Sign In
Create Account
Note: this list is not comprehensive. Many bugs in the current game are no longer an issue (either fixed or eliminated by feature replacement), and we've laid a lot of new groundwork under the hood to make the code more robust and to speed up future development. Below are the changes visible and applicable to players. I would like to thank all the developers and data collectors that made this project possible, as well as all the players who contributed their suggestions and ideas.
Route Reputation
After price, your reputation on a route is the biggest factor in how many passengers you attract. This rating is determined by:
· Service frequency – how many flights a week you provide
· On-time performance – depends on how packed your aircraft’s schedule is, followed by employee morale and efficiency. Even with the most hardworking employees, an aircraft flying 20 hours a day will be hard to keep on schedule.
· Legroom – the more seats you pack into a plane, the less passengers will enjoy their experience on your flights.
· In-Flight Service – food, entertainment, pillows, blankets, and other amenities help differentiate you from the competition.
· How long you’ve flown the route – when starting a new route, it takes time to gain traction and attract passengers from existing carriers.
Airline Reputation
Your overall reputation helps you establish reputation on new routes more quickly. This rating is determined by your reputation on existing routes, network size, employee morale, the age of your airline, and other qualities.
Payload / Weight Restrictions
With this realism feature, you will no longer be able to carry a full payload at the aircraft’s maximum range. For now we are using a generic formula to determine the maximum number of passengers that can be carried on a flight as a function of the aircraft’s maximum range. As we compile weight data for all aircraft in the game (thanks to the many helpful players here), we will transition to using more sophisticated, individualized calculations so that different aircraft will display their unique performance characteristics. However, the accuracy of these calculations rely on our fuel burn model, which we will tweak continuously over the beta testing period, so don't be surprised if payload figures for the same aircraft fluctuate from day to day in the beta games.
Employee Management and Morale
You decide how much to pay your employees and how many reserve crews to hire. Higher wages (compared to the in-game industry average), profit sharing, and bonuses boost morale and efficiency; not hiring reserve crews saves money but increases stress and lowers morale. Employee morale is a factor in your airline reputation, as customers respond well to being treated by happy rather than angry employees.
Employees are hired automatically as your airline expands. Employees also retire or leave the company according to the attrition rate, which is inversely proportional to morale. If your operation contracts and required staffing levels go down, you can either wait for them to retire or leave by themselves, or you can immediately lay off unneeded workers at the cost of significantly damaging the morale of the remaining employees. Pay raises and cuts, as well as bonuses and layoffs, have a lasting effect on morale that decreases with time. Payday is the 15th of every month (that's when you pay all your employees to reduce the shock at month change).
In-Flight Service
New service options allow you to customize your onboard amenities for different markets. Options include food, pillows and blankets, newspapers and magazines, and various other items. You can choose to apply an IFS scheme to all routes within a specified distance range. For finer control, you can also set the IFS scheme for an individual route (city pair). IFS is configured separately from IFE (in-flight entertainment), and both count toward the IFS portion of the route reputation.
We've added a few more IFE options as well, including WiFi and mobile phone coverage. Also, IFE is now linked with cabin seat configurations.
Airline Events*
Major storms and hurricanes can shut down entire airports for aday or two and grind airline operations to a halt. Watch out if your only hub is a coastal city.
* This feature is still being implemented and will not be available for the first few days of the beta.
Fuel Stops*
If a route is longer than 70% of the range of the longest-range aircraft available, you have the option of adding a fuel stop to make the route flyable. However, flights with a fuel stop decreases its appeal if there are non-stop alternatives available, so be prepared to adjust your price accordingly.
* This feature is still being implemented and will not be available for the first few days of the beta.
Marketing
Advertising through various channels helps to amplify your airline’s reputation. The net effect is dependent upon your existing reputation: if you have a high reputation, marketing will provide a bigger boost than if you have a poor reputation (in which case you don’t have much to advertise in the first place). The budget for each type of advertising is set as a percentage of your monthly sales, which means marketing cost is proportional to your airline size.
