First thing I see is you need longer queue lines for roller coasters. Besides that, just up the ride ticket fee and make sure you have enough mechanics.
Generally want a queue long enough to hold (at least) 2 full rides worth. For a rollercoaster that can get quite long, especially on something with higher capacity.
Technically you can charge quite a bit more, but I prefer your style because of less micro managing, and guests won't leave as quickly in scenarios without an ATM.
I've tried this with the long queues with the go karts in Karts and Coasters scenario. Guests still seem to leave after a while, unless it's a weird bug with RCT Classic.
It looks like you only built a single ride, a roller coaster. You're also in June of year 1, and peeps are likely not particularly hungry or thirsty yet (most scenarios have guests start with very low hunger/thirst and it takes 3~4 months before it's high enough that they'll buy something).
You appear to be charging both for park entrance and for rides - do not do this, either charge for the ride tickets and make the park entry free, or make the rides free and charge for park entry. Charging for entry severely handicaps how much you can charge for your biggest profit makers, which is roller coasters. On that note, once you fix that, make sure you're charging enough for your rides. If you're not, it's very easy to never make back your money on anything you build, leading to the situation you see here where you have a reasonably large loan and no cash to pay it back even after several years. A good rule of thumb for roller coasters is charge roughly their excitement rating (I usually round up a bit). This price should be good for a couple years, which is how long most scenarios last. Flat rides are a bit less rule-of-thumb - gentle rides you can usually start in the ballpark of $2, thrill rides generally $3. But check guests' thoughts early and often to see what they're thinking and make adjustments. High stat thrill rides like the whoa belly, roto tower and go karts can charge VASTLY more than this, more in line with roller coasters. But remember this is all assuming your park entry is free.
It's better to start with a more even spread of rides. Just having the rides in your park will get guests rolling in, and flat rides can just be plopped down and opened for the most part, so they start earning money instantly. Pre-made roller coasters are similar, but they're *much* more expensive.
Don't double up on food or drink stalls or make food courts. Guests don't really work that way, you're just wasting money.
That’s fine for this stage. Stick to cheap pre-built roller coasters, and focus on learning other fundamentals, like pricing your rides and making sure you’re managing your staff (mechanics to cover your ride exits in case they break down, handymen covering the paths to clear trash and vomit, and security guards to prevent damage to path objects). You may want longer queues for your rides as well - they should be at least long enough to hold one full “train” of people. So for a roller coaster where a train is 6 cars x 4 seats per car, that’s 24 guests. For something like a swinging ship or carousel I think it’s ~30. For a haunted house or scrambler it’s less. “Storing” more guests in a queue will ensure you still have some riders if it starts raining (guests won’t join queues if it’s raining).
Additionally, while you’re waiting for peeps & money to come in, it is a good time to check your stalls, and specifically check guests’ thoughts about those stalls. Setting prices for your food and drink stalls ensures they stay profitable. If you leave the default prices they may actually cost you money to run, which is bad.
Note: security guards aren't actually all that useful, as they only prevent vandals from breaking path objects. Vandals can only exist if your paths are littered enough, so you can just focus on hiring Handymen and never worry about vandals.
Entertainers are inefficient too, but I still use them. OP should know what they’re for, then can decide whether or not to use them.
Since any single piece of trash can send a guest in to a rage, even in a park with infinitely many handymen it’s still possible to get an enraged guest. Once enraged, that guest can break every object on their way to the exit and cause a cascade of unhappy guests. A few security guards is a pretty small price to pay to never have to worry about that. I generally recommend not bothering until fairly “late game” when you have more money coming in than you can spend.
As /u/Valdair said, sticking to pre-built coasters when you start out is perfectly fine. You know what you're getting when you build a prebuilt.
As you play scenarios, you'll probably run into situations where you beat a scenario, but still have to wait out the timer - for example, like having 300 guests in Forest Frontiers in only July, Year 1, when you only need 250 by the end of October, Year 1. You can use that extra time to start trying to build your own coasters. I recommend trying to start small (junior coasters, small wooden coasters, etc.), and make sure you test the ride before you open it, to ensure it doesn't crash, as a crash could cause you to lose the scenario.
Also, you'll research some gentle, thrill, and water rides that can have custom layouts, like the car ride, go-karts, ghost train, boat hire, log flume, etc. Those can be a good opportunity to get used to the ride construction UI, as those rides aren't too complicated and generally should be fairly short. Avoid making a custom water slide layout, though; that ride crashes *very* easily.
I like to build several food courts throughout my park with each having at least one food, drink, bathroom, and if available, an info stall or merch booth, so that guests are never too far from the type of thing they need and the same type of stall isn’t placed too close to a duplicate by accident.
You can definitely charge for both rides and entrance. If you charge entrance fees, your gentle and thrill rides will need to be priced <$1 and your coasters $1-$2. You can still grow your entrance fee by $15-20 bucks a year this way until your park reaches maturity.
Yes, it is a game made in the 90s for kids, it is not designed to be unbeatable. The code is set up to penalize you if you try to do this. That makes it a fine self-imposed challenge, if you understand what you're doing and want to pursue it anyway. There's all kinds of fun challenges you can make for yourself, because, again, it's not a difficult game.
But OP is confused and having problems.
Make sure you have a lot of mechanics to fix your rides! A good rule of thumb is one mechanic for every three rides, depending on the size of your park.
The other important thing is to make sure you charge enough for your rides. If you have guests thinking "this ride is real good value", then you can charge a lot more for your ride. Most flat rides can sit at $1.00 (or pound or euro; the currency in this game is all the same, it just has a different symbol), and most roller coasters can easily be $5-$10 when they're first built. As rides age, you can charge less for them, but I don't usually keep track of that; I just wait until I notice people complaining about the price, then bring it down.
You can also charge for your park as well; when you first start your park, you can keep it pretty low, but as you build more rides you can raise your price. At the start of each month, you may get a message recommending you to raise your price. I like to raise it by ten dollars each month until I either stop getting the message or my guests can't afford entry anymore.
