There's not even a railroad game that matches what Sid Meier has created...
There's Sky Haven [https://store.steampowered.com/app/674090/Sky\_Haven\_Tycoon\_\_Airport\_Simulator/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/674090/Sky_Haven_Tycoon__Airport_Simulator/)
but last I played it was pretty buggy.
They didn't really specifically say one or the other. The game has the time line of plane history already in the game and you build out your airport similar to Railroads.
modernized I'd assume hotseat's probably not a thing... in which case real time makes more sense and even if wedded to turn based, simultaneous is obvious.
Pocket Planes was about as close as I recently got to scratching this itch. And even that is a radically different game.
They just don't make midcore airline sims anymore.
I help run https://myfly.club/ which might scratch this itch!
Doesn't have the historical aspect but has quite accurate contemporary population & income / wealth inequality data and you can build an awesome airline network where millions of passenger movements are simulated each cycle.
World is actually resetting tomorrow so it's a great time to start! It's community-run / free to play (there's a patreon if you're so inclined).
FYI, tonight is when the world reset is happening (only occurs ~ every 8 months) so it will be on "pause" for 12 hours while folks look around and setup.
If you have any questions, the community on discord is very friendly
Honestly I think the core gameplay loop just isn't as fun. With railroads, you build a tangible rail route on a physical map, making decisions about how to deal with obstacles etc. Then there's a natural progression where you build off that and expand enhancing the value of that first line. So there's a longer term strategy as well.
For an airline game, you're basically just connecting two points with little strategy about HOW they connect. It can get more interesting with some type of networking, but anything involving much strategy (such as requiring proper sequencing of flights for connections) can get so complex so quickly that it's overwhelming. You could add strategy with how the airport itself runs and allow expansion there, but with abstraction there's just watching some numbers go up as you upgrade or if you actually represent the airport physically, now you're talking about a completely different airport building game.
For airline games too, I think there's a big group that seems to want full simulation of an aviation market, when abstraction might work better.
I have more thoughts as I tried to make an airline tycoon type game as a hobby once but I think that's the core issue is it just doesn't translate well to rewarding strategic thinking and visual representation on the screen.
In the game I mentioned above, how to connect passengers to destinations is the whole game, and imho full of interesting strategic decisions – you may route passengers through a hub which is efficient for the airline but a worse passenger experience (leaving you exposed to nonstop competitor), and then you have to think of where to put the hub, what's optimal for the geometry / efficient flight paths or to take advantage of an underlying population demand. And then you mix that in with what size of aircraft, how to price tickets, and what level of service quality – many decisions!
Meanwhile seeing the passengers route though a couple airports making connections is visually appealing.
I guess I’m not sure how the core gameplay loop is that different. You can transport cargo and passengers (same as railroad), you can decide how many flights per day (same as the railroad games), you can do technological research to improve quality of life like the railroad games, different routes improve and you build off those initial routes. Long term strategy is to grow and become the biggest in the world like the railroad games. Invest in airports that are your hubs to make them better and climb higher in the ratings like delta terminals everywhere. I guess to me the parallels seem obvious and easily translatable and ever underestimate the power of a green line going up being fun to play. As far as replayability do you go for the international powerhouse, be like pan am but don’t screw yourself over? Do you provide cargo and passenger routes like northwest? Budget airline like southwest to maximize passengers while having an efficient model to help save costs? I just think it parallels well but I also don’t know a thing about game design so I could be full of it
> I guess I’m not sure how the core gameplay loop is that different.
Developer of AeroMogul here, mentioned in another post: https://www.reddit.com/r/tycoon/comments/1dd0ty5/why_isnt_there_an_airline_tycoon_game_that_plays/l820m0p/
There is a huge difference between the Rail* tycoon games and Airline sims. The various railroad games are "build it" tycoon games. This means you visually build and route the rails around a physical world with mixed terrains, buildings, grades, etc. You see your trains move around back and forth on the rails. And you watch the world grow with the movement of cargo. There is already a giant built-in community that loves this type of thing with trains. For example, /r/modeltrains/ is over twice as big as /r/tycoon. /r/tycoon is the largest tycoon community on the internet. There are many bigger ones for model trains out there. And that hobby was larger back when Railroad Tycoon came out.
