Hello!
I recently found the game and I am really enjoying it and the level of detail! The game I will be talking about below is my third game, I liquidated the first two as I started in the UK and purchased planes that were too big and tried to fly internationally! Since then I’ve read through the “AS for beginners - an attempted blog” a couple of times and its helped me figure out basics of the UI and how to start operations generally. However I still feel like I’m missing or misunderstanding some important things. While I don’t have any real direct questions I was hoping for some more specific advice for my current airline or for someone to simply confirm some of the conclusions I have come up with in the paragraphs below.
From reading the tutorial in this forum and looking at a few others and watching a couple of video’s the main thing about being a beginner is choosing where you start wisely! The consensus seemed to be the following:
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No competition for domestic flights.
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Not part of any treaty.
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Does not have unrestricted market access.
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Have at least a couple medium sized airport with demand etc.
I spent about 3 hours looking for a country that matched that criteria and found that it was pretty specific and very uncommon to find a place with all four of those things! Although I didn’t look at all servers as I spent three hours just looking at 1! In the end I settled with Cuba. I realise that this isn’t ideal for a few reasons. One being that its a fairly small country, second that I can’t connect flights to the US later on, third there is a giant airline that does routes from Cuba to all around the Caribbean so there is very little room for expansion later, and finally the airport sizes and demand are not super high. However I decided to give it a go as it was the first country I had found with no domestic competition AND it has restricted market access.
So after I picked Cuba, I had a look at some of the routes I could run and decided on using the “Bombardier Dash8-Q400 NextGen BASIC” so I leased three. (Probably my first mistake - after picking Cuba). I chose them because the tutorial suggests its a popular and often good choice for beginner games (I must admit I don’t have much knowledge about passenger airliners). I compared all of the Q400’s and with the routes and picked the NextGen Basic since it had higher profit than the others even for the same amount of seats. I believe my mistake being that three aircraft with 80 seats each was too many for me to schedule flights for as the number of airports bigger than 1 with more than 1 demand is fairly low. (Or maybe I’ve just not experienced that much demand yet).
Two of my planes are running flights from HAV to various other smaller airports around Cuba. One thing I didn’t realise when I picked Cuba was that one of the 4 demand airports (Varadero) is so close to the capital airport, that I’ve not put a route between the two as I think they might be too close for it to be worthwhile? Furthermore another two of the 4 demand airports are very close together and I’m unsure if I should fly routes from both of those airports to the capital, while writing this I’m starting to think that I should as the game has calculated the demand for both airports and its not like people are actually travelling from the local area to create that demand! (If you understand my meaning).
The good news is I am getting a fair number of passengers on my flights although they are not totally full. I'm thinking this is partially because my image is still somewhat low (I'm paying my staff above the national average so it is rising!) and another part due to not all of my flights having all of the possible demand calculation times. I didn't chose the three day delay as I decided it would be better to start making some money instead of just having the planes sitting around. Not sure if this was the correct thing to do or not, but regardless I have been changing the schedule's almost daily trying to figure things out anyway.
One of the reasons I have been changing my flights so much is because I feel like my connections are not linking up, I have been changing them over and over again and I still feel like they are not connecting as much as I expected them to. It was only today that I realised that maybe its due to the distances involved and maybe just isn’t worth it (What I meant by Cuba’s size being a problem). If that is the case should I just switch to having flights from every airport to every other airport? Or should I still have all of the flights flying to or from Havana. I have been scheduling my flights using the wave format (or trying to) making sure my flights land 1 hour and 1 minute before 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00 (Minimum transfer window at HAV is listed as 1 hour). Which are the times when both of my aircraft are scheduled to depart from Havana. My current schedules:
Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read my post!
Airline: Dowie Airlines
Server: croydon