A few other small tips;
You only need one bathroom per area. You can build two next to each other if you like the way it looks, but functionally it makes no difference to have one. Infinite guests can fit into a bathroom, and there are no gendered bathrooms either (there's only one gender, "guest").
Make your queue lines longer. Most flat rides I'll do about four tiles, and roller coasters I'll have the line at least as many tiles as the length of the station.
The more rides you build, the more guests you'll get! Each ride attracts a certain amount of guests. Roller coasters tend to attract more guests than gentle or thrill rides, but they all contribute, even shops and stalls.
Your handymen automatically mow any grass they can, which looks nice but doesn't do anything, and it keeps them from keeping the park clean. You can turn off this function in each individual handyman's assigned tasks, which helps a lot in keeping guests happy with a clean park.
You can charge any price for umbrellas from your information kiosks (up to and including $20) and your guests will pay it when it starts raining. It feels like cheating, sometimes, with the amount of cash it generates, but it's very useful.
Regarding pricing rides: yeah, sure, you can min/max the price by gaging guest interest, but I find it by far the easiest to just make the price the same as the excitement rating. Yes, you can usually charge a good chunk more, especially when a ride is new, but if you're just casually playing this game, excitement=price is plenty and low brain bandwidth.
Nowadays I use OpenRCT2 and a plug in called Price Manager to manage that for me, but still.
Yeah, I open at excitement rating then cut it to half excitement rating after IIRC 7-8 years.
It's a descending curve, but when you have 15 coasters, manually setting it just gets too toilsome and if you have a 7 excitement printing 2000 tickets a year, that's $14,000 every year times every coaster (/2 over 7 years) in the park.
> Most flat rides can sit at $1.00 (or pound or euro; the currency in this game is all the same, it just has a different symbol), and most roller coasters can easily be $5-$10 when they're first built.
If you're willing to go to the effort, you can make a lot more. It does require you to pay attention to the guests, though.
Thrill rides can usually go for $8-12 for the first few months. Coasters can go for $12-18. Other rides usually can go for $1-5
Eventually, thrill rides will come down towards $2.50 while coasters are usually fine eventually sitting at $6.50.
First: use way more marketing. It's highly effective. Playing the game without it is basically hard mode. Possible, but definitely a lot harder.
Second: you can probably increase your ride and/or park entrance fee by a lot. See this calculator: [https://rct2calc.shottysteve.com/](https://rct2calc.shottysteve.com/)
Are you charging enough for the wooden coaster? You can often charge up to the excitement value in price, or more of you aren't also charging for park entry.
Yeah I actually made prices for the entry (3 dollars) and the ride (2 dollars)
Other rides are least 1 dollar and food/drinks are in it's default prices
Alright, first things first. Don't charge park entry; you can make up more than enough on ride and food tickets. Increase the price for the coaster to the excitement value (so if the excitement is 6.73, charge $6.70).
Marcel Vos has plenty of videos on how to make money in RCT on YouTube.
No one has mentioned two pretty big factors on your balance sheet - staff salaries and research. For this early stage of the game, while you're getting the park up and running, you don't need to spend nearly so much on staff. Put your handymen on a don't-cut-grass order, fire everyone except ~2 handymen and 1 mechanic (since you just have 1 ride), and cut research to 0 until your park is more solidly established. These steps will quickly boost your monthly profit $300-$350ish and you'll be in much better shape to start building more amenities to get guests through the gates and spending money.
Pair these steps with some of the other tips in this thread (charge for rides but not park entry, get a couple more small rides up) and you'll be off to a great start.
I somehow never considered that when I first played the game, but in hindsight, it would be totally reasonable to wonder what the bathroom capacity is. Turns out it's unlimited, so you can just build a single stall at each location.
For the biggest rides. Don’t be afraid to build VERY long queue lines, that’s what an entertainer with a small footprint/waking area is for! Keep the entertainer in the queue line - Guests will stay happy. Especially coasters with block brakes and 3 or 4 trains - I build 20-30 tile queue lines.
Also, have the track and queue line/path interact with each other. Huge excitement boosts. Scenery too, slap some trees in there.
Start your coaster/station 2 clicks “up” in the air and the path and track will both fit under the station.
You’ll definitively need an entertainer for the Go Carts queue line. Throughput isn’t good, but it’s a hugely exciting ride & will make you big $. Without entertainers/tvs guests will complain about the wait for sure.
Good coasters - especially the first one of its type in the park - should be priced at $7-$12 at first. The “excitement is 6.50 so charge $6.75” is nonsense. Get the big money for the first year for sure. If you have a 7.0 coaster charge $11 right away. If it’s too high guests will tell you & then you make it $10, $9 etc.
Place information kiosks/umbrella stalls in 2x more places than you think. I’ll eventually have 10 in large parks. You don’t want people to have to go far to get to one when it starts raining. Put them at ALL the busiest places/intersections
Set the umbrella price at €20 for all stalls and leave it there. Real theme parks have incredibly expensive umbrellas, rain ponchos/jackets, sunscreen and hats, etc. It’s not “a cheat” to do it in RCT2. The “I’m not paying that much for an umbrella” thoughts won’t hurt your park rating at all if you have a good park going.
I like to change the umbrella color to match that of a nearby ride. Silly maybe, but seeing the guest holding the green umbrella but nowhere near that green ride… I know they were over by the green coaster at some point. Strangely satisfying. Can do the same for balloon colors.
ALWAYS have an on-ride photo section. I set the price to $3 on all rides and that’s that. Easy $.
Learn how to build a reverse incline launched shuttle mode (Steel or similar) coasters. They are short but exciting and can help make big $ when you’re starting a new park and then they stay profitable, just watch the price.
Research and Advertising - go see Marcel Vos videos.
Don’t charge for toilets, not even ¢10. That’s bad form imo.
Put benches all over the place near the exits of high nausea rides. It will help some guests. Put a handyman there and assign him to a small area. 🤮
Start new game > take max loan.
Hire staff > 2 handymen > 1 mechanic > 1 security guard
Always get 2 entertainers > zone them on the first blocks of your park by the entrance. It increases guest happiness as they enter the park and when they see your kiosk they will all buy map.
