Airline Club

I'm going to suggest something weird and will probably get some flak, but f it.

What if you randomized a bit the countries income lvl and even the cities populations?

ATM there are some obviously better countries that you can't really ignore if you want to be #1. I fear that all the most experienced players will all create HQ's in JFK, LHR, HND and FRA. I'm sure as hell will.
I think the game would be hell of a lot more fun if the pop and income were a bit more spread out and not so concentrated on europe. Imagine if South Africa end up with an income lvl of 49 while Germany gets 28, imagine if Las Vegas had 12mi pop and Tokyo only 600k. There could be a lot of different strategies and would be way more fun trying to find good routes in a new world.
I know that this would throw any kind of IRL resemblance to the bin, but tbh, all planes are ridiculously far from IRL performance and the income lvl system is a little broken, anyone trying some real roleplay can't do it anyway, so you might as well go nuts.
I would love that way more than any new feature.

I've always liked the Space and Beyond thingy because of this, you don't need to be restricted by IRL numbers, you can create what's more fun to play.
My dream would be a random world with random countries and ****, but I know that would take a ridiculous amount of work.
Randomizing the cities pop and countries income level is crazy easy tho. So easy actually, that I did it myself with the cities pop. (crude tho, just multiplied the city pop by a random number between 0.01 and 4)

Hmm, nice.
About the airplane model remake, new buildings, advertisement, airport expansion and other stuff you mentioned?
Will that happen before V2, so you can test how it goes, or at the same time? (or not at all?)
Do you have an ETA (days, weeks, months?)?
I'm waiting for a world reset to start playing again, but I'm not really motivated if the new stuff are just minor things you could add/modify in the current world.

Also, about monetizing the game. You should do that by increasing the amount of people playing, not by selling ingame buffs, even more so if it's a competitive MP game like this.
IMO, if you want to make more money out of this, you'll need a clear roadmap with clearly defined goals and deadlines. (Morb said earlier he's not donating anymore because something like this).
You'll need to make people donate because they believe that, even if they don't think the game is good enough atm, you will keep adding stuff that interest them.
Basically, you'll have to take the game seriously, not as a hobby (and I know that if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't).

Obviously, I'm not donating anything so you could just tell me to **** off.

Also, maybe 5000km-6000km routes shouldn't be considered as intercontinental as it ruins some game strategies.

IDK, JFK -> France, Spain, UK is less than 6000km, that would be OP as hell. I think it would also be unfair to countries in SA, southern Africa and Australia, that would gain nothing from it.

And btw, at least in my case, IC routes aren't that profitable anymore. I make max 1 million for a single a380 on IC route, 650k-700k of this has to go to service quality to keep it steady, and combined with the true depreciation costs, there really isn't much left. I'm sure many middle-sized airlines are more profitable than me.

Yeah, it's the same for me.
The SQ is a severe limiting factor atm. Some weeks ago I've opened 3 long range regional routes in Asia and had to increase the SQ by $8mi to keep the same level.

And like Flinke said, ignoring domestic to have hundreds of IC wouldn't work because you need those domestic pax to fill your planes, even more so when everyone else would dozens of IC going everywhere.
But, I think that removing the IC limit could be bad, mainly because small airlines don't have spend nearly as much as an big one on SQ, it would be too easy to create a IC route with lower tickets and higher quality, this would cripple the economy of all big airlines I think.

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Thanks for the inputs guys!

I do agree that the airport slots are already the limiting factor.

What about this - removing the limit of domestic and regional routes?

I still want to keep the IC limit for now as otherwise some mega airlines might get crazy profit and never bother with domestic/regional flight anymore - until i can change the game model to prevent that (or have certain airline-country relationship to dictate how many routes u can do) I would like to keep IC limits for now

Thoughts ?

I also think that would be good. You can also think of tying the IC requirements to other milestones, like asset value, plane count, domestic/regional route count, total pax count, etc.
I still think the underlying problem is the rep system tho, and that it should be worked on in the future.

Agreed! Minus the part of restricting IC to HQ, if you do that at least let us change HQ.

My situation now is at a point where it is impossible to compete with airlines with HQ's due to slots, so it's hard to keep my rep. Unisky is basically 60% inactive. I have almost $100bi in bank and have nowhere and no reason  to spend it, and I can't do anything about any of this because of limitations in routes, HQ, bases and the rep system.

I was in favor of the limitations because I always thought about how damaging to small airlines removing them could be, big airlines would be everywhere without limits.
But now I think that all these limitations just aren't needed. Small airlines would ALWAYS be more profitable because of more efficient planes. Sure, I could still crush them by taking a loss, but such is life, the only reason someone would do this is because they need the pax for the rep system anyway.  The only reason for the limits is the rep system, which I now think is redundant.
I think that because of this, all competition in the game is geared towards reputation, when it should be about profits.

IMO, limits are just here to try to fix flaws with the rep system.
This won't even be all that difficult to fix I think, just remove the rep block for routes and bases and all is well, change that to cashflow or asset value.
No more bullying because you need the pax for the rep, no more artificial limits when you have money to burn. No more wasting regional routes with 14 passengers to some godforsaken country in africa or central america to get 1 rep.

Let us both declare bankruptcy Flinke!
You can be the first.
Trust me, I'll do the same.
I would never lie to you just to get #1.

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Yeah, the saturation is something that have been brought up a lot of times already, it is one of the reasons I starting add more cities and population.
I also would like periodic resets, but I can totally understand why some people would hate it and I can't really blame them.
I think the ideal scenario would be multiple concurrent worlds, with maybe different rules and structures, each with a long reset cycle. (idk, 1 year?).
Almost all MMOs do have at least multiple worlds.
Sadly, due to server limitations that isn't possible.

But we can complain all we want about the current system, the question is what would be a balanced solution for it? Probably pretty tricky..

Exactly, most solutions I can think and that have been suggested by others require a lot of changes, that probably would break the current balance.
Nevertheless, as someone that doesn't really have anything to do anymore, I would support any new system, even if it comes with a world reset. That's probably never going to happen tho.

Ok, thanks for clarifications bluesky! So municipality numbers it is and preferably small countries that need fixing it is, as to not let the global population in game grow too much.

Question: How to handle cities that are existing already, but have numbers that are clearly too low (say e.g. more than 25% off)? Use the same sheet, or would you want a new tab or something?

Just another point - and I say that as someone operating an airline from a wealth 11 country - why the idea that population % should be = income level? Ok, I see the idea that wealthy countries have more airports overall and so more coverage areas to fill. But still, it's already hard enough in low wealth areas, wouldn't it make sense to reach something like 10% in every country?

1. Cities with the wrong pop have the same problem as municipalities, we can't change the source, so they stay as they are.

2. That's for patson to decide.
The pop coverage % == income was my idea btw, it was just a initial target, idk if it's the best solution and since the server can't really handle anything more, that's going to be as good as it gets I guess.

I would also like to use the urban areas, specially for europeans cities for the same reason you listed.
But the game uses GeoNames (http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/) as the source for these cities, and the source use strictly the municipal borders for population calculation.
Using urban areas would require the update/overwrite of that source data, and patson doesn't allow that. That's why I said that this is mainly for adding cities and not for adjustments.

The quantities of cities isn't really a problem, that is just a list, the problem is the extra calculation needed for the extra passengers, that's where there are huge performance hits.
That's why patson doesn't want to add the 100mi population missing in China, that would increase the pop count by 20%.

The source is not really that important, just try to pick the newer one and steer away from predictions. Even if a source is not great, it shouldn't have huge differences.
That site you linked is awesome, I'll be using it if I ever add anything in the future, thanks!

Thanks for your help!