Ok, this is going to be a bit lenghty, because I want to explain a few things, then I'll shut up.
1. What vani56 was referring to was a comment left in the TripleA alliance thread by Paxton under a comment by me explaining my strategy and the benefits and results from it. While I don't believe Paxton was targeting me or anyone as a player with this change, he was targeting the strategy as such, hence why some people are being hit harder then others.
2. In general vani56 employed similar strategy as me, mostly coming to the same conclusions as me independently and maybe a small influence from what I posted in the alliance thread in the last few days.
3. To be clear, I don't have a beef over this, my annoyance is more connected with the fact that this chance is diminishing from the quality of the game rather then contributing to it and to a degree in the way it was implemented on a whim, which I hope Paxton does not take this personally. I understand very well the need to re-balance the game or any game for that matter over time, however such re-balancing has to be done with small incremental changes which have a limited effect and spread over time.
4. Unfortunately the change is brought on by a false assumption that my strategy is based on a "skewered" network towards long flights where I have benefited from an advantage for long flights built into the mechanics of the game. Pretty much all mechanics in the game have a bias towards short haul flights. Plane costs, fuel usage, price to space ratio (though there is a miscalculation here, but I'll explain below), initial investment and so on. Specifically ROI on long range routes is much lower then short or medium routes.
There is a couple of mechanics though which were implemented for that purpose that in reality cause the exact opposite and they're limit on basses and routes, especially intercontinental routes.
What in essence happens is, because each airline can have only a very small and limited amount of intercontinental routes and because if you want to grow beyond a certain point you need to utilize those to the maximum as well as the very low margins for them overall, everyone is looking to setup routes with no competition. On the other hand because they're so few in relation to other routes, there is a high demand for them and low supply, so in the absence of competition the prices are driven towards their high end thus making them highly profitable. There is a catch however, one needs to be able to deliver the sufficient traffic to them to realize that profit.
This situation is exasperated further by the requirement of rep points for base expansion and in the way they can be squired with new or younger airlines basically having little ability to do that and thus being even further limited.
I took advantage of a couple of things to escape the trap and manage to grow quite quickly over the past 5 weeks to the point of being on the verge of challenging the top 3 airlines in the game. First that was identifying the key bases that were underutilized or not at all and developing those into a network that has an advantage over most. Those are SFO, Newark, Narita and Amsterdam. The second reason is that I applied and was accepted in the #1 alliance relatively early in the development of my airline and the 20 rep bonus speeded up my growth. Most importantly however and the main reason for my quick growth was the introduction of the used plane market which is somewhat flawed. I tried to point out some of the flaws in it from the star, in any case it has allowed me to expand operations much faster and with a much quicker capital turnover.
Never the less while my profitability was good and I reached 155 mil in cash flow weekly, which is about 90 mil profit weekly (before plane replacement costs), it was still no more then 6-7% profit margin overall, which while good is by no means huge. In additional the profit margin has been going down and not up as I've expanded. Having the 4 most profitable routes was and is misleading as my network was and is built to generate trafic which then generates the profit at the intercontinental (connecting) routes while the rest are not very profitable. Simply put I was taking low margins or even losses on many routes specifically to feed the long haul ones where I would generate the profit for all of them together.
Thew last reason is strategic, it was me gaming the mechanics of the game by only developing some of my basses and using the rest to move and increase my route limit. Simply put I built basses to maximize my regional routes, then filled those and then switched to basses to maximize my domestic route numbers and filled those. The game is setup that once you build a route even if your limit goes lower than the routes you have you keep it. In this way I have built more routes with 11 basses than are possible with the limitations. In this way I've sacrificed the ability to be able to be flexible with my routes in the future until I manage to expand the amount of basses I can have.
I've explained all this to illustrate that it is not the result of short vs long routes, but a convergence of a lot of the mechanics in the game all limiting in one or another way what players can do in the game.
Now, because my profetional background is research (social and market researh to be precise) I let all the changes take effect without me changing anything since yesterday to get a general idea of the effect they have had on my airline and see if any of my assumptions have any merrit. This is the result in general terms:
Service quality (150 mil investment) down 23% (from 100 to 77.07 after 2% increase in funding)... to recover 100 rating I would need to increase investment to ~230 mil
Passenger totals down ~10% (from about 720K to ~650K)
Slots lost ~ 280-290 (about 50 each on my main 5 basses and 30 on my HQ plus some smaller numbers on another 3 basses)
Cash flow - 44% (from 155 mil to 87 mil) this is before plane depreciation and plane replacement costs (my plane depreciation is at 63 mil weekly)
profit - 375% ( from 92 mil to 24 mil, before plane replacement costs but after plane depreciation)
turnover ~ - 30% ( from about 950 mil to 710 mil, I don't remember the exact number for turnover but it inching towards 1 bil so I'm taking 950 as probably closest to the actual number)
As I keep planes on 60% auto-renew and I have 173 A380s, 71 Boeing 767s, 97 Boeing 787s and 129 A318s, my replacement costs every 14 years or 748 weeks is 22 887.2 mil or 30.6 mil per week, currently I'm running at 6 mil per week loss as compared to 62 mil per week profit before. The 62 mil profit represented a profit margin of 6.52% and currently - 0.8%
Finally to the effect of the changes:
They will not help short haul routes at all and most likely will hurt them in the long term when the system has adjusted to the changes introduced. The reason is simple it makes airlines that focus more on short haul flights less competitive and turns them into feeder airlines exclusively. This will happen because if they run a higher service quality to be competitive against other airlines with long haul routes they will be unable to setup and run the long haul routes to take advantage of the passenger volumes as their costs will spike up very quickly and force them to lower service quality and loose their advantage on short haul flights, cause them to loose slots if they lower costs as well which means huge investment into higher bases and higher costs for basses. On the other hand long haul flight airlines once they adapt to the changes, lower investment will get even less competition and be able to charge the same or even higher prices while lowering costs for service. The reason is simple the bottleneck in intercontinental routes remains and it is due to the mechanics of the game though not the service quality one.
Longer term this means that all airlines will be forced to run both short haul and long haul routes and will be forced into a small range of service quality level variation as going lower or higher very quickly becomes unprofitable. In essence this change lowers the impact of service quality on the game greatly and lowers the ability of players to compete on the basis of differentiation in tactics.
There are many ways to increase competition in the game, but it seems my ideas do not generate much interest so I won't bother you with those anymore. So I'll take a more leisurely approach to the game moving forward or take some time off until there is a reason to play it again. I just hope resets is not what follows as a solution, not really interested in doing the same thing in the same cities over and over even if every few months.
Good luck,
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