Planet Coaster

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2012
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Oxfordshire
It is all pointless until management becomes a thing for it still. Nothing changed there and what has been put in is bad soggy band aids that don't work as intended such as the staff room with no thought on how to make it work. They are creative but missed the boat by a mile. However they seem to know how to do some management since they have it in the Jurassic World game being shown with more.

Also weather has never happened or wildlife and it all still feels generic tbh.

The basic management/scenario gameplay should have been from day 1:

  • Use the global map as the actual playable world. Have 3 or 4 rival NPC companies with theme parks located on the globe. Create story line with said player starting as manager of new company or being brought in from small theme park that is now needing to revitalise and have to work through to become the next Disney or similar.
  • Have the NPC be unique to one another with their own selling points specialising in say a water park theme or coasters and thrill seeker. Let the player work out how best to combat that park so that you select a region on the globe with a location to start a new park. Then expand the empire and purchase smaller amusement parks or buy out other NPC parks even as you try to conquer the globe.
  • Make story driven events where you are working on a park and one of your older parks is hit by a natural disaster and you have to rebuild it to make it profitable again or similar
  • When purchasing plots of the land as split into odd plot shapes with you expanding in a more fluid direction rather than big squares. Allow the player to pick different shapes, routes and the plots can give positive and negative affects to the park depending what that parcel of land has in it's boarders such as a natural mine or a wonder of the world to keep the replay different each time. You can have the parcel of lands populated differently each time by making it randomised on start up. It keeps things fresh. If you split an area of the map into 21 regions but you can only purchase 7 regions maximum then it allows the player to change their creative design each time with the layout and what works best for them each time also
  • Training should be more complicated. You should need to train them to unlock things such as the ride sequencer is only possible if you have senior ride attendant who has to go on a specific course. Or trained to work on specific rides, all can do basic flat rides but to be a coaster ride attendant then you need to be level 4 or similar out of 10. Level 7 gets some of the sequence stuff unlocked then. If you don't want to train those people you can hire staff but they will generally be only 90% as effective as training although you could do training refresh courses for your staff to boost their performance.
  • Have actual tab with each staff member having their own development tree to see what they have learnt and what skills they have. Give them personalities like they had in Theme hospital where you consider their attributes to pay and they can ask for pay rises and similar
These are reasonable things that make a proper career mode. The current version are just individual scenario gameplay and it lacks a real progression game to aim and achieve. If you took what they had now with all the DLC's and just refactored that into the career mode I would have pumped hundreds of hours into it tbh.
 
Associate
Joined
10 Sep 2009
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1,467
Anyone still play? I only got this a couple of months ago so I missed the initial popularity. Really enjoy it, but I am amazed at the PC hardware required to run it at 1440p 60fps. I can manage it on mostly high settings with a few things turned down to medium (spec below). This game pushes systems so hard!
 
Associate
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4 Jul 2008
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Belfast, N.Ireland
I recently got hooked back into Cities Skylines and now I am really interested in this game! I was big fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon back in the day.

It's currently in the Steam sale is it worth a purchase? It's £7.49 for the standard game it seems. I guess this is good enough to get started?
 
Soldato
Joined
14 Mar 2011
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5,418
My 2 cents, as a huge RCT fan (and Transport Tycoon before it :p)

The building tools are incredible - absolutely second-to-none, you won't be disappointed in the slightest at what you can build and all the options for designing your rides and park...

BUT it is severely lacking the other part of what I enjoyed about RCT - the management aspects are extremely watered down to the point they are virtually non-existent. Making money is trivial, keeping the park running smoothly is a complete doddle and nothing even remotely challenging ever happens (unless you go out of your way to make tons of bad decisions to create problems)... part of this is due to the fact that the maximum size your park can get to (in terms of number of guests) is not that large (maybe 1,000 people at the very maximum) so the park never feels like a "massive" park to me...

So it depends what you're looking for... as a sandbox builder it's incredible, as a game though I'm not so convinced (and I think it's because of that I played it a lot when I first got it but quickly dropped it and didn't go back, yet)
 
Man of Honour
Joined
21 Nov 2004
Posts
44,880
I recently got hooked back into Cities Skylines and now I am really interested in this game! I was big fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon back in the day.