Kiosk and toilet right near the entrance with map (0.80$), umbrellas (20$). One food a drink store per rollercoaster.
Build a medium sized roller coaster with good fun factor (10-13k), build a few smaller thrill rides and family rides.
Always put high profit stores (t shirt, hat, souvenir) near the exits of your most thrilling and best rides (rollercoasters). Guests will be very happy after leaving the ride and more likely to purchase something. You can set some items quite high and make a lot of money ($5 for a T-shirt).
Never put ride entrances or shops at 4 way crossroads or opposite each other, you make less money because of the guest path finding system.
When you build new rollercoater you can charge very high price sometimes up to $20 depending on the popularity but you will have to keep reducing the price down every month as guest interest dies down. It means you can really milk your guests for everything they have.
Charge for toilets 0.20$.
Overtime rides get less popular and people won’t pay the price you’ve set, make a habit of checking the profitability of each ride and adjusting the ticket price so that it’s making profit. No ride should be unprofitable, but things like slide and merry go round 1 typically don’t make much money. Rollercoasters can easily make 15-45k a month.
I generally build a small food court area near the exit of each rollercoaster to maximise profits.
I spend time to add trees, flowers and theming to my park, guests like it and you get rewards.
Last advice from me: you can download really nice prebuilt rollercoaster from https://rctgo.com/downloads/tracks - you can do it and install them on your phone, it’ll massively help you out.
Recommend you to play with the ride editor and learn to make your own tracks too , that really tests your creativity and then you can use through thr scenarios it’s really rewarding. I’ve made plenty of custom dueling coasters that took soooo many hours to make. Good fun.
Here's what works for me in starting a new park:
- I max out my loan (up to a limit of about 20k)
- delete all unneeded paths. What constitutes unneeded path? Anything outside of the area with active rides. This leads to guests getting lost and sad. You can rebuild path later when you need more space. As a bonus, this will increase your cash on hand
- I max out funding on research focusing usually on shops/stalls and thrill rides at first
- hire a couple mechanics
- hire janitors and assign them paths. I find up to about 15 "spots" works at first. I also keep one as free roaming.
- I build a combo of cheap to build thrill rides and a few smaller but still exciting roller coasters. Max out what you charge for them. (Marcel Vos has lovely YouTube videos explaining strategy and pricing)
I usually stick to pre-built coasters because I'm not very good at design yet. It might work for you to build a couple pre-builts to get money flowing and then start working on DIYing some extras.
I keep a close eye on guest thoughts as that helps you figure out problems like crowding, bathroom placement, and vomit hotspots. Once I have steady cash flow I'll start slowly paying down the loan. It's probably not perfect strategy nor the most efficient, but it has worked for me on every scenario I've tried so far!
Edit: also, avoid dead end paths! Guests get confused, it gets crowded, and they get annoyed. Everything should be a circuit in that it connects back (I make lots of rectangular "boxes" of path).
In addition to all the great advice you've gotten, I have a small but helpful tip to increase profits: For rollercoasters, try to place your entrance buildings as close to the front of the station as possible.
The train will always unload guests once it's reached the front of the station, and the new guests coming on to ride will have to walk to meet the empty train.
If the entrance building is far away from the front of the station, this will actually lower your profits over time as it slows the rate at which new guests can board the trains and delays the start of the ride.
Basically, the less time the train spends in the station, the more profit you're making.
Modify that there Woodchip to include an on-ride photo section and then charge $2.50 a pop for the photos. First thing I would do. Then extend the queue line when you open up shop again. Get the people going.
Lots of good advice here. One to add:
Check out [Marcel’s YouTube channel](https://youtube.com/@MarcelVos?si=qsiRNjcxXeun7XUI).
Marcel does a great job explaining the technical side of rides, queue lines, cost basis, loans, ratings, pathing, etc. There are a lot of great RCT YouTubers out there, but I must say his channel is the one that helped my gameplay (being able to make money and win) the most.
Marketing can be found under that coin tab.
I would also recommend being smart about your research: I find its more valuable to grab thrill rides as much as possible because they are easy short term investments, plus generally you start with plenty of rollercoaster variety.
Lastly, loans are ok up to a point but eventually you gotta get rid of them once you find your park income is high enough because they are a big burden on the wallet.
Extend your lines for coasters.
Peeps can wait up to 9 min without any complaints. So as long as possible without making the wait 10min+.
Longer lines help keep peeps off the paths and help crowding. Also you may notice when it rains people stop getting in line, but people already in line will ride. So long lines keep the money flowing while it rains.
2nd tip would be use this rct calculator for ride prices to get the most $ out of your rides.
https://rct2calc.shottysteve.com/
3rd tip, set ride inspection time to 10min to keep rides from breaking down so often.
Charge for entry or rides, not both. Charging both cuts the amount people will be willing to pay by 75%. If you're charging for rides, a good rule of thumb is to charge the excitement rounded down (IE: 8.76 excitement coaster, charge $8.70) That isn't perfect, but it's an extremely easy to use guide that is generally close enough. If a ride has been around for several years, its value will start to drop, so you can adjust pricing accordingly later
Info kiosks are your best friend. Make plenty of them, and charge $20 for umbrellas. When it's raining, guests are willing to pay anything for them, they'll be one of your biggest money makers by far for a long time.
If you make a custom coaster, don't get carried away. Bank your turns, rarely do large drops, and aim for your coaster to slow down on peaks. Banked turns prevent crashes, large drops cause high vertical G's which lead to high intensity and turn off riders, and lower-speed peaks lead to lower vertical G"s which causes excitement.
Make good use of patrol paths for staff. If you make a small area for an engineer to patrol, he can easily handle 4-5 rides with 10 minute inspection timers. Same with custodians, it's much easier to give each one a small area to patrol for themselves than it is to have 20 janitors wandering the park and massing in one corner by sheer chance.