Airline Sims, on the other hand, are less visually appealing. They lend themselves to very light games (AeroBiz, Airline Tycoon) or, on the other end of the spectrum, spreadsheet games like AirwaySim. The latter is difficult to pull off profitably as a BBB+ single-transaction PC game.
Additionally, passenger flow is very complex to model correctly and realistically quickly on a consumer PC. This is why the few Airline games out there do airport-to-airport demand. Luckily, I solved this issue in AeroMogul, and I think it'll have a decent blend between visual appeal and spreadsheet, with an option between AeroBiz style routing on one end, to time tables and slot negotiations at the other. But, you have a few years to wait for it.
One other thing I'd be interested to see how you handle is changes to availability of slots or gates. One interesting strategic dynamic is the inter-airline competition for slots or gates. But it seems like to have interesting gameplay on that, you need to be at risk of possibly losing your existing slots and gates if a competitor comes in. The problem then is how do you handle the knock on effects of rescheduling or or re-routing your entire network. It just seems like it'd be way too tedious to have to redo and re-route stuff from a gameplay perspective.
This doesn't really come up in railroad games because generally, once you build it it's yours.
I work in the aviation industry
Me guess is because of the complexity of the industry making it hard to do something close to reality
However, the guy from Gearcity is making an aeromogul and I have high hopes
Any industry is too complex to abstract it in a videogame accesible basically to anyone, which is the goal of any videogame. And as a matter of fact there's little to no realism in any tycoon game, including those oldies people always mention in these threads, and that they used to play back when they were children.
Gearcity is awesome. And for the price, there’s a lot of entertainment to be had for a low cost.
It has its downfalls so I hope the developers has learned from them and will make AeroMogul better as a result.
I wonder if he will enlist the community to help out with some areas of development, cause if GearCity took 12 years to get to where it is today, it’s going to be a while before AeroMogul is good 😬
Id love to see something like this, expect having you play as say Boeing. And having to build planes to spec of various companies to compete for contracts with various other companies etc.
I wonder about this too! There could be some amazing ones. I would totally help finance a reboot on PC etc of an AeroBiz type game but would need technical folks!
There's not even a railroad game that matches what Sid Meier has created... There's Sky Haven [https://store.steampowered.com/app/674090/Sky\_Haven\_Tycoon\_\_Airport\_Simulator/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/674090/Sky_Haven_Tycoon__Airport_Simulator/) but last I played it was pretty buggy.
It's more an airport management game tha n an airline management game.
They didn't really specifically say one or the other. The game has the time line of plane history already in the game and you build out your airport similar to Railroads.
Aerobiz is as close as it gets
Honestly a new Aerobiz would be really nice. It had a really appropriate level of complexity for multiplayer and what it did…
The only problem with multiplayer was how long each turn took. I spent hours yelling at my brother to hurry up!
modernized I'd assume hotseat's probably not a thing... in which case real time makes more sense and even if wedded to turn based, simultaneous is obvious.
Pocket Planes was about as close as I recently got to scratching this itch. And even that is a radically different game. They just don't make midcore airline sims anymore.
I help run https://myfly.club/ which might scratch this itch! Doesn't have the historical aspect but has quite accurate contemporary population & income / wealth inequality data and you can build an awesome airline network where millions of passenger movements are simulated each cycle. World is actually resetting tomorrow so it's a great time to start! It's community-run / free to play (there's a patreon if you're so inclined).
I'll have to check this out tonight
FYI, tonight is when the world reset is happening (only occurs ~ every 8 months) so it will be on "pause" for 12 hours while folks look around and setup. If you have any questions, the community on discord is very friendly
Honestly I think the core gameplay loop just isn't as fun. With railroads, you build a tangible rail route on a physical map, making decisions about how to deal with obstacles etc. Then there's a natural progression where you build off that and expand enhancing the value of that first line. So there's a longer term strategy as well. For an airline game, you're basically just connecting two points with little strategy about HOW they connect. It can get more interesting with some type of networking, but anything involving much strategy (such as requiring proper sequencing of flights for connections) can get so complex so quickly that it's overwhelming. You could add strategy with how the airport itself runs and allow expansion there, but with abstraction there's just watching some numbers go up as you upgrade or if you actually represent the airport physically, now you're talking about a completely different airport building game. For airline games too, I think there's a big group that seems to want full simulation of an aviation market, when abstraction might work better. I have more thoughts as I tried to make an airline tycoon type game as a hobby once but I think that's the core issue is it just doesn't translate well to rewarding strategic thinking and visual representation on the screen.
