Out of date a/c in long private worlds and high passengers in the early days.

[Royal First Fleet]

Yep it`s a long title, but...

I noticed that in long running worlds it becomes increasingly harder to start as a new player.
For example. In PW452 you start with 2 Farman F.60 Goliath, but the gamedate is nov 1965.
Making it almost impossible to start up your airline as a new player.
Would it be a suggestion to change the start-up aircraft to a more modern one say every 10yr. as time moves on in a world.

Second thing I noticed is that when a world starts in the 1910`s or 1920`s an airport like Atlanta already has like 90Mil. passengers. How can that be when the Wright brothers just flew for the first time a few years before. Airlines make enormous profits with thousands of aircraft in the early years of flying, affording them to buy the most expensive aircrafts for years to come. While someone who enters later in this world is hindered by outdated start-up aircraft and unrealistic competion.

Would it not be possible to give passenger numbers by aproximation per decade. Say Atlanta in 1910 800 pas., in 1920 8.000 pas. etc, etc. I know exact passengers per year per airport are not available, but maybe a formula that gives you in 1920 a certain percentage, say 5% of the passengernumbers from now. And in 1930 7.5% for example.


Maybe this was suggested before, it`s just a thought.


Greets RFA

[dktc]

The first one is actually quite controversial. We do have different default start-up aircrafts for each year, but they do fluctuate in value/performance. Another issue is that for private worlds, the creators could choose to start with non-default aircrafts, and we would need some sort of AI to match an aircraft with similar performance or data or value to the starter. But back to the issue at heart, even if we change the starter to a more "era-appropriate" one, the performance would still be about the same as the original starter. We can't exactly give larger aircrafts as starters as the game proceeds. Since you are concerned with the feasibility of starting an airline late in a game world, that may not be a valid solution to your concern.

Second one... there are data available for 1920's and onward for airports in selected countries. I know for a fact that USA has that kind of publication as I have seen the published booklets in one of the libraries in my alma mater. The problem is that no one is willing to enter those into the game. We have discussed, amongst staff, the idea of having reallife fluctuating data for airports say from 90's and onward, and I believe Stephen said that it is not that big a problem in terms of coding. But the real problem lies with data collection and data entry.
As for the percentage... we would need some kind of benchmark. What should we use? CPI? GDP growth? For one, all those indices are country specific. For two, they do not completely reflect the performance of the aviation industry.

That said, we would still want to hear more from others about those two ideas.

[CHR]

Default starting aircraft changing? I think it is really a case of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It starts to become too complicated for world creators to decide on and players to work out what's happening if plane types are changing all the time. But mostly, it isn't really a problem in the vast majority of games (5, 10, 15, even 20 year games).
It only becomes a big problem with the really long games. These are fairly rare, and usually fill up well before the first 10 years anyway. But that aside, even if you start very late, in AM virtually any aircraft can earn a decent amount of money for your airline, at least enough to buy a cheap 2nd hand one off someone else in the world and get your airline going with something new, even if this takes slightly longer than with a newer start aircraft.
Basically, very few games go long enough for it too be much problem, of them, most fill up very quickly, and even if you are in such a situation, you should still be able to make enough money to get your airline going.

Historical pax data...
It would be interesting to compare some of the data for GDP and airport passenger numbers, because I think they would likely have a decent correlation. If somewhere with a good set of historical data (like the US...) could be used, I think a decent model for airport pax size could probably be created just based on the variables of current pax levels, date and country GDP.
The assumption, which I don't think is too unreasonable, is that the entire country is at roughly the same level of development. It would also allow airport openings/closing to be simulated - by reducing their pax to zero when not open (in conjunction with an alteration to the LF script to make airports with 0 pax generate 0 revenue...).

Of course, this might need to be accompanied by a change in the LF/fare scripts to allow airlines to make greater income in the earlier days. As it stands, one can make a decent profit, but not a fortune, during early stages of the game, even with the huge capacity airports. Back then small numbers of people (i.e. small pax levels) were willing to pay huge fares to fly. If the data was put into the current scripts, you would be flying between airports with a few thousand pax - giving you quite low fares. I suppose this is related to the fact that pax numbers don't give a true indication of demand for travel between cities. In the past, there might have been a large amount of demand to go between two cities, but, as fares had to be so high (due to planes being more expensive to build/operate) this opportunity was only open to a small number of people.

In many ways the current method neatly simulates this. In the earlier stages of the game, as you have a 20 seat plane, when you fly between multi-million pax airports, you get fares into the thousands of Euros. This is actually fairly accurate - as in real life, people would have been willing to pay huge fares to fly. This is balanced up by the fact that aircraft are considerably more costly than comparative aircraft later in the game, the fact that you don't actually make much money per route (1000 x 20 people... less than a 100-200 seater will make you in modern games) and that they can only manage a few routes at most per aircraft (as they are slow). That said, there is still considerable room to make lots of money (as there is in modern worlds).

I guess the conclusion I would make is that you can make similar (on balance, perhaps slightly lower) amounts of money in old games as compared to modern ones. From a realism point of view, that isn't so realistic - airlines back then were far smaller than current ones. This probably isn't such a bad thing though, as I suspect the game would be quite dull if your fleet consisted of 20 aircraft that operated 2 routes each out of a handful of bases. Sure you can make monster airlines like in the modern games, but that is part of the thing that makes the game interesting to play.