Hi welcome to the game! My name is Goldy and I collected all of the stats in the game that we use. Let me answer your questions one by one:
- Each route is a one-way flight? So do I need to have a pair of routes for each flight to come back?
As ALT said, think of a route as a single itinerary for each plane i.e. all the routes your plane would fly for the day. When you do it as you do above, the game scheduler might get confused and some will not schedule more than likely. When doing this, be sure to avoid the demand “dead zone” between 0100-0500 LOCAL TIME of arrival or destination. Don’t depart or arrive during that window or you will experience some form of demand loss. And yes, ideally your itinerary should terminate at the home base that you started at.
- When creating every route that would bring the plane back to my base, I would receive a message telling me it was overriding another route. Why? My routes aren’t spaced enough? I thought I should strive for the least amount possible of planes in the ground.
I’m not sure what is happening there without further context, but do make sure you are deactivating, cancelling, and then reactivating your routes if you make changes to it or else it will overlap. And yes DO strive to have the least amount of planes on the ground, ideally zero.
- My 1st flight already occurred but had no passengers. Is it normal?
Completely normal if you haven’t changed your prices and are on routes with competition (which it seems like you are judging by the pictures and ALT’s reply). The game operates on an awareness system and this awareness can be found in the route marketing tab (it shows awareness and allows you to add marketing to it). This awareness starts at 1/4th of your airline’s general awareness and increases over time. The more you operate the route, the faster it will grow. You can lower your routes to increase loads, but note that full loads might not equate to max profit. Do note that your reputation on routes (based on the service and seats offered i.e. hard product/soft product) affects how many passengers you’ll be able to carry at a certain price point, so do your best to maintain a high reputation. Note this is separate from awareness. Also note that all aspects of the passenger experience except extra fees contribute to reputation, which are seats, IFE, and IFS.
- Should I operate in major airports competing with the big guys or should I focus on smaller airports where I can have the majority of market share? In those smaller airports, the profits wouldn’t be as greater, right? Would it matter in the long-run?
You definitely want to avoid competition for exactly the reasons ALT stated above. You’ll lose the no-competition 30% bonus and have difficulty competing and making profit. Follow ALT’s advice to go with medium sized airports and link them together. If you still find competition at that level, you can go smaller as you’re operating A220s. One of the nice things about this game is when an airport is at the lowest passenger numbers (1 passenger per year) you still get okay demand. So to answer your question, you can still make great profits provided you scale your service to the demand available. For instance, do not use an A380 on a pair of airports with only 10 million passengers total yearly between them.
- What tips and guides should I follow as a beginner?
Everything ALT says is very good advice here. For auctions, one thing to note is that system generated aircraft auctioned by “Broker” starts at a reserve price of 50% of market value. The reserve price is the price that MUST be met to win the plane. User-auctioned planes can set the reserve to anything from $10,000 to $999,990,000. If you place a bid over the reserve but under another airline’s maximum bid, your bid will automatically be overbid until you beat that maximum bid and the message “You did not exceed the maximum bid” or something of that sorts will pop up.
For your employees, keep the happiness rate above 105% to make sure you don’t have attrition (loss of employees, adding retraining costs). You can do this by raising wages OR raising reserve staff percentage. You also need to update your headquarters occasionally to keep your employees happy (no employee will like working with 200 other colleagues in a building with a single toilet). You can find this in the infrastructure tab.
About credit rating it’s based on three factors: assets vs. liability, airline age, and net operating profit. The way it’s weighted, net operating profit weighs the most. This might change for future game rounds, but right now that’s how it’s calculated. Assets are anything you own which in this case is planes. Liabilities include any debt, such as leases and loans. Airline age is really straightforward and it maxes out at 1 year but it’s not that much of your credit calculation. Credit rating is calculated at 0000 UTC every day. Weekly costs and fees are taken out at 1200 UTC on Fridays.
Planes have a max payload range and a max reserve range. The max payload range is the maximum distance a plane can fly with full fuel tanks and full payload. Max reserve range is either how long a plane can fly with its given fuel capacity or before it’s not able to carry any more load. It varies for each plane some are limited in the first way, some in the second way. A plane might still be able to fly beyond the max payload range with a full passenger load as the amount of fuel will obviously not be at max capacity. In addition, if you have a configuration on your planes that is less than the maximum seat slots an aircraft is allowed to have, you can fly further than that max payload range. Turnaround time is the time between routes, but you also need to factor in taxi time at both ends which is 15 minutes at each airport (departure and arrival for a total of 30 minutes). Note that increasing turnaround time does nothing right now except make it look nicer with more even intervals.
Maintenance checks were implemented at the start of this round and need to be done at a certain amount of flight hours. The game will automatically schedule these for you or you can schedule them manually. You can see how much they cost and how long they take in an individual aircraft’s information page. A checks are every 500 flying hours, B 3,000, C 10,000 and D 40,000.
Gates come in two forms: shared and dedicated. Dedicated gives you 10 slots to use, and also extending the lease on the gate gives you a discount. Shared only gives you one slot and you don’t get a discount with extension. You can get a dedicated game for cheaper than 10 shared gates, so if you know you’re going to expand at an airport, get the dedicated gate.
In reference to your second post, ALT’s guess is as good as mine.
So as you can see there is a lot to play around with in the game. Reading the game guide can certainly help you if you’re looking for something specific. Good luck and let us know if you have any other questions! You can join our Discord where we can answer your questions in real time! With the forums there might be a slight delay but in the Discord we usually respond quickly. Look for players with special colors in the names; they usually have a special role and are suited to help. There are also spreadsheets in the pinned messages in the Discord that allow you to calculate certain aspects of the game, like seeing if your a route you want to run is range restricted with a certain plane and your credit rating at any given point.
So a few things:
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