I checked the soft guest cap using a memory scanner, and Heide-Park seems to indeed have an actual soft guest cap of 2088 as you calculated. I think the reason Heide-Park works well in this challenge is that guests don't run out of money as fast as the other parks. The other two real parks start out with a lot of guests complaining about low cash, but Heide-Park has considerably fewer. The guests all start out with 70-100 euros and the park entrances all cost 50 euros. All the rides are free in each scenario, so guests have 20-50 euros to spend on food, drinks, umbrellas, and souvenirs. Heide-Park has much fewer stalls and information kiosks, so I suspect that guests are more likely to waste their money in the other parks by buying things while their condition bars are relatively high, causing them to run out of money much sooner. Whereas in Heide-Park, they're more likely to gain the full benefit of their purchases and stay in the park considerably longer, allowing the guest generation to outpace guest depletion.
This is by far the most plausible explanation I've seen so far. Also, just like you I was starting to have doubts about the soft guest cap I got from the plugin that tells you it, so I manually calculated it just to be sure.
So if you take all their money right away they spend the whole time complaining that they’re out of money and lowering your park rating. So ideally you want them to spend all their money gradually during their stay.
I can imagine that starting off so close to the cap means you have an army of guests who mostly aren't ready to leave yet, meaning you get some months where the guest generation easily outpaces the loss. That combined with a slightly superior park design could be all it takes to make the difference.
@@MarcelVos Also longer ride/queuing times can make them spend money slower and hold more guests in a limbo allowing you to gain more guests passed the cap. I have done it many times on accident and I had no idea why my coasters would say "NOT OWNED BY PARK" when clicking test, I found out from your sprite limit video why...
Someone somewhere on earth beat heidepark in 2003 by accidently leaving the pc running overnight, and ever since watching you beat a scenario with 3 clicks, He's been waiting for this exact video.
If you ever do figure out what's so unique about Heide Park, could be interesting for a follow-up, since it seems to involve some currently unknown emergent behaviour. Even though for most practical purposes it probably doesn't make a difference compared to e.g. advertising.
It's a shame ORCT2 doesn't have a Doom-esque replay file system (yet..? 👀), it would be interesting to go through the winning run and do some inspection with some of the fancy stat plugins
@@rayronvr but that doesn’t explain why Heide park could get so much higher than the soft guest cap while the last place with the cheat code (so handymen didn’t matter) couldn’t.
Yeah Heidepark! I live not far away from Heidepark (Germany) and the company I am working for supplies the Heidepark with beverages. I think our beer is the reason that the park attracts more guests than it should.
My theory: Heide Park has all the ride prices set as free, so aside from the initial cost guests aren't spending money on anything but food meaning they don't run out of cash as fast, and are willing to stay in the park longer. Alton Towers also has all rides set to free but has a far worse initial layout with long stretches of empty path making guests get bored
Could it have to do with proximity of park entrance to guest spawn point? Which changes how quickly the guest count will react to changes that affect it? Or maybe the path layout and guest pathfinding algorithm? Length of queue lines? Anything which changes how long a guest stays in the park. Things that make it resistant to drops or keep guests from leaving without making them too unhappy?
Or is it harder guest generation? I thought I recall from an earlier video, that can sometimes allow you to exceed the soft guest cap, or something like that
@@rcspriter Harder guest generation doesn't make you exceed the soft guest cap, but rather changes it. Not that it matters as Heide Park doesn't have it enabled.
I haven’t had the chance to look into it today to see if it is actually the case for Heide Park, but here’s an explanation of the spawn distance theory: - The soft guest cap affects the spawn rate. - There is a variable amount of lag between guests getting spawned and entering the park. - If there is a short distance between the spawn and the entrance, the soft guest cap will be harder. - If there is a long distance, then once the soft guest cap has been reached, there will still be a lot of guests who have spawned walking into the park, so the peak number of guests will be higher. Again, I am not sure if this is what is happening here, but it would be cool to see it tested using the scenario builder or something. Average peak above the soft guest cap vs length of path between spawn and entrance.
@@eccentricbass3730 It takes even the slowest guests only 9 days to reach the park entrance, that can never come even close to explaining the increase of guests over the span of more than a year.
One time I was working on a custom scenario and was like "yea, it'll be fine if I let it run overnight, I got a backup" I didnt, I forgot to hire mechanics Woke up to all my stuff broken down, 3 guests, and 14M in the red and the backup? never saved, somehow.
Every time you do one of these minimum challenges I think it can't be beat. Every time so far I've been wrong. What's next? Beat the level before you start it?
