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A spectre is haunting AE... the spectre of unity.
In these recent weeks, with my return to Airline-Empires from NationStates (a political simulator game), I have noticed an annoying, reprehensible, and undeserving recipient of a corroded stash of tarnished, worthless trophies, who has shamelessly paraded his "records" of success to the forum community, not at all considering the consequences this would have on his already-sodden reputation and has raised many angered at his wholly destructive, egocentric, and narcissistic manner. He is known by a rather unpleasant and ill-memorable display name, and a tyrannical nickname that is absolutely undeserved by this player, who has done nothing but only recently stirred up anger, frustration, and ill-will from other players.
Unfortunately, his style of gameplay is entirely unlike what AE was designed to be played as. Airline-Empires, at its core, is designed for players to create airlines who compete for demand by Daily Demand, or a game-determined number of passengers who demand a certain route. The majority of gameplay, if not all, is oriented about airlines competing to take daily demand and have the highest possible profit doing so. Daily Demand can be manipulated, though the only way I've seen it been manipulated is by lowering the price dramatically. However, what many AE players may not realize is that the game has a second type of demand built into the system: connecting passengers. Connecting passengers, unlike Daily Demand, are not shown in any graph in AE, nor is there a set built-in price that Connecting passengers are supposed to pay. Instead, Connecting passengers are exclusive to the player's airline and the alliance that the airline is within, and as a result of what are likely faulty equations and a lack of development from the AE Development Team, has led to certain airlines seeking to find the best possible profit-making strategies to turn towards serving only connecting passengers. Inflated Spamliners by Artificial Demand, which references how these subset of spamliners artificially raise demand that is unseen by competitor airlines, and their distinguishing feature of drastically inflating rather than deflating their prices, take advantage of connecting passengers in the following ways:
- Airline Hubs
- Alliances
- (Likely) Spam IFS
- Inflated Prices with Regional Airports
- Spam Prices with Close Major Airports
The information that I've gathered upon this practice specifically was by personal experimentation with one of my own airlines, Aero Xizang. Aero Xizang, a Chinese, Tibetan-based airline in R3, just recently joined the world, though I had expanded it rapidly with spare time on my hands. In noticing the aforementioned player and his antics, I was determined to create a model of his operations, at least at a small scale, so that we can all play this version of the game as it lasts.
ISAD1.png 175.74KB
6 downloads
As it can be seen above, there is virtually zero Daily Demand. However, both the Origin and the Destination are hubs, increasing the number of connecting passengers between them. The two airports also have no competition from other airlines (though this is likely a small factor), have extremely low Annual Passenger numbers, but are supporting a $134,443 profit by entirely connecting passengers! It must also be noted that JSJ is a regional hub to other smaller airports, but has no connections to any large, major Chinese airports. Furthermore, the price is unusually inflated to $425, which is illogical for a route between these two regional airports. How could this happen? The secret is on the next tab.
ISAD2.png 84.17KB
3 downloads
What is important on this tab is that with Spam IFS, it makes up a disproportionate amount of the Revenue Distribution, especially concerning the inflated flight price for this route. Furthermore, what is even more important is that fuel is not a majority cost in the Cost Distribution. With it being a minority, the efficiency of the plane does not matter, and this is what enables ISADs to nearly continuously buy planes of all kinds, as when employing such a technique, efficiency does not matter. Rather, frequency does, and the connection that the hub airport has - by alliance. Additionally, as connecting passengers grow (which will be explained further on), the player is able to increase the prices, and may not even require the use of Spam IFS, thus maintaining an unusually high reputation in relying on connecting passengers as their sole customer base. Lastly, the ticket prices that the connecting passengers will pay for is not defaulted - rather, you must look for it, and this is wherein my analysis becomes speculation. There is increased Daily Demand as one approaches $1 in certain regional routes, but increased connecting passenger demand as one approaches a certain price, often in the hundreds if not thousands, in certain regional routes. I feel that as a result of Yuxi having the reconcile the two differing demands of Daily Demand and Connecting Pax, he had made the decision to create a separate bell curve for each with certain limitations, which has resulted in an overall bimodal distribution where players are expected to be between the two bell curves but be more in line with the Daily Demand curve. The definition of an ISAD, in my opinion, is an airline who establishes routes from a small, <100,000 regional airport as a hub for smaller regional airports, who relies on airline & alliance hubs to cater primarily to the Connecting Pax bell curve of the overall bimodal total passenger demand. Though the most well-known ISAD does employ other, conventional spamlining techniques to create a profit, they primarily rely on the massive, overbalanced stream of income they receive from their reliance on the Connecting Pax bell curve.
I had attempted to establish a route from JSJ, the model regional hub in this game, to the nearby major airport, Harbin. However, this did not work, and it thoroughly explains why the most well-known ISADs have to "set-up" before they truly take root - they require alliances to facilitate ISAD regional hubs not supported for a single ISAD. I had to have another ISAD in my same alliance to operate a regional hub in another region, from which there could be a possibility of having the two establish a hub for use by the alliance of ISADs to bypass what I believe is the Singleplayer Major Hub ISAD Restriction - no single player can create a massive, successful ISAD without the use of an alliance bypass so as to reestablish the bimodal distribution of passengers not created for singleplayer ISADs in large hub airports. This hypothesis has not been tested yet, although I aim making strides towards doing so with my second airline in R3, Aero Xinjiang.
I'd like to thank you for your time, and I will also be continually updating this post. Please post any feedback you have. Thank you.
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