another solution is needed. quite frankly, this round is EXTREMELY off balance due to the blue eyed approach of just going into 1950 with 2000s traffic rates.
i think a simple KISS solution would work out best. the roi on planes is not so good because of the price of them but due to the revenue potential.
the solution is simple: add an "era modifier" since any airport tweaking on case by case basis would be too complex to implement
say that the numbers in game are for 2000 round, and global passenger movements were 100%. you then figure out how many passengers were in say 1950, and use that as a multiplier. lets just assume that 2000 saw 5bn global pax movements. if 1950 had 250m, you would then go and multiply the passenger number for all the airports in game with 0.05, hence ATL would not have 82m but 4.1m PAX per year.
its just logical to see how economics of scale work here, and its sad to see the amount of development work that seems to go into mutliworld and revenue related things and see the most critical part of such a game, its economics, are just abandoned totally, which make the other part kind of moot.
totally OFF the equation here is how people are trying to reduce disparity between players, either make a competetive game and embrace competition or give free handouts to everyone. matter of fact is that such limits that were suggested above would not hit those up front but other players, since certain alliances would cede their quota of best planes to their frontrunner, just as they do now with slots of alliance routes and others who dont have backing from alliances the size of dozens of players, like myself, would figure out how to aquire the planes for markup.
all the suggested changes would do is even make things worse for not so competetive players, since they would be stuck with the less favourable planes and a little token markup here and there.
lets not forget, in this round, how certain planes became popular. its those who set the pace who figure out which plane works best at first, so there would be a headstart again.
this whole rebalancing needs to be focused on the root of the game economics, not to equalize players.
i'll go out on yet an even more unpopular route: dont ask people who dont understand the game on ways of improving it. my brother plays his airline about 1 minutes per real life week in this round, yet he is almost in top 100. so i would say that the majority of players voting on changes dont even come close to understanding the implications of them.
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