Airline Club

Quote from: patson on October 23, 2018, 12:45:26 am

Now onto Airport expansion

Goals:
1. Airport expansion should be one of the "ultimate" project (hence pricey)
2. Airport expansion should require involvement of multiple airlines beyond certain scale threshold
3. Airlines that contribute to the airport expansion will be provided with some permanent slots
4. Airport expansion affects the "population radius" of an airport. Hence it will see more population coverage after the expansion, other close by airport will see a drop in population coverage

I am concerned about #4. In particular, it gives me an easy way to dump my massive (nine figure) pile of cash onto kneecapping Narita .

Actually #4 makes me think that a valuable and probably-easy addition to the game would be something Starlight proposed a few months ago: a recognition that some airport serve the same metro area and pooling their populations. His suggested implementation was, as I recall, invisible zero-cost infinite-capacity connecting flights between, for example, IAD and DCA. (Maybe prevent these flights from counting against the 4 hop limit?)

Actually Narita is at 7 and Haneda at 9, so it would be Haneda that gets kneecapped when both are at 10.... 3 expansions vs 1.

I would amend things at least that an airline can at a greater cost upgrade their HQ airport alone. Otherwise you're just implementing another reason not to pick any but the biggest airports as starting points as it might be impossible to get enough people to upgrade. More in general however that rule will cause problems down the line as people are able to create and run multiple airlines and fund expansions that way.

I think there should be a set cost that needs to get met and which can get met by "contributions" by any combination of airlines. After the cost is met, the project would have a set amount of time for completion, however others can contribute 5% of the cost to speed the project up by 1% of the time and still get rewards for it. Make the slot rewards a set number and award them based on share of contribution (including after initial cost is met).

For example:

Airport: level 4 to level 5
project start cost (non refundable): 800 000 000 (40% of funding cost, this cost would be non refundable and would be payed by the airline initiating the project, it will not be part of the actual funding)
Project funding (refundable - 90%): 2 000 000 000 contribution required (this is just totally hypothetical for example purposes only) (this can be funded in chunks of 5% of cost with any player able to fund from 1 to 20 of those chunks)
funding window: 5 years to raise funds (meaning after the first contribution the project remains open for further contributions until full for 5 years, if funds not contributed by then, refund and close)
project duration: 20 years ( possible to speed up by up to 20% by other airlines for contributing 5% of the cost during construction - 1% speed up per contributing airline with 20 airlines the limit)
slots distribution: 45 slots distributed based on contribution (40 slot purely representational and 5 for main contributor)

The reason for this is to guarantee the ability of airlines to "get in on expansions" while still allowing the freedom to do so alone. By adjusting the cost for expansions per tier as to make it an expensive proposition to do so alone will be enough to limit the ability of top airlines to dump a lot of cash alone. On the other hand it will prevent alliances from being able to "game" certain airports while other smaller alliances or individual players cannot find enough backers for their smaller and middle sized airports. It would actually create an incentive to start HQs in medium and smaller sized airports with the potential promise of extra slots via expansions down the line. It will also allow players to join in regardless and create a small bonus (faster completion) for collaboration, but not big enough that alliance "gaming" can disadvantage other players.

Also somewhere there should be a space where players can see what airport expansions have been initiated and where.