Research - Observations and suggestions after playing 5 years with a new park

[steevm]

I created a scenario with the majority of rides locked at the start of the game. I enabled some of the basics to get a basic park up and running: burgers, soft drinks, info kiosk, toilets, baloons, carousel, spiral slide, twister, bumper cars, ferris wheel, enterprise, wooden coaster, mini coaster and miniature railway and basic props. I gave the park 50,000 bucks, and added a couple of flower beds, benches and bins, a delivery area, staff room and some basic pathways.

I thought this would be a decent representation of a typical scenario; lots of stuff left to unlock, but enough to work with at the start.

I then started funneling some cash into research, starting from the end of year 0 - i.e. after I had built up a very basic park.

The first thing I noticed was in the Research screen itself. There is a hire button, but you can only hire one team. Seeing as you can set the team's budget to zero, this raises a number of questions:

• What it he purpose of the Hire button if you can only hire one team? Will there be the option to hire more teams in the future?
  
• Shouldn't there already be a team hired without a budget, seeing as there is no difference financially to have no team or a team with no budget?
  
• Why would I fire a team if I can set the budget to 0?
  
• I didn't like the fact that you need to remember to select a new category of research BEFORE the current research is finished, otherwise they will continue researching in the same category. While this might make sense with multiple teams (each with a different area of focus and budget), it's no good if you only have one team if you can't set priorities when you want to.
  
• Why not use the RCT approach (or something similar) with sliders that determine the likelihood of different types of rides? It's does pretty much the same thing, emulates multiple research teams (albeit with one big money pool) and doesn't require me to manually change categories every time something is researched. At any rate, I liked being able to set the research focus to more exciting flat rides, coasters and shops at the start of the game in RCT, and then branching out into things like props as I went along. It meant I could set the research sliders and forget about research until several years into the game. I don't want to babysit my researchers.

At any rate, I set up a research team with a budget if 125 bucks per month, told them to get me a flat ride, and waited. And waited. And waited a bit more.

Now I know the default budget for the team is set to 1000 bucks, but at the moment, it's hard enough to make a profit as things stand, let alone 1000 bucks in a new park with no guests. So I think you need to make some changes to the economy in one way or another to really be able to determine whether research is fast/slow enough. I do think that waiting something like 10 months for a flat ride was far too long. Half that would probably be the limit.

So if you are expecting people to be setting budgets of 1000 for research (which in my sloppy calculations means ~1 month to research), it stands to reason you need to fine tune the other aspects of the economy to make it possible to earn more money. But in my park, with almost all the initial attractions built (plus a few I researched), I'm not making a profit with 250 now allocated to research. Things are fine until it rains, when no one rides the moneyspinners and people flee the park.

I think that this an area where you can take a whole number of approaches to balancing the gameplay. There's the obvious solution of simply making research cheaper to perform. But there are other solutions that I think might actually be better solutions in terms of the greater economic picture:

• The biggest money-spinners at the moment are shops. Their running costs (haulers+stocks) are a much lower percentage of their income than the maintenance costs of rides. When you factor in the cost of hiring mechanics as well, running costs are well over 50% of revenue from rides in good weather; the minute it rains, you bleed money. Lowering the running cost of the rides would leave more money for research and make building roller coasters more appealing. My main rollercoaster is struggling to make a profit, and I'm actually relying on income from the flat rides to keep the park afloat. I'd like to see the rollercoasters as the main money spinners and the flat rides as supplementary, i.e. the opposite of how it is now. This is probably linked to another issue with intensity that is dealt with below.
  
• My park can handle a lot more guests than I am getting, and I set the rate to the highest possible. Granted, I would probably have higher visitor numbers if they didn't go home when they run out of money or it rains - but without cash to invest, I can't research an ATM, an umbrella stand or alternative indoor rides. So it's a vicious circle: not enough guests in the park to sustain the park to research the attractions that would keep the guests in the park. More generous spawning of peeps would counteract this. It might also be worth considering the "this park is too crowded" metric from RCT and make people less likely to spawn if the park is overcrowded, and more likely to spawn if it is relatively empty (all other things being equal).
  
• Some guests are too finicky about which rides they will visit. I understand a preference for higher intensity, but at the moment, this seems to be set in stone. Certain peeps will only ride the 2 high intensity rides I have, and avoid everything else. In RCT, I'm pretty certain that there were more variables at play here - people who were in the park for hours and having a great time would sometimes ride the most mundane rides on a whim. Sure, they'd prefer the more intense rides, and would purposefully head to them, but they didn't shun everything the way the peeps in Parkitect do. If the peeps were slightly more flexible (maybe make the ride's excitement factor play a bigger role), it would increase the number of guests on the rides, and thereby also increase income. I'm not asking for Daredevil Dave to ride the carousel all day, but he should at least be willing to give the medium intensity roller coasters a whirl. This is the main reason my roller coaster isn't a moneyspinner - everyone is riding the more intense flat rides instead.
  
  On a similar note, the log flume I built in the previous park was a complete disaster because nobody wanted to go on a low intensity ride despite it having a pretty good excitement rating.
  In short, if people are too finicky about the rides they are willing to go on, it will severely hamper scenarios with only a few rides available at the start, and make it impossible to unlock the rides you need make everyone really happy.

At any rate, I think it would make sense to change Parkitect's economy such that it's a lot easier to make money so that we can properly evaluate the research feature in the context of an actual game. I know the economy is still a work in progress, but I whink it might be time to at least make some basic changes so that it's more fun to play right now. Maybe a combination of approaches is what you need? Reduce the cost of research by a bit, and somewhat reduce maintenance costs for rides, and things are probably be OK for the game's current status. The good thing is that the basics most definitely work - I was able to research several rides and shops. I just need some money to actually be able to research - right now I have $ 921.24 left of the $ 50k I started with... :D