Just to give my two cents to the discussion:
I don't think the game is too easy, but rather it don't change.
Once you found out how the game works and have developed a strategy, you can just keep on doing it and improve it slightly and you'll almost certainly make loads of money. What is missing are parameters that change like fuel pricing (i know it does, but only slightly) and stuff. I could even imagine inflation and the odd random hyperinflation (just a thought) so that peolpe have to develop new stratgies from tome to time.
Well, thats just my two cents.
quatz
I agree. It's simulation complexity that's lacking. I'm perfectly fine with the front end, and I personally feel we don't need to explicitly set three classes of prices, for instance. However, I think if we were to add high fuel price variability, booms/depressions in certain cities/regions, regional effects (i.e. if there are a lot of JFK-LAX routes priced at 150 but no EWR-LAX route, you shouldn't be able to charge 700 flying a EWR-LAX route). Also, I feel the current available passenger formula is not very realistic. For instance, last round I saw 3 airlines flying B757 from Chicago to Anakuluk (sp?), a village in Alaska everyday. In real life, would that
ever happen? Of course not! So how is it possible that in the game these people are charging 900 euros for the privilege of Windy City residents to take a vacation in Anakuluk?
My suggestion to add some variety in strategy would be twofold (and in these suggestions I try as much to make it a back-end change rather than add complexity for the user):
1) Make a 'cost-focused' strategy more viable.
This means that fuel costs/staff costs have to increase significantly so that in certain times of fluctuations (when fuel prices go sky-high), only those with the best cost controls will be able to make decent profits. To this end:
i) Perhaps the maintenance formula should be tweaked so that it takes into account the variety of aircraft one buys, and the different types of engine one flies. Southwest Airlines was the first to insist on having one common airplane across the fleet, and that's one of the reasons they have been able to keep maintenance costs down.
ii) Perhaps make airplane costs fluctuate according to market demand rather than based on research (which honestly isn't that accurate anyway, since then the plane costs should rise every game year due to inflation). Certainly start with the researched numbers, but then make them start to slowly drift upward or downward depending on market demand. This will then create the dual strategy of - 'always trying to take advantage of buying the cheap planes' vs 'trying to have fleet homogeneity and lower maintenance costs'
2) Create a trade-off between 'hub' and 'point-to-point' strategies.
This would involve lifting the restriction on only being able to fly departures out of one of your bases. I think what one should do is allow people to fly out of any airport they can get a gate at, but make passenger demand much lower than if they were flying out of a hub (so magnify the effects of the hub transit effect). This way, some airlines could set up, say, a Northern Canada/Russia network of little Cessnas without having to open 6 bases at pipsqueak airports, and still profit greatly from the small cities traffic, while other airlines could run the major routes with the hub-and-spoke system and focus more on focus leadership to win price wars.
And to facilitate the viability of a 'Northern' airline or some airline operating only in harsh conditions (Sahara maybe?), perhaps add a (and yes, this will be terribly annoying) 'harshness' index to airports from 0-100, and this index will be how much more that can be charged flying to that airport in a formula like this:
(1+[airport 1's harshness]%)*(1+[airport 2's harshness]%)*normal price charged.
I'm assuming most airports would get a 0 harshness index, since there's really not any difficulty flying to that area, but if, say, you're flying from Juneau to the aforementioned Anakuluk, you might get 1.2*1.99*normal price which will really kick it up for that northern airline.
Anyway, I'm not expecting all (or even any) of that to be implemented right away, but I hope there are at least some fresh ideas in my post, and that it'll be kept by the developers and perhaps considered at some point in the future when complexity is added.
I'd just add a note of caution with complexity - try to add it in the back-end, as I've already stressed - I've seen many great browser-based games die because the 'old-guard' got bored with the game and demanded change/complexity, which the developers acquiesced to, but then the complexity killed the flow of new users because the learning curve became too steep.
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(<- completely sarcastic)