#rainbow summit

Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic: Rainbow Summit

So knowing that this park is easily one of the (if not THE) hardest parks in roller coaster tycoon, I’ve decided that I’m going to play it as soon as I unlocked it, because just thinking about it makes me stressed and I want to get it over with because I’m confidant I can beat three rest of the parks in this game.

So this park not only has a height limit and a huge guest objective AND no marketing (the part that I’m most worried about), but it also has a pay to enter system, which means it will be harder to make money. This park is HARD.

I’m realizing about halfway through this park that all I have to do to beat this park is to break the game. I have to break roller coaster tycoon in order to achieve my goal. I already have 4 underground shuttle loops, and imma build a bunch more compact exciting coasters underground as well. I think I’ve got this one in the bag. It is April year 2, and I have 2,000 guests. July year 2: 2,430 guests. September year 2: 2500 guests. At this point I have 38 rides including 11 coasters. August year 4: 2,900 guests. This is ridiculous. Too crowded.

Well I beat the park with 3,050 guests, haven’t built a ride since year 2, just basically monitoring paths and guests for 2 years, I’m honestly shocked that I got it first try, and I’ll post a picture of what my park looks like after I beat it, because I know that 80% of this is being demolished when I start my beautification process. But now is the fun part! Designing many terrain style coasters, which I’m good at and I like.

You can do a lot with 35 feet. All of the coasters I’ve built have high excitement ratings, and they becoming higher the more trees are around them. Any type of coaster can be built in this park, if there’s a will there’s a way. There are no underground mega coasters in this park, so what you see is what you get.

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.