Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 FAQ/Hints and tips version 1.1 by Vlada Peric (Gallavant) Contents: ========= 1. Copyright 2. Contact 3. Introduction 4. Version History And Date 5. Tips 6. Pricing 7. Bugs 8. Cheats and Easter Eggs 9. Park Awards 10. Credits 1. Copyright ============ This FAQ is copyright (c) 2002-04 Vlada Peric (Gallavant). It's for personal and private use only. It may not be reprinted in part or in whole, or reproduced in any way or in any form (written or otherwise). This document is free, and thus cannot be used in any commercial transaction. You must get my express written consent to reference, alter or post FAQ. This FAQ can be found at: - www.gamefaqs.com - www.neoseeker.com If you find it anywhere else please tell me. 2. Contact ========== If you have any contributions and suggestions for this FAQ you may contact me at vlada.peric@gmail.com. Make sure to put "RCT 2"or something similar in the subject or the e-mail might be ignored because of my spam filters. I'm no longer playing the game, so I can't answer any questions you might send me. 3. Version History ================== 1.0 16.11.2002. - First release. 1.1 23.06.2004. - Major re-format of the guide 4. Introduction =============== This FAQ will contain tips about roller coaster building and pricing. Currently it is small but I just wanted to get it up before other FAQs. Although there are a lot of FAQs in the works none has been posted yet. Since the introduction of hit counters on GameFAQs, I have seen that this FAQ is still viewed a lot, even though its old, so I decided to re-format it. Note that I am no longer playing the game, so I probably wont be able to answer any questions you might have. Model of a tip: tip. name of the contributor (if none than I myself have contributed) 5. Tips ======= The following are the tips I have collected (and written) in no particular order. - When your coasters have more than 10 intensity the excitement rating will decrease much. - Some coasters (inverted, stand-up...) will have higher intensity due to their nature. - Before the final turn or right after make some brakes to decrease intensity. Don't use strong brakes or you will get an opposite effect. - Drops make "air time" when taken fast enough and thus increase excitement. Too many drops and you will have a high negative vertical G rating and increase intensity instead of excitement. - If you have a long and fast coaster you will need to have a few slow sections to let the guests gain their breath. - Tunnels and much scenery increase excitement. Dayains - In tunnels guests tend to be sicker. - Banked and gentler corners at slower speeds help decrease nausea and intensity. Dayains - Coasters with a lot of turns tend to be more nauseating especially repeated helixes at high speeds. Dayains - I try to keep the average speed of the ride around 30 mph. Of Course certain rides, such as LIM and Air Power Launches and going to have to be constantly moving faster than 30 mph. silentdeath - Certain scenarios or User-created scenario's have an option that allows the majority of your park guest to have a need for ride intensity that is over 9. If this is enabled, you will have an easier time making roller coasters. silentdeath - I find when making a wooden rollercoaster with a lot of dips to go some thing like 100ft 80ft 80ft 60ft 40ft 40ft will create large amounts of air time with out creating large nausea ratings, this keeps the speed at about 10-20 at the peaks of the hills. andyyoung999 - You should try to avoid more than 2 chain lifts, because that lowers your average speed, takes more time, and loses you money. Legoman8 - Try to keep lower speeds, less than the average if possible, when turning quickly or suddenly dropping or rising. Legoman8 - Roller Coasters tend to brake down a lot so make sure to put the inspection time on 10 min. - Only scenery that is within 4 "fields" of the ride counts in the ride's scenery. - Don't forget to change the entrance and exit looks for better scenery. - Always try to make ride tracks go trough loops to increase excitement. - Several guests in a hundred will actually ride your high (10<) intensity coasters however don't rely on that too much. - High intensity coasters crash more. - If one of your coasters crashes, quickly close the ride to prevent more casualties. - Crashes and especially "road kills" will make a ride unpopular fast. To confront this close the ride for a few months and advertise it (free entry) for 2-4 weeks. When opening it decrease the price by 0.2-0.3$. - Paths and queue lines over ride tracks increase excitement. - Avoid using 90 degrees turns. They increase intensity and nausea too much. - Synchronizing stations will increase excitement. - When synchronizing if the coasters aren't symmetrical try to design them so that they race each other. This increases ratings quite a bit. - For a safer ride use block brakes. - For unsafe rides it is best to make one train with the most possible cars because when it crashes there will be no other trains to crash into it. - If the ride has single cars it is best to make them go at 10-15 seconds intervals. - To gain some experience in coaster building build a pre-built coaster and copy it. This way you will see some small tricks the "official" builders use. - If you want to save a ride you must wait for it