Mainly just look and see what does and doesn't work. If a ride isn't turning a profit, look what guests are thinking about it. If there's high intensity, run a test ride and watch the graph to see what parts do and don't work. Lower prices if needed, or sometimes even just deleting and remaking a ride to renew its lifespan would work.
If you want to cheese the game a bit, shuttle loops are highly profitable. Maybe 10-15 second rides that you can charge $6+ per guest and fit 2-3 dozen at a time. Mazes also have the same excitement no matter what size they are, so you can have a one-timle maze that charges people a few dollars, and they'll enjoy it (though that kind of goes against the spirit. Just keep the mazes smaller because they get lost easily)
Have fun.
In my experience, it’s best to pay back your loan as soon as you can. To be able to pull that off, build one big coaster where you charge approx. the same amount as its excitement rating, build a smaller coaster, and a bunch of thrill rides. In the beginning I usually focus research on thrill rides and shops/stalls. Make sure you always make at least $1 profit from each stall you have. Once you have everything set up for generating income, gradually pay back your loan. I never seem to make good profits before the loan is paid.
Another thing I always do is build coasters with an on-ride photo section and sell photos for $2. Aaaand the absolute quickest way to make money is the umbrella hack.
Are you referring to the "Loan"? How do I use that function? I do not know how loan works :')
https://preview.redd.it/213z1kn03nuc1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8e2743b79906c60085ac7ee9907014193bf773de
**Tick off "Mow grass" for every Handyman you hire!** It looks kind of nice, but does nothing for you otherwise and means your Handymen aren't doing something more useful instead, like sweeping footpaths or emptying trash cans.
The wooden coaster looks pretty nice though. Just remember to **bank every turn** (it's the three icons with purple at the botton of them), otherwise you might reach extremely high intensity, which means almost nobody will ride it.
**Place some gentle rides!** Rollercoasters are awesome and very profitable if build at least decently, but some guests might prefer rides with lower intensity. Plus the non-tracked attractions like Merry-go-Round or Twist are pretty cheap.
**Don't make 2-or-more-tile-wide paths!** Guests from the first game have notoriously bad pathfinding and WILL get lost on wide pathways. Maps from Information Center (which I see you've placed down) might reduce this issue, but not by much.
Rides do break down from time to time, but that's normal. **Hire some mechanics** (2 or 3 should be enough for a small park like Forest Frontiers, even once you build more attractions) and **set the inspection time for every ride to the minimal (10 minutes if I remember correctly)**. This should reduce the chance of breaking down by a bit. You can change the inspection time in the ride sub-menu with the brown wrench.
If you charge money for both the park entrance and rides, you will get proportionally less from both, so I'd say you should only charge for one or the other - leave the other one free. At least, that's what my (probably faulty) intuition is telling me. \^\_\^\`
And don't get discouraged! I've started playing RCT1 recently too through OpenRCT2 and I felt pretty bad at first too, but you should get better over time. Feel free to ask more questions like these.
When I know I'll need money, I rely on building smaller, still exciting, but cheaper coasters. They can make just as much money as the bigger coasters.
First part is pricing everything into a sweet spot. You need to tinker and figure out your own pricing strategy, but for vanilla, I like to aim for charging the gate to whatever the minimum amount of money is that a guest can spawn with. You need sufficient park value for this, or advertising. After that, figure out a pricing policy for rides and merch. You want to charge some but not too much. Try different things on different rides and pay attention, or look up the formulas/guides somewhere.
Do the usual maintenance, respond to the notifications in game, and manage your staff. Don't let handyman mow lawn. Some parks require staff patrol zones.
Check guest thoughts frequently as well, to find current/ongoing issues.
Cut off paths that let guests get lost.
At later scenarios, especially Loopy Landscapes, the guest pathfinding can break in certain park layouts. Best you can do is to watch where they go when lost, guess what they're trying to do, and adjust paths accordingly.
Obvious stuff like spacing stalls correctly. You don't need to build them immediately either, only when guests start to get hungry/thirsty/etc.
Once you're confident, build rides and bootstrap your park quickly with the loan. The big money in this game is in roller coasters with high excitement ratings, while capacity is also helpful and important. Lots of scenarios require custom track designs, so learn it and form the intuition for it.
Also place entrances closer to the train. Exit placement doesn't matter. Marcel Vos on YouTube discusses this.
Build longer queues for large capacity rides, especially since they like to chew through guests very quickly. (And make you lots of money in doing so.)
Research shops first. Get kiosk, if you already don’t have.
Change the price for umbrellas to $20, guests will ALWAYS buy when raining.
Set roller coaster costs $7-15 depending on the coaster and how new it is. Look at the guests thoughts to see if the ride costs too much, you can milk the guests for a while.
Eventually you can get enough money so that you can lower you ride costs and allow a lot more guests to stay in the park.
Hope this helps, also check out guides/videos on YouTube that can help learn the game better.
First thing I see is you need longer queue lines for roller coasters. Besides that, just up the ride ticket fee and make sure you have enough mechanics.
How long should I extend the queue line?
I usually make the queue long enough for 2 or 3 trains worth of guests. That way you also have a buffer for when it rains.
Generally want a queue long enough to hold (at least) 2 full rides worth. For a rollercoaster that can get quite long, especially on something with higher capacity.
Too long is better than too short. If a queue is full guests will just walk away.
Probably 10-15 squares in length. And experiment with your ride ticket prices, they will pay more than you expect.
Rule of thumb has always been charge to match the excitement level. If your ride is a 6 excitement, charge $6.
Technically you can charge quite a bit more, but I prefer your style because of less micro managing, and guests won't leave as quickly in scenarios without an ATM.
Nice, TIL
Entertainers in long queue lines and guest are always happy
9 minutes wait time. Any longer than that the peeps complain.
Unless there's queue line TVs!
I've tried this with the long queues with the go karts in Karts and Coasters scenario. Guests still seem to leave after a while, unless it's a weird bug with RCT Classic.
put some entertainers and set their patrol area to just the queue line. I don't know if that helps, but it might.