Have you considered the impact of monthly awards? I believe Heide Park is, by default, so well-designed that it is initially eligible for at least a few of these. Each one simultaneously active causes the guest generation to rise x1.25 (multiplicative) per positive award, up to a theoretical maximum of x2.44 if four different positive awards are attained in the last 4 months. This is seldom even if you are eligible for every single positive award just because of the odds that the game checks for a negative award sometime in the last 4 months, but I frequently see 2 or 3 awards active at a time on my longer-term park builds, where I can set my own goals to get as many awards as possible at once (i.e. Dazzling Colors, Best Staff, Best Toilets, and Best Gentle Rides simultaneously). This leaves us with a question: what awards is Heide eligible for by default? Without checking, I imagine it must have 10 or more gentle rides, so Best Gentle Rides? Safest Park? Best Value Award?
That's not a bad hypothesis, but I'm afraid it's probably not true. I just ran the three parks a few times and got a similar amount of awards in all three, usually 1 or 2 in the first 1.5 years. So it's true that you are eligible for a wide variety of awards which will get you some of them, but that's not what differentiates Heide Park from the others.
Considering how much this relied on randomness, it begs the question. How often do you attempt to do something that does not work at all and don't do a video about it?
Oh quite a lot of times. The Crazy Castle excavation video was originally thought up as removing Leafy Lake's lake. When it turned out Deurklink had already done that I raised the stakes by trying to turn Amity Airfield into a lake. That didn't work as the money just wasn't there, so after that I turned to Crazy Castle. Even that was originally different as I wanted to turn it into a lake at the original water level. Only halfway the playthrough I figured I was making enough money to excavate it all the way down to -9 meters. These kinds of videos go through many different stages sometimes. There is one challenge I failed to do a few years ago and wrote off as impossible, but recently managed to complete. That video will release in a few weeks probably.
@@narzgel1007 yeah, a video of the things that never panned out would be cool. It might even inspire some clever viewers to tackle those unachieved challenges themselves.
This is making me wonder what the minimum total number of interactions (mouse clicks and key presses) required to beat OpenRCT2 (complete all scenarios) is. That would I think be an interesting challenge.
II know "Heide Park" in the real world. And yes, it is a awsome park. It's not a big surprise people go there even if you do not anything. It is just great the way it is.
Imagine a let's play of Heide Park scenario - playing in real time, doing lots of scrolling, opening and closing all kinds of windows, extensive studying of stats and commenting all the time on possible tweaks and strategies but essentially doing absolutely nothing gameplay-wise and then somehow ending up winning the scenario :D
Megaworld Park might work on RCT Classic. The guest generation is a lot nicer on scenarios that don’t have any money. Guests usually don’t leave the park, and you can easily get to 10,000 guests by doing nothing as long as you have enough staff. It will be a slow process though.
For Megaworld Park the problem was more often the park rating though, as it takes quite a while to get from the 2100 you start with to the 3500 you need, and in that time your park has a high chance of being closed.
I've only ever played the second game, so I'm surprised to learn that the first game has a park from near me. What I'm even more shocked to learn is that the Colossos which I've always perceived as the face of the Heide Park is actually younger than the first game. Makes me want to add the post-1999 rides to the scenario, though I'm not sure that's fully possible. For the Krake alone you'd probably have to cheat Watercoaster pieces into a Vertical-Drop Coaster.
This could actually be a good thing in this challenge. Prices are well below what could be charged, so Best Value Park award is possible in this challenge (maybe?)
This series reminds me of pannenkoek2012's journey to beat Super Mario 64 with as few A presses as possible (look up Bismuth's "How Gaming's Most Iconic Challenge Was Invented - The History of the SM64 A Button Challenge Part 1" if you have no clue what I'm on about).
Between the three Real Life Roller Coaster, Heide Park is the only one with a free-roaming handyman who mows. It seems like mowing the grass increases the soft guest gap. I beat Alton Towers by just adding handyman who mow. There is something more to mowing grass than the aesthetics.
Heide park is very well-designed park (minus the handyman shortage). Monthly awards boost the guest generation I believe. Guests stay happy and are very easy to retain in the park because they only need to pay for food + beverages. What a gem of a park!
One of these days, the answer is going to be "No, you can't." And the video will be all about precisely what you tried and why you still failed every time, and it'll be just as interesting as all of these successful crazy challenges.
the little bit of Six Flags Great Adventure you showed was actually kinda accurate to the real park in Jackson, NJ, USA. I live nearby to it. I saw the classic El Toro and the yellow coaster next to it and I was like damn...
I suspect that Merry-go-round has something to do with Heide Park mystery. LOOK it got FIVE Merry-Go-Rounds. That being said, perhaps negative guest thought not only impacts rating but also immediately impacts guest generation. Or guest leaving park too early due to unhappiness so that guest generation cannot cover up the guest exiting, is the cause. Regardless Merry Go Round's unique geust thought buff must have some meaning here.
Maybe weirdness of the soft guest cap has something to do with some minor differences in how rct1 and rct2 deal with it. There might even be some scripted stuff hidden in the scenario to make it easier than normal. It is probably worth further investigation since there might be more to the soft guest cap that can be uncovered by investigating this weirdness.