to be tested then on the test screen (the tab with the clock) you will see a floppy disc in the corner. Press it to save the ride. Hold it to save the ride with scenery. - Don't use half loops when coaster is traveling at very high speed. Locator - Excitement goes up just a bit when you use a "Cable Lift" on a Giga Coaster. Hastin Zylstra - The more you can cluster the coaster together (or better yet, cluster 2 or 3 together), the more exciting it is. Coaster Junky - Also, when I'm all done with a coaster, I put in trees in every little spot I can within it. Sure, you could put scenery and stuff but I'm lazy. I just grab a few trees and plop plop plop them in every nook and cranny I can (I just go crazy with the mouse). Seen excitement levels rise almost a whole point doing this. Coaster Junky - Speed control on the loops of course. They don't seem to like doing a loop at 80 mph for some reason? I try to keep it around (preferably less then this) 20 mph or so when doing inversions. Coaster Junky - Height of thrill rides like the Launched Freefall and the Roto-drop impact the amount of Intensity and Nausea dramatically. Try and limit both rides to around 150 ft. or less. CSL - If you charge a high price to get into the park, then build an ATM right at the entrance, so guests can get their money out. - When you have a pay-per-ride park, try placing cash machines between the exit of a popular coaster and its entrance. - Don't place ATMs at hugely crowded areas just because the people are there. If there is nothing to spend money on nearby, they wont use it. - When you are building huge parks note the limits: 255 shops/stalls/rides, staff limit is 200 and sprites (guests, ducks, vomit...) limit is 10000. - When nobody wants to go on a ride any more, simply close the ride and delete one piece of the ride, then replace the piece and open the ride again. This can be done as many times as you need (you can also do it when it is raining it will work too). - Staff members always ignore "No Entry" signs. - If your Handyman is given lots of work (lots of gardens to water, trash to sweep, or vomit to clean), keep the patrol area very small. - Handyman can: Sweep Footpaths, Water Gardens, Empty Litter Bins and Mow Grass. Note that by default mow grass is off. - Mowing grass apparently doesn't increase park rating or anything so be sure never to turn that on for a Handyman. - Chance of vandalism is directly related to the concentration of litter/vomit on the ground. - Mad guests will destroy your park (benches, lamps and litter bins) - Mechanics can: Inspect Rides and Fix Rides. - Mechanic must have access to the EXIT of a ride to make inspections/repairs. - Vandalism will never occur near a security guard. - Have Entertainers patrol the end section of long queue lines (lines over 9 minutes) to keep guests from complaining about the wait and to increase the time before guests leave a long queue in disgust. - Have Entertainers patrol long walkways without rides and areas of high trash/vomit potential to divert guests from making negative comments. - Amount of your loan will directly affect your Company Value. - Large pools of water will attract migrating ducks. - Click on a duck to make it quack. - Click on a balloon in the air to make it pop. - Guest will pay more to buy an umbrella while it rains. - Salty food will make a desire for a drink more probable. - An exciting ride will increase a guests desire to purchase a souvenir. - Park maps reduce the chance of Guests becoming lost and help Guests decide what to ride next. - There is no reason why you cannot use one of the Transport rides and convert it into a compact Gentle ride. - To stack scenery hold Shift and move the cursor up and down. The same method can be used for placing rides and shops underground. - Rides that twist through scenery items gain the so-called 'head-chop' bonus, which gives bonuses for and scenery that the rider sweeps by giving a feeling of imminent collision. - Trees automatically cleared as needed when building rides, paths and even from landscape changes. - Log Flumes will generally get high E ratings. But people get bored and want to get off if it's more than 4 minutes or so... Especially with the long rides to the top of the hill. With Log Flumes, ninety percent of the ride is lift hills and slow turns and such that get guests bored. - You can design Log Flumes so that guests get off at the station at the bottom of the lift hill and board the ride at the station at the top. This means that most of their ride is downhill and more exciting. - Wide paths are acceptable, but only to a point. When sections of your paths are 4 or 5 wide, people will get confused. In my opinion 2 is enough. - Peeps will complain if you have long sections of path with no rides or stands. - To save time press Alt+F4 to quickly exit the game. - All scenery objects have the same increase in excitement rating. Even quarter tiles have the same increase as a full-tile object. Multi tile objects count for as much tiles they are on. Considering this, you can conclude that you can better have lots of quarter tile bushes than one big pyramid. This is very weird but true. Also there is a maximum amount of objects that can be counted into the excitement rating (I don't know exactly how much). - On Roller Coasters slower lift hills generate more excitement. - Handymen: