Demand calculation and other questions

[luetze]

Hi,

as an old aviaton enthusiast who recently discoverd this game first off I'd like to say I'm glad and thankful there is an offline PC airline simulation that is still maintained 

Since then I test around occasionally to acquaint myself with the game mechanism. The following scenario made me wonder how the demand calculation is working. Yesterday I've opened a route between Addis Abeba (Bole International Airport) and Denver/Dallas (don't remember which one of the two). The general demand between both cities was stated with 'very high' in the route menu yet the plane (A359) is filled to under 1% only which did't change over the time      

In some old YT-videos I saw that the demand between two cities was shown as a number in previous versions. Would find that information more useful than a unspecific low, high whatever when very high can result into a load factor of <1 percent.

Speaking about load factor and passenger numbers. Can I see somewhere the actual passenger number on a route or is the load factor the only info?

Ah and something else that strikes my mind. When I lease an aircraft I can't find an info about the leasing rate. Did I overlook it?

Questions upon questions and I'm sure there will come more  

[Tjoeker]

Hi and welcome to the forum!
You may shoot as many questions as you please in our direction.

The demand indeed isn't perfectly simulated in v2.13. We're having some issues with updating this in v2.14, that's why this update takes so long.
But it should eventually all be fixed in v2.14.

The only thing you can try on routes with a low filling degree is to fiddle around with the departure/arrival times.
Passengers in the game don't like to depart or arrive between 01:00 and 05:00. (or in a lesser extent between 00:00 and 06:00)
So you should avoid these times at all cost.

In the future when we implement connecting traffic, passengers won't care about overnight transfers as much as they aren't really 'arriving' at their destination.


The old videos you find are probably from v1. Very old and outdated.
I, so far, found 1 video about TAPv2, but it's Portuguese only.

We changed to low/high/... demand designations to not give away exact demand figures.
But of course, from the next version on low will always mean low and high will always mean high demand.


Some more detailed information should indeed be coming soon.
For the time being you can just see the top 5 best performing routes on your home/airline page.

[luetze]

Hi Tjoeker, thanks for the welcome and your prompt reply! Cool to see that the developers are active in the forum

If I may fire some more questions (partly from my first post):

- How can I configure the routes manually? I found the route menu and cleaned the schedule but then it wouldn’t let set me the flight times manually. It was always stated times are overlapping even though I left two days between the (round-)flights. Flight itself was 12hrs in one direction.

- Is there an overview over the passenger numbers for a route or just the load factor info? Would love to see the actual numbers.

- Where can I see the leasing rates before signing a contract?

Regarding the demand calculation I’m looking forward to v2.14 then.

[Tjoeker]

1) Each flight has an additional turn time, meaning that your 12 hour flight probably takes about 13 hours to complete (1 hour to get ready to fly back). This means you won't be able to fit the entire schedule in one day, as it's 2 hours longer.

You can use 2 ways to schedule flights at the moment:

-the manual scheduler: go to routes/airliners. This will explain best what I talked about above. The grey block is the turn-time.

-the semi automated scheduler: go to routes and click on the airliner icon on the right. Here you can see what airliners are available at the time you'd like to depart.

You can learn more about scheduling flights here.
I hope that helps.


2) I forgot about this because it needs some improvements. ^^
You can see the total amount of passengers you flew on a route on the route statistics page.
You can also check the balance of each individual route on the home/routes and destinations page.


3) I see this hasn't been implemented yet in v13.
In v14 you can see the leasing cost of each airliner in the list.

--

At the moment v14 keeps on getting pushed back. Now it is because we need to redo some code for a better performance and to allow to build on it for future features.
We thank our community for being so patient..

[luetze]

Thanks again for the explanations.

No worries about the pushback of v14. Better to take the time that's needed to sort out the known issues now and increase the overall game experience. Many thanks for your efforts!