I did this by having a very compact, but lengthy, helix section at the beginning.  I also wanted to get more excitement from having proximity to the Wooden Coaster, so I have lots of track adjacent to it.  My favorite part of this ride is the parallel corkscrews that go over the Wooden's track, I think it looks really cool.

I had researched a few good roller coasters during this time, all steel based, so I switched to researching shops again, hoping to get the Cash Machine.  In June of Year 3, I finally did, and I put them everywhere.  At this point, the Wooden roller coaster was making almost $10,000 per hour and the Floorless was making $20,000.  The Floorless has the advantage of 3 trains over the Wooden's two, and had a little bit more excitement.  

During this time I also took care of some upkeep problems, such as not enough shop and staff.  The park was growing quickly because of the giant roller coasters, and keeping up with the increasing guests while still quickly building roller coasters became difficult.  In between each new coaster I would check the paths and guest's thoughts to make sure the park was still in good condition.

The next roller coaster I built was the Vertical Drop, which is very similar to the Floorless.  I had quite a bit of money at this point, and I decided to try and build it in the same area as the other two roller coasters, to help save space for the other 7 that I still needed to build.  I tried to have as much adjacent track to gain excitement, as I wanted the only inversions to be the two loops after the first drop.  This turned out to work out perfectly, as I went over the minimum length by quite a bit, which definitely helped me get the 9 excitement rating.

Using the remaining space on the flat side of the park, I built a Corkscrew Coaster. This one didn't work out as well as I expected.  The intensity was really high, and the excitement was just over the minimum.  This is most likely caused because of the number of inversions, I should of used more big drops instead of more inversions.  The amount of adjacent track is ample, but clearly not enough to get a higher excitement.  If I redid this, I probably would have big hills and big drops initially, and then some cork screws and helixes, rather than a combination of all of them throughout the whole ride.

The next ride I built was a hypercoaster.  I have almost no experience building these, but I knew I'd have to have a huge lift hill and have a few good drops.  The first two drops did a good job of this, and then I used helixes above the other roller coasters to build excitement while also having extra points for proximity to other pieces of track (this also helped increase the excitement on the Corkscrews Coaster).

Since I was running out of room in the flat area of the park, I decided to build the next roller coaster (number 6) underground.  I prefer to use Mine Train rollercoasters underground because of their excellent helix abilities, and they seem to be more exciting on this ride than some others.  Also higher lateral G's seem to be tolerated more.  As you can see in the screenshot, there are a lot of helixes that are adjacent to help build excitement.  The first drop goes into bunny hills that go all the way across the park, turn around, and come back to a second, very short, lift hill, and go into what you see on the screen.  I was really expecting a higher excitement from this, because it is underground and a fairly long ride.  While not my best Mine ride, it did pass the requirements for the scenario.

This Twister turned out almost exactly like I expected.  I used many inversions to get the excitement up, but also used many helixes to meet the length requirement.  The only cool thing about this ride is the first drop goes into a corkscrew that goes through a loop, other than that this is a pretty straight forward ride with inversions.

I usually avoid building Flying Turns (Bobsled Coaster in RCT1) because they are very difficult to do correctly.  The single cars do not hold speed for very long, so you have to have excessively tall lift hills to make sure they make it back to the station.  Luckily I had essentially unlimited money at this point, so I just build the ride above all the thrill rides at the north end of the park.  It does feature a second lift hill halfway through the ride to make sure the cars make it all the way around, but other than that this is a pretty boring ride.  While building it I ran into many problems with the Enterprises below, because they require a lot of vertical space, therefore I was not able to make large hills or drops like I wanted to.  This resulted in mainly helixes, which was most likely the biggest reason why the excitement was just barely about 7.

About one month later, the Flying Turns ride crashed, so I shut it down for the remainder of the scenario.  It did meet the requirements for the 10 roller coasters, however it was negatively impacting my park rating, so I kept it, but left it closed.

For the 9th coaster I built a Hyper Twister, which is basically just a normal steel style roller coaster.  This had a very tall lift hill, which allowed me to have this ride above the Twister coaster and still have large drops (the air time is 7 seconds!).  I used the helixes as long turn around pieces, so that the length would be above the required length, and on the way back to the station I had it go through the Twister's loop.  I was really surprised that it worked, as there was already a corkscrew going through the loop.  Now I know that two pieces of track can fit through a single loop, very cool.

Shortly after building the Hyper Twister, I received the award for Best Custom Designed Rides, pretty sweet!

I had one more roller coaster to build, nearly $100,000 and had almost half of the park to build it in.  I decided to try a Giga Coaster.

I had a super duper huge lift hill, and had a few big hills at the beginning of the ride.  Then several huge stacks of helixes, some turns on top of the other roller coasters, and then a short underground section with several helixes as the turn around area to get back to the station.  I was really surprised with the excitement on this ride, because it really was a fairly simple ride.  I'm sure it cost a fortune, but I had so much money I wasn't really paying attention.  Also, having a length of 10,000 feet definitely helped.

Once I opened the Giga coaster I reopened the Flying Turns ride to win the scenario.

The goal is 10 different types of roller coasters, that are at least 4,000ft and have a 7+ excitement.  It took me a while, but I started making a lot of cash and finally researched the good roller coasters.  This picture was taken after I built the 8th qualifying coaster.