Hello and welcome
For starters you can return all your unused gates. Why, you say? Because each gate gives you ten slots, and a flight with a daily frequency of one uses one slot. Having four gates for one flight is therefore not economically reasonable.
In order to expand, you will need enough money to purchase more planes in order to open new routes in order to earn more money in order to purchase more planes.......
The first planes you buy should be cheap, but as time goes on you will be able to purchase bigger planes. With your current DOC, you will earn ~€2 million a month, so that is a cheap 20-seater each month. Remember to check these three important things when purchasing aircraft:
- Range: Make sure it can fly where you want it to fly.
- Speed: Make sure it is fast enough; not really important in the beginning.
- Seats: Make sure it has enough seats to fulfil your needs. Generally speaking, the more the better.
The strategy that earns the most money is to spam routes within ~500 miles of your base until there are no airports left. Then you either expand to another airport and repeat, or expand out to 1000 miles. This is not realistic at all, so you might want to fly some longer routes too - it is entirely up to you.
Why spam routes, you say? Let's say a plane can fly a 1000 mile route in 10 hours earning 50k, but it can fly two 500 mile routes in 5 hours earning 35k each - total 500 mile profit: 70k. Thus the short routes give the biggest total profit, even if the individual route earns less.
A new base costs four gates plus 60x the gate rent fee of the desired airport (e.g. the gate rent fee is 300k, a new base then costs 300k * 60 = 18,000k). It is entirely up to you when to establish a new base, but 6-12 months is not a long time. You could also stick with one base all the time, there is nothing preventing you from doing that.
When creating a new base near one of your current bases, you will be able to create routes to airports you already have gates at. This means you save money on gate rent.
Back to aircraft:
Try to keep the remaining time on aircraft less than one hour. You can see how much time your aircraft have left by clicking on Aircraft -> View Aircraft. There is a column called 'Hours', it shows how many hours and minutes your plane has left.
Useful tools in the game:
OCP - is an abbreviation for One Click Purchase. It is a button you click to rent a gate immediately without having to reload the page. OCP is very useful when using Gate Search or when in need of some more gates in general. In order to activate OCP, go to your Admin panel and click on 'Visit the Features Market'. There wou can activate Improved OCP.
Improved gate search - Search for nearby airports and create routes with one click. Improved enables you to order the airports by passenger numbers, distance, name, country, etc. You also get a range of different useful options to help you choose the right airports.
I hope this wasn't too long
If you have any additional questions, feel free to ask, I will try to keep it short
