The only way to win is not to play.

Ive played the first version and now v2. The prices in the game are ridiculous. Its sad that a game that should be all about passenger traffic is actually best won by never owning a single passenger plane! You should only ever buy cargo planes and airports. Heres why: passenger planes rarely are able to pay for themselves.

Why its better to play this as a cargo/airport game: 1) passengers require tons of counters and offices while cargo only requires ONE office and ONE cargo unit per airport regardless of how much cargo youre carrying. 2) few people focus on cargo so the number of competing routes is very low 3) the condition of a cargo plane doesnt have much impact on number of customers. 4) passenger planes require tons more personnel = $$$. 5) passenger plane traffic cycles wildly over the year and theres no way to automatically have prices adjust to demand while cargo traffic is very steady.

You can spend tons of credits and money on passenger planes but remember that the profits that show up for a route **dont account** for slot fees, personnel, maintenance, plane depreciation, fuel, counters/offices, etc. So routes that you think are profitable are actually costing you tons of money and you have no way to find that out! Ive sent suggestions to the developers about displaying the other numbers so that you can actually see if a route is hurting your bottom line or not.

I was playing a game where I was only doing cargo and airports and purchased an airline of a player that left the game (M&A). I took on over a thousand new routes, mostly passenger. But my overall profits went down and my airline which had been gaining value over time suddenly went into complete stagnation. Most of the routes were being serviced by smaller planes running at 100% occupancy and at max price and they **still** couldnt pay for themselves with all of the other costs factored in. If it werent for my airports, I would have been pushed out of the game. The airports were making about $700M per month while the passenger planes expenses were eating all of their own profits and some of my airports profits even though they all appeared profitable.

The numbers are all screwy in the game. The game charges way too many coins for plane upgrades, where if you just cashed them in youd make way more money than whatever profit gains you get from the fuel efficiency/reaching cities others cant. Most of the things that cost coins will never save/make you as much as just turning the coins into cash later in the game.

Building a new airport takes 12 hours but upgrading one takes 0 minutes? The game has tons of things that just arent well thought out. I have NEVER had a need for some of the huge planes even when code sharing, so why have them? The small planes cannot pay for themselves, either fix that or why have them? Its sad that a game that is supposed to be all about servicing passengers is best played and won (Ive won or placed in the top 3 of a number of games) by pretending the passengers didnt even exist, using the cargo planes only to make enough money to start buying airports. That is the easiest and best way to win the game. But that requires tons of coins which means tons of money...

So, after spending a ton of money wondering where all of your profits are and discovering its actually a game best played by ultimately not owning airplanes(!!!), you can save yourself a lot of real money by just never downloading it to begin with. Sad, because I like the idea of it, but have been frustrated with how the game actually plays. Im selling off all the supposedly nicely profitable passenger planes and seeing my overall profit going way up. THATS STUPID.

nuclearspike about AirTycoon Online 2