T w e n t y S i d e d

I completed the RollerCoaster Tycoon base game last week and started working on the first expansion, Corkscrew Follies. Two things were immediately apparent. First, Corkscrew Follies employs the same challenges and difficulties as the base game, but provides different and additional rides and shops to meet a scenario’s demands. In fact, the research tree will tend to focus on the new elements more than the old elements, requiring you to learn to use the new facilities. The second obvious change was the implementation of scenery and ground elements to represent artificial structures like castles and a variety of other buildings, really enhancing the “themed” idea of your amusement park. Honestly, I had previously associated this change with RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. Probably because I played a lot of the RCT2 base game before I obtained the expansion packs for RollerCoaster Tycoon. It was interesting to see where RCT2’s theming came from. It becomes clear, seeing how these ideas were originally implemented, how the building structures in RCT2 are really the same thing…just with “land” that is invisible (and intangible and non-obtrusive in most situations, if I remember correctly. In RCT, there still has to be a physical piece of land which retains it’s inherent properties to apply the “appearance” of walls, ceilings, etc. to.) Unfortunately, while interesting, I never found this part of the game to be as captivating as the core park management gameplay. A big reason why I never spent all that much time in RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.

Upon realizing I was mainly dealing with cosmetic differences, I started getting a bit bored with RollerCoaster Tycoon, and went looking for other games to mix in…all sim games, of course.

But first, to finish up the original scenario challenges in RCT:

The 15th scenario, Pacific Pyramids, is an odd one. Like Evergreen Gardens, you start with a “park” that has a different function: it is a walking-tour of “Egyptian-themed ruins.” I like to think it’s a left-behind movie set. The park is medium-sized and already has a moderate amount of path…too much to be useful from the start. The pre-existing giant pyramids near the entrance actually create a great deal of value for your park…they are an expensive decoration. Keeping them is ideal, but this also creates a challenge to build around. There is one HUGE problem that must be addressed: the back-half of the park has a long underground path connecting two areas. I mentioned before that guests in RCT have a great deal of trouble with underground pathing. Heck, your *employees* have trouble with underground pathing…they can take a wrong step and go wandering over a mountain sticking to their predefined route, yet not accomplishing anything because they aren’t actually on the path. Cut this underground section off from the rest of the path immediately (you should already have cut the back-half of the park off anyway as it is unnecessary to maintain all of this at the beginning.) Make sure any guests in the underground section get out; you will most likely have to cut both ends of the path off then manually move each guest back to the front of the park. Then finish deleting the path. From there this scenario is straightforward.

The final few scenarios all introduce arbitrary and unusual restrictions. These I didn’t care for very much, although each is plausible, and probably has one or more real-world examples.

Crumbly Woods comes right after Pacific Pyramids. This is a large, established, well-running park except for one problem: the rides in the park are all around 15-years-old. They are unpopular, prone to breakdown, and one roller coaster is practically guaranteed to crash on you. You will notice in the pic above several out-of-place sections of terrain. Those were part of themed rides that I deleted. Three coasters and a car ride (normally a reliable Gentle ride) are too old to maintain popularity and are more likely to crash. As usual, the most complex coaster, in this case a double Wooden Roller Coaster, is the most prone to tragic failure. All the other pre-existing Thrill and Gentle rides can be maintained with a normal maintenance schedule and free or near-free prices. The extant Car Ride can be saved if you want, but Car Rides are slow at best, and its value can be recreated with a shorter, simpler Car Ride that isn’t taking up prime real estate. Now, I want to be fair: rides so old/bad they cripple your park isn’t really an arbitrary condition. But I included it on this list because the easiest solution to the problem is to delete all your roller coasters; certainly non-intuitive.

