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"A real airline this size could open more hubs."

They might, but it would take years or even decades - not the single day of gametime required in Airline Empires.

For starters, consider gatespace. Effectively unlimited gates are instantly available in Airline Empires as long as you have enough money - and just about every "big" airline has the money to build as big of a terminal it wants anywhere. Want a 1,000-daily-flight hub at JFK? Done with a couple of clicks. In the real world, the vast majority of airports are completely gate-space constrained - there may be a handful of open gates, but if you want to build an entirely new terminal for 10, 20 or more gates, it would take years - or even decades - to work through the planning process, environmental review, construction time, etc.

Secondly, there's runway availability. LGA and DCA are, in the real world, legally slot-restricted. You could build all the new gates you wanted there and it wouldn't matter - you wouldn't be allowed to take off or land. For the rest of the airports, jamming a 500-flight hub into many of them would, in terms of capacity, bring them to their knees. Your hub operation would grind to a halt as delays piled up on top of one another. Never mind, as happens in AE, FIVE 500-flight hubs added to a single airport.

" A real airline this size could open more hubs."

Sure, but it might take years - not a single day of gametime, as is currently possible in Airline Empires. The vast majority of American airports do not have hundreds - or even dozens - of spare, empty gates lying around for the taking, and building a new terminal is a non-trivial process that takes years or even decades. You can't just magically create 100 gates at the click of a button.

Then you run into the issue of runway capacity - LGA and DCA are under slot restrictions and most other major U.S. airports are at or near the physical limits of what their runways can handle. Opening a new 500-flight hub at, say, SFO, is quite simply impossible - your operations would congest the airport to such a degree that your hub operations would begin to break down.

That essentially negates the point of limiting the number of hubs, because the airlines that are big enough will just build a 40-gate terminal and dominate the airport anyway, whether they can call it a hub or not.

In the real world, every airline can't build an unlimited number of gates at any airport they want, overnight. You can't walk into LHR tomorrow, build a new terminal and open a 500-flight-per-day hub... doesn't matter how much money you have, there's not the terminal space or the runway capacity. If you want to get down to it, that's the most unrealistic part of the game. If you wanted to slow things down, reducing the number of available gates/landing slots and making terminal construction take actual time (months to years) would surely do it. Or, once an airport fills up... that's it, no mas, until maybe in a certain number of years they open a new runway.

The idea that low-cost airlines don't have "hubs" is a fantasy anymore. They may not call them that, but passengers certainly can and do make connections at such sites. Furthermore, call it a "hub," call it a "base," it's still a large operation to maintain that costs a significant amount of money no matter what name you put on it. Running 15 gates and hundreds of flights is not slightly more complex than a 2-gate outstation, it's hugely more complex. Airline Empires should reflect that fact.

The vaunted "point-to-point" of Southwest Airlines is now about 30 percent connecting traffic, and more than that at places such as Chicago-Midway, Phoenix and St. Louis.

And I'm open to tweaking the number of non-hub gates allowed. Maybe it's 7, not 5. That gets you 50 flights a day, and I daresay there's hardly any airline in the world that has a single outstation receiving 50 flights a day. Southwest's 10th-busiest station only serves 100 departures.

Again refining my idea... don't put a hard limit on the number of hubs, but limit the number of hubs per continent to somewhere between 7-10. If an airline wants to get supermega, they can, but they have to do it by broadening global reach, not dominating every single potential hubsite in a country/region.