Depending on technical feasibility, we might build onto this with a “crew rotations” feature: Crews flying out from their base arrive at outstations where they either need to fly back on duty or rest for a certain amount of hours. Naturally, this incurs additional costs. This could also be expanded to have more elaborate “service time” rules for very-long distance flights, where crews need to rest en route. But one thing after another…might make this into a dedicated item eventually.
This is primarily about flight crews, but other staff might be local to their place of operation as well, which might give “local flavor” to things like staff fluctuation across all parts of the workforce.
Why?
As crew bases need to be established and maintained, they require additional investment and consideration when expanding. At the same time, crews are local to their base and as such cannot be transferred freely between all bases of an airline, adding yet another piece of inertia that will hopefully help in making expansion in AirlineSim less mindless and more deliberate.
When?
Depends on the features mentioned in the opening paragraph.
Dont know if this is the place but it would be nice to move aircraft between subs with the flight planning in place. Say i would start a regional, moving planes to the regional with the flight plan in place just a different Airline code would be really nice. Many time this happens in the real world. Smaller regional airlines can then be made. say USA territory, you would open a regional in Guam, HNL or even in Billings montana to support the feeding to the larger airlines. But as this game is ristricted in aircraft types you need to do this.
Well, if this will be implemented, then most players will base their employees in the big airports, while the smaller ones will be left with plenty of room
It would make the game more complex for any airlines operating mid or long haul flights, even if they only operate only out of a single base.
Let say if I operate a 2x weekly flight from DXB to KEF, it wouldn’t make sense for me to open a crew base at KEF, but the crew definitely need rest after a flight of such distance, so the options are either for the crew to stay outstation half a week until next flight, or schedule the return flight with hours of break in-between arriving and departing flight, adding more restriction to scheduling, and more things to learn for new player of the game.
Which in turn make newly participating airlines more difficult to find slot in congested airport to fly the aircrafts into, especially with the game’s current model of flight time calculation and slot availability.
Obviously, all of this is a rough idea at this point, so I don’t know what exactly it will look like in practice. But the general design guidelines apply: Almost everything will be strategic/tactical from the player’s perspective. So yes, they might have to consider the things you mentioned. But even if they don’t, it won’t immediately break their business. AS will take care of making sure things work - within certain boundaries, of course - and players can optimise where and how they see fit.
There’s also a middle-ground, where players could pick from relatively simple options at first (always fly back crews off-duty on the return flight, fly them back on flights of other airlines, let them stay at a hotel, etc…) that apply by default and then drill down where it makes sense.
Which also implies that they don’t immediately run out of stuff to do once they got their first 3 planes scheduled, but they can actually start diving deeper and check out the details.
Over the years I’ve come to realise that this point applies to such a large amount of imaginable (or existing) features that we’d basically have to stop adding any new stuff because of it. Same as “anything that costs money is an advantage to large airlines because they got more money”. Yes, totally. And it’s sad that that’s how the world - both real and virtual - works. But rather than using this as an excuse to not do things, I’d rather add depth to the game, taking the real world as a blue print, while at the same time trying to find game design approaches that lessen the negative consequences for newbies and/or add a handicap for large airlines. And in many cases, the latter isn’t even “unrealistic”: How else would LCCs have captured so much of the market over the past few decades if it wasn’t for legacy carriers struggling with…well…legacy handicaps?
Having in depth control for players to dig deep down is not inherently a bad thing, but should be done in a more ibtroductory approach that make sure players do not have to deal with as much control and options at the very beginning when they first started operating their airlines, which should probably start out even simpler than now. Hence it would first be required to do UI overhaul and probably also overhaul to other game mechanism to make it easier for new players to join the game in the first place, before advanced features like this can be added without overwhleming players.
And as for how legacy carriers in real world face so much challenge in business by LCC, I believe a big reason is LCC in real world can undercut legacy carriers in term of fare to attract mass market travellers who value low fare more than comfort or brand, can operate point to point route at high aircraft utilization rate that save costs compared to having to coordinate transfer at hub, able to secure effeicient narrowbody at reasonable cost compared to older carriers who might be stuck with lease contract or ownership of older planes while legacy carrier cash flow run low due to low travel demand in economic downturns, and some other factors. All these aren’t simulated in the game to allow such sort of competition, and the current AS’s ORS focus on brand image and seat product quality are more like from the era of before deregulation of airlines. Therefore I believe it’s a requirement to implement the advanced passenger distribution system before the game can get more accurate.
