30 days isn't long in the AS world, but I wanted to share some thoughts with those who are new to the game. It's extremely fun - and frustrating! I started out joining the Yaeger game almost a month after it launched (and Otto a few days ago), jumped right into a mega airport, spent every $ of startup money, didn't really read much about "how to play" this game, and was annoyed that my flights had more cabin crew than passengers on them. I did everything wrong - yet in hindsight, it was a great learning experience.
I hit reboot quickly and restarted in a smaller country - and applied my learnings. The company has survived a few weeks!
Read through the forums, the wiki, and look at the YouTube tutorials - they really will help. At the same time, they will not give you a magic formula to become a worldwide airline in 30 days. And that's part of the beauty of this simulation - the more you tinker with settings, the more you learn (caution: do not delete your cabin configuration like I did - oops). Work with service levels, pricing, etc. and you'll find what works - and what doesn't work. For me, it's a lot of trial and error (more error than anything LOL) but for me, this has been the way to learn.
It's not fast. It can be complicated getting the hang of things. You will probably have to reboot a few times. From what I've read in the forums, that's very normal.
Have a plan - the saying "plan you work and work your plan" makes AS a lot easier to play.
Once you finally have an airline that is making a little money, it's very addictive! Anyway, just my own experiences here - hope this helps someone else when they're new to this simulation!
I started back in mid April 2018 and I found out that by reading the forums, by doing ridiculously extensive research and by planning my moves well in advance, changed the whole thing.
There is such a wealth of information “hidden” in different screens and menus in AS that with time you will see how you are going to be able to “read” your competitors and minimize mistakes.
Personally I plan my moves months ahead and my little airline was the first ever I started in AS. We all made many mistakes in the beginning and I think the most common is to try to implement what we think we know from the real world. Well, AS doesn’t work exactly like that. It has its’ own ways that once you understand them you will adapt and prosper.
Of course you have to be patient and wait for the right moment to make your move. Once your airline reaches a critical size then more mistakes are forgiven as I found out.
One last thing. With time you will start creating your own managerial tools mostly spreadsheets for various functions of your airline as you will need to analyze data, control and plan your finances and calculate risk taking of your moves.
And don’t forget another very important tool, AS Route Maps. It works with base AS data but provides such displayed and analysis of data that when you use it properly, you can find out almost anything.
Seats, service profiles and age of the planes really matter. I liked the age thing when I started on on Yeager and thought I'd cheat by buying older plans and get 6+ to start vs 2-3. It really hurt my rating and held my airline back..