[Discussion] [Cases] ~ Airport Development

Hey all, with the game reaching a more and more complete stage, the community as a whole, should consider internalized practices as not logical for new players. The game has a very complex system of balancing based on lots of factors all over game.

There are a few things that others and I tried to focus over several threads and the DEV team picked up on a lot. But overarching issues seems to need focus too.

Black boxes

All kind of ratings are not explained in the tutorial or found in the game;

  • Types of airplanes landed in total, as needed for the achievement
  • Shop availability related to airport rating is not explained anywhere.
  • Contract availability related to airport rating is not explained anywhere.
  • Airport rating in stars ~ no explaining on hover, like before
  • Staff rating in percentages ~ cant be found anywhere
  • Airport satisfaction sub-part per rating
  • Emergency indecent response reports do not include prevention advise
  • Delivery costs; you cannot find the recurring deliveries in # anywhere. There is no central management panel that shows you had X garbage runs and X food deliveries and X fuel runs, with an X cost on average. Which means you cannot make decisions based on the cost-price of any of those services.

Money management

  • As a player you cannot find out when 3 star loans unlock, its a black box.
  • As a player you cannot restructure loans, now you have to wait out loans, which made me quit the game a lot of times, its not very rewarding game-play. While you have a huge leverage position, you cant build in your game.
  • Ask for a quote based on your asset inventory worth (max loan I saw was 2 million, I want to loan something like 10 mil when I start building a terminal for Large Planes. Even when I have 10 mil on the bank.)
  • The hourly income marker on the HUD should be a rolling average of 24 hours, the current value has no worth at all for decision making.
  • The cash flow graph, is a strait line for me. The Y axes should have a range near current development, so you can see a trend-line in the numbers.
  • Loan deposits or closures have a baring on the financial report advice, which generates advises that are not valuable at all. When you get a 1 mil loan in, you are not making money with your field, you just got a huge deposit. When repaying a big loan, you do not have a negative result, you have a lower burden on your daily expenditures.

Non specific game decisions

  • Booting up Baggage Systems is very complex, you cannot start up baggage on a segregated number of stands, which makes it a problem, since you have to invest into baggage services for all stands active. Which is a big turnoff for me. Stands could have a baggage slider, like the international slider.
  • When building into a new stand type, all airline ratings will drop immediately, which will make a huge dent in your income, due to the flight generation immediately spawning non assignable larger medium or large plane types. When using the auto-planner, you will never notice the drop in smaller type of planes, until its to late. You will loose huge money piles finding out. There should be a more gliding scale of spawning flight types. ~ By the way, why do contracts generate more high end flights as low end flights?

Automated processes

  • Stands and parking spots will not show assigned vehicles, when active in a task, which can result in over-assigning vehicles based on wrong game-play information.
  • Vehicles can release themselves from a parking spot, which is not explained or warned about, you will find out when opening the depot. This due to the above mentioned wrong game-play information.
  • Path-finding support. As a player, you cannot suggest paths for PAX, which can make looking at your PAX very annoying, since you as a player design with a purpose. Also, on bigger fields, the path-finding will always be a burden on your game-play which I still think could tank more PAX based on suggestive path-finding. When suggested path-finding is not reaching the desired destination, free paths can still be generated by the engine.
  • As a player, you do not get a warning when your flight capacity is reached.

Extra

  • It is illogically that you only can unassign stands from the auto-planner when its on.
  • It is illogically that you cannot delete active objects on a delayed bases. Just like with closing stands, all actions of an object, should be canceled in time. A check-in desk should report “closing will remove all planned flights” and then finish the assigned task, to be deleted after.
  • It is illogical that secure exit need to be staff-zoned to be staff only, its not in line with other object interactions.
  • It feels illogically that international zoning does not imply secure zoning.
  • Staff and vehicle pressure is only available as direct information, which does not show peak usage, which could be listed as a MAX value in the same menu, for the last 24h, which would make it possible to hire staffers until you hit the MAX number.
  • Flight planner reports, have no summery data or logging, to find out about systemic issue at your airport.
  • The statistic screens turn into strait lines when you compare longer periods, which makes it non valuable management information.

