Aircraft Type Assignment to Routes

[mwgalica]

This could be a really stupid thought, but I couldn't get it out of my head while I was playing this morning.

I was thinking about route assignments in this and other similar games (like the old Airbucks or Airline Tycoon) and the general idea seems to be plane N1234A flies route 1000 and plane N1234B flies route 1001 and so on. But my (possibly very wrong) understanding of how airlines assign aircraft to routes is much more complex in practice but the basic theory is there is a pool of same-type aircraft that are assigned to a certain group of routes e.g. N1234A flies route 1000 one day and route 1001 the next.

Would something like this pool-style assignment be possible? Mostly I'm thinking instead of assigning a particular aircraft (N1234A) to a route, I can have the option to say I want a certain aircraft type (A320) to fly the route and the individual aircraft gets assigned as available. I think especially with plane crashes, mechanical failures, or other events; if an aircraft goes down to maintenance, a pool aircraft could quickly be assigned to the route without much disruption to the route itself.

[Tjoeker]

I believe scheduling an airliner to a route for a day is even more complicated than what you suggest in real life. If I'm not mistaken they sell tickets and depending on how well the sales go for that day schedule an airliner to the route (upgrade to A321 or downgrade to A319 when sales are going well or bad respectively). This however requires a lot of computational power and is thus out of the question.

Your suggestion of scheduling a type to a flight adds required computational power as well, for no real gains gameplay wise. The current system allows the user to take a quick look at how much time there is left to schedule.

That being said, when we update the maintenance system, we will implement some automatic temporary replacements.
And when we update the auto scheduler, some flights will get swapped around automatically when scheduling new flights to get an optimal schedule.
But doing this day to day asks too much of your system.

[mwgalica]

That totally makes sense; no sense in making the computer work harder if it doesn't actually make gameplay more enjoyable.

It sounds like the auto-scheduler is planned to more or less do what I envision, at least to a point where I can imagine the rest happening in the background.

Thanks for the reply and all you do!