Special Rules World (Post Yours Ideas)

[ezzeqiel]

With the new full featured world starting this friday, AWS will have a total of 4 full standard games running at the same time. Some of us had asked for a separate game world with experimental features and/or special rules, and sami listened  

Possible shorter scenario later on (next month) could have some special stuff then, depending on the ideas.

I'm opening this thread so everyone can post their ideas to include in a "experimental/special rules short world" that will be opened (hopefully and maybe) next month.



Everyone should consider that not every idea could be implemented in a short therm period, since some could be difficult to code into the software. Despite of that I think every idea should be posted, since you never know how hard or easy some stuff can be to code.

[ezzeqiel]

My ideas:

-Free market slot system.
Terminals, Airlines can build terminals, sell them, lease them, share with alliance, and each terminal comes with a fixed set of slots/gates that the airline can use.
Leasing. Possibility to lease slots/gates for a monthly fee. (lease from the airport, lease from other airlines, etc).
Unlimited slots/gates, being the only limitation the higher costs of acquiring each of the next slot.
Airlines can sell slots.
Alliances can build terminals for its members.



-Starting airports.
Every airline is restricted to start the game in small airports, and can move to bigger and bigger airports one step at a time, depending on achieving certain thresholds (IE. Can move to bigger airport when 100.000 pax transported, 20 planes in fleet and 20.000.000 revenue)



-Airports pax numbers.
Every airport starts the game with the same stats, and grows accordingly on how well the airlines there are doing. (hub building and connections)



-Unrestricted airline basing.
Airlines can open more than 3 bases.
Airlines can operate more than 100 airplanes in secondary bases.
Airlines can open bases (or focus cities) in other countries (besides Euro open skies)


Some of this ideas cannot be implemented together, but I'd like to see one or another..

[Curse]

Fully unrestricted aircraft production slots.

If Tu-114 or another exotic aircraft has about 200 orders, they don't simply increase output from 2 to 3 a month, they are going to build two other factories and don't gather up deliveries with dates 10+ years in the future - like it would had happened in real life.

This also should include orders from a single airline to fix the "one delivery every two month while we're doing nothing in the mean time even when there are free production slots"-thing.

[LemonButt]

Here is an idea--completely unrestricted flights.

You can depart/arrive at any airport you'd like in the game, but costs would be determined by "cross utilization".  i.e. someone who flies 3 routes out of Heathrow would have significantly lower costs than someone who flies 1 route out of Heathrow, 1 route out of Stansted, and 1 route out of Gatwick. 

This would open up the entire world to the entire player base where the only limit would be a "free market" system where it just gets too expensive to fly out of other cities.  Most players would be using the standard "hub and spoke" model, but this would allow players to experiment with "focus cities" or "point-to-point" models.

It could get really interesting when airlines start BK'ing and leaving many major routes empty.  This should be a fairly easy one to implement as well...

[swiftus27]

I still want a game with 50 players and maybe the largest 100-200 or so airports in the world

[TPMP]

My ideas:

-Free market slot system.
Terminals, Airlines can build terminals, sell them, lease them, share with alliance, and each terminal comes with a fixed set of slots/gates that the airline can use.
Leasing. Possibility to lease slots/gates for a monthly fee. (lease from the airport, lease from other airlines, etc).
Unlimited slots/gates, being the only limitation the higher costs of acquiring each of the next slot.
Airlines can sell slots.
Alliances can build terminals for its members.

+1

[tcrlaf]

Not a fan of the "terminals" idea. The game is complicated enough already.

You couldn't standardize a terminal price, either. If I base in Cincinatti, for instance, I don't need a brass-n-glass palace to impress the F/C pax, all I need is a cheap cattle barn to flow pax through. If I base at LAX or JFK, do I need to spend 3/4 Billion dollars to build a Sky Palace for the ages to keep the premium pax??

In today's REAL WORLD, all of these are financed on the taxpayers backs now. Shared, pay-per-use, flexible gating is becoming the norm, as well, in new airports. The new terminals in Las Vegas are pefrect examples of this.

[Sami]

The test or special rules world won't have any elements that require major coding, such as the terminals thing (it's a longer term development idea). Changes to default rules, like unlimited bases for example, are possible.

[LemonButt]

Not a fan of the "terminals" idea. The game is complicated enough already.

Terminals would give players an exclusive slot pool versus a shared one.  Currently, a single player could hoard all the available slots, leaving other players with zero.  This is one of the key drivers behind the terminals system and would make the game less complicated, versus more as you would be able to preplan your routes without having to worry about slots being available or not based on other players' actions.

[Sanabas]

Relaxed commonality penalties + more active brokers + no player to player plane sales. Might mean too much coding of commonality/brokers, though.

Also one that'd need more coding, but much more randomness in demand, whether for some routes, or some airports/countries suddenly growing in demand. Those sort of changes happen occasionally now. e.g. Melbourne gets new airport, Mel-Syd sudden;y jumps hugely. Athens gets new airport, lots of routes get bigger. USSR breaks up, Domodedovo, Baku, Tashkent suddenly change hugely. war starts, Baghdad becomes practically unusable. But they're all known about in advance, and most demand doesn't change. It slowly grows, but it slowly grows at the same rate everywhere. Might need to be coupled with ability to take your whole airline and move somewhere else. Because having your HQ suddenly have a Baghdad-like change would likely mean your airline & game ends thanks to RNG. Which leads me to:

Ability to move your whole airline. Either the chance to change one of your bases to HQ, while HQ becomes a secondary base, something particularly useful in a long gameworld where a major airport opens later, e.g. Farance & CDG, Saudi Arabia, Australia & Melbourne, Russia & Domodedovo. Or the chance to take your whole airline, planes, cash & all, get say 50% of slot value back as cash, and take the whole lot to a brand new airport. Could make for some interesting competition. Could also become a useful feature if limited to new airports opening, the ability to move your HQ to that airport when it arrives. I'd like to run my small plane experiment out of London City. But to do that, I'd need to BK and start over when it opens, so not so much fun. If my 20 year old small plane airline was given the chance to switch HQ to the new small plane airport, that'd be much more incentive to keep it up.

