Before someone says “balancing a game is not something you do during Alpha phase”, be quiet, I’m just trying to help.
Loans
Loans can be an effective way to get a large sum of cash but some of the requirements are crazy. See below where the game does not only attempt to charge me a 16% interest rate, but asking me to pay the amount back in 2 days. 2 DAYS. That means I need to earn $7,000 per hour to get the $290,000 and lets be honest, if I could cover $7,000 per hour I could also just wait two in-game days to get the money right?
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The loan in question here is the first loan and should apply to starters. Realistically speaking I could probably use $290,000 to generate an income of $1,000 per hour meaning I would need more time to pay back the money. The starter loan should probably be limited to $750 per hour payback and the loan should run for at least 30 days. For the other two loans those numbers could be doubled each step to justify the higher amount. Also, upon immediately repaying the contract, a 15% fine over the remaining amount should be paid.
Fuel
(Already discussed and adjusted slightly but some maths here). Example, a GA airport starts off with a budget of $500,000. In order to properly generate an income one needs to refuel the aircrafts and that costs $50,000 in research, $25,000 in a depot and $10,000 for 4 fuel trucks totaling to $85,000 for the fuel upgrade. My four trucks also require $50 in upkeep per hour and the depot wants $500 per day totaling to $4,800 upkeep per day. Nature fuel has politely offered to give me a liter of fuel for only $1.97 and the standard game setting sells my fuel at $2 per liter. Aircrafts tend to take about 100 to 200 liters of fuel in my airport giving me a whopping $4.5 profit in fuel per aircraft. Now, I don’t mean to brag but with $4.5 profit per aircraft and $4,800 upkeep, I need to refuel about 1060 aircrafts per day, just to meet upkeep.
Realistically, I want to break even on my investment costs within 20 in-game days at most. 20 days means I want to earn back at total of $9,050 per day. Each plane takes 100 to 200 liters and considering turnarounds seem to take about 4 hours, 10 stands would allow for roughly 40 planes per day. 40 planes per day taking 150 liters on average means a liter of fuel should give $1.5 profit per liter to break even in 20 days.
Besides the price of fuel, upon setting up my airport with my limited $500,000 budget and squeezing in the research and buildings, the arrival of 200,000 liters of fuel at a price of $1.97 means I am presented with a paycheck of $394,000 in instant fuel costs. This issue could be resolved by making smaller fuel depots only holding 15,000 liters, storing enough for 100 flights or alternatively, a system where an airport can pay back over time as the fuel is used up.
Operational costs
The airport in the screenshot has 10 grass stands ($500 per ??), an ATC tower (200 per ??), a fuel and vehicle depot ($500 and $300) and two runways claiming ($750/H). If I count all these up and assume the runways are per day, I get a $312.5 hourly cost. some buildings have no time specifications while the runway has an incorrect specification.
One could say the buildings therefor have a daily upkeep but this is inconsistent with vehicles having an hourly upkeep (one fuel truck is $50 per hour and the map has four running). There should probably be a more consistent unit of time.
Budget overview
The budget history has already be altered to be able to display previous statistics but there are still two issues.
- The budget overview should not include construction costs. If my airport makes $10,000 profit per day but I construct a $9,000 building, the game will register that as $1,000 profit. The budget overview is useful when I’m looking to see if I can afford to increase my structural daily expenditure by taking a loan for example but using the construction costs, makes these numbers unusable. Also if a fuel delivery were to arrive that day, I would go massively in the red that day.
- The budget overview should keep a small log of details. Currently the budget only shows either total spenditure/income or hourly estimates. When upgrading my fuel system however, I would want to look at a history of specific fuel income over time to determine whether it was worth it. The hourly estimates should also be kept for the overview.
I will update as I play and encounter and feel free to give issues below