Messages

31

General Chat / Re: Aircraft Maintainance costs

« on: January 31, 2011, 01:39:50 am »

Increased age (which will increase costs slowly over time) and aircraft purchases are likely candidates. Especially purchases of large and/or old second-hand aircraft can give big jumps. The maintenance formula is kinda funny though - it can jump around quite a bit even with smaller transactions.

32

General Chat / Re: Pretend Historic Airline Ads

« on: January 31, 2011, 01:31:25 am »

I've got a few old ones lying about on my computer too. Looking back at them, there are a few things that I would probably change if I was doing them again... but here they are in all their original glory!


Based in Paris (among other airports), for one round I had a re-branding to Air Europe


An African round - playing with only Africa (i.e. no European/Mid East cities to fly to) makes for quite a slow game - very low fares.


Eh, not such a creative ad... I took the picture though, as with the heavily photoshopped food one


GOAL!


Back from when we flew from Paris... pretty boring ad really. Note that beautiful 747-100 in CHR livery though, it was a fairly early world I was in (though I would point out I didn't own any at that point, actually... I don't know if I bought any in that world at all...).

Any body else got some old ads to share?
I noticed the older airline reports seem to be missing. Were they filed away or something? Some of the best reports around were there...

33

Airline Reports / CHR Airlines News

« on: January 30, 2011, 05:55:10 pm »

March 20, 1995
CHR Airlines, the most respected name in European aviation, with a history stretching back to the 1930s, has opened a new division at Munich Franz-Josef-Strauss Airport. The airline, with an initial fleet of five MD-90-55 aircraft, has expanded through the purchase of two ATR-42-500 aircraft, making it the largest airline in the world*.

Offering an unparalleled level of service to 20 airports around Germany and Europe, CHR makes the journey as good as any destination.

*By daily passenger numbers

34

Airline Reports / World 1836 CHR Airlines

« on: January 30, 2011, 05:30:10 pm »

CHR Airlines, Germany's international airline
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Barcelona Airport, Bremen, Copenhagen Airport, Dresden International, Düsseldorf International, Frankfurt Airport, Galileo Galilei International, London Heathrow, Madrid-Barajas Airport, Paris Charles De Gaulle, Rome Leonardo Da Vinci, Tegel, Torino Caselle, Treviso St. Angelo, Valerio Catullo, Vienna International Airport, W. A. Mozart Airport, Weeze, Zürich Airport     
Fleet

McDonnell Douglas MD-90 (5)

ATR 42-500 (2)

Routes

35

Private World Discussion & Invitation / Re: Realistic World?

« on: January 27, 2011, 06:27:59 pm »

Thought I might give it a go - CHR Airlines, based in Munich
Not making nearly as much money as I normally would!

36

Game Strategy / Re: Question about route length

« on: January 19, 2011, 11:55:16 pm »

I think it probably isn't as simple as just adding on extra money to the route fare for the extra distance, but something more akin to multiplying it.
To choose a fairly random number, say you get a 50% increase in fares when comparing two alike (in terms of competition) routes of short and long haul routes. Two large cities, with low competition, would normally earn quite high fares, which, when boosted by 50%, makes quite a decent extra profit. Compare that to a large and a small, or even two small cities, where you would be earning only small to moderate fares - which when increased by 50%, are still not terribly large.
I've tried making a fairly extensive long haul network between Europe and America before, and found that the flights drop off fairly steeply in revenue when you start flying to the sub 10-15 million airports.

I think a thing that often confuses people regarding long haul is that they are not so readily compared to short haul between similar sized airports, due to the considerable difference in competition. While it is fairly clear that at least some additional revenue seems to come from simply having longer routes, it may be that most of the extra revenue is simply due to the decreased competition. Think how much higher the fares would be on something like LHR > FRA if it had as little competition as LHR > JFK.

37

Game Data / Re: Boeing 737 - range and capacity and price

« on: January 17, 2011, 07:42:24 am »

Regarding the seats, AM uses the highest number of seats actually put on an aircraft, not the maximum theoretically possible (hence many large long haul aircraft have lower numbers of seats than they could - as all the users have had first/business sections). I suspect Boeing would likely publish the maximum legal limit (and the other sources probably used Boeing's data). Can you find a seat plan or similar from an actual airline?

Regarding the prices, they are generated by a script, based on the plane's stats.

38

[++] Suggestions / Re: Airport-based turn times

« on: January 17, 2011, 07:30:07 am »

Interesting idea. I think the problem with basing it solely on pax data is that there isn't a great correlation between passenger numbers and delays. While smaller airports tend to be run fairly quickly, within larger airports it can vary considerably - and the actual number of passengers probably has less to do with it than how good those running the place are.

39

[=] Suggestions / Re: Loadfactor Suggestion

« on: January 16, 2011, 12:34:32 am »

Could you do something automatically, whereby airports can affect those nearby? Airports don't necessarily need to be in the same town to steal pax. from each other. I imagine some kind of script would take into account the size of each airport (larger airports having more effect) and the distance (where the effect of an airport diminishes with distance away). This would mean the effects of large airports could be felt further away.
It would work so that flights originating from AND going to the same area can affect the LF of nearby routes. It could be as simple as adding the extra distance between the airports at either end. i.e. if my route is from Gatwick > Orly, to calculate the extra distance component from a Heathrow > CDG route, you would add the distance between Heathrow and Gatwick to the distance between Orly and CDG.
It's a pretty simple idea as to how the end product would work, but I imagine that it could be quite difficult to code and be server intensive (with every route affecting those at least fairly nearby).

