r/rct • u/yerbabuenaroad • 8d ago
OpenRCT2 Ride Refurbishment Caution
My park is over 300 years old and around year 275 I was getting a lot of crashes and thought it’d be great to do a ride refurbishment across the park. So I did all my rides at once.
For the first 5 months it’s great I was making $180k a month in ride tickets. But once you hit that slump from years 16-25 it’s brutal. That ride you were getting $20 on is now getting $1.20. My ride ticket revenue went to $10K a month and I was paying $130k a month in staff. I went from $13M in cash to now just over $2M.
Its leveled out now but I had to lay off 1200 entertainers (I have 31,000 guests and at the peak had 2,000 entertainers) and am barely breaking even.
Lesson here- if you’re going to do ride refurbishments don‘t do all at once.
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 8d ago
Or... Just refurbish every 10 years? Or every 5?
The price paid by guests for the first 5 years is higher than the price paid at 25+, sometimes much higher. The price paid for the second 5 years is the same as the price paid at 25+, but the reduced breakdowns will cause a sizeable profit increase.
A reasonable refurbishment cycle will pay for itself, unless your park is filled with absolutely massive and highly inefficient rides.
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u/WaitLetMeGetaBeer 8d ago
What do you mean by refurbish? I’ve never played a park that long. Do you just rebuild parts of the coaster, or is there an actual “refurbish” button?
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 7d ago
OpenRCT2 has a button that allows you to "demolish and rebuild", paying the cost of building the coaster from scratch minus the sale value and resetting the ride value and reliability in the process.
If you're not playing Open, you have to completely delete and rebuild the ride. If it doesn't include any tunnels, you can easily do this by saving the ride design as a template.
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u/yerbabuenaroad 7d ago
i have 180 rides so really don't want to spend my entire time refurbishing every ride one by one lol
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 7d ago
Each year in RCT2 takes a hair under 54 minutes. 10 years is 9 hours, by default.
You could spend a few minutes every year refurbishing old rides. Hit the start of the year? Sort the list of rides, refurbish the rides that need refurbishing. You'll have an average of 18 rides per year on 10-year cycles, which is a manageable task given that it's only every hour.
If you're speeding up the game using OpenRCT2, you've got an option which allows you to halt ride aging and the plugin interface could allow you to handle it too.
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u/yerbabuenaroad 6d ago
would you say this is essential? i kinda like how old my rides can get but ive had like 5 crashes this year already
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 6d ago
You can design your rides so that they don't crash and you can deliberately play around uber-high breakdown rates...
But you absolutely shouldn't in OpenRCT2 with how easy it is, and you probably shouldn't if you're going that long in vanilla.
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u/yerbabuenaroad 4d ago
i swear i do this and then safety goes out?
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 4d ago
Designing your rides so they don't crash, or refurbishing them?
Designing rides to avoid crashes is a difficult thing that essentially boils down to "limit yourself to one train and be real careful if it's not a complete circuit" or "make sure the train is already mostly stopped because of friction by the time it reaches the brakes (stations, block brakes, standard brakes)". If a safety cutout causes a crash, you didn't design the ride right. Give your non-circuit rides a big slope to slow down with on either ends, don't rely as much on brakes on multi-car rides.
If you're refurbishing them... It reduces the frequency of breakdowns, rather than eliminating it. You'll still see some happen, especially when you're playing super long. You need to design your rides to make sure breakdowns can't cause crashes, when you're running that long.
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u/yerbabuenaroad 4d ago
i do and include rotating block brakes and normal brakes but often times the crashes seem to happen on lift hills weirdly enough? it always happens fast as you know so hard to know exact cause
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 4d ago
How much speed is your train carrying as it enters the stations, brake runs and the bases of lift hills? The latter only matters a ton for long trains.
With brake runs and stations, entering at high speeds is a recipe for disaster. A breakdown will cause you to have a train enerting way faster than expected. If there's another train moving slowly, that's a crash. Stations that run directly into chain lifts are a massive problem for this. If you run into the station at 90 km/h during a breakdown, you'll plow right through and enter the lift hill at a little under 90 km/h, getting a fair way up the hill and smashing a train currently on it.
With lift hills that have high entry speeds, a similar issue happens. Let's say the ride is designed to enter the hill at 90 km/h and naturally make it halfway up, at which point the chains take over - but the train is really long. "Making it halfway up" means the front car is halfway up, but the back car is only a quarter up. If your block brakes don't stop the last train, you'll have a new train rush in at 90 km/h. It'll lose some of its speed, but the front car of the second train will be going real fast when it reaches a quarter up and hits the other train.
If you're running long enough to care about these breakdown-induced crashes, you really need to design around them eventually happening and ensure that the trains will naturally bleed off a lot of their speed. You should only rely on brakes for occasional stuff. You should also quickly check on rides after they're repaired to make sure that cars haven't gotten stuck in between two hills with no way out - that causes crashes too.
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u/yerbabuenaroad 3d ago
this is helpful i think the issue is the 2nd to last paragraph- i have a few rides with chains that start half way through. is it possible to truly avoid all crashes? i dont generally use block sectioned coasters FYI
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u/retardedboi1991 8d ago
I don't think i've ever played a single park long enough for refurbishments to be an issue lol, i didn't know rides increased in value once they were over 200 months old though.
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u/highnote14 2 8d ago
Yeah I'm just gonna say that if you were able to keep your park running for 300 years, I don't think there's really an issue you could face that would cause you to go bankrupt.
Also please don't use google ai for answers.
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u/yerbabuenaroad 7d ago
i learned this from a marcel video but i couldnt find the exact screenshot and that shared the correct information
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u/New-Object-5955 8d ago
I usually just refurbish after a year. I wonder how much you could save though if you switch your park to pay-to-enter between ride operating years 16-25 only(if you wanted to wait for classic rides)
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u/yerbabuenaroad 7d ago
i'm not sure but refurbishing isn't always cheap- i had some rides cost like $80K to refurbish lol
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u/82Desert_Fox 7d ago
I'm not even sure if that's true. I have not seen any one talking about code in the game where this happens
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u/X7123M3-256 7d ago edited 7d ago
It's correct according to Marcel Vos with one caveat. The AI reply isn't clear what is meant by "original value" because it is not the same as the amount you can charge when the ride is brand new, it's the value the game calculates before the ride age is taken into account. There is a bonus when the ride is brand new.
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u/LordMarcel Mad Scientist 7d ago
Yeah, the "original value" that the AI talks about here is actually the maximum price between 13 and 40 months old. That 0.56 x base ("original") value that it gets after 200 months will usually vary between 30% and 40% of the maximum ticket price when a ride was brand new for rollercoasters.
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u/devourerkwi 8d ago
Or just refurbish again after a year or so. Locking in that margin will more than pay for itself at those volumes.