General Scenario Guide

This article lists many tips to keep a park running smoothly while dealing with common problems associated with operating an amusement park.

General

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• Whenever you start a new park or scenario, the first thing you should do is pause the game. Besides being able to scroll around and get a general overview of the map, you can also set up your research & development, make changes to your finances and open/close/demolish rides while the game is paused.
• Some parks already have a developed path network at the start; quite often, such parks have no rides, resulting in overdeveloped path networks that do not lead guests to rides, causing guests to often wander around aimlessly and get lost, while causing any staff you hire to potentially wander a great distance away from any paths or rides that they should be moving around. Pathways that lead to nowhere should be "disconnected" from the paths that you are using by removing one connecting path tile between them and the paths you are using; any guests or staff already in the disconnected paths should be picked up and placed onto the paths you are using. As you expand your park by building more rides, these disconnected paths can be reconnected if you need to use them, saving you the necessity of building new paths around your park.
• Benches and litter bins are more heavily used around food/drink stalls; placing lots of these path items around these stalls will reduce the amount of litter seen elsewhere in your park. In addition, guests who feel sick after exiting a ride are more likely to sit on the nearest available bench upon exiting the ride; giving such guests enough benches to sit at the exit of a nauseating ride will allow their nausea ratings to drop a little, extending the amount of time they are able to get to the nearest Bathroom or drink stall before they throw up.
• You need enough Staff to keep a park in good condition.
  • Handymen should be assigned patrol areas if your path has a large and/or complicated path network. Each handyman is capable of keeping a 30-40-tile pathway clean, depending on the nausea rating of rides, presence of food/drink stalls and number of junctions on the path.
  • Mechanics do not need to be assigned patrol areas as the nearest mechanic to a broken down ride will usually be assigned to it. However, if your park's path network is large and/or complex, or if a short stretch of pathway has several rides along it, consider assigning patrol areas to some of your mechanics. One mechanic can manage 3-4 rides, inspecting them and fixing them as they break down.
  • Security guards are only required along stretches of path that constantly experience vandalism; their patrol areas should be set accordingly.
  • Entertainers help to increase and maintain the happiness of guests who see them, but are also useful in extending queue length times. Setting an Entertainer to patrol along a queue line path will lengthen the tolerance for guests to wait by about 2 minutes.
• If a pathway is untidy, guests will start to vandalize the path items along it. If your park is kept clean, you do not need to hire any security guards at all.
• Bathrooms and drink stalls help to reduce the nausea rating of guests feeling sick; consider placing some of them near your most nauseating rides.
• Place food stalls near less nauseating rides to prevent your guests from vomiting all over the area. Stalls with souvenirs should go to your most exciting rides, since happy guests are more inclined to buy balloons etc.
• A higher Park Rating attracts more guests, so keep your park's Park Rating high by building and maintaining a variety of rides that are crash-free, ensuring its paths are clean and free of vandalized path items and keeping the number of guests who are lost to a minimum.
• Park awards affect the number of guests entering your park for a period of about 4 months. Good awards, such as the "Best Value", "Safest" and "Tidiest" park awards, will attract more guests to your park, while bad awards, such as the "Worst Value", "Worst Food" and "Most Disappointing" park awards, will reduce the number of guests visiting your park.
• Marketing campaigns temporarily boost the number of guests visiting your park. If your scenario objective is to have a certain number of guests in your park by the end of a certain year, starting a marketing campaign a few months before the deadline may be useful if you only need 50-100 more guests to reach the objective.
• If your scenario objective is to have a certain number of guests in your park by the end of a certain year, you only need a few additional guests in your park, and you only have a few days left before the deadline, you can block the park exits with No-Entry signs or by removing the path tile right after the park entrance. Note that your park rating will start to drop very fast, but this method helps to keep guests intending to leave the park around longer, hopefully for a long enough time for the deadline to pass without your park rating dropping below the objective.

