For real I did a major hub in australia with a papua new guinea sub.... the real path to this game to play fair is pay attention to the mct and work with that like make every AC depart at the same time and bring it back at time that works with the MCT and that's it if you get this you are good to go!
One of the things i always disliked in this game is inability to know who/when/where drops out. In RL this would be a highly publicised piece of news, but in AirlineSim we are in the dark. Even looking at the news feed does not help unless i know of the specific airline in question. There is no option to see that an airline closed down and then click on it to get useful information.
So if i see that "Air Gone" has entered bankruptcy unless i know where that airline was based it does not mean much at all. We need more tools to be able to jump when an opportunity presents itself. And yes, a large airline will have an advantage, but again this is the case in RL as well to an extent.
but what good what that do? other than in real life, a few dozen players would jump on the available new market, rendering it "useless" for the sake of this argument.
There is almost always opportunity in Chile, Venezuela, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Peru, Phillipenes, etc. All countries with strong traffic.
This is true. I successfully started an airline based in THR on Pearls and within two weeks I grew from 7 to 22 aircraft. BUT, due to the big/dominant/huge excisting airlines in the region it is nearly impossible to expand outside Iran though, so I have to figure out a strategy there.
I was also able to successfully start an Antalya-based airline in Stapleton, having some 30 737 and 4 767 within two weeks, thanks to huge domestic market in Turkey. But the think with older server is once you want to expand to long haul, there's no slots available in major airports at your preferred time and limit your ability to create departure and arrival wave. With AS heavily based on connection model, your newborn airline is really at disadvantage in old mature server.
Even in Ellinikon when I started about 3 months late from world start, I was a little bit struggling competing with several established player in my home country. With slots availability down to 5% and decreasing, my best chance of growing is if one of them went bankrupt. So now the gameplay is wait and see who's got bored first.