How the decoration rating impacts your parks

Parkitect is a game that feels and plays significantly differently from Roller Coaster Tycoon. In order to succeed in Parkitect, you must embrace decorations, theming, and staff management. To illustrate why this is important, I ran an experiment on Maple Meadows to test out the effect of a decoration rating on profitability. The bottom line is that paying attention to your decoration and immersion ratings can give your monthly income at least a 35% boost.

How much does the decoration rating matter?

Sorry for the boring title, but I wanted to capture the essence of an experiment I ran today. I've spent quite a bit of time playing Parkitect now, and for the past two weeks or so I made a conscious effort to try and identify 1) how different is the game from the all-time classic Rollercoaster Tycoon, and 2) for all the emphasis on decorations, how much does your decoration rating really matter?

TL:DR Answer to #1: ultimately this is subjective, but I find that embracing decorations, theming, and staff management give a game that's fundamentally different from RCT. Answer to #2: A lot.

The test park - no decorations

I decided to run an an experiment on Maple Meadows to test out the effect of a decoration rating on profitability. There would be two save files, each with the exact same layout, rides, and pricing. My staff consisted of two haulers, two handymen, two engineers, and one security guard. There's a 3-tile high wall blocking the receiving dock from view, so any elements affecting decoration rating are rides or stalls. The base layout is shown below. Included is a junior coaster, three thrill rides, a burger and drink stall, and restrooms.


Here's a view of the scenery impact. With the exception of a tile or two on the left, the only negative rating is coming from the bathroom. There's nothing contributing significantly to a good rating.


Here are the financials after six months of operation. Omitting January, my park lost $1,501 from February to the end of June.

The test park - with lots of decorations

Here's the layout for the same park with a moderate amount of decoration. I'm not skilled at this aspect of the game yet, but I think it looks fairly decent and keeps with the scenario theme. This much scenery cost me about $2,700 or so.


The decoration overview confirms that there are some tiles with a 'good' rating. Note that enclosing the bathroom has completely eliminated the negative rating from it. Hmm...


Here are the financials after six months of operation. Omitting January, my park lost $879 from February to the end of June. Hmm. That's almost half of my first test with zero decorations. There might be something to this...

Crunching the numbers

Of course, a one to one test doesn't prove anything for certain so I decided to run this test three times on each map. Once the construction costs are omitted, it's pretty clear that a higher decoration rating has a significant impact on your park's profitability. The numbers don't lie. Here's the sum balance for each category for February through June:


A few key takeaways here:

• More people come to parks with a higher decoration rating. From this test, it looks like you get at least a 30% boost.
  
• Ride income was almost double in parks with good decoration. I'll have to pay attention to this, but I think it's that decoration contributes to immersion and happiness, and happy guests ride more frequently.
  
• These numbers don't seem huge, but they add up immensely over the life of your park. The additional $400 from your extra guests can make or break your park in year two when you're trying to add an expensive new steel roller coaster.

Benches matter too?

One thing I noticed when doing this test is how frequently I'd see notifications about tired guests. Even at the fastest speed, I was surprised at how many of them shuffled slowly along paths and out the gate on their way home. So as a test variant, I decided to add a total of ten benches to each scenario and see what changed.


Hmm, that's interesting! What do the numbers say?

• Ride income in the "no deco" scenario almost doubled.
  
• Ride income went up by 11% in the "deco" scenario.
  
• Shop income increased by almost 35% in both scenarios.

Benches have a huge impact on guest energy levels, and their energy is a key factor in how much time they spend in your park. The longer you can keep guests in your park, the less pressure you're under to constantly attract a stream of new guests.

In closing

Doing this exercise have given me a new appreciation for Parkitect. The decoration system and employee / shop management really does create a game that feels and plays different from Roller Coaster Tycoon. If you neglect scenery, you'll have a difficult time creating a profitable park. There's definitely a balance between adding rides and theming them well, and I'm still learning that. It seems like money spent on scenery is an investment with no recurring expenses but significant long-term payoff.

I hope this experiment proves helpful to someone!

[Wai]

May I amend the comment about fences and walls having no decorative value. Certainly, they all act as blockers to negative items like staff facilities and toilets, but, a few, very few, do have decorative value. Most notably the string light fences. Strings of them, one above the other around rides are terrific at boosting decoration value. (I will post one of my ride boosters on my workshop for anyone who wants this done for them.)

There are others, I suggest you experiment to find them. Easy to do, just pick a low rated ride which you know has no negative influences nearby and surround with the wall or fence. Like the string lights, you may need quite a few, but, it can be worth the effort. The lights look really pretty at night but they boost during the day as well.

[LegoLandLiam]

It's so cool that you assessed this with math. To me it sort of just makes sense and was somewhat straightforward that scenery affects the happiness (and thus how long and how much money a guest spends). To see the numbers is awesome.

[Boweh]

As others mentioned, fences and walls don't actually add to decoration rating. They just block line of sight from bad decoration. I will add, however, that fences serve an additional purpose in that, when placed between two path tiles, it splits the path in half. Because you can only place benches, trash cans, photo stands, on the edges of paths, fences allow you to place these objects on large sections of path. In this way you can have a main entrance with a wide path, to avoid 'the park is too crowded' complaints, but also pepper the area with benches to make use of all that real estate. In addition to also adding more trash cans, fences can split the flow of guest pathing in high traffic areas, which eases the load on your janitors.

[Boweh]

Scenery near rides increases ride excitement, which increases how much you can charge for them. You didn't increase ticket prices, so these old tests doesn't accurately reflect how much theming adds to your income, but the drastic increase in ride profits anyways probably stems from increased traffic. Guests ride more readily when they think they're getting a better deal. Less empty seats from empty queues.

[vertigo]

Great write-up and well run tests. As someone who very recently got into OpenRCT2 and just today got Parkitect I am very glad to see people running tests like this, it reminds me of Marcel Vos.

Nice work on the decorations btw, they look good. Having only just started playing the game I am blown away by some of the decorations I've seen and that's just from a video on Western Roundup.

Cheers for the guide

[[ADR] onufmi]

In my experience pretty paths, fences and ground textures have no impact on decoration. Walls, roofs and doors are only good for hiding ugly things. And the actual pretty things are props and objects.

It would be good to see another decoration guide now that we know its big aspect of this game. I wonder if certain props give more decoration score. what if you get lower score for mismatching themes, spamming 1 objects all over. At what distance the decoration is effective and so on. maybe im the one who should do that ahah

[xX10]

I love seeing stuff like this.
Thanks for sharing!

[Captain Newo]

thanks for putting in the effort to communicate the importance of decorating to the community! so cool that this is such an integral part of making profit

[Toast!]

This is great thank you! I was wondering why I was making no money. However my slide was really popular. The reason was because, likely, I had a lot of decoration there and it was attracting guests.

[SomePlayer]

Thanks for the guide.

You can add some decorations inside the attractions too. Not for how much this will help.