RCT2 and Later

• When starting a new scenario, check your park entrance fee and any rides already existing in the park to determine if the scenario is a "free park entry" or "free rides" scenario. The general strategy to play a "free park entry" scenario differs noticeably from the general strategy to play a "free rides" scenario.
• Place First Aid Rooms near the exits of rides with high nausea ratings to encourage guests who feel sick after leaving the ride to enter the room and deplete their nausea rating before they throw up on the path. First Aid Rooms serve no purpose in other parts of your park.

RCT3

• In addition to what you can do in RCT1 and RCT2, you can now also perform construction works and purchase land while the game is paused.
• If the reliability of a ride is low and/or the Park Inspector is harping about the low reliability of a ride, you can manually summon a Mechanic to inspect the ride in question, boosting its reliability.

Research & Development

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• You can set up your research & development options even when the game is paused.
• Increasing research funding speeds up the rate which you get new rides. If you are given a small variety of rides at the start of a scenario, considering increasing research funding to get new rides; you can reduce funding at a later time when you feel that you have enough park elements to work with.

RCT1

• Some saved track designs use special track pieces or cars that may not be available at the same time the ride type is researched or for that particular scenario. These track designs will remain unavailable unless the track pieces or cars they use are available through researching Ride Improvements.

RCT1 and RCT2

• You can choose which research categories to focus on in the Research Funding window by ticking the categories you want to research. Research & devlopment will then prioritise the categories you choose over the other categories until all items in your chosen categories have been researched. Unless research is set to No Funding, unticking every category is the same as ticking every category.
• A greyed out, unclickable research category means that everything in that category has been researched, or there is nothing in that category to research. Once all research categories are greyed out, set research funding to No Funding as you will no longer receive anything from sinking funds into research & development.

RCT3

• If you have the Soaked! or Wild! expansion packs installed, the 18 scenarios included with the base RCT3 game will have their research trees updated to incorporate elements from any installed expansion pack.

Finances

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• The amount of money guests start with varies across scenarios. Within individual scenarios, this amount also varies by $30.
• Setting an admission fee for each bathroom in your park will help to reduce their monthly running cost.
• If guests are thinking that a particular ride in your park "is (a) really good value", you may wish to consider increasing its admission price. Alternatively, you can set the pricing of your rides such that most of the rides in your park have guests thinking that they are "(a) really good value", which gives you a high chance of getting the Best Value park award.
• A good way to determine if the admission fee for a ride is too high or too low is to check that ride's Satisfaction rating. In general, the optimal Satisfaction rating is 75%.
• Where applicable, note the loan interest rate for the scenario you are playing. Some scenarios have high loan interest rates to dissuade you from borrowing too much money from the bank. It is possible to actually lose a huge chunk of your monthly earnings to loan interest if the interest rate is high enough. As a rule of thumb, you should exercise caution when borrowing money from the bank if the loan interest rate exceeds 10%.
• Before starting larger projects, you should already have a basic park with a few rides running, and you should be generating a consistent monthly profit. This will help to defray the construction and/or landscaping costs for the project.

RCT1 and RCT3

• As soon as you have any park entrance fee (even $1), your guests will pay considerably less for your rides. The higher the park entrance fee is, the lower you can charge for individual rides. In addition, as your rides age (and their value drops), you may need to reduce their admission fees so that guests will continue riding them, or otherwise demolish and rebuild them as "new" rides.
• Make sure that even the poorest guests can afford your park entrance fee and still ride some rides afterwards, otherwise they will leave very unhappy, increasing your chances of getting the "Worst Value" park award.

"Free Park Entry/Pay per Ride" Parks

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• As soon as a guest is out of money, they will usually leave your park, unless you provide free rides, food, drinks and bathrooms. If a scenario's objective requires your park to have a large number of guests and a high Park Rating, earning as much money as possible might be counterproductive.

RCT2

• As a rule of thumb, you can raise the price for coasters up until their excitement rating, rounded down. For non-coaster tracked rides, the standard fee is usually okay.

RCT2, RCT3 and RCTC

• Cash Machines/A.T.Ms. should be placed near the entrance to rides with a high admission fee, which will "help" guests pay for the ride's admission fee by putting them within reasonable walking distance of the nearest cash dispenser.