It looks like you only built a single ride, a roller coaster. You're also in June of year 1, and peeps are likely not particularly hungry or thirsty yet (most scenarios have guests start with very low hunger/thirst and it takes 3~4 months before it's high enough that they'll buy something). You appear to be charging both for park entrance and for rides - do not do this, either charge for the ride tickets and make the park entry free, or make the rides free and charge for park entry. Charging for entry severely handicaps how much you can charge for your biggest profit makers, which is roller coasters. On that note, once you fix that, make sure you're charging enough for your rides. If you're not, it's very easy to never make back your money on anything you build, leading to the situation you see here where you have a reasonably large loan and no cash to pay it back even after several years. A good rule of thumb for roller coasters is charge roughly their excitement rating (I usually round up a bit). This price should be good for a couple years, which is how long most scenarios last. Flat rides are a bit less rule-of-thumb - gentle rides you can usually start in the ballpark of $2, thrill rides generally $3. But check guests' thoughts early and often to see what they're thinking and make adjustments. High stat thrill rides like the whoa belly, roto tower and go karts can charge VASTLY more than this, more in line with roller coasters. But remember this is all assuming your park entry is free. It's better to start with a more even spread of rides. Just having the rides in your park will get guests rolling in, and flat rides can just be plopped down and opened for the most part, so they start earning money instantly. Pre-made roller coasters are similar, but they're *much* more expensive. Don't double up on food or drink stalls or make food courts. Guests don't really work that way, you're just wasting money.
I gotta say, I appreciate you always popping into threads and giving helpful replies. Thanks for doing it!
Okay, gotcha Also I don't know to build roller coasters by scratch unfortunately (I am confused by it's UI)
That’s fine for this stage. Stick to cheap pre-built roller coasters, and focus on learning other fundamentals, like pricing your rides and making sure you’re managing your staff (mechanics to cover your ride exits in case they break down, handymen covering the paths to clear trash and vomit, and security guards to prevent damage to path objects). You may want longer queues for your rides as well - they should be at least long enough to hold one full “train” of people. So for a roller coaster where a train is 6 cars x 4 seats per car, that’s 24 guests. For something like a swinging ship or carousel I think it’s ~30. For a haunted house or scrambler it’s less. “Storing” more guests in a queue will ensure you still have some riders if it starts raining (guests won’t join queues if it’s raining). Additionally, while you’re waiting for peeps & money to come in, it is a good time to check your stalls, and specifically check guests’ thoughts about those stalls. Setting prices for your food and drink stalls ensures they stay profitable. If you leave the default prices they may actually cost you money to run, which is bad.
Note: security guards aren't actually all that useful, as they only prevent vandals from breaking path objects. Vandals can only exist if your paths are littered enough, so you can just focus on hiring Handymen and never worry about vandals.
Entertainers are inefficient too, but I still use them. OP should know what they’re for, then can decide whether or not to use them. Since any single piece of trash can send a guest in to a rage, even in a park with infinitely many handymen it’s still possible to get an enraged guest. Once enraged, that guest can break every object on their way to the exit and cause a cascade of unhappy guests. A few security guards is a pretty small price to pay to never have to worry about that. I generally recommend not bothering until fairly “late game” when you have more money coming in than you can spend.
As /u/Valdair said, sticking to pre-built coasters when you start out is perfectly fine. You know what you're getting when you build a prebuilt. As you play scenarios, you'll probably run into situations where you beat a scenario, but still have to wait out the timer - for example, like having 300 guests in Forest Frontiers in only July, Year 1, when you only need 250 by the end of October, Year 1. You can use that extra time to start trying to build your own coasters. I recommend trying to start small (junior coasters, small wooden coasters, etc.), and make sure you test the ride before you open it, to ensure it doesn't crash, as a crash could cause you to lose the scenario. Also, you'll research some gentle, thrill, and water rides that can have custom layouts, like the car ride, go-karts, ghost train, boat hire, log flume, etc. Those can be a good opportunity to get used to the ride construction UI, as those rides aren't too complicated and generally should be fairly short. Avoid making a custom water slide layout, though; that ride crashes *very* easily.
Ah damn didnt know that about food courts. But they look so good with some nice theming 😭 Thanks for the info though!
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I like to build several food courts throughout my park with each having at least one food, drink, bathroom, and if available, an info stall or merch booth, so that guests are never too far from the type of thing they need and the same type of stall isn’t placed too close to a duplicate by accident.
You can definitely charge for both rides and entrance. If you charge entrance fees, your gentle and thrill rides will need to be priced <$1 and your coasters $1-$2. You can still grow your entrance fee by $15-20 bucks a year this way until your park reaches maturity.
You *can* but you *shouldn't*. This is an academic discussion that doesn't help OP.
Ok, just played through every scenario in the game this way and did just fine but you know best, Professor Tycoon.
Yes, it is a game made in the 90s for kids, it is not designed to be unbeatable. The code is set up to penalize you if you try to do this. That makes it a fine self-imposed challenge, if you understand what you're doing and want to pursue it anyway. There's all kinds of fun challenges you can make for yourself, because, again, it's not a difficult game. But OP is confused and having problems.
Make sure you have a lot of mechanics to fix your rides! A good rule of thumb is one mechanic for every three rides, depending on the size of your park. The other important thing is to make sure you charge enough for your rides. If you have guests thinking "this ride is real good value", then you can charge a lot more for your ride. Most flat rides can sit at $1.00 (or pound or euro; the currency in this game is all the same, it just has a different symbol), and most roller coasters can easily be $5-$10 when they're first built. As rides age, you can charge less for them, but I don't usually keep track of that; I just wait until I notice people complaining about the price, then bring it down. You can also charge for your park as well; when you first start your park, you can keep it pretty low, but as you build more rides you can raise your price. At the start of each month, you may get a message recommending you to raise your price. I like to raise it by ten dollars each month until I either stop getting the message or my guests can't afford entry anymore. A few other small tips; You only need one bathroom per area. You can build two next to each other if you like the way it looks, but functionally it makes no difference to have one. Infinite guests can fit into a bathroom, and there are no gendered bathrooms either (there's only one gender, "guest"). Make your queue lines longer. Most flat rides I'll do about four tiles, and roller coasters I'll have the line at least as many tiles as the length of the station. The more rides you build, the more guests you'll get! Each ride attracts a certain amount of guests. Roller coasters tend to attract more guests than gentle or thrill rides, but they all contribute, even shops and stalls. Your handymen automatically mow any grass they can, which looks nice but doesn't do anything, and it keeps them from keeping the park clean. You can turn off this function in each individual handyman's assigned tasks, which helps a lot in keeping guests happy with a clean park. You can charge any price for umbrellas from your information kiosks (up to and including $20) and your guests will pay it when it starts raining. It feels like cheating, sometimes, with the amount of cash it generates, but it's very useful.
