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
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.
