Few ideas for a betterment of game experience

English Boards General
1

Reading all the frustration venting going on at the moment, presented mostly in a childish manner to be frank I have thought it to be a good thing to present something hopefully more constructive.

To sum up prevailing feelings of the posters here - people think a very quick growth of the airlines should not be possible and some of them find it extremely offending to their vision of the game. I happen to agree with that feeling (about game being much too fast and much too easy), while not agreeing at all with the frustration directed towards the few people who took their time to prepare for the server start and play the game as it is now. Therefore, why don’t we try and discuss (in civilised manner please) what sort of changes to the game could be fairly easily made to achieve such an effect? To start the ball rolling, let me propose a few points:

  • As the world at a server start is in principle in the pre-aviation era, shouldn’t we assume there is no planes in existence at that point and all have to be manufactured and delivered new to the players? That would mean no used planes, ever, except the ones released by players (by putting them on sale/lease, or by liquidation).

  • Increase significantly the delivery time on planes and bind it to the total number of orders made, so the most popular ones will require a long waiting time.

  • Increase the cost of aquisition, probably easiest to do by increase of leasing deposit and leasing rates.

  • Decrease the profitability of early routes by decreasing the number of pax available, could be simply done by dividing the initial demand by say 10 and increasing it slowly over several months to the original value. That way one couldn’t simply prey on a few ultra-profitable routes and milk them dry for initial expansion capital.

  • Decrease the profit margin per flight across the board, it’s simply too huge even on established servers. This could be done either by a drop in ticket prices or by an increase of running costs in some way.

The above are of course just a broad outlines of measures to be taken in an effort to slow down the pace of the game and ultimately increase the enjoyment of a significant number of players. Those measures would have to be implemented to a fresh gameworld and I imagine, should be not that hard to implement in the engine. Unless I’m wrong here?

Anyway, what do you people think about that?

2

I agree with most of your points - except for the one where you suggest decreasing the profitability of routes. I don’t think that there should be any change to passenger demand on routes. One of the only problems with this simulations is that it fails to project real-life conditions and it would be in the best interest of all if we all had a fair share in this game. I agree that we all start with 10mil AS$ and that the most skillful make it big, but I believe that a few changes should be made.

First of all - older aircraft should cost MORE to operate/lease as they age. For example, as aircraft become scarce, they should simulate the fact that parts will be getting scarce and hence, higher costs to maintain these aircraft. And if raising leasing costs sounds out of this world then the least the game should do is raise the maintenance fees for these old aircraft a lot higher than they are.

Your point about keeping orders and deliveries realistic is another one that I firmly uphold to be beneficial to all of us. It would keep the game realistic and beneficial to airlines who truly want to make their airline realistic by building up to the point where they can acquire new-built aircraft.

There are a few more suggestions that I would want to roll out but I don’t want to release a storm.

Thanks.

3

Thanks for your reply born2flyboeing,

My point is not that much about the game being more realistic, which tends to be next to impossible to implement in many cases, it’s rather about making it slower and more difficult in a sense, thus perhaps avoiding such growth extremes as we see now on Gatow. Don’t get me wrong, I like realistic, I just prefer simple and working.

As for the old aircrafts - this is a computer game and as such it tends to come down to binary options, in this case a certain a/c model might be either good or bad for an optimised growth model. If it is bad, it won’t be even looked at (as are many models are on current servers), if it is good, people will use it ruthlessly, no matter what changes you make. So it’s simpler just to remove used planes at all and be gone with the whole issue. Nothing stops anyone from playing on another server with used planes enabled after all.

4

Well - yea. Agreed. Some simulation companies like AirwaySim and I believe a few free ones - offer worlds based in different time periods. And I also agree that at some point these old aircraft should be removed.

It’d be interesting to see what other people have to say on this topic.

5

I agree that some changes should be made to make it more realistic, it is completely insane that growth can be achieved so fast just by using a bunch of old a/c. Increasing operative costs would be a good way to make them not that profitable and the idea of slowing the delivery time, also seems fair to me.

Now it is time for the managers to decide if they want to implement such a measures. For example, I think that limiting one holding per player and world is a good measure that benefited all players. What is being proposed here, will make average users happier and give back the feeling of good simulation.

6

May be a restriction to the number of subsidiarys per holding could be useful to lower the expansion speed of airlines, too ?

7

How does the number of subsidiaries affect an expansion speed? If anything it slows it down.

8

That depends on your income. If your growth is limited by order times a sub gives you a new order queue.

9

Very true, haven’t thought about that. It would indeed be a way around in conditions set in my original post.

So it’s either limit the number of subsidiaries or make the queue one for a whole holding (or is it already that way? I haven’t tested subsidiaries too much).

10

Also, the game should implement a max on no. of leased plane, let’s say 100. The would also slow down the snowball effect when the companies large enough to buy a plane but still prefer to lease.

11

Wouldn’t it be better to make leasing not such an obviously better choice as it is now? At the moment it doesn’t make much sense to buy at all, I would consider that option only if sitting on a pile of cash with no idea what to do with them.

