Sharing Thoughts on The Fastest/Most Profitable Start

[tungstennedge]

I have been playing this game for a couple years now, and I've learned some of the best strategies to conquer all sorts of markets, but one thing I've always sucked at is starting games strong.

I've only been involved in the true start of half a dozen worlds, and I never seem to get of the line like other players.

Here are the few points I've noticed which are important in fast starts, I'm wondering how important these are in reality:

-Starting Short Hual routes

-Starting With the routes with the largest open demand possible, even if it means slightly worse scheduling efficiency, and not seven day scheduling

-Increasing prices for monopoly/undersupplied routes (Anyone got any good rules for this, my results seems to be great sometimes and disastrous on others

-Building route image on a large number of routes

-Leasing cheaper aircraft types (and what length should I use/ what length of lease gives you your deposit back faster)

-not over-investing in marketing(I hear 5% of expenses is a good amount)

Also, there are obviously bases with drastically different demand profiles across the world, but In general, whats a way to guarantee a fast start? I find that if you take aircraft that are too small, and routes too short, then it takes forever to recoup slot costs, and if you start longer routes/larger aircraft it takes forever for the routes to stop loosing money. Whats a good way to balence spending on leases/ slot aquisition/loss making routes due to low image?

Another thing I'm wondering is how to choose between adding more of the same flight,  or a new flight to a new destination.  For example, if I have a route with 300 supply and 1000 demand, and another with 0 supply and 500 demand, which route is better to open? Is absolute demand more valuable than the ratio of open demand? How does open demand, or the ratio of open demand effect load factors on zero image routes?

 

 I usually join game-worlds in the middle, as I find the free route image you get, plus usually more forgiving used market kinder to fast expansion, plus I like the added challenge of trying to knock down large established companies. However, now I really want to try a world where I smart from the beginning, and try establish a near monopoly in a large base. The most impressive I've saw was a player by the name of tim who managed a monopoly in LAX (had like 70%+ of all slots), and averaged a ridiculous 20 + billion/q net profit. I really want to learn what techniques players use to get the fastest possible start, since I think it would help a ton in establishing stronghold bases, and its really difficult to do when joining mid game.

If anyone has any feedback on any of these points I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, Thanks!

-Tungstennedge

[tungstennedge]

Whoops, I've noticed I posted this in the wrong board, if anyone could move this to the speed world discussion board I would appreciate it

[sanabas]

In the very long worlds, plane choice is easy, because your only 2 options are DC6 & Connie.

Micromanaging prices - I can't be bothered.

Leasing cheaper planes - yeah, maybe, if supply on the UM is low. You should lease them only as long as you expect to be flying them for. Never lease anything past a D-check. The saving from say an 18 month lease vs a 4.5 year lease isn't really that much, but if you know you'll use it for 4.5 years and then return it to be D-checked, or if you're right on 0 cash, then nothing wrong with taking the slightly longer lease. Never lease a new plane for anything other than 5 years though.

RI on a lot of routes - yeah, usually. May slow you down very slightly in the immediate-term, but probably pays off in the short-medium term. Would certainly want to get RI started on all of my larger, shorter routes.

There isn't one way to do it. But as a rule of thumb, you're likely going to get 5 planes in your initial start, you're going to need to pay for slots for all 5. If the planes are expensive, or slots are particularly expensive, or initial cash is relatively low, then maybe you want to fly longer routes and so buy less slots. If you have huge routes that will fly full from day 1, e.g. LHR-JFK, or Sydney-Melbourne, or Japanese domestic stuff, you're going to want to jump on those immediately. If you have 5 planes making immediate profit, that snowballs, you can afford more, and the limiting factor becomes acquiring them from the UM. As the UM starts to dry up, you can't keep leasaing stuff, more cash will accumulate, you can start looking at buying a used plane or two, to then have a secured loan and look at a new plane order.

For example, if I have a route with 300 supply and 1000 demand, and another with 0 supply and 500 demand, which route is better to open? Is absolute demand more valuable than the ratio of open demand? How does open demand, or the ratio of open demand effect load factors on zero image routes?

Don't worry about competition, especially on startup. Assume that you're going to get maybe 10% of demand at 0 RI. And your competitor will get a different 10% with their 0 RI. So the competition is basically irrelevant, you'll get 50 pax on your first flight on that 500 demand route, regardless of whether you have it to yourself or 6 other airlines are also flying it. The other consideration there is slot costs, particularly destination slot costs. A 300 demand route to a smaller airport might be better than a 500 demand route to a bigger one, purely because it saves cash upfront.

If you are trying to get off to a very fast start, the only real constants are that you're going to be quite aggressive with cash management, hovering around 0 cash or even into the negatives, because all available cash is used to increase growth, at least until you run out of easily available planes. That might mean buying slots only as planes are delivered, certainly means assinging routes to planes and therefore needing to hire staff at the last possible day, or taking cash down to 0 before the 12pm expenses come out, and then being in negative cash after midday. And that you'll be wanting to get 3 planes/week from the UM as much as possible. you'll almost certainly want to be doing it with a large fleet, medium planes typically cost you too much in slots, very large typically cost too much in upfront lease costs. and depending on the UM, you might end up using a temporary startup fleet just because of availability.

However, now I really want to try a world where I smart from the beginning, and try establish a near monopoly in a large base.

That is dependent on others in your base either giving up, getting bored, making a big error, or being poorly run in general. doesn't matter how fast your start, how good you are, if luck of the draw gives you 2 very good players in your HQ, and they don't make any major errors, then a near monopoly is simply not possible. If the luck of the draw gives you 6 other airlines that are all poorly run, not very ambitious, prone to errors, etc, then you can eventually get a near monopoly, regardless of whether you've gotten off to a very fast start or not.

[ak.123346]

If you start with medium jets, like a Fokker 100 for example, profit margins are very high load factors rapidly max and plane aquisition tends to be faster and cheaper. Medium jets also quickly eat up all the slots in the best time blocks. Even on extremely crowded routes I usually see $350k-$800k weekly profit on each Fokker 100 or Bombardier. That's a high margin for such cheap planes.

I start with medium jets and establish a revenue stream to move onto another more long term strategy.