If I remember rightly, lease costs are directly proportional to depreciation, so the balance between depreciation and leasing is always the same. It's still most cost-effective to lease planes until the cost-to-purchase hits zero. (And it's a lot of effort for very little extra money, with a proper spamline). Depreciation rates only change the time that takes to happen. 

It's also on one of the aircraft info pages. Not the one that shows profit/loss, seat changes, etc. The other one.

Base maintenance isn't really a problem unless you're running a very marginal airline. One or two planes in a family should cover it fairly easily, three or four and it becomes unimportant.

Very early on when starting an airline, it's just about worth thinking about - but only to the extent of e.g. deferring the first deliveries for a couple of weeks to get a couple of planes together, or to get them at the start of a month instead of the end.

With the discount for a big order, and only paying 50% deposit, you're looking at about $3-4bn laid out up front. That's not even a lot for non-spamlines that have been running a while. Anyone up near the top of the leaderboards is sitting on $100's of billions in cash at a minimum. Top spots are usually over $1 trillion, and often several times that - certainly, my biggest airline has had> $1bn DOP, enough to pay for that in a day or two.

The main restriction at LCY in real life is the steep glide-slope required to land there. Which I believe is tied in with the tight noise controls - planes spend less time low over residential parts of London, that way.

In practice, if you actually could land and take-off with a 747D there, you could fill every seat on cross-channel hops. So at least that side of things is OK in game

There's a bug with automatically recalculating routes when you expand terminals. You have to go through and manually 'save' every route affected. That alone is a good reason to only build 200 gate terminals, once you have enough cash that it's not an issue.

Early in the game, there's a point where you pretty much have to build at least one or two smaller terminals, but I tend to expand them to max as soon as possible, hopefully before adding too many routes to them!

There's nothing to apologise for. It's a reasonable, polite question. Bit whiney, but heyho, can't have everything.

To clarify, your build queue is in the order you, er, leased/purchased the planes. So if you order (say) A321s a few years ahead, and then order some A320s to fill in the gap, it won't work. The planes you want delivered sooner have to be ordered first.

If you do the maths, it can sometimes be worth dumping the orders and losing the deposits, because you can make enough profit out of re-ordering and getting the older planes right away that it offsets the loss. Depends on the kind of airline you're running, the profits you make per plane, and the timescale.

You can set the route pages to display stats weekly. Makes life a lot easier

The use-case for light rail/trams - I understand in the US the terms are pretty much interchangeable, whereas in the UK light rail means commuter trains - isn't big cities. The road-sharing and traffic interactions make it more expensive than alternatives - even taking into account the very high cost of tunneling - and that's before you even think about the alternative commercial value of the street-level property needed for a tram stop. 

It's great in smaller and/or less dense cities, though, where it runs as light rail outside the city for a few tens of miles (at most) and then works much like buses for a mile or two in the city centre. The benefits are the cost-savings over running buses and light rail, and the convenience of not having to switch from one to the other.

If you want to fix transport in big cities, and you're willing to make big changes, it's really not a hard problem to solve. All you need to do is separate light traffic - say, <500kg - from heavy traffic. As soon as you're not mixing with full-size cars, let alone lorries and buses, you can safely ride a scooter, or drive a go-kart, or use any other small, light vehicle you can dream up. Very few cities are so big that you need to do more than 15-20mph to get around - in fact, getting anything like that speed at rush hour is a dream in most big cities - and you're not up against lorries, so you don't need much crash protection. The energy usage is better than full public transport, for such light vehicles, and yet we'd have all the advantages of individual vehicles.

It also solves a lot of the legal/ethical problems with driverless cars if you have vehicles too light and slow to kill anyone even if they do accidentally hit them.

And let's be honest, the main reason to do it is that it'd be more fun

The use-case for light rail/trams - I understand in the US the terms are pretty much interchangeable, whereas in the UK light rail means commuter trains - isn't big cities. The road-sharing and traffic interactions make it more expensive than alternatives - even taking into account the very high cost of tunneling - and that's before you even think about the alternative commercial value of the street-level property needed for a tram stop. 

It's great in smaller and/or less dense cities, though, where it runs as light rail outside the city for a few tens of miles (at most) and then works much like buses for a mile or two in the city centre. The benefits are the cost-savings over running buses and light rail, and the convenience of not having to switch from one to the other.

If you want to fix transport in big cities, and you're willing to make big changes, it's really not a hard problem to solve. All you need to do is separate light traffic - say, <500kg - from heavy traffic. As soon as you're not mixing with full-size cars, let alone lorries and buses, you can safely ride a scooter, or drive a go-kart sized vehicle, or anything else of that nature. 

IIRC that's one of the things that's affected by the number of spare employees you have in relevant areas - ground crew, aircrew, mechanics, I'm probably forgetting one. 

The key to this game is to experiment and work it out, because a lot of this stuff isn't clearly written down anywhere even if you search the forums and read everything vaguely related. Let us know what you find out

Time management is AE's most important skill, if you want to top the leaderboards. Ultimately it's less about the maximum theoretical profit that could potentially be made, and more about how much profit you can add to your airline in a certain amount of playing time.

Just for example, last game I made the mistake of ordering new planes on leases for far too long; it's definitely a bit more profitable to do it that way - lease until 'buy from lessor' cost drops to zero, it's cheaper than paying the depreciation over that time - but it's not enough extra profit to be worth all the extra time/hassle managing it all when instead you can use that time to add new planes to new routes.

Ultimately it takes about the same amount of time to set up a new route with 100 pax as with 100,000 pax. So the bigger you get, the less time it takes you to allocate a given number of new planes. 