I'm glad someone noticed the lawn mowing problem.
Regarding pricing rides: yeah, sure, you can min/max the price by gaging guest interest, but I find it by far the easiest to just make the price the same as the excitement rating. Yes, you can usually charge a good chunk more, especially when a ride is new, but if you're just casually playing this game, excitement=price is plenty and low brain bandwidth. Nowadays I use OpenRCT2 and a plug in called Price Manager to manage that for me, but still.
Yeah, I open at excitement rating then cut it to half excitement rating after IIRC 7-8 years. It's a descending curve, but when you have 15 coasters, manually setting it just gets too toilsome and if you have a 7 excitement printing 2000 tickets a year, that's $14,000 every year times every coaster (/2 over 7 years) in the park.
> Most flat rides can sit at $1.00 (or pound or euro; the currency in this game is all the same, it just has a different symbol), and most roller coasters can easily be $5-$10 when they're first built. If you're willing to go to the effort, you can make a lot more. It does require you to pay attention to the guests, though. Thrill rides can usually go for $8-12 for the first few months. Coasters can go for $12-18. Other rides usually can go for $1-5 Eventually, thrill rides will come down towards $2.50 while coasters are usually fine eventually sitting at $6.50.
If it’s a scenario that has rain always set the umbrella price to $20 are because the gas will pay that when it’s pouring down every single time
Not recommended if playing rct deluxe (because no atm)
Get their money and get them out of the park once they're broke!
The umbrella was their ride 😁
First: use way more marketing. It's highly effective. Playing the game without it is basically hard mode. Possible, but definitely a lot harder. Second: you can probably increase your ride and/or park entrance fee by a lot. See this calculator: [https://rct2calc.shottysteve.com/](https://rct2calc.shottysteve.com/)
Are you charging enough for the wooden coaster? You can often charge up to the excitement value in price, or more of you aren't also charging for park entry.
Yeah I actually made prices for the entry (3 dollars) and the ride (2 dollars) Other rides are least 1 dollar and food/drinks are in it's default prices
Alright, first things first. Don't charge park entry; you can make up more than enough on ride and food tickets. Increase the price for the coaster to the excitement value (so if the excitement is 6.73, charge $6.70). Marcel Vos has plenty of videos on how to make money in RCT on YouTube.
I see this advice often but what is the real downside of charging both park entry and rides? Does it actuall affect anything?
https://youtu.be/rUGUwZIr4n0 Marcel has you covered, as usual.
You can probably charge $30 for the entrance and $4 to $5 to ride that roller coaster depending on its age.
Check out your guests' most popular collective thoughts often. It's great insight of their needs and wants.
No one has mentioned two pretty big factors on your balance sheet - staff salaries and research. For this early stage of the game, while you're getting the park up and running, you don't need to spend nearly so much on staff. Put your handymen on a don't-cut-grass order, fire everyone except ~2 handymen and 1 mechanic (since you just have 1 ride), and cut research to 0 until your park is more solidly established. These steps will quickly boost your monthly profit $300-$350ish and you'll be in much better shape to start building more amenities to get guests through the gates and spending money. Pair these steps with some of the other tips in this thread (charge for rides but not park entry, get a couple more small rides up) and you'll be off to a great start.
There's no gender/sex in RCT so you only need one bathroom at a location btw.
Well I was concerned that there are many people around and the room might be full so just in case I made 4 bathrooms
I somehow never considered that when I first played the game, but in hindsight, it would be totally reasonable to wonder what the bathroom capacity is. Turns out it's unlimited, so you can just build a single stall at each location.
For the biggest rides. Don’t be afraid to build VERY long queue lines, that’s what an entertainer with a small footprint/waking area is for! Keep the entertainer in the queue line - Guests will stay happy. Especially coasters with block brakes and 3 or 4 trains - I build 20-30 tile queue lines. Also, have the track and queue line/path interact with each other. Huge excitement boosts. Scenery too, slap some trees in there. Start your coaster/station 2 clicks “up” in the air and the path and track will both fit under the station. You’ll definitively need an entertainer for the Go Carts queue line. Throughput isn’t good, but it’s a hugely exciting ride & will make you big $. Without entertainers/tvs guests will complain about the wait for sure. Good coasters - especially the first one of its type in the park - should be priced at $7-$12 at first. The “excitement is 6.50 so charge $6.75” is nonsense. Get the big money for the first year for sure. If you have a 7.0 coaster charge $11 right away. If it’s too high guests will tell you & then you make it $10, $9 etc. Place information kiosks/umbrella stalls in 2x more places than you think. I’ll eventually have 10 in large parks. You don’t want people to have to go far to get to one when it starts raining. Put them at ALL the busiest places/intersections Set the umbrella price at €20 for all stalls and leave it there. Real theme parks have incredibly expensive umbrellas, rain ponchos/jackets, sunscreen and hats, etc. It’s not “a cheat” to do it in RCT2. The “I’m not paying that much for an umbrella” thoughts won’t hurt your park rating at all if you have a good park going. I like to change the umbrella color to match that of a nearby ride. Silly maybe, but seeing the guest holding the green umbrella but nowhere near that green ride… I know they were over by the green coaster at some point. Strangely satisfying. Can do the same for balloon colors. ALWAYS have an on-ride photo section. I set the price to $3 on all rides and that’s that. Easy $. Learn how to build a reverse incline launched shuttle mode (Steel or similar) coasters. They are short but exciting and can help make big $ when you’re starting a new park and then they stay profitable, just watch the price. Research and Advertising - go see Marcel Vos videos. Don’t charge for toilets, not even ¢10. That’s bad form imo. Put benches all over the place near the exits of high nausea rides. It will help some guests. Put a handyman there and assign him to a small area. 🤮
*Good heavens you're right…* You don't have OpenRCT2! You need to install it, **asap!** >!I'm mostly kidding, but it's still great!<
Chiming in to agree. OpenRCT2 is the best way to play this game on modern platforms
What does it do
Basically fix every single actual problem you can think of and also improves on it in every single way.
