The Space Rings is a Gentle Ride featured in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and all future installments.

(Space Rings built in Micro Park)

“Concentric pivoting rings allowing the rider free rotation in all directions.” - In-game description.

Technical Information

Stats

• Base Excitement Rating: 1.50
• Base Intensity Rating: 0.00
• Base Nausea Rating: 0.10

Stat Contribution Values

• Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 12
• Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 4
• Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 4
• Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 30

Building Information

• Size: 3x3
• Base Cost: $288.00
• Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $1.00
• Support Height Limit: 65ft/19.5m/+13

Other Information

• Guest Capacity: 4
• Sheltered?: No

Building the Space Rings

The Space Rings is a very basic flat ride. It is the second cheapest flat ride in the game, only behind the Crooked House, and it has a lot of advantages in its dimensions. It requires only 3 height units of clearance to build over, which is one of the smallest clearance requirements of any ride in the game.

Additionally, It has a massive maximum support height of 13 height units, which is larger than any other Gentle or Thrill Ride in the game. For most practical purposes, this advantage is negligible, but it makes the Space Rings very useful wherever you need to stack a large amount of rides on top of each other. Kinda like a park that's only 15x15 tiles in size, right? These two advantages compound off of each other. Assuming they're all built on ground level or above, you can stack up to 5 Space Rings in the same 3x3 area.

In terms of customization, the Space Rings leaves a lot to be desired. The only aspect of the ride that can be altered (other than the colors, price, and inspection intervals) is the number of rings. This number starts at 4, which is the highest amount that the ride can have. There's no intrinsic benefit to ever running the ride with less than 4 rings, so this setting is useless. Always run 4 rings on a Space Rings.

There are three different types of Space Rings. The original Space Rings are featured in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and all future installments, whereas the Time Machine and the Mace Ride both originate from RollerCoaster Tycoon 2's Time Twister expansion.

1. Standard Space Rings
2. Time Machine
3. Mace Ride

The standard Space Rings and the Time Machine are both identical to each other in every aspect, but the Mace Ride gets a 75% bonus to its Excitement and Intensity Ratings, and a 20% bonus to its Nausea rating. Oddly, while the standard Space Rings and the Time Machine both count as Gentle Rides, the Mace Ride counts as a Thrill Ride in vanilla RCT2. OpenRCT2 fixes this to place it in the Gentle Ride category with all of the other variants.

Stats

The stats are one of the most notable aspects of the Space Rings. While its base Excitement Rating is average for a Gentle Ride, it has the highest base Intensity Rating of any Gentle Ride in the game at 2.10, and despite being categorized as a Gentle Ride, it has the highest base Nausea Rating of any ride in the game at 6.50. The only ride in the game that can naturally start higher than this is the Top Spin if you put it into Berserk Mode.

Due to the way its stats and rating multipliers are adjudicated, the Space Rings is one of only two rides in the game in which its Excitement Rating does not contribute the most towards the ride's ticket price or your Park Value (the other being the Air Powered Vertical Coaster) if you don't take advantage of the scenery bonus.

It does have a fairly high BonusScenery value towards its Excitement at 25,098 whereas its Intensity and Nausea Ratings will unaffected. By maxing out the scenery bonus, this can raise its Excitement Rating from 1.50 to 2.39.

On a Mace Ride, the base Excitement, Intensity, and Nausea Ratings jump up to 2.37, 3.33, and 7.51 respectively. Since the scenery bonus is calculated before the percentage bonus is applied, maxing out the scenery bonus on a Mace Ride will increase the Excitement Rating from 2.37 to 3.79.

Throughput & Profit

This is unfortunately the part where the Space Rings falters quite heavily.

Whenever a guest gets on a ring, it will freely rotate around the ride for about one minute before leaving the ride and stepping out. Unlike most rides, the Space Rings do not need to unload every guest at the same time for new guests to get on. Instead, a new guest can get on the ride as soon as one of the rings becomes unoccupied. However, even with this advantage, it has the smallest maximum capacity of any ride in the game at only 4 guests, and with each guest riding the ride for a minute, this means that the ride will process guests incredibly slowly. Even with a tiny queue line, this can lead to guests complaining that they've been waiting too long to get on the ride. If you build a Space Rings, you may even wish to not build a queue line at all and connect the Entrance building with the main path, but if you do build a queue line, you should keep it to only one or two tiles.

One other huge disadvantage of the ride are its tiny multiplier values for each of its three ratings. This means that despite having a fairly adequate Excitement Rating and large numbers for the other two ratings, you can't actually charge that much money for it. For the first five months, you can charge $6.60 for it, but this drops down to $2.60 for months 5-13, and down to $0.60 afterwards. After 104 in-game months, the ride will need to be entirely free to enter for guests to be willing to ride it. These prices are the exact same as the Crooked House, but while the Crooked House can't break down, offers rain protection, and won't nauseate your guests, the Space Rings has no advantages to make up for this. The only advantage it has over the Crooked House is that it contributes slightly more to your soft guest cap (30 for the Space Rings versus 22 for the Crooked House).

Due to the tiny guest capacity and ride time, the Space Rings has a pathetically small guest turnover rate of only a little over 200 guests per hour. If the ride ran at its 5-13 month old price of $2.60 for that entire period, it would only be able to make you somewhere between $480.00 and $550.00 through entry tickets alone. It however is actually worse than that because you also need to take into account the fact that breakdowns and rainstorms will give the ride some additional downtime, the cost of the mechanic needed to fix the ride, and you've almost definitely needed to hire a new handyman specifically to patrol the Space Rings, and the Space Rings may very well actually cause you to lose money once it becomes only a few years old.

Verdict

The Space Rings is one of the worst rides in the game, if not the worst. Despite its fairly strong stats for a flat ride, you can't charge very much money for it. It has a slow throughput, and will also cause your guests to become very sick after riding it.

Other Gentle Rides

[to come soon]