It's a lot more profitable to have a 200 gate terminal than leasing gates, a 200 terminal can lower your gate payments at that airport by almost half, depending on the airport. For example, in S3A, I have a 200 terminal at ATH, and I only pay 152k for each gate compared to 217k for leased ones

 

There's another much simpler reason: every time you increase the size of a hub, you have to manually 'save' all the routes from it to avoid the buggy auto-recalc. It's easier to go to 200 straight away, if you have the cash.

As stated, once you have enough cash cushion for it not to matter, terminals are free anyway.

Aside from that, it's also quicker to add routes when you have terminals everywhere - no need to mess about with gates each time, just pick planes and add them.

The first terminal or two I build will usually be at a point where money is tight enough to be building smaller terminals, but fairly shortly after that they get upgraded and then everything else is 200 gates.

Never EVER cancel a lease. You're just giving away money.

Just buy the plane from the lessor and sell it. You'll recapture half of your previous lease payments.

The most profitable thing to do (long-term) is to lease aircraft until the point the cost to buy is 0. You're paying the full lease cost in cash each month - but you get half of that back when you eventually buy the plane, so the total cost is significantly less than the depreciation would be if you'd owned it instead. 

This sort of thing only matters with marginally profitable airline models or if you're going for absolute maximum profit. If you have more than a few planes, it's very hard to buy-from-lessor at exactly the right time.  

If you want to make it easy, 1/2/50. For every 50 total capacity, 1F and 2C. All the rest are Y.

That actually gives you 1/2/43 if you have exactly 50 (or 100, or 150, etc.) seats, but the remainder should all be Y too (unless it's almost 50), so on average you're running more like 1/2/65. 

Now pledge your eternal loyalty to The Emperor.

Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant.

It isn't a stupid excuse. We tried to recruit people who are willing to fix the problems before, but guess what: nobody showed up

I'd be willing to have a look. But I don't want to work on AE 4.0, I want to work on AE 3.1.1 - set some minor goals we might reach in a few weeks and go from there.

Haha, that's so funny Emp

The best livery ever is actually in AE.

I love the old liveries from the days when they were trying to make planes look long and thin (so they'd look fast). These days they try and make them look as fat as possible to imply more interior space.

Another fave:

It says 'I <3 Cook's Club' until they open the door...

The idea of AE is that it's not too 'tight' on money, so you can do things the way you want and run little airlines on odd routes, or whatever you fancy. The flip side of that, though, is that you can make ridiculous amounts of cash if that's what you want to do.

I've never understood why anyone cares what other players get up to, though.

. Basically you will be paying $16 million a month for those two 747's. It will be very difficult to generate enough cash flow to cover that cost. The Airbus 330/340 family is a bit cheaper and does the same job.

In my experience two 747s should easily cover their maintenance even without any IFS etc. You can do it with one, though. Same for smaller planes. Base cost is proportional to initial purchase price, so it doesn't make a lot of difference what plane it is in most cases. If anything you get more revenue per seat on smaller planes, so they're much easier to get to cover the maintenance.

At the beginning of the game it's worth thinking about delivery dates. If you get the first of a new type on the 23rd of a month, you pay the maintenance cost that month but get no revenue from it. If you get it on the 1st, you get a whole month's revenue.

Also, if you're delaying deliveries, there's nothing to stop you stacking the first two or three of a type - that way you wait longer, but get a few together to help with the base maintenance.

For what it's worth, I don't think going for expensive gates early on is worthwhile. It's cheaper to rent gates at several smaller airports with the same total demand as one gate at a big airport, and having a wider spread of routes has other benefits. Airline rep goes up with the number of destinations, up to a certain point. And it's more 'robust' to be diversified, if one route goes wrong you lose a little bit of your income instead of a major chunk.

Thomas Cook Airlines (!) fly MAN-TAB-BGI-MAN. I'm not sure if you can buy tickets for TAB-BGI, but you can definitely buy them for BGI-MAN. The plane makes a round-trip only stopping to let people on and off, for refuelling, and a quick interior clean at BGI, and keeps the same flight number throughout, so arguably it's a MAN-MAN flight

1. I don't know of any rules as such, but don't drop the price from the default. If you do, everyone matches you and you get the same ratios but with less profit than if everyone matches the default price. 

2. You get 50% of lease payments as credit towards buying the aircraft, so until the cost to purchase hits zero you're effectively paying half the lease fee. If you want to keep planes for the entire game, lease everything on first acquisition until the buy-cost hits zero. (I assume the lease costs are in proportion to the depreciation, but I've never checked. If not it's theoretically possible that a plane with ultra-low depreciation could cost less per month than half the lease payment.)

The differences are fairly small, though. Off the top of my head it's ~1-2% a year

3. Once you can afford to build terminals, they might as well be hubs. Before that, not worth doing IMO. Even if you don't want to build a huge airline, hub passengers are a convenient way to fill up the remainder if you have a half-full flight or something. If you're making lots of money from IFS then they may well be worth putting on special flights for.  Also, see point 6.

4. If you mean a way to calculate them, then no. If you mean a way to maximise them, see point 6.

5. I think they're fairly static - seasonal fluctuations IIRC, but it's all minor. 

6. If you have enough daily pax - 1m+, but the more the better - then you can raise ticket prices above default on hub routes and fill the seats with connecting pax. Even with them only paying 50%, you're still making much more than all-green. By the time you get to 10m+ pax a day you're making ridiculous amounts, at least 5x the normal profit.

Two corollaries to that, if you want to top the leaderboard:

- Grow as fast as possible from the start. Don't worry about every type of plane making great profits as long as you're increasing total pax - get them all, fill them all.

- Within reason, nothing you do at the start will make much difference to your final position. A few billion is irrelevant once you have tens of billions DOP.