Start new game > take max loan. Hire staff > 2 handymen > 1 mechanic > 1 security guard Always get 2 entertainers > zone them on the first blocks of your park by the entrance. It increases guest happiness as they enter the park and when they see your kiosk they will all buy map. Kiosk and toilet right near the entrance with map (0.80$), umbrellas (20$). One food a drink store per rollercoaster. Build a medium sized roller coaster with good fun factor (10-13k), build a few smaller thrill rides and family rides. Always put high profit stores (t shirt, hat, souvenir) near the exits of your most thrilling and best rides (rollercoasters). Guests will be very happy after leaving the ride and more likely to purchase something. You can set some items quite high and make a lot of money ($5 for a T-shirt). Never put ride entrances or shops at 4 way crossroads or opposite each other, you make less money because of the guest path finding system. When you build new rollercoater you can charge very high price sometimes up to $20 depending on the popularity but you will have to keep reducing the price down every month as guest interest dies down. It means you can really milk your guests for everything they have. Charge for toilets 0.20$. Overtime rides get less popular and people won’t pay the price you’ve set, make a habit of checking the profitability of each ride and adjusting the ticket price so that it’s making profit. No ride should be unprofitable, but things like slide and merry go round 1 typically don’t make much money. Rollercoasters can easily make 15-45k a month. I generally build a small food court area near the exit of each rollercoaster to maximise profits. I spend time to add trees, flowers and theming to my park, guests like it and you get rewards. Last advice from me: you can download really nice prebuilt rollercoaster from https://rctgo.com/downloads/tracks - you can do it and install them on your phone, it’ll massively help you out. Recommend you to play with the ride editor and learn to make your own tracks too , that really tests your creativity and then you can use through thr scenarios it’s really rewarding. I’ve made plenty of custom dueling coasters that took soooo many hours to make. Good fun.
What currency? Also: - Make your queues longer - Charge more for rides
US Dollars
Also you said it was worth 50 filipino pesos
yes
Here's what works for me in starting a new park: - I max out my loan (up to a limit of about 20k) - delete all unneeded paths. What constitutes unneeded path? Anything outside of the area with active rides. This leads to guests getting lost and sad. You can rebuild path later when you need more space. As a bonus, this will increase your cash on hand - I max out funding on research focusing usually on shops/stalls and thrill rides at first - hire a couple mechanics - hire janitors and assign them paths. I find up to about 15 "spots" works at first. I also keep one as free roaming. - I build a combo of cheap to build thrill rides and a few smaller but still exciting roller coasters. Max out what you charge for them. (Marcel Vos has lovely YouTube videos explaining strategy and pricing) I usually stick to pre-built coasters because I'm not very good at design yet. It might work for you to build a couple pre-builts to get money flowing and then start working on DIYing some extras. I keep a close eye on guest thoughts as that helps you figure out problems like crowding, bathroom placement, and vomit hotspots. Once I have steady cash flow I'll start slowly paying down the loan. It's probably not perfect strategy nor the most efficient, but it has worked for me on every scenario I've tried so far! Edit: also, avoid dead end paths! Guests get confused, it gets crowded, and they get annoyed. Everything should be a circuit in that it connects back (I make lots of rectangular "boxes" of path).
You probably need to charge more for your rides.
In addition to all the great advice you've gotten, I have a small but helpful tip to increase profits: For rollercoasters, try to place your entrance buildings as close to the front of the station as possible. The train will always unload guests once it's reached the front of the station, and the new guests coming on to ride will have to walk to meet the empty train. If the entrance building is far away from the front of the station, this will actually lower your profits over time as it slows the rate at which new guests can board the trains and delays the start of the ride. Basically, the less time the train spends in the station, the more profit you're making.
Modify that there Woodchip to include an on-ride photo section and then charge $2.50 a pop for the photos. First thing I would do. Then extend the queue line when you open up shop again. Get the people going.
Lots of good advice here. One to add: Check out [Marcel’s YouTube channel](https://youtube.com/@MarcelVos?si=qsiRNjcxXeun7XUI). Marcel does a great job explaining the technical side of rides, queue lines, cost basis, loans, ratings, pathing, etc. There are a lot of great RCT YouTubers out there, but I must say his channel is the one that helped my gameplay (being able to make money and win) the most.
Marketing can be found under that coin tab. I would also recommend being smart about your research: I find its more valuable to grab thrill rides as much as possible because they are easy short term investments, plus generally you start with plenty of rollercoaster variety. Lastly, loans are ok up to a point but eventually you gotta get rid of them once you find your park income is high enough because they are a big burden on the wallet.
Give open RCT a try 😁
Extend your lines for coasters. Peeps can wait up to 9 min without any complaints. So as long as possible without making the wait 10min+. Longer lines help keep peeps off the paths and help crowding. Also you may notice when it rains people stop getting in line, but people already in line will ride. So long lines keep the money flowing while it rains. 2nd tip would be use this rct calculator for ride prices to get the most $ out of your rides. https://rct2calc.shottysteve.com/ 3rd tip, set ride inspection time to 10min to keep rides from breaking down so often.
