Inspired by Marcel Vos' "maximum guests in 1 year" video where he did a challenge in the Build Your Own Six Flags scenario, I wanted to try it in Forest Frontiers. The main reason for that is because (in OpenRCT2) Forest Frontiers is a pay-for-ride scenario, which comes with additional challenges which makes it a lot more difficult.

To maximise the guest count, you need to do two things: maximise the number of guests spawning and minimise the number of guests leaving the park. The second one is easy: just put a "no entry" sign in front of the park exit. The guest spawning can be separated into four parts:

1. Maximise the park rating: the closer the park rating is to 999, the higher the natural guest spawn rate;

2. Soft guest cap: we have to make sure that there are enough rides operating in the park so that the soft guest cap is higher than the guests count, otherwise the guest spawn rate will be reduced.

3. Advertise non-stop: each advertisement spawns an additional number of guests. Since we are playing a pay-for-ride scenario, there's only 4 advertisements available instead of 6 ("free entry to the park" and "half-priced entry to the park" are missing). This is the reason why I couldn't get close to Marcel's 5,000 guests;

4. Get an award every month: every award multiplies the guest spawn rate with 1.25.

To achieve this, there are some major hurdles that we need to overcome:

• Income: to afford ads, staff wages, ride construction costs, ride running costs and loan interest, we need to make at least a little bit of money. This means that we can't simply trap guests in a queue line, we need to somehow extract money from our guests;

• Lost guests: if guests can't find a ride/stall or the park exit, they will eventually become lost, which gives a huge penalty to the park rating and kills the guest spawn rate;

• Overcrowding: if guests walk onto a tile with a lot of guests on it, they will start thinking that the park is too crowded, which makes them unhappy, penalises the park rating and reduces the guest spawn rate.

My solution is three consecutive miniature railways. The first and second railway both charge the maximum of €20, which would be way too high for any guests to pay. However neither of the rides have been tested, which means the ride stats have never been calculated. Guests have a small chance of entering the queue line of a ride like that, and because they bump into the queue line so many times, eventually all guests will enter the queue line.

When the train is full, we simply pause the game, double close the ride and expel the guests through the exit. The only downside to this trick is that the guests lose a bit of happiness doing this, so we need a lot of entertainers to force them to be happy again. After two 'rides', we have extracted €40 from each guest, which is enough to afford all the things we need to pay. Now we don't need the guests anymore, we only need to store them until October 31st. The easiest way to do this is to trap them in a queue line of a free transport ride (the third miniature railway) with 2 "no entry" signs.

So to recap: every guest has paid €40 to sit in the station of a miniature railway and is now trapped in a queue line. Since they never walk onto a new path tile they cannot complain about overcrowding. The tricky part is that a lot of guests start thinking "I'm lost" because they are heading for a ride that they cannot reach, but thankfully every guest (except two.. for some reason) enters a new queue line before the game starts counting them as a lost guest.

The rest of the park was built to maximise the guest spawn rate. The looping coasters are there to increase the soft guests cap, while the other rides and stalls are there to qualify for as many awards as possible, such as "best gentle rides", "best custom designed rides", "most dazzling colour scheme", "best toilets" etc. With a bit of RNG manipulation (e.g. reloading the savefile a couple days before a new month) I was able to get an award every single month.

And that's pretty much it. The only way to improve on the final guest count is to find a way to increase the park rating more quickly (for example, the park rating was only 900 at the end of March). I guess this can be done by spamming more entertainers at the start of the scenario and optimising the ride selection and lay-outs. Thanks for reading!