On the other hand, Rainbow Valley is nothing *but* arbitrary. As you can see the terrain is certainly unusual, being very wide and thin, but the size is more than adequate. The trick in this scenario is that *you are not allowed to modify the land profile in any way.* That is, you can’t level the land, you can’t raise it, you can’t lower it. You *can* build tunnels, but without modifying the land, the entrances and exits are restricted to existing, unobstructed, fully-square, right-angle faces. Which the game does provide you with, so it’s clear you are meant to use them. I didn’t. All of my tracked rides were custom in this scenario; very few pre-existing designs will fit the terrain. One of my three coasters was stock: the shuttle loop, which is an accelerated-launch coaster through a single loop that uses a gravity return to that station along the same path. It is extremely terrain-forgiving thanks to its steel structure and small footprint. I can build custom water rides and go-karts all day long; but the two custom coasters did little more than the minimum possible. This is one of the most challenging scenarios in the base game.

The final scenario, Thunder Rock, *is* the most challenging scenario…at least the first time you play it. Yeah, building on top of a giant rock is limiting. Managing the cleanliness and safety of the paths is very difficult here; there’s a lot of doubling-up from the very beginning as the routes, which use predefined 3×3 squares, don’t line up with the paths going up the rock in a useful manner. However, the most challenging part of Thunder Rock is the money limitation. This isn’t the first scenario where cash is limited in some way, but in all the previous such scenarios you have to hit some pretty high or obscure limits to discover this. In Thunder Rock, guests only have about half the money they usually do. You will find this out the fastest if you use my technique of making the rides cheap (or free) and setting a high Park Entrance fee. If I can build quickly, I usually start out with a PE fee of $15, then raise it $5 / month (or nearly: I wait until the information ticker tells me guests think my Park Entrance fee is really cheap…sometimes this DOES NOT happen every month.) In an 8-month season, this means I go past $30 Park Entrance about half-way through my first year. I am ashamed to say it took me 18 months of wondering why I wasn’t taking in very much cash (and still raising my Park Entrance fee every month or so) to realize I was only making a little bit of money on food from the earliest visitors to the park. *For months* every new visitor was bouncing off my entrance gate like it was an invisible wall, because they couldn’t afford to get in. I actually had to look this up, which is when I found out about the severe money restriction on guests. There was still some variation, so I lowered my park entrance fee to $25 and charged at least 10 cents for each ride, while leaving food prices alone. Suddenly the money started flooding in as all the people desperate to see two years of new rides finally came crashing into the park. I slammed in a few more limited-space roller coasters and beat the scenario handily. You can see I even spent a month liberally spreading trees in every unfilled area. But I also started watching the entrance every time I raised the park entrance fee after that. I did come across a scenario in Corkscrew Follies that maxed out at $50. Once I raised it $5 to $55, every other guest started bouncing. $50 twice is better than $55 once…even I can do that math.

As I began to realize Corkscrew Follies, and presumably the subsequent expansions, were mostly going to be more of the same, I started looking for other games to install and try. One of the first is a game I have only tried a few times and never beaten: Pharaoh + Cleapatra (also known as Pharaoh Cleopatra).

Pharaoh is a city-builder sim released in 1999, the same as RollerCoaster Tycoon. An expansion pack called Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile was released the following year. I’m not sure you can even buy the two games separately anymore. Pharaoh takes fundamental design cues from the Caesar city-building games, which themselves were initially heavily inspired by SimCity with subsequent versions being modeled after SimCity 2000. In fact, Impression, the developer of the Caesar games for Sierra On-line (drink), also developed Pharaoh and Cleopatra. (Note: I actually owned/own all the Caesar games, even though I’ve never played more than a few minutes. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I owned them through Stardock’s Impulse store. When Gamestop bought and subsequently shutdown Impulse, I lost about half the software I owned on that platform.) Like SimCity, a fundamental part of city management is placing city services where their area-of-affect covers currently-unserved locations. However, an element borrowed from the Caesar games, and seen in a similar format in RollerCoaster Tycoon, is services provided by “walkers.” For instance, a primary measurement of growth and accomplishment in Pharoah is “upgraded” housing. However, you don’t do this yourself as a player; instead you have to provide the right mix of services to create the conditions in which a house can “upgrade” itself. Some services, such as food and water availability, are provided by walkers who follow your city’s roads outward from the service provider. If they walk by a place that needs that service, the need is met. If they don’t, the need is not met…even if the service “facility” is right next door. You have no control over the route the walkers take, *except* for “roadblocks” and building as few intersections in your roads as possible. The lack of intersections is important because at every intersection, a walker makes a random decision about which way to go. The manual says the walker won’t duplicate the original decision upon reaching the same intersection, but it’s not really clear what that means. “Roadblocks,” however can be used to stop a walker from taking a particular route. ANY walker, as far as I understand. Now, considering you are really only concerned with making sure your *housing* areas are supplied, this makes a certain amount of sense…you don’t need a walker carrying water to your hunting guild, they can fend for themselves. Apparently. Same with the stone quarry; they get all the water they need from the rocks, naturally.

