Hey! Good to see another RCT2'er!
As for your buildings: just be as realistic as you can. Does not have to be to the extreme, but quality > quantity. I'm not expecting you to be good asap, it's going to take a little while to master. I highly suggest getting OpenRCT2 as well. It will help you out so much.
As for pov, I have not tinkered with that at all. Someone else may be able to help though!
So happy to see you try out RCT2! Good luck!
Resuming regularly scheduled programming!
It took me two years just to figure out that the Shift key raised scenery, and it wasn't until 2013 that I discovered what the Ctrl key did. With a background in RCT3, you already know these commands, so you're ahead of where I was when I began RCT2.
Unlike RCT3, however, even the most basic form of RCT2 gives you the building blocks to create a spectacular variety of buildings without the need to download any custom scenery. Even though they are arranged by theme, as they are in RCT3, the best-looking buildings are often made from mixing and matching walls and roofs from different scenery sets. The Walls and Roofs set, which is available in every scenario, will give you enough to build in a variety of different styles on its own, but the other sets, most importantly the Mechanical, Medieval, Mine, Abstract, and Pirates sets, will add additional walls, roofs, and fences to your arsenal. The brilliance is in the ambiguity--an experienced and resourceful player can bring any theme idea to life with these sets alone. That's why dedicated RCT2 designers prefer RCT2 over all of the other more "advanced" theme park simulators.
You'll want to use the scenario editor to create your own "sandbox" scenario, as none of the existing in-game scenarios are ideal for customizing a roller coaster and its environment in its entirety. You can also turn off money this way.
I use HyperCam 2 for POVs. A successful isometric POV must be made using the control panel that appears when you click on a coaster, in the first panel that gives you a view of the ride (image of a slide). Navigate to the dropdown menu directly above the image that says "Overview" and select "Train 1" (or whichever train you want to use), and pull the bottom right corner down and to the right to make the image of the train larger. With the help of HyperCam 2, your POV can look something like this:
The coaster itself has an unrealistic layout with very basic scenery, but the camera follows the train around every curve. While you can't actually "ride" the rides, this ability to watch the train gives a more realistic understanding of roller coaster physics than RCT3's onride feature.
OpenRCT2 is more advanced than RCT2, but it's also more complicated to learn since technical features have been added. I would suggest remaining in vanilla RCT2 until you have a solid understanding of how everything works. I still haven't made the transition, but I prefer to build using the same tools and techniques that are available to every RCT2 player.
If you have any questions along the way, I will do everything I can to help you learn and master this marvelous game. I have 13 years of experience, but I'm still learning new techniques all the time.
Has a very ironic fear of drops
Terry and Blaze said all that needed to be said from what I can see, but I'm glad you've started playing, its an amazing game