RCT3

• Adjusting the admission fee of your rides is seldom needed if a reasonable cost is initially set. For the most part, ride admission fees should be set to around $0.40 multiplied by the sum of the intensity and excitement ratings.

"Paid Park Entry/Free Rides" Parks

• Your park entrance fee should be set to the lowest amount of cash a guest starts with. For instance, if the guests in a scenario start off with $40-$60, your park entrance fee should be set to $40. It is usually not advantageous to get more money from richer guests at the park entrance while turning poorer guests away.
• Guests usually pay the most at the park entrance; once they enter the park, the only way for you to get money from them is through food and drinks, merchandise and services only. The amount that they will usually pay during their time in your park is almost never higher than what they can potentially pay at the park entrance.
• You need to ensure that there is always a steady flow of guests entering the park. As the number of guests in your park is largely determined by the number of rides you have operating in your park, this can be achieved by any of the following methods:
  1. Continuously building new rides;
  2. Not building any food and drink stalls, toilets or cash machines/A.T.Ms. in your park, which will force guests to leave your park once they are hungry, thirsty, need to go to the toilet and/or run out of cash buying merchandise;
  3. Closing the park for a brief period of time so that most of your older guests leave before re-opening the park to allow guests in again.

Rides

• Rides with high nausea ratings should not be placed near food stalls as guests are more likely to throw up due to them possibly buying some food before riding the ride, causing their nausea rating to increase faster.
• Placing a ride near other rides, scenery objects, water or footpaths, or building a portion or all of a ride underground, will affect and usually increase the ride's ratings.
• Tracked rides should not exceed 5 minutes in ride time, otherwise guests will start thinking about wanting to get off the ride. Ride breakdowns also aggravate this issue by artificially lengthening ride time.
• Roller coasters with the Powered Launch operating mode allows you to create cheap, compact shuttle tracks with relatively good ride ratings and a high guest capacity due to how short the ride is. The most basic shuttle track is a station platform leading to a vertical loop and, from RCT2 onwards, with a steep slope or another vertical loop built at the back of the station as an overrun track in the event of brakes failure. Set the launch speed just right so that the train goes halfway up the loop, then down again. Even though the ride's excitement rating won't be too high (about 4), its low ride time (below 10s) allows the coaster to be vastly more profitable than many continuous circuit coasters due to the number of rides it can complete within a short span of time. Such tracks are also extremely cheap, usually costing less than $2,000.
• Watch out for rides running on Continuous Circuit Mode that have more than one car/train and their car/train enters the station at a speed above 28 mph (45 km/h). These rides are likely to crash if their brakes fail during a breakdown.
• Rides with covered cars, and tracked rides with 40% or more of their overall length constructed underground, will attract guests even when it is raining.
• Although a large number of scenarios focus on constructing rides on uneven terrain, consider preparing some compact rides and save the track design to use in scenarios. You will usually find a spot for these rides in most scenarios, giving you a head-start. Consider checking the Ride Exchange for track designs you can use.
• If a ride offers more than one operating mode, you can build multiple versions of this ride and have them run on different operating modes. Your guests won't get bored of this.
• Queue lines should at least be long enough to hold enough guests for 1 car/train.

RCT2 and RCTC

• Guests will board and alight from rides at half-speed if the path tile connecting to the ride entrance is sloped. In addition, Mechanics will take twice as long to fix rides under the same conditions. Plan your path network, design your rides and place your ride entrances such that the path tile connected directly to your ride entrances is flat to ensure that guests board and alight quickly and your Mechanics fix rides at full speed.

Guests

• Guests have different preferred intensity ratings, with some scenarios locking all guests' preferred ride intensities to 5 and below or 9 and above. Your park should comprise rides with various excitement ratings.
• Guests will start to feel that they are spending too much time queueing for a ride if its queue time exceeds 7 minutes, and they will start to leave the queue unhappy from 9 minutes onwards. Queue Line TVs and Entertainers can raise the latter to 11 minutes. If a ride's queue time is 7 minutes or more, consider shortening it so that guests will not feel frustrated waiting in line.