The game does a fair job of teaching you how to play, but I did notice in the first three levels there was always one thing left out, and that was consistently the one thing that I could not tell if I was doing. You can *almost* close the loop by combining the scenario’s instructions with the manual’s descriptions. I suspect the element I am currently missing is properly using the “overlays,” which are info-graphics meant to show you whether given needs are being met. Considering this is the element of every scenario that I currently can’t discern, I’m pretty sure that will be the answer. Installing the GOG version of Pharaoh + Cleopatra through Lutris worked the first try. I “installed” the widescreen HD patch (it’s just a directory of patched .exe files, each designed for a specific resolution), but found the graphics, especially the writing, to be too tiny at 1920×1080. Using 1280×720 worked a treat; though. I’m currently working on getting SimCity 3000 set to use the same resolution. This is a bit trickier in SC3K; you really can’t change the resolution from within the game. It will freeze the desktop and, at least as far as I can tell, force you to logout and back in to fix the problem.

Railroad Tycoon II Platinum started up first try, too. However, I was shocked to discover I couldn’t remember how to play. It’s coming back to me as I stew on it, and hopefully I’ll have a chance to write on it soon. I started to install Tropico, but then I got Tropico 4 for free from GOG the other day. I have heard several times that Tropico 4 is the most-refined and enjoyable iteration of the original game, with 5 and 6 pursuing differences significant enough to separate them from the older games. I bought Tropico when it first came out, and loved it dearly. However, I never meshed with the mechanics very well. I always reached the end of the scenario in the 2000’s (date) while still running the island somewhere around the late-1950’s. And that’s in sandbox mode; I never even came *close* to completing even the easiest scenarios. I tried reading tutorials, watching videos, and inevitably;

Maybe Tropico 4 will be different.

The latest Galactic Seasons event has started in Star Wars: The Old Republic, but there really isn’t anything to show off from that, yet. It’s a Bounty Hunting event, something they do on a smaller scale regularly, and not something I usually engage in. On top of that, to access the story element of Galactic Seasons 7 you have to be up-to-date on the storyline, and I am woefully *not* current on the story. Considering I can cache the GS story until it becomes available for me, though; this isn’t really that big of a deal. I’m mostly playing for all the free stuff you can earn every week with minimal effort.

While playing around with various games I might try installing, it occurred to me to install the original Guild Wars, the first MMORPG I ever played. In fact, I tried it specifically because of what Shamus said about it (use the “search archives” tool above to search for “guild wars” and see his posts from June 12, 2008 – June 26, 2008.) The original game is so simple and rock-solid I probably should *not* have been surprised that the install really wasn’t any more complex than launching the stock installer through Lutris. Game installed, I logged in; everything was just as I left it:

How many other people were playing this ancient multi-player? I don’t know. I didn’t check. Hang on. <logs in> In post-searing Lion’s Arch, looks like about a dozen players. About the same in post-searing Ascalon. These are both early cities in the game, so that’s not bad for an MMO a half-step above support-mode. I do seem to be getting quite a bit of lag, though. This could be my own network traffic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the game is just so reduced at this point it’s a problem. But I did notice there were still some background downloads going on, so we’ll see. It’s been long enough since I played Guild Wars that I’ll definitely have to start a new character just to learn how to play again.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading!

 

Paige Francis He/him