For now this is what is in my head, in just a few minutes thinking, maybe I will add more later on. Others could add their experiences too, I would like this to be a suggestion thread / discussion into reaching a better game state as a group. This discussion is not intended for new features, which can be placed in the feature forums.

4 Likes

You’ve got some good points :slight_smile:
maybe the devs will take a look at this :slight_smile:

1 Like

Before I add to the list that jasperwillem provided above (all great points) I would like to mention that it is important for the programmers to ensure that current features are working properly before hitting ‘wish-list’ items that we all want to submit. Although those items should be submitted, I hope they work on things that make the gameplay better. Here are a few of my thoughts.

jasperwillem has a lot of excellent points especially things like the international zone not being a secure zone.

Game Play - General
-As I move my mouse around the screen while building - the pop ups from all the menus come up and de-select what I wanted to select. (Ex, when you go to the bulldozer if you go down to far the percentage window comes up). If you drag a large section of terminal and end under a notification, then you have to re-do it. I know my airport is closed - I dont need a notification that I cannot get rid of on the upper left telling me that for 4 hours. While I am trying to place a template, if the mouse rolls over the menu system the pop ups show up and you cannot see the lower end of the screen. You have to drag the template around so the pop ups go off and then go back to placing the template.

-Why Can’t I zoom out to see the entire airport. If not to just take a look if things a re straight or lined up.

-The baggage conveyor tiles are incredibly hard to decipher when you are trying to place HS conveyors. (or any conveyors). The artwork of the tile that they sit on and the small arrows causes an optical illusion that makes it appear they are going the wrong way or opposing each other when they really aren’t. I have to move the tile over a wall to see which way the arrow is pointing on occasion. It makes troubleshooting baggage connections almost impossible Very frustrating.

Improvements
There are people who love playing the game, but there are also people that love designing the game. Here is my idea with regards to designers like myself. I build and test my entire huge airport before ever opening it to the public. I build big, custom (not square) airports and test them, staff them and then open them. So that first 7 days for me is all building - I dont care about profit graphs or ratings are all.

I think there are 2 modes to the game; Active and Inactive.

Active is when you are playing the game with passengers, and you are interested in all the game functionality. Graphs, staff, airplanes - the entire gambit of what the game is supposed to provide. While in Active mode- you can build and construct and use all the game functionality.

Inactive is construction mode. If I could turn off everything that I dont need, except the toolbar to build, and turn off all the pop ups and menus that dont deal with construction mode it would be much more efficient for me. Inactive mode would also STOP THE TIME so I didn’t have to build in the dark. It would potentially just pause the game or slow it down so you could construct.

Just some thoughts

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Suggestions on employee recruitment: I
n the game, the hiring HR seems to have no real role. I still need to manually screen the skills of employees and recruit them, while the skills of employees on the recruitment panel cannot help me automatically reject applications that do not meet the requirements of screening. For example, if I built a large airport, I would need to recruit more than 600 employees, and manually selecting and recruiting employees one by one would be a lot of time and work. And don’t feel the role of hiring HR.


Suggestion:
Considering game balance

  1. you need to manually screen employees and recruit them before hiring HR.

  2. After the recruitment of HR, the research and development can be carried out in the RESEARCH and Development column. After the completion of the research and development, the screening and rejection function can be turned on in the recruitment column, and the HR will automatically reject the application that fails to meet the skill screening requirements.

  3. After the previous research and development, further research and development can be carried out to acquire a higher level of skills. Only by setting the required skill level and number of employees, HR can conduct independent recruitment.

  4. Consider the different skills and salary requirements of the employees to be recruited, and the employees do not apply at the same time. So HR will tell me how much it will cost and how long it will take to recruit enough employees. Hr’s skill level also affects the time it takes to recruit enough employees automatically.

So that’s my advice on hiring.

@SANTACRUZ ~ See my idea for batch hiring :wink:

Great idea, would be nice to include a specification for how much you are prepared to pay in wages as well, perhaps a pay cap you won’t go above.

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