Leases should be more expensive in my opinion, while new plane loan interest perhaps somewhat lower. And if actual lease offer is limited in number there wouldn’t be much choice left then put a buy order for a new bird and wait for delivery (quite some time if the plane is popular, like some models of Airbus, Boeing or Bombardier).

12

As a newbie this particular game, I find that getting ticket sales are extremely difficult and filling an aircraft.

Quite frankly 10mil is not enough to start an airline and it takes weeks to tweak the ticket prices so that you get a good load avg and still make a marginal profit. I played for about 3 weeks and I am still bleeding to death. I will need to reset soon.

I think maybe the people who started a long time ago or those who could pick and find a good route are now bored and just complains that it is not realistic.

Compared to another airline sim I played on the net, this one is difficult and time consuming to stay afloat and much slower going though the years. The other one I played starts in the late 1940s where you start for pre WWII A/C and you move every week up by 1 quarter of a year. New A/C become more available as you go through the years, and production/avail stops when the factory stopped making them. You can always lease/rent ones which were still available.

It makes sense because unless the owner scrapped the a/c, these are still avail.

The difference in this game is that if an airline folds/liquidates, all owned and leased A/C by default goes to AS.

I agree that the leased ones should go back to the owner, but not those which were owned. The owned ones need to go on auction, which is basically the liquidator selling them back to the public.

They also have a bigger selection of A/C.

Players also need to specify the engine maker as it will affect the maint costs, this is because of engine commonality.

They also have A/C maint, which specifically need to be in the flight plan, e.g. when to do A,B,C and D checks and the times for each. C and D checks can’t be done anywhere, it has to be done at service centers, which has staff specifically trained to overhaul those engines.

So one of the nifty feature were the ability to move flight plans and flights over from one A/C to another, as players regularly had shuffle A/C in and out of maint, or risk a engine failure emergency. Like with the regular airlines if an airframe or engine did a certain amount of flying time, it needs to do a certain type of maint.

C and D checks are extremely long to perform and also very expensive, so the operating airline always had to weigh up if they will incur the wait and the cost, or will they rather put the A/C up for sale and get a new one, for leases, terminate the lease and get a new one.

There was also marketing and code sharing schedules, which are missing in this game.

I have not checked if leasing is cheaper in this game. In the real world and in the other game leasing was more expensive than owning if you have the money to buy the AC.

It does not make sense what people say here that leasing an old AC should be more expensive and leasing a new one.

It does not work like that in the real world.

The monthly or quarterly lease payments are generally based on what the AC’s cost was for the lessor to purchase and then that cost is spread over the useful lifetime of the AC plus interest charges. That is assuming it is a finance lease. If it is an operating lease, then maint costs and such is also included in the lease payment charge.

But lets assume it is a finance lease, then why should an old DC-3 which probably cost 3mil new have higher per month or quarter than say a D1900, which were about 12Mil new? Of course the instalments and monthly payments of the DC-3 will be less, simply because when it was new, the price was significantly lower than today’s A/C.

The reason why realwold airline might not want to buy or lease and old AC is because of either availability, commonality or that horrid expense to do the C or D check.

In the other game the D check’s cost was the same as the A/C’s cost when it was new. So if the DC3 was 3 mil new, the D check will be 3mil. All A/C on lease and up for sale has their flight hours listed since last D check so that players can see if they will want to lease/buy that A/C.

This game does not really go into the maint aspects or costs in detail.

In the other game new AC order slots was only released at certain times. You can’t really simulate real world manuf and order processing, as in real world it takes years to build an A/C or a limited number thereof due to their capacity constraints.

And in the real world number of airlines grew over time and so did A/C manuf capacities and availability of A/C.

Airlines of the 1940s and 50s, had to buy and operate ex military A/C, hence the DC-3,4, Lockheed Conctellations, Junkers, etc.

Russia has TU-134, and IL-76, which were actually made for the military, same goes for some of the Antanov A/C.

But because this is a game, you don’t want to get into the situation where you have a new airline starting and there are no A/C available on lease or to order. So you need to somewhat release new A/C over time.

I think there should be a limited number of slots avail for new A/C orders, and overtime maybe increase those slots as number of orders for that particular A/C model were processed over time. Aka simulating the factory’s expansion in capacity due to popularity.

Also, because this game goes so slow through the years, I think people do get bored. In the game I played because you move from 1940 to 2013 over a year or 2 playing time, airlines have to regularly review new A/c available, order new onces, apply maint, leasing contracts expiring, strikes, a/c and engine recalls, emergencies, that it really keeps them on their toes.

Some of the compaints in that game, well if Embraer recalled all their A/C for mandatory maint and grounded them, the airline incurred heavy financial penalties for tickets sold and people had to be rebooked onto alternate airlines, or put up at an hotel to catch another flight.

I think this game lost this kind of dynamic.

Anyways, just a few ideas.

13

As you mentioned - it is another game with another attitude and aim.

14

I think leasing is the key, there should be a time allotment to a lease, where as you are penalized financially for terminating the lease early.

Old aircraft may be good for fast growth, but you'd be more reluctant to use them if you had to keep them for 3 years(for example).

Just as in real life, if you terminate a lease before the term, the item would go for auction. The outstanding balance of the value would be charged on to you.