All right, so we’ve heard your feedback and we’ve reviewed your comments. I think that the discussion here is a good indication of how complex this subject really is and in turn another great example on how complex a game of this character can be, i.e. simulating an airport. It shows that this discussion is indeed needed to be had and that once you start going over it in your head, weighing together all aspects of the game regarding airport placement, tutorial, complexity, progression, resemblance with real life experiences and expectations, it really becomes obvious how important it is to tread lightly and think things through before moving forward with a specific implementation.
Easy if you want, hard if you can.
That said, as a response to your feedback we’ve put some additional time into enabling a gameplay based toggle setting called “realistic international stands”. Enabling this setting will cause a toggle to appear on the stand display and flight planner stand settings row where you can select the type of air traffic that stand should receive, i.e. if it’s an international stand or a domestic stand. If it’s an international stand it can only connect with boarding desks placed in an international zoned area and if it’s domestic it can only connect to boarding desks placed in a non-international zoned area (i.e. no specific zone at all). This also means that flights from other countries cannot be planned on domestic stands and that flights from within the country cannot be planned on international stands, as expected.
This solves the issue most people here mentioned, the fact that you cannot have wide body domestic flights or small international flights, which the “realistic international stands” setting enabled. It’s also something we feel is a good compromise between enabling new players to play Airport CEO without too much of a learning curve and allowing you peeps, the CE-PROs to enjoy the game a little bit more.
Regarding specific legislation such as EU and Schengen or other similar relationships across the globe we simply cannot support that due to the value it brings to the game does not make up for the complexity and resources required to both implement, and maintain it due to various potential Brexits, Swexits or Quitalys or whatever.
The setting will be purposefully hidden away because it’s something we’ve implemented for you people here, the real pro users, and not intended for people to enable on their first play-through and it’s mechanics will not be mentioned in the tutorial (it’s instead explained as you enable it). The default version of ACEO will feature an unruly government that require you to passport screen anyone who arrives on an aircraft that parks on a large stand, and the game will just like with the setting enabled only allow international flights on large stands.
The passport checking feature and international zoning is completed and we’ll go through it in detail in the next dev blog and share some pictures with you! 