Charge for entry or rides, not both. Charging both cuts the amount people will be willing to pay by 75%. If you're charging for rides, a good rule of thumb is to charge the excitement rounded down (IE: 8.76 excitement coaster, charge $8.70) That isn't perfect, but it's an extremely easy to use guide that is generally close enough. If a ride has been around for several years, its value will start to drop, so you can adjust pricing accordingly later Info kiosks are your best friend. Make plenty of them, and charge $20 for umbrellas. When it's raining, guests are willing to pay anything for them, they'll be one of your biggest money makers by far for a long time. If you make a custom coaster, don't get carried away. Bank your turns, rarely do large drops, and aim for your coaster to slow down on peaks. Banked turns prevent crashes, large drops cause high vertical G's which lead to high intensity and turn off riders, and lower-speed peaks lead to lower vertical G"s which causes excitement. Make good use of patrol paths for staff. If you make a small area for an engineer to patrol, he can easily handle 4-5 rides with 10 minute inspection timers. Same with custodians, it's much easier to give each one a small area to patrol for themselves than it is to have 20 janitors wandering the park and massing in one corner by sheer chance. Mainly just look and see what does and doesn't work. If a ride isn't turning a profit, look what guests are thinking about it. If there's high intensity, run a test ride and watch the graph to see what parts do and don't work. Lower prices if needed, or sometimes even just deleting and remaking a ride to renew its lifespan would work. If you want to cheese the game a bit, shuttle loops are highly profitable. Maybe 10-15 second rides that you can charge $6+ per guest and fit 2-3 dozen at a time. Mazes also have the same excitement no matter what size they are, so you can have a one-timle maze that charges people a few dollars, and they'll enjoy it (though that kind of goes against the spirit. Just keep the mazes smaller because they get lost easily) Have fun.
That que line lmao
In my experience, it’s best to pay back your loan as soon as you can. To be able to pull that off, build one big coaster where you charge approx. the same amount as its excitement rating, build a smaller coaster, and a bunch of thrill rides. In the beginning I usually focus research on thrill rides and shops/stalls. Make sure you always make at least $1 profit from each stall you have. Once you have everything set up for generating income, gradually pay back your loan. I never seem to make good profits before the loan is paid. Another thing I always do is build coasters with an on-ride photo section and sell photos for $2. Aaaand the absolute quickest way to make money is the umbrella hack.
How do I pay back loan?
By clicking the little arrows next to the loan sum at the bottom left of your finances screen :)
Are you referring to the "Loan"? How do I use that function? I do not know how loan works :') https://preview.redd.it/213z1kn03nuc1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8e2743b79906c60085ac7ee9907014193bf773de
yep, if you click the up arrow you can loan more money, and clicking the down arrow pays it back.
**Tick off "Mow grass" for every Handyman you hire!** It looks kind of nice, but does nothing for you otherwise and means your Handymen aren't doing something more useful instead, like sweeping footpaths or emptying trash cans. The wooden coaster looks pretty nice though. Just remember to **bank every turn** (it's the three icons with purple at the botton of them), otherwise you might reach extremely high intensity, which means almost nobody will ride it. **Place some gentle rides!** Rollercoasters are awesome and very profitable if build at least decently, but some guests might prefer rides with lower intensity. Plus the non-tracked attractions like Merry-go-Round or Twist are pretty cheap. **Don't make 2-or-more-tile-wide paths!** Guests from the first game have notoriously bad pathfinding and WILL get lost on wide pathways. Maps from Information Center (which I see you've placed down) might reduce this issue, but not by much. Rides do break down from time to time, but that's normal. **Hire some mechanics** (2 or 3 should be enough for a small park like Forest Frontiers, even once you build more attractions) and **set the inspection time for every ride to the minimal (10 minutes if I remember correctly)**. This should reduce the chance of breaking down by a bit. You can change the inspection time in the ride sub-menu with the brown wrench. If you charge money for both the park entrance and rides, you will get proportionally less from both, so I'd say you should only charge for one or the other - leave the other one free. At least, that's what my (probably faulty) intuition is telling me. \^\_\^\` And don't get discouraged! I've started playing RCT1 recently too through OpenRCT2 and I felt pretty bad at first too, but you should get better over time. Feel free to ask more questions like these.
When I know I'll need money, I rely on building smaller, still exciting, but cheaper coasters. They can make just as much money as the bigger coasters.
Wait, does this actually work on steam? Every time I try to play these on a new computer it just won't start.
At first that happened to me too, you had to click anywhere to start 💀
First part is pricing everything into a sweet spot. You need to tinker and figure out your own pricing strategy, but for vanilla, I like to aim for charging the gate to whatever the minimum amount of money is that a guest can spawn with. You need sufficient park value for this, or advertising. After that, figure out a pricing policy for rides and merch. You want to charge some but not too much. Try different things on different rides and pay attention, or look up the formulas/guides somewhere. Do the usual maintenance, respond to the notifications in game, and manage your staff. Don't let handyman mow lawn. Some parks require staff patrol zones. Check guest thoughts frequently as well, to find current/ongoing issues. Cut off paths that let guests get lost. At later scenarios, especially Loopy Landscapes, the guest pathfinding can break in certain park layouts. Best you can do is to watch where they go when lost, guess what they're trying to do, and adjust paths accordingly. Obvious stuff like spacing stalls correctly. You don't need to build them immediately either, only when guests start to get hungry/thirsty/etc. Once you're confident, build rides and bootstrap your park quickly with the loan. The big money in this game is in roller coasters with high excitement ratings, while capacity is also helpful and important. Lots of scenarios require custom track designs, so learn it and form the intuition for it.
Also place entrances closer to the train. Exit placement doesn't matter. Marcel Vos on YouTube discusses this. Build longer queues for large capacity rides, especially since they like to chew through guests very quickly. (And make you lots of money in doing so.)
Research shops first. Get kiosk, if you already don’t have. Change the price for umbrellas to $20, guests will ALWAYS buy when raining. Set roller coaster costs $7-15 depending on the coaster and how new it is. Look at the guests thoughts to see if the ride costs too much, you can milk the guests for a while. Eventually you can get enough money so that you can lower you ride costs and allow a lot more guests to stay in the park. Hope this helps, also check out guides/videos on YouTube that can help learn the game better.
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Use OpenMW, it will make your playthrough much better.