Automation Functionality - Departments

[fatman1683]

I envision a type of added functionality available to the airline CEO through the establishment of a specialized department that automates a certain task.

For example, the Maintenance Department would allow the CEO to assign hulls to a pool of spare aircraft, and aircraft which are taken off the line for maintenance would have their routes flown by one of these spares.

The Pricing Department would allow the CEO to set a target load factor for a given route or city pair, and pricing on that route would be periodically adjusted in an attempt to achieve the target load factor.

These functions would require careful management, as insufficient spare aircraft means routes still miss flights, and too many means idle hulls not earning money.  Similarly, a too-ambitious LF target might drive prices down below breakeven if the route demand is insufficient, and a too-relaxed target could leave significant revenue on the table.

All told, I believe that these and other similar features can be used to automate time-consuming and complex tasks without significantly changing the overall difficulty of the game.  If further difficulty tuning is required, adjusting the cost of the department, or possibly allowing that cost to be scaled, would be a useful way of modifying the bottom-line impact of the Department without sacrificing its utility.

Honestly, I'm just tired of manually swapping out hulls for C and D checks, and going through hundreds of routes trying to fix ticket prices.