Bonds and Credit Rating
To raise money for your airline, you can issue corporate bonds, which you pay back after 5 years and also pay interest for every month (interest rates are based on historical records when available). The upside is that you have access to emergency funds should the need arise; on the other hand, issuing bonds lowers your credit rating, which in turn limits your ability to borrow more money.
Your credit rating also determines how many aircraft you can lease at any given time. For example, with a BBB rating, you can have 100 aircraft leases active (including ones on order). With a C rating, you can lease up to a whopping 3 aircraft before the lessor gets uncomfortable. You can always buy aircraft instead of leasing them, regardless of your credit rating.
Missing bond payments will get your airline shut down! Because this is a continuously running game and we cannot expect players to be online all the time, you have a 6 month grace period upon defaulting on a bond payment before your airline is declared bankrupt and its assets liquidated. Use with caution.
Integrated Route Management
Route research, finance, and startup have been merged into one new route management system. The old Flash-based charts have been replaced with more compatible and less demanding JavaScript-based charts. We hope the new route details page makes the most common tasks more streamlined.
Aircraft Management
Similar to the new route management system, the aircraft details page has been redone to make things easier to find. Additionally, you can now close or move individual flights to other aircraft directly from the aircraft’s flight list!
Production and Delivery Dates
You can now pre-order aircraft before production starts. To make things interesting, the date on which an aircraft becomes available for preorder is randomly selected somewhere between 1 and 3 years before the production start year. The date of the first delivery (made available once the pre-order period starts) is also random and will be sometime in the listed production start year. These dates are seeded when the game world starts, so there will be some variability among the worlds, which eliminates any advantage a player in any time zone has in becoming a launch customer.
Special Airport Restrictions
Airport restrictions such as international flights from LGA and DCA and the Wright Amendment at DAL have been implemented in realistic worlds.
Airline Press Releases
Instead of a long list of forums and subforums, we have a new blogging system on the forums where you can post all your press releases!
Other Changes and Fixes
- Improved Finance Information – the finance summary is much more detailed and includes payroll information for individual employee groups so you can see exactly where your money is going.
- Improved Airport Browser – you can now filter the airport list by distance to a specified airport.
- Extend or terminate multiple leases - no need to do so one at a time
- Declare bankruptcy - no need to terminate/sell aircraft first, it's now done automatically
- Logo and livery uploads now accept most image formats and will resize automatically. Also the pesky caching problem is no more! (each uploaded image now has a unique file name).
- Ability to change your airline name (for a fee and a reputation hit)
- Landing fees - based on aircraft weight (will be implemented after weight data is compiled and merged into the game)
- Revised cost structure to grow with expansion to curb endless exponential growth
- Increasing demand - passenger demand starts relative low in the beginning of the game (so that routes aren't as big a vacuum at the start) and increases to full strength over the first 10-15 years of the game.
- Deliveries scheduled for the 0th day of a month should no longer occur
Known Issues (will be fixed during the testing period)
- When starting a route or adding flights, you have to re-save the route after creation to get the correct loadfactor/reputation figures.
- Buying and selling used aircraft results in you getting charged the full aircraft valuation, regardless of the number of aircraft on the market.
- The “Change Aircraft†confirmation screen appears distorted in Chrome.
- Accepting or rejecting alliance invitations/requests produce SQL errors.
- Flight numbers are not generated properly.
Planned Updates (will be implemented after major bugs are fixed, possibly after beta ends)
- Ability to select entire routes (not just individual flights) on aircraft details and route details flight list to enable quicker selection
- Show range/payload and runway performance data on aircraft details page
- Add runway filter to airport browser and add a link to airport browser (filter by range/runway) from aircraft details
- Add route map to aircraft flight list
- On-time performance to consider utilization of other “spare†aircraft flying through the city (range and runway qualifications apply)
- Add inactivity warning to My Airlines page for airlines nearing deletion
- Add itemized details to route finance (gallons of fuel consumed, billable crew hours, etc)
- View list of individual transactions on finance page
- Aircraft registration and naming
- Update maps to use latest Google Maps API for better performance
- Charts and graphs (track history of each finance item, cash/valuation/passengers/fleet history, etc.)
Back to top
