Airlines Manager: Plane Tycoon

The exponential growth of route costs is unacceptable. How can buying a route through Hays, KS ever be $70,000,000? It makes getting past a certain part of expansion impossible because they force you to take out loans early and then once you start having to pay off those loans, then you’re being forced to spend $70 million on tiny regional airports and at least $90 million for bigger ones. So then you have to max out your loans just to buy one route, plus a short haul plane, which leasing at this point is about your only option. But then those loans have to start being paid and then you’re lucky to come out even because you can’t afford planes/route that would make enough to cover loan payments. I’ve restarted 4 times, becoming more thrifty each time to start, and I always arrive in the exact same situation because of route costs. Will definitely rate higher if/when this gets fixed because it’s a pretty deep game and could be a lot of fun.

This game is really detailed and intricate. You really get a sense of the complexity associated with running an airline. I especially like the way the employee training aspect is implemented. Also the way that loans and general finance is done is really superb. The one element that makes so sense is the exponential increase in route costs. After about 5 routes, it costs over 50 MILLION dollars to open a new route. After about 8 routes this jumps to between 90 MILLION and 110 MILLION. And that’s for routes to any city, not just major cities. So far it seems like there’s no ceiling on these costs. This is completely unrealistic and really throws off the financial strategy of the game. Think about airlines like Ryanair or JetBlue. They expanded pretty quickly and did not pay 100 million dollars to open each new route. The cost to open a new route should not be the same as or more than the cost of a brand new aircraft. In my opinion this is the worst part of the game and really takes away a lot of enjoyment from what otherwise is an amazing game. I also noticed the omission of a few major cities for some of the countries. Maybe looking at the top cities by population might help avoid this.

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GOOD: Game is very fun to play. I love designing the aircrafts with custom livery’s in the airline painter app, and then I named them in the game with real airline names, as well as custom names. It is very easy to set schedules and buy planes, routes, etc. I never fully understood what the “demand” meant and how we were supposed to deal with that, but other than that the game was great. BAD: After playing for a good few weeks, I managed to have like almost 20 planes and lots of routes. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make money and buy a new hub and eventually expand your routes throughout the world. PLEASE READ: One night, I played for about 10 mins then I was done and went to bed with about 250,000,000 dollars. The next day I went into the game and found that I had about -400,000,000 dollars. At that point, I stopped playing the game as there was nothing I could do. I found out that it was because all the planes were getting in accidents and the game automatically pays for repairs, which cost a lot and happen very frequently, like every flight for every plane. So in about 1 day I lost like 600 million dollars. Please fix this

I am a month in professional mode knowing that this game would be running slow due to realism mode. However, creating an airline in a real time setting rather than tycoon speed is more intriguing. An airline doesn't reach 5 stars in a month, it takes lots of time, perhaps years. Just like any rpg/building game, it starts slow, as you progress, things get better such as more planes, more routes, research services. The challenge within the game is, as you buy more routes, it gets more expensive. And that's where the waiting and saving money comes to play. In real life situations, we don't see major airlines buying aircraft everyday or announcing new routes every week. Which gives us a real life feel of managing our own airline. We have a choice if you want to play the tycoon version or professional. I choose professional for the endless and real life experience. It's slow but I'm sure the journey to becoming a 5 star airline will be worthwhile.

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Fun game until you start going further and it makes you wait 8 hours just to receive a plane you leased. Obviously this is the developers way of testing your patience to get you to buy more credits to just pay for the plane- if you start doing that it’s gonna get pretty darn expensive. Have played these kind of games before and they all start making you wait- which is why I usually fall off. I don’t mind waiting 5-10 minutes but when it takes me 8 hours to create a new route then it just loses the fun of the game. Also as you start growing the cost of a route gets very expensive.. paying $60 mil to fly into a mid size city airport.. I know they have said that’s realistic but is it when you only 10-12 routes, not like we have major cash flow at that point. So anyone it’s a good game, well put together, but loses its fun when it starts making you wait for 8 hours and paying all those airport route fees, this will now just become another game that I check on once in a while I will start looking at other games instead