Sami, thank you for the different pay scales. That is really working for making small aircraft viable. Now, at the risk of being too whiny, (and I know that this is actually a fairly large piece of code when all consequences are factored), the next problem for commuters is that advertising campaigns seem to be based on number of flights alone. This means that running one of my 58 pax Fokkers 5 flights a day has more impact on the advertising budget than than running 2 747s 2 flights a day a piece.
Would it be possible to run the advertising calculation as (flight # *2 for round trip)x(max number of pax on an aircraft)
Example 1) Beechcraft 19000d with 19 max pax pax doing 5 flights a day.
(5x2)*19=190
Example 2) A380-800 with 853 max pax doing 2 flights a day
(2*2)*853=3,412
As I understand the present system, the Beechcraft would actually require more money in advertising to influence fewer than 5% of the A380's required passengers for a full load.
My apologizes if my creativity in search strings missed a thread where this has been discussed, I have taken a hiatus from the game, and have not kept up with current conversations. I also want to thank you again for the differentiated pilot scales.
Nice idea,
but I don't think this really happens IRL. Advertisements costs, that's just how it is - big airlines can afford them, small ones can't. In fact, on TV, you only see adverts of big airlines.
I said nothing about trying to make television adds affordable to smaller carriers. I'm just suggesting that putting a small aircraft that does not have many seats to fill (so therefore does not need to reach as many people to fill them) should not cause the cost of advertising to scale quite as dramatically as it does. The fact that small aircraft do not end up on nation wide television or radio is already modeled in the game.
Quote from: Name_Omitted on December 13, 2009, 05:27:44 PM
I'm just suggesting that putting a small aircraft that does not have many seats to fill (so therefore does not need to reach as many people to fill them) should not cause the cost of advertising to scale quite as dramatically as it does.
Which means you want smaller ad cost for smaller aircraft, which is not used IRL, so why should it be here?
The biggest changed needed to make regional aircraft viable is overhead. So that overhead is a function of seats not simply aircraft. Does HQ staff need to increase as much when adding one J31 as opposed to adding one 747 (front line staff would obviously be more impacted by the 747). Also aircraft under 20 seats shouldnt require a FA. I dont know if this has been fixed or not.
Agreed, many of the variables and functions are based on number of routes, number of aircraft and such items, and only partly to the size of the aircraft (MTOW related mainly). A completely general and global airline size coefficient variable would help a lot on which the costs on certain things could be factored.
Quote from: Filippo on December 13, 2009, 06:45:36 PM
Which means you want smaller ad cost for smaller aircraft, which is not used IRL, so why should it be here?
That is correct, but someone flying a route 10X a day should get getting a better bang for his advertising budget than someone who flies once per day with an aircraft 10X as big.
Instead of changing the costs, how about changing the effectiveness of route advertising based on the number of flights per day.
Quote from: mykalberta on December 16, 2009, 04:19:57 PM
That is correct, but someone flying a route 10X a day should get getting a better bang for his advertising budget than someone who flies once per day with an aircraft 10X as big.
Instead of changing the costs, how about changing the effectiveness of route advertising based on the number of flights per day.
That already exists.
The number of flights per day helps in two ways:
1> Passengers
greatly prefer airlines with more flights per day. By far, in this game, the most effective way to steal pax is to increase your flight frequency with smaller aircraft on a route than the competition.
2> Route Image, which is what your route marketing budget helps grow, grows faster the more flights per day you fly. In my experience, you actually get much more effective growth by increasing flights than you do by increasing marketing outlay. Most experienced players don't put much, if any, money into route marketing because it's simply not particularly effective. If you open 3 routes to otherwise identical cities, one with one flight, one with 2 flights, and one you spend a lot of marketing money on and then watch the RI grow at each-- the one you fly to twice as often will get an RI increase the fastest followed by the one you spend marketing money on and the one you did nothing extra do won't be far behind.