I think it might have something to do with where the guests spawn in. That long road leading into the park means that guests don't count as _in_ the park until well after a great deal more guests have wandered onto the road. It might even be that having such a long walk glitches something out and the guests never stop spawning on the map at their default rate.
Heide Park is just 25 minutes away by car. Cool to see that you have beaten Heide Park without doing anything. It's also a nice amusement park, the second biggest in Germany if I remember correctly.
Your videos have sparked my interest in this game again. Not really a rollercoaster fan, I actually don't go into any of them, but this game was my youth and I cannot wait to try again. You are doing a fantastic job with these videos!
"At this point, it became a little bit of an obsession." Ahhh. That made my entire day. We really appreciate your effort -- or here, LACK of effort -- Marcel!
Wouldn’t that be all of them? For every park, there is some point of minimum action that still results in a victory condition, those points will just be in different spots depending on the scenario. Heide Park appears to be the only scenario where that minimum point is actually zero though.
IIRC in Vanilla RCT 1 you can do this in Forest Frontiers if you start the scenario using the Tutorial. Since the game is placing everything itself you are doing nothing and beating the Scenario after the Tutorial finishes will count as having beaten it in the scenario list. The Junior Coaster the Tutorial builds for you is a absolute crowd pleaser. Not sure if the Tutorial is hiring and placing Staff, so that might be an issue.
Maybe Heide Park's secret is all the extra scenery? Just a shot in the dark, but from the other examples you shown, that one seems to look the best scenery wise.
Heide Park being the only Park in RCT that is based on a real-life Park from Germany. Funny how the german Park is the one that efficiently reaches the goal without any input
Wow...that's dedication to your fans watching the game play without doing anything...I would go nuts. Another video to make us all think about how we play the game. 😁😁
funny thing. I beat heide park a few days ago and noticed this as well. but since I did not do a challange run, I was astonished how easy to beat it was. I just got a few adds, and then managed park rating. hire 30 handymen, replaced some vandalism and build a few paths because the advertisement was a mistake.
Maybe heidepark has a bad path layout that keeps guests inside longer, but it is also pretty so that the park rating doesn't drop as much from guests getting lost
One very important issue with Megaworld Park is the park entrance. It voids many of the guests that enter because the entrance tile is an upward-facing hill, so you really only have around half as many guests enter the park as should actually be counted. Otherwise I'm almost certain you could make the goal with it too.
I love how you can see that he goes way into debt completing the scenario (since IIRC the rct1 Real Parks have absurdly high starting loans, like literally in the _millions._ )
@@stokkie01 I don't mean initially. Just at some point. If you're lucky with how clean your park stays you can probably push to the goal whilst keeping the rating high enough. Or some goals don't have a rating requirement right?
This video gives me a idea, Of what scenario you could do with as little work as possible on RCT Classic. Which is likely close to OpenRCT2 but not so much.
I investigated Six Flags Great Adventure and I found that it *theoretically* should be possible, but a major hindrance is an oversight where one of the janitors' patrol areas are separated by paths they can't walk on, meaning they're stuck in one corner while vomit and litter pile up where they cannot access. There are no stalls in that area and the only ride is a pirate ship, so litter drops and vomit only build up slowly over time, but it's near impossible to get the rating back above 850 once there's enough of it.
I had a quick look over the maps and my take on them is that hyde park has a monorail near the entrance, and ive always found monorails and other transport rides to really mess with the guests pathing, so maybe guests that are "planning to leave" hitch a ride on the monorail and then get lost, or the monorail in general may be trapping guests very effectively in the park. furthermore i find that some of the parks have really 'bad' pathways which make the guests walk aimlessly for a really long time and when combined with the monorails messing with things so it makes guests leave less because you have a bunch of semi trapped guests. i also think that this is the reason for sometimes the guest count not dropping when your park rating has tanked due to the vandalism and vomit giving the handymen more time to clean stuff up
All those resets seem miserable, but as you said, it was quite exciting by the end of it. So you did complete an objective without doing anything: You had fun. :D
That confirms it: Heide Park ist the best Park! I was hoping from the very beginning that this park might be the lucky winner. :D It most certainly is the park where I've been the most in real life. :D
Having just completed the scenario, there's one factor that may not have been properly factored: Awards. As you already mentioned in past videos, they increase your guest multiplier by some factor; likely enough to be pushed over the scenario's request. Heide-Park qualifies easily for Best Value and Water Rides to begin with; and while I was doing this challenge...(and clearing it first try) I noticed those award were being pushed out quite quickly. It might be a good time to do a video on how the guest cap works.
Take the number of wins/attempts as the probability of winning the do nothing challenge as a starting point. And then start doing 1 thing, and record the attempts. I would start by adding 1 handyman, then figure out the wins/attempts ratio. Then take away one handyman... Then add one ride... Then add one ad campaign etc.... It would be boring because you'd want to do hundreds of attempts even if you win more than once. Do this with other parks, it would be fascinating to craft a database to try and figure out what the best "minimal effort" strategies are.
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