@LemonButt
Those A320 numbers don't check out--my little CRJs are producing $1.2m/month in revenue so I assume you confused that with weekly revenue (i.e. would be $1.2m/month lease with $4.8m in revenue).
I was indeed looking at profit, not revenue. My A321 have an average of 250-300k profit (not revenue) per week, so about 1.2m profit a month on average (not revenue). Seeing your company stats in history and the future, you had 43 million in operating revenue the whole quarter with 15 CRJs. That means 2.8 million revenue per plane per quarter or about 1m per plane per month. Then again, your HQ is much smaller with very little competition. Your competitor Aladdin failed to make his base a fortress and made it easy for you to compete. Most of your routes are either complete monopolies or in direct competition with his F27/F50 which have not filled the whole demand of the route. This is why the CRJ200 works for you even though it is very expensive. You would have a lot better margin flying cheaper F28 (and could expand faster/modernize sooner with owned planes). Because your 300k profit per quarter is quite bad. Just imagine saving ~13.5m in quarterly lease costs (leasing 15x F28 for 40k each vs. leasing 15x CRJ200 for ~340k each). You'd now have some 14m in quarterly profits instead of 0.3m.
I think the point your missing is the opportunity cost. Having aircraft available on the used market with very high prices is a liquid market versus what we have today with no availability where the price is infinity. This is the same principle in running an airline--if you don't have empty seats on your flights your prices are too low.
In case AI brokers would order brandnew planes themselves during/after launch and occupy production slots, they would of course put those planes on the UM for the highest possible price to make a profit. This is especially true for highly popular planes that woud be bought immediately (high demand). Prices would be extremely high and smaller airlines would have no chance to get these new aircraft while big airlines wouldn't even look at the price tag and scoop up everything they can find.
Airlines aren't missing out on any discounts because if they were to join the game world today, they'd be at the back of line missing the launch window which is first come/first served and shutting players out of the market--not to mention they can't order tens of aircraft at a time until deep in the game even at the minimum lease.
Every airline that orders planes during the 45 days launch period gets these discounts. It's not first come, first serve. It used to be like that in the past, but not anymore. So even small airlines can get juicy discounts. However, if they are forced to rely on the used market, prices would be much steeper (since no discounts + high demand/competition). Obviously players joining now (after the launch period ended) missed their chance. That's life. But even then they could order popular models and still get decent delivery slots. The earliest possible delivery slots are always given to those airlines who are not in the waiting line yet.
So this thread is about fleet commonality and the added expenses due to slow delivery--even when colluding with alliance members to increase delivery rates. These same airlines are getting 20%+ discounts and upset that it's more expensive to have the extra fleet type? They are still coming out way ahead because they are paying well below true market rates because the market isn't liquid. If liquidity isn't the issue, what is the issue then? Players mismanaging their airlines?
The issue is that the 4th fleet penalty is not linear. The penalty gets worse the bigger your fleet becomes. It is manageable with a few hundred planes, but deadly with huge fleets. Even the discounts won't help then. There are only 2 options:
1) Constantly flying 2 main fleets and reserving the 3rd fleet for transitions (easy method, but limiting)
2) Flying 3 main fleets and storing the 4th fleet (transition fleet) until the complete order got delivered and swap the entire 3rd fleet over night (stressful method, but more versatile operations)
Working together with alliance members means you can get better delivery slots. If you order 300 A320 on your own, the delivery will be spread over a very long period of time. However, if you only order 100 A320 yourself and have 4 other suppliers order 50 A320 each, then the delivery will not be spread that much over various years, but be more dense. The core problem is that those 200 A320 need to be sold/bought via the used market and you are limited to just 3 planes per week. One of my alliance members is flying well over 600 MD80's and is trying to transition to 737-800. This transition alone will take him many game years to come. Not because the planes are not available for him, but because he is technically not allowed to buy them from the used market (can't keep up with planes being listed) and/or because he has no interest to be constantly logged in to buy planes. There is indeed an increased delivery rate in theory, but no way the delivered planes can be given to the actual player with that high rate.
Hence the idea (see previous page) that players should be allowed to either:
1) Tell the system to buy all privately listings automatically when able (3 planes per game week) even if the player is not online until there are no more privately listed planes on the used market
2) Buy all privately listed planes at once
Option 1 would not change the game mechanics one bit, but would allow the player to be offline while the planes are being bought automatically (and thus reducing the constant need to be online to do big fleet transitions).
Option 2 would also reduce the stress since all privately listed planes can be bought with one click. Until now, the "3 planes per week limit" has been justified with staff being busy. However, the conditions/prices of privately listed orders don't change. Staff would not need to process every plane individually, but the order as a whole. So I think it makes sense to let players buy all privately listed planes at once. If that is too much to ask for, at least let the players set up automatic purchases of privately listed planes (even when the player is offline).
As you can see the issue is not about increasing the production rate/delivery rate. That would not be touched at all. The issue is how to optimize the transfer from planes from one airline to another.
@Spiff:
This isn't true. If you place a large lease order you still get a large order discount. If you are willing to lease for 8-15 years (I know some don't cause of the 8 year D checks)...but if you do this, you get both a further long-term lease discount and a lower monthly lease price. Granted there is no, launch order discount, but you still can get significant discounts on lease terms depending on your game strategy.
It is true. If you read my post again, I was talking about airlines buying from the
used market, not ordering new. There is no discount whatsoever if you buy/lease planes from the used market. Please read again. LemonButt argues that players should only be able to order new planes directly from the manufacturer by either paying 100% upfront or by leasing them for 5 years. I argued that this favors large airlines who can afford to pay 100% upfront (because leasing new is never a good idea). LemonButt proceeds to say that all airlines who cannot afford to pay 100% upfront could buy planes from AI brokers on the used market. I then argued that this again favors big airlines because the used market offers no discounts and has usually higher prices even (depending on demand). Not to mention that rich airlines would buy everything they can grab off the used market. So small airlines are disadvantaged in three different ways: 1) no discounts when buying from used market vs big airlines making direct purchases from the manufacturer; 2) high prices on used market due to high demand; 3) rich airlines buying all planes off the used market AND receiving planes from the manufacturer at the same time.