I always zone them. Initially I keep them to about five 4x4 squares, but when an area gets crowded and heavily puked on, I'll cut that down to three. Yes that's extreme, but in my experience nothing pulls down park rating faster than disgusting paths (Well, a crashing coaster is always worse)... The one thing that I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT TOLERATE is a handyman walking through queue lines. There's no reason, peeps don't puke or litter in line. Therefore, I am very diligent and methodical about placing paths within the handyman's zones, and placing queue lines so the handyman cannot go into them. Exit paths, if necessary, are not near queue lines so I can zone the exit path without accidentally zoning the queue lines. I'll occasionally put a free-range handyperson if things get crazy, or I don't feel like taking the time to rezone everyone. NOTE: That wasn't my opinion it's from a friend I just posted it because it is effective. - Mechanics: I put one mechanic per rollercoaster, and zone it to only take care of that coaster. For flat rides, I'll usually place them so a few of them exit near each other, then I'll place one mechanic near and zone it to take care of all of those flat rides. Picky? Yes. But my coasters that are down to 10% reliability still have 1-3% downtime. :-) Now this is very important: NEVER NEVER NEVER CREATE A FREE-RANGE MECHANIC! I thought at first, because I'd zone one mechanic for multiple flat rides, it was a good idea to have them around.... Until I had a large park and was getting the "Coaster has still not been fixed, check where your mechanics are and consider hiring additional mechanics" messages... WHY!?!? I have a mechanic zoned specifically for that coaster! Why wasn't HE fixing it? When I opened up the panel, I discovered that the game had, instead of the mechanic who was zone for the coaster, called the free-range mechanic... WHO WAS ON THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE MAP! Wow. Dumb, dumb, dumb! NOTE: That too was my friend's opinion. - Approximately one out of five guests will buy an on-ride photo. - Guests will only buy one on-ride photo in the whole park so it is better to even the prices for all photos to even the profit. - The longer your guests are near the lamps the happier they get, so sitting on benches eating helps much. - Placing TV's along queue lines makes guests happier (obvious) but also attracts more visitors to the ride. - I sometimes place an Entertainer on a small patrol Right At the park entrance. This way any peep entering the park has good chance of getting an immediate happiness boost. It also has a chance of lessening the anger of peeps leaving the park, so the park satisfaction rating will stay higher. - Guests can also carry non-consumable items such as maps, photographs, umbrellas, hats, etc... With the exception of Balloons, guest will never lose a non-consumable item. Guests can only carry one item of each type (when presented with the opportunity to acquire more they will often make a comment about already having one). - Guests will die if they fall in water or are caught in a ride accident. - Drowning guests can be saved if you react quickly enough with the "pincers". - Nausea levels decrease over time. - Each peace of the queue line can hold 4 guests. - Even if a ride doesn't have a queue line one guest can still wait for it. - Park maps and observation towers can help the guests to see where they are going. 6. Pricing ========== When charging ride admissions you should charge the excitement rating (rounded down) i.e. if the excitement is 7.38 charge 7.3$ not 7.4$. The only exception to this rule is when you build a new ride you can charge 0.2-0.4$ more just be sure to decrease it after few months. After a year or two you should decrease the cost by a dollar or so. The same tricks work with other rides (transport, thrill, gentle, water). If guests stop riding a coaster you should consider decreasing the price even more. If the above method doesn't work well for you try some of these alternate prices. You can try to quadruple the default price for coasters, treble it for thrill rides, and double it for Gentle. After a while the peeps start to complain that the rides are too expensive at which point you can usually halve the price. That leaves them at double the default for coasters, 1.5 times for Thrill, and par for gentles. AndroidCodeRed suggests different prices: My pricings for a roller coaster: Exc. - - - - Price 10.00 + = 10.00 9.00 - 9.99 = 9.50 8.00 - 8.99 = 9.00 7.60 - 7.99 = 8.50 6.50 - 7.59 = 8.00 6.49 - = 7.50 Thrill ride: 8.00 Enterprise 16-20 swings Launched Freefall (intensity more than 9) 7.50 Swinging Inverter Ship 12-15 swings Top Spin (Intense & Berserk mode) Enterprise 16- swings Launched Freefall (intensity more than 7) 7.00 Top Spin (Beginner mode) Launched Freefall (intensity less than 7) Magic Carpet (max. swings) Thanks AndroidCodeRed When charging park admissions you can use this rule. Charge each ride and stall 1.5$. So if you have around 20 rides and stalls you can charge 20*1.5$=30$ and if you have around 50 rides and stalls you can charge 50*1.5$=75$. If you are not building anything decrease price by a buck every second or third month. If your park rating is over 800 you can charge about 5-10$ more. If your park rating is below 300 try not to charge more that 10- 20$ no matter how many rides you have. Guests don't like vomit and trash all around. 