40

Game Strategy / Re: Question about route length

« on: January 15, 2011, 11:34:42 pm »

On the extra routes, it may be caused by routes between your bases - which show up as under a certain base. Alternately, you may have just missed out some of the gates.

In terms of demand/how much people pay/how many passengers there are, it is sort of the same thing.
As far as I know, AM doesn't consider all the variables separately (indeed you can run routes to airports with 0 pax - which should have no demand). It is a bit artificial in discussing the game to break things up into the number of potential passengers and how much people pay, when they aren't really separate issues in terms of the game.

But yes, longer routes can charge higher fares (though in my experience this is not proportional to the extra distance (and time) of flying there - i.e. 2x the distance is less than 2x the revenue - i.e. short haul is more profitable).
Larger aircraft should be more profitable on longer haul routes, as less time (relative to the flight duration) is spent reloading at the gate.

To go off on a slight tangent, you could argue that (in real life at least) route distance does affect demand (not just base fare price) - in that people can't be bothered to go to the hassle of flying for short distances.

41

[-] Suggestions / Re: Aircraft preference/passenger appeal

« on: January 06, 2011, 11:08:29 pm »

This sort of thing comes up every now and then, and I would agree that changes need to be made to the LF calculations.
It is actually reasonable that smaller aircraft can charge higher fares. You need to consider that every passenger will want to fly at a certain time of day. To fill a large aircraft, you need to find, say, 200 people willing to fly when your plane departs. For a small plane, you may only have to find 50. The small flight will be able to charge a premium, because it can tap into this market of people who absolutely need to fly at a certain time (say those on business). To fill all the seats on the larger aircraft, you need to have lower fares to entice enough people to come at a less convenient time. It's kinda difficult to explain.
You can also observe that the other effect of this is that the difference in prices diminishes as there are more aircraft flying the routes, as the time differences (and thus the number of premium payers) would be smaller.
However, I think the exact dynamics of this could be improved - often smaller aircraft do get too much of an advantage. Another interesting thing would be to have additional flights on a route completely separate from each other - not diminishing each other's LF any more than another competitor (at the moment, if you have a frequency of 2, you have to settle for a lower fare than your competitors - which isn't realistic, as each flight would be considered separately by customers).

Speed and fares are definitely issues. The Concorde is a great example of how speed makes minimal difference to fares in the game - where a large speed increase can lead to hardly higher fares. Small fare changes can also be a problem - where small differences in fares (like 5 Euros) can result in considerably different LFs.

42

[-] Suggestions / Re: Different tiers for worlds (competitive vs. lesiure games?)

« on: January 06, 2011, 10:31:11 pm »

I think that many of the realism suggestions here would be just as welcome to leisure players - like more profitable long haul. I tend to think that separate a separate leisure game type is probably not necessary yet, as most of the features currently in the game would also be welcome for leisure players, but with more complex features like multi-class seating, cargo, taxes or less generous earnings, leisure worlds may be useful. If there were to be leisure worlds, I think they should probably be able to earn large amounts of money (i.e. higher fares and/or lower costs) - so that one can run an airline at any size/location they like profitably, and probably have lesser LF changes due to competition - to minimise time spent changing routes.

43

[=] Suggestions / Re: Customer Perks

« on: January 06, 2011, 10:18:56 pm »

I don't really see why a launch customer would have more valuable aircraft. Early aircraft often don't perform up to the same standards as later ones (weren't the early A380s overweight?), and I don't think any passengers would care about how many planes you have - in terms of larger fleet sizes.
Unfortunately, as others have suggested, most of the more realistic "perks" tend to benefit large airlines. For example, a manufacturer may give a discount for large orders, or more homogeneous fleets may have lower maintenance costs.

44

[=] Suggestions / Re: List of Online Players?

« on: January 05, 2011, 08:01:09 pm »

I think it would be good to have it on the View Airline, like the Activity information, with "Online" or "Offline" in green and red respectively.
I also like the idea of the gates circle style indicator, but I'm not sure where to put it.
The rankings page seems the immediately most obvious spot to put it. It would have the benefit of showing everyone who is online fairly easily, and sorts them by value to allow you to locate an airline of a rough size and in a certain continent for potential deals. The problem with this would be that I imagine it might be a fair load on the server, especially when most people probably don't want to see the information when they look up rankings.
An alternative to the rankings page could be to potentially put a list of online airlines on the home page as text or to create a new page for the information (maybe under the Corporate tab - which only has two pages now).
I think the circles could potentially also be put on the Create Routes page, showing which of your competition are online while you are creating/editing routes. This could be useful, as one may not check to see if their competitors are online before editing routes.
Indeed, circles could be put next to airline names in various other spots - such as on View Aircraft when leasing (both as the owner and leaser), next to messages in the inbox and forum, maybe even next to airlines on the Aircraft Market (though that could be a bit over the top - maybe just when viewing the individual aircraft) or the broker listing on the market home page.

45

General Chat / Re: Airline Mogul IRC Server

« on: January 04, 2011, 10:38:33 pm »

The in-game one works fine for me now. You may have to give it permission to run to get it to work on the in-game one (and you also need Java). The server may also have gone down when you tried.

On another note, how does one access the mobile version of the forums?