Hey guys! I recently started playing RCT2 again. I hadn’t played since I was a kid, and I’m having a blast so far. I’ve been lurking this sub during work breaks, and honestly, it’s impressive what you guys have made. I’ve also learned so many little things from you. Awesome work!
I wanted to share this little project I’m currently working on.
The main idea was to make a theme park made of several islands, where guests have to travel by boat from island to island. I set up a Boat Hire ride with a track going all around the islands, with stations on each island so guests can take a boat and stop at the next island. As you can see, I’m not really playing for efficiency. I’m playing to make it look cool and beautiful.
At first I had a problem, you can’t put that many boats on a Boat Hire ride, since only one station is recognized as the “main station” that should contain boats. Since my stations are 12 tiles long, I could only put 12 boats on the ride.
After some investigation, I found out I could cheat and add more boats than normally allowed. I set it to 90 boats at first, and it was kind of a disaster. Eventually, all the guests got stuck in one of the stations waiting for empty boats to leave, while not enough guests were getting into the empty boats.
I tried to make empty boats leave the station like you can with other rides, but it didn’t seem to work for Boat Hire. I don’t know if I was doing something wrong, but it seems like a guest has to ride a boat for it to start moving to the next station.
After many attempts changing the number of boats and trying to organize guests between stations using “No Entry” signs, I finally got the behavior I was looking for. You can see boats all around the map, no major jams, and almost every station has people waiting for a boat to arrive. The final boat count is 35.
Then it hit me, if I did this, my staff wouldn’t be able to reach broken rides or anything else on the islands, and I didn’t want that to become a problem. So I ended up building bridges that connect all of the islands. Overall, the result is not bad, and the feeling that guests need to use boats to travel between islands is still there.
I had a lot of fun setting this up, and I can’t wait to start filling the park with more attractions, buildings, and scenery.