It's currently in the Steam sale is it worth a purchase? It's £7.49 for the standard game it seems. I guess this is good enough to get started?

Plenty of content. Just make sure you have a strong cpu.
 
Associate
Joined
4 Jul 2008
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1,613
Location
Belfast, N.Ireland
My 2 cents, as a huge RCT fan (and Transport Tycoon before it :p)

The building tools are incredible - absolutely second-to-none, you won't be disappointed in the slightest at what you can build and all the options for designing your rides and park...

BUT it is severely lacking the other part of what I enjoyed about RCT - the management aspects are extremely watered down to the point they are virtually non-existent. Making money is trivial, keeping the park running smoothly is a complete doddle and nothing even remotely challenging ever happens (unless you go out of your way to make tons of bad decisions to create problems)... part of this is due to the fact that the maximum size your park can get to (in terms of number of guests) is not that large (maybe 1,000 people at the very maximum) so the park never feels like a "massive" park to me...

So it depends what you're looking for... as a sandbox builder it's incredible, as a game though I'm not so convinced (and I think it's because of that I played it a lot when I first got it but quickly dropped it and didn't go back, yet)

Oh that sound like a disappointment! I love the management side of things. Hopefully they fix that for Planet Zoo (Which also looks amazing)!

Hmmm I will watch a few more videos and decide it's only £7.50 after all!
 
Caporegime
Joined
1 Dec 2010
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Welling, London
Mate, it’s an absolute steal at £7.50. The hours I’ve sunk into this are ridiculous. I’ve just sunk over a grand into a new Ryzen 3900 system, and this was one of the main reasons for it. My 2500k just weren’t cutting the mustard.
 
Soldato
Joined
8 Nov 2003
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5,521
Location
Bedfordshire
I bought it at launch and spent more than enough time in it to justify the cost. Once you get a couple of good rollercoasters established making money is easy, there is some skill in building specific coasters to progress through the various scenarios.

My overclocked x5650 still just about manages it. 1k guests my parks are just getting started, can easily have more guests in the park than that.
 
Associate
Joined
26 Apr 2006
Posts
700
Bought this game a while back. Whilst i love RCT series, i just didn't fall in love with this one.
Haven't played it in a while, but my main put off was staff management. Staff just seemed to be un happy all the time, no matter how much training/pay/staff rooms i gave them. They would be unhappy then quit, and it was a real pain in the a trying to work out who had just quit and replacing them etc ... any advice/fixes for this ?
 
Soldato
Joined
8 Nov 2003
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5,521
Location
Bedfordshire
Staffing needs to be a balance. Training them makes them work harder and can get through the queues/breakdowns/thefts faster, but they need to be paid appropriate for the skill level. If all your staff are trained up but there's little for them to do they get bored and become unhappy, likewise if there is too much work they become stressed and unhappy. Only ones I train to max are security and zoned shop workers dedicated to really busy outlets, all others on rotation only get medium training so they don't serve customers too fast in quieter zones.
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2012
Posts
4,139
Location
Oxfordshire
Worth £7.50. management side awful, like complete trash, I gave huge posts during Alpha and they were like yeah we working to make it unique, which actually meant bland. Gave up mid beta, checked updates for about a year, nothing changed management wise, haven't played since.

The career is more individual scenarios that feel disjointed. It could have been ace with the globe as the home map to compete against AI etc like theme hospital did.

No buying of land parcels that could make it replayable by having unique features, no weather, no real staff management with actual training, more like a mobile app in that sense.

But yeah great sandbox.

What's worse is that jurrasic park got worse with less sandbox building abilities. So really have given up with Frontier now.
 
Soldato
Joined
14 Mar 2011
Posts
5,418
I was a massive fan of RCT and RCT2... just not sure this is worth it.

I'd say it depends on what aspects of RCT and RCT2 (and RCT3 as well) you were a massive fan of

Building parks and stuff in sandbox mode - you will love Planet Coaster

The campaign and challenge of managing a successful park - you will get bored of Planet Coaster
 
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