Click on MC's PC and hit "schedule", you can move the girls around the bottom row and have them give +1 rating per girl per time slot (+4 day and +4 night, total +8 per "day")
Hit the bottom row of upgrades to make them stop exploding. Rush those on everything day 1 and nothing will ever break again. 10k per building once and forget that fire ever existed
Note two things: You can't access that Schedule option until you get Belle, which is significantly after everything turns to shit, and each upgrade normally takes five days - but if you're like me and miss that the UI element for changing the amount of time/cost it takes to upgrade/repair, it's the <> brackets around the price/time shown. I was looking for that a while ago and completely missed it somehow:/
Wow, that hurts. I'm sorry you think so little of us. Of course we've playtested the game, without cheats as a player would. The only sticky point is the expansion park, which is meant to be difficult to unlock, but of course it's harder if you're starting the game for the first time or restart with every version.
I have a
really hard time believing you. The $2M for the park expansion and the sheer amount of
time needed to get it even after you have everything else at top condition is pretty damning, and the fact you claim you should visit every ride in order to provide "protection" to it when visiting rides is pretty much
purely detrimental due to it triggering things breaking down and villains showing up really heavily indicates that you haven't played the game the way a normal player would - or you just don't care about player experience or think that making players waste time is somehow good gameplay, which is worse.
I'm fine with management games - I like Lab Rats 2 more than Lab Rats 1, for example, and support the changes to make the management aspect more meaningful. Park After Dark, at this point, has some great writing and great art but the management aspects have a number of fatal flaws. Maybe you're supposed to just hit "advance time" repeatedly without visiting people or the park for multiple turns at a time, but that is
not how I expected to have to play this game until I started looking at the code and going into this thread to figure out why everything was falling apart when I visited every location and every person every time period trying to figure out how to progress to the next set of characters.
If the recommend way of playing the game is to not do anything besides hit 'advance time' most of the time, that should be made explicit somehow rather than buried in a forum thread somewhere.
As we've said before multiple times, dates do not block other progress in any way. Dates (and a small hit to income) are the only thing that park rating affects, but if you're still concerned about it, simply building all the attractions should give you more than enough to date again. That's assuming you're not clicking every red exclamation and needlessly taking the hit every time one appears.
Considering I don't know what the fuck allows you to progress, and exclamation marks seem to queue up if you don't clear them,
of course I'm mindlessly clicking every one of them. I don't know the internals of the game (until I started looking at the code when I found out the fucking things show up every time you open the map rather than on when time advances). If the only way the player is supposed to play it is to
not click the exclamation marks unless you absolutely have to go to that ride, then they shouldn't even appear when they're a repeat of something that's already happened.
The "decision" you made was to not immediately buy the upgrades that prevent those attractions from burning. That's probably not what you want to hear, but that's the "strategy" part. You know that there's a possibility of a random event causing trouble, so do you try to deal with it pre-emptively, or do something else with your time/money instead?
My experience with this has been things break down too fast to recover from it; due to the sheer amount of
time it takes to recover from each breakdown, and how long it takes to add pixie protection, I've had a damned hard time recovering... but then I also couldn't find the UI element for shortening the amount of time it takes to repair, so that's probably going to help.