[LemonButt]

no player to player plane sales

Incoming flame replies in 3...2...1...

[BD]

To shape a game to be more directly competitive, large airport game:

• Medium game world length, era doesn't matter. - short enough to maintain interest and intensity, but long enough to allow consequences of strategies to show up.
• Restrict the number of airports that players can HQ at to half or a third of the number of players, randomly increasing as players join, and/or by some time factor.
• These HQ are randomly picked from the top 20 - 50 airports (i.e. LHR, ATL may not be available on day one).
• Available airports decrease too, if there is an empty one, if the number of players decrease , but are added back in the same order dropped (to prevent starting and stopping to game the system).
• Unlimited bases beyond the HQ - no restriction on base location world wide.
• However, bases must be at size=5 airports.
• Unlimited routes/aircraft flown at each base.
• No aircraft sales between players.
• Production lines are fairly open - i.e. each airline can get a delivery of one aircraft at a rate between one every two weeks and every month, depending on the volume of the order.
• No discounts for aircraft orders.

Not sure if this all would tax the resources of a game server, so might need to have some restriction on bases and aircraft flown at each.

[LemonButt]

Simple Aircraft Crashes modeled:

Every flight, take a random number between 1 and 10,000,000 and if it equal x, then crash the plane.  Pick another random number for fatalities (only fatal crashed would be modelled).

If it crashed, execute a function to create the ripple effect.  Airline in question loses 50% of their CI.

If you are based on the same continent and flying the same fleet group: -15 CI
Other continent and same fleet group: -7.5 CI
Same continent and same manufacturer: -7.5 CI
Other continent and same manufacturer: -4 CI

Instead of 10,000,000 you could change it to 10,000,000 / (condition)^2 and then the odds of a 100% condition aircraft crashing is 1 in 10 million and the odds of an 80% condition aircraft crashing is 1 in 6.4 million etc.  Don't forget that the leasing company needs to get paid out, too

[ezzeqiel]

In today's REAL WORLD, all of these are financed on the taxpayers backs now.

I think this thread should be focused on making a fun yet challenging game rather than thinking how RL works...

This is one of the key drivers behind the terminals system and would make the game less complicated, versus more as you would be able to preplan your routes without having to worry about slots being available or not based on other players' actions.

Not necessarily. I'm thinking airports with both, terminals and shared slot pools... Terminals should be expensive so if you want to grow fast, some operations should be based on shared pools (government or airport owned)... Also, there will be some time until airlines can gather the millions needed to build terminals...


On the other hand, the "Alliances terminals", would add a whole new social aspect to the game (and a new level of depth in route planning), since slot usage will have to be coordinated thru the alliance...
An entire alliance can (for example) gather some money to fund a big terminal on LHR, and their members will decide how to use it (this is a multiplayer game after all, but there's always little talking between people playing it)...


Anyway, terminals seems to be a major code thing, so we'll have to wait on that...

[Sami]

The next small world will be in Europe. But in reference to this thread, anything special you'd like to see? (that requires minimal coding efforts; most of the things talked here earlier are major system changes that won't be built for a single scenario)

[Xflash]

I have an idea with small codechanges:

Calls to the used market depending to your staff or the fleet size. Default 3 calls a week to max 21 a week.
If you use the fleetsize: 1 call for 2 planes after the 2nd plane. If you have a fleetsize of 4 you have 4 calls, 6 planes 5 calls, 8 planes 6 calls and so on to a max of 21 calls at 36 planes.

This would help if you join later because the early birds cant grow too fast at the begining.

2nd idea:

If you lease a plane you have to pay the 3 month rate, add it to the income statement. In the real world you add it to your running costs and you dont have to pay taxes for this.

[chiveicrook]

Something that actually should be easy:

a) modern demand with Jet Age planes
or vice versa
b) modern planes with Jet Age demand

[Sami]

If you lease a plane you have to pay the 3 month rate, add it to the income statement. In the real world you add it to your running costs and you dont have to pay taxes for this.

The current (new) accounting system works EXACTLY how it works in real life in regards to leases etc.

[Curse]

b) modern planes with Jet Age demand

Not enough demand except Heathrow and 3-4 other airports. The skies will be ruled by whatever is the most efficient prop aircraft, probably Fokker 50 and Dash 8s.


The modern demand with Jet Age prop aircraft only sounds interesting. However, it's a scheduling nightmare because they are so small and, another big problem, due to the same or very similar ticket income all over the world but extremely different staff salaries big airlines aren't really possible yet. Dimishing returns begins at about 130 aircraft in the US.

[NovemberCharlie]

Games with few tough aircraft types. 4 small, 3 medium, 2 large, 1 very large and supersonic
Eg:
CASA 235
Shorts 330
DHC7
BN2

AW650
VFW64
DO328

TU154
Merure

IL96

TU144
Concorde

Fuel prices up to 800-900 or so
Game from 2010-2020 or so

Cheers