User Guide

Footpath Accessories include necessary items like benches, litter bins, and street
lamps. These are vital to your park’s efficiency and cleanliness, and to the comfort of
your guests. Accessories can only be built on footpaths–benches only on the flat
sections.
Walls, fences, and hedges fall into the category of Borders.
Using these, you can produce pleasant decorative boundaries
perfect for edging paths and scenic gardens.
Statuary includes many types of statues
and fountains. These can be expensive,
but add greatly to the beauty of your park.
• Once you’ve chosen the type of scenery you intend to install, click on the picture of the
specific item you want to add to your landscape.
Use the Rotate button to orient the object exactly the way you want it.
Note that for some things, there’s neither need nor opportunity for
rotation–fences and footpath accessories, for example.
• Move the mouse pointer to where you want the thing installed. You’ll notice that the cursor,
once it moves out of the Scenery window, reminds you what object you have selected. For
example, if you’re placing trees, the cursor includes a tree icon. Also, the highlight on the
land reflects the space needed to install the item you’ve chosen. Most items require one or
more complete squares, however, smaller items (like certain shrubs) need only a quarter of a
land square, and border items (fences and such) take up only the edge of a land square.
• Click when you’ve found the right location, and the scenery is installed. Any cost is deducted
from your treasury.
When you wish to remove an item, make sure that you’re in one of the construction modes (any
window that allows you to build something is open), place the cursor over the item, check the
Message Area to be sure you’re in the right place, and right-click. Your treasury is immediately
modified by any fee or refund.
Research
As we’ve mentioned a number of times already, novelty and variety are remarkably important to
the continued success of your park. When you begin any scenario, your options in terms of rides
and other attractions might seem rather limited. That’s because they are. At the start, you have
only the bare minimum needed to get underway. To discover more forms of guest entertainment,
you must do research.
You have at your disposal a research and development (R&D) team composed of experienced
designers and engineers–and a few safety experts. These highly trained people will invent
not only completely new rides, but also improvements to existing designs, ways of building
scenery that fits a certain theme, and new shops and stalls for your
guests’ convenience. With their research successes in your hands,
you can continually upgrade your park, thus keeping up the all-
important levels of novelty and variety and attracting greater
numbers of visitors.
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The only catch is that you must pay for the research efforts–every month. Let’s look at how you
control your researchers.
Click the Research button on the Toolbar to open the Research window. What you see
is the Current Research display, which tells you what development your R&D team is
currently working on and when they expect to complete it. Below that is a summary
of their previous achievement (if any). This display is for information only.
Select the Research Funding tab to
take control of your efforts at invention.
• The Research Funding setting is what you use to determine the level of support you want to
give your researchers. The more you pay, the faster you’ll get results.
• Below that are the Research Priorities boxes. Clicking any of these controls whether that
particular category of research is included in your team’s efforts. (A check denotes an
included item.) When the R&D folks finish a job and start fishing around for their next
project, they will only look into the categories you’ve left open to them. Note that if you leave
no items selected, no research goes on, but you still pay for it.
Research Limits
If a particular research category is greyed out, that means that no further developments are
available in that area. Your expert team has exhausted the possibilities in that category.
The R&D prospects are different in each scenario–you cannot discover all the possible items
and improvements in every one. It’s up to your researchers to let you know what can and can’t
be discovered, then to invent it for you.
When your R&D team meets with success, a notice in the Message Area alerts you to their
findings. You can use the new discovery immediately (provided you have the space and funding).
Note that you cannot make improvements to an existing ride without first closing the ride.
Awards
By the time you get your park up and running, you’ve done a lot of work. The satisfaction of a
job well done is its own reward, of course, but if you’ve done well, there are others you might
earn. Several national organisations keep a watchful eye on parks like yours, and each year they
give out awards in a number of categories. For example, there are established awards for the
Tidiest Park in the nation, the Safest, and the Best Value, just to name a few.
You’ll be notified in the Message Area of any award you receive. These awards are stored (for a
time) under the Awards tab of the Park window. Any time you wish, you can go there and bask
in the evidence of your excellence.
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