7. Bugs ======= Yes there are some very annoying (and stupid) bugs in the game. I am going to list them just for reference. Most of these bugs are contributions and of they are checked by me they will have a NOTE: after them telling my findings. - While building a coaster I deleted both ends of a section I was scrapping. When I got to the end piece, the track was set to Station Platform by default. I right-clicked on another piece to resume the track when I noticed that the piece of station was still there in its silhouette form. I completed the track and tested it, but it wouldn't let me save it because there can be only one station on that type of coaster. I tried to connect up with it and then delete it but discovered that I couldn't because it wasn't really there. NOTE: Confirmed with a Multi-Dimensional coaster. Sent to Infogrames and they admit it. - If you take a saved game with more than 5 partially built coasters to a scenario with the scenario objective set to complete 5 coasters, you have to complete all of them, not just 5. When you convert the save game to a scenario it doesn't check to whether the partially built coasters have 'legal' stations with entrances and exits. If they don't, you cannot add them when you play the scenario, so it is impossible to win it! - The scenario editor absolutely will not allow one to select "Construction Rights" over the entrance path. NOTE: Confirmed. - There very well could be a bug in the stats calculator. I downloaded an Inverted Vertical Shuttle track from the ride exchange, plopped it down in the track editor and ran it. It had I think 5 or 6 inversions ran for 6 circuits really compact, kind of neat looking, etc. So, first time I ran it, the ratings were like N ~20, I ~ 25, E ~650! No that is not a typo, it actually was 650 on excitement, so I immediately thought "Oh, this is a bug". To confirm my suspicions, I plopped it down on an in game map, and re-ran it, and the ratings were all within the acceptable levels (somewhere between 5 and 7 for all three). Along with that, I dropped it to run one circuit, and the excitement dropped to around 1.5, so from what I've witnessed, there is most definitely a bug in the calculator. NOTE: Confirmed. Can happen in other occasions. I am only putting it here because I don't have any other place. - Even if you build rides underground guests won't ride them when raining (unless the rides are "covered"). - You have to make sure that each of the "default" scenario tabs like trees, roofs/walls, fences, path bits etc has at least one item in it else you get an error. - If you build a racing coaster in the same manner as RCT1, with two really long stations and not using the block brake system, I can save it easily. If you, however, build it with 4 stations (a load and unload for each side) and run it in block brake mode, it doesn't save correctly. - There is no way to turn off the research in a No Money scenario. NOTE: I don't think that is a bug I just didn't know where to put it. 8. Cheats and Easter Eggs ========================= As probably everybody knows you type the "cheats" as guest names. If a cheat is unconfirmed I will put a note next to it. Melanie Warn - Maximizes happiness for that guest Chris Sawyer - Photographs Katie Brayshaw - Waves at other guests Simon Foster - Paints John Mace - Pays double for all rides Tom Cruise - Visits all attractions NOTE: Unconfirmed. Damon Hill - Drives Go-Karts very fast Michael Schumacher - Drives Go-Karts even faster Mr Bean - Drives Go-Karts really slow. Bill Gates - Gives all guests unlimited money NOTE: Unconfirmed. Tony Day - Hungry guest NOTE: Unconfirmed. John Wardley - Constantly thinks: "Wow" Elissa White - Thinks: "I'm so excited - It's an Intamin ride!" while riding on a Giga Coaster Andy Hine - Thinks: "Nice ride! But not as good as the Phoenix..." upon exiting a coaster. David Ellis - Thinks: "... and here we are on [ridename]!" while on [ridename]. You can use the same names many times using this method: [Example] Melanie Warn=MELANIE WARN=MeLaNiE WaRn... This method can be used with any name cheat. 9. Park Awards ============== There are many new and funny awards. Note that not all of these rewards are verified by me. I mostly got them from various forums. Most Untidy Park Award Tidiest Park Award Park With The Best Roller Coasters Award Best Value Park Award Most Beautiful Park Award Worst Value Park Award Safest Park Award Best Staff Award Best Park Food Award Worst Park Food Award Best Park Restrooms Award Most Disappointing Park Award Best Water Rides Award Best Custom-Designed Rides Award Most Dazzling Ride Color Schemes Award Most Confusing Park Layout Award Best Gentle Ride Award Best Bathroom Facilities Award Cleanest Footpaths in the Country Award Worst Food in the Country Award Worst Scenery in the Country Award 10. Credits =========== Special thanks to aetherwave without whom this guide would have been very small and not so informative. Thanks to dayains, silentdeath, andyyoung999, legoman8, Locator, Hastin Zylstra, Coaster Junky and CSL for many tips. Thanks to chronotriggerfreak for help in the pricing section. Thanks to AndroidCodeRed for alternate pricing tactic. This FAQ is copyright (c) 2002-2004 Vlada Peric.