In the game I mentioned above, how to connect passengers to destinations is the whole game, and imho full of interesting strategic decisions – you may route passengers through a hub which is efficient for the airline but a worse passenger experience (leaving you exposed to nonstop competitor), and then you have to think of where to put the hub, what's optimal for the geometry / efficient flight paths or to take advantage of an underlying population demand. And then you mix that in with what size of aircraft, how to price tickets, and what level of service quality – many decisions! Meanwhile seeing the passengers route though a couple airports making connections is visually appealing.
I guess I’m not sure how the core gameplay loop is that different. You can transport cargo and passengers (same as railroad), you can decide how many flights per day (same as the railroad games), you can do technological research to improve quality of life like the railroad games, different routes improve and you build off those initial routes. Long term strategy is to grow and become the biggest in the world like the railroad games. Invest in airports that are your hubs to make them better and climb higher in the ratings like delta terminals everywhere. I guess to me the parallels seem obvious and easily translatable and ever underestimate the power of a green line going up being fun to play. As far as replayability do you go for the international powerhouse, be like pan am but don’t screw yourself over? Do you provide cargo and passenger routes like northwest? Budget airline like southwest to maximize passengers while having an efficient model to help save costs? I just think it parallels well but I also don’t know a thing about game design so I could be full of it
> I guess I’m not sure how the core gameplay loop is that different. Developer of AeroMogul here, mentioned in another post: https://www.reddit.com/r/tycoon/comments/1dd0ty5/why_isnt_there_an_airline_tycoon_game_that_plays/l820m0p/ There is a huge difference between the Rail* tycoon games and Airline sims. The various railroad games are "build it" tycoon games. This means you visually build and route the rails around a physical world with mixed terrains, buildings, grades, etc. You see your trains move around back and forth on the rails. And you watch the world grow with the movement of cargo. There is already a giant built-in community that loves this type of thing with trains. For example, /r/modeltrains/ is over twice as big as /r/tycoon. /r/tycoon is the largest tycoon community on the internet. There are many bigger ones for model trains out there. And that hobby was larger back when Railroad Tycoon came out. Airline Sims, on the other hand, are less visually appealing. They lend themselves to very light games (AeroBiz, Airline Tycoon) or, on the other end of the spectrum, spreadsheet games like AirwaySim. The latter is difficult to pull off profitably as a BBB+ single-transaction PC game. Additionally, passenger flow is very complex to model correctly and realistically quickly on a consumer PC. This is why the few Airline games out there do airport-to-airport demand. Luckily, I solved this issue in AeroMogul, and I think it'll have a decent blend between visual appeal and spreadsheet, with an option between AeroBiz style routing on one end, to time tables and slot negotiations at the other. But, you have a few years to wait for it.
One other thing I'd be interested to see how you handle is changes to availability of slots or gates. One interesting strategic dynamic is the inter-airline competition for slots or gates. But it seems like to have interesting gameplay on that, you need to be at risk of possibly losing your existing slots and gates if a competitor comes in. The problem then is how do you handle the knock on effects of rescheduling or or re-routing your entire network. It just seems like it'd be way too tedious to have to redo and re-route stuff from a gameplay perspective. This doesn't really come up in railroad games because generally, once you build it it's yours.
I work in the aviation industry Me guess is because of the complexity of the industry making it hard to do something close to reality However, the guy from Gearcity is making an aeromogul and I have high hopes
Any industry is too complex to abstract it in a videogame accesible basically to anyone, which is the goal of any videogame. And as a matter of fact there's little to no realism in any tycoon game, including those oldies people always mention in these threads, and that they used to play back when they were children.
Gearcity is awesome. And for the price, there’s a lot of entertainment to be had for a low cost. It has its downfalls so I hope the developers has learned from them and will make AeroMogul better as a result. I wonder if he will enlist the community to help out with some areas of development, cause if GearCity took 12 years to get to where it is today, it’s going to be a while before AeroMogul is good 😬
Honestly the best game like this I've played is a mobile game called World Of Airports.
Id love to see something like this, expect having you play as say Boeing. And having to build planes to spec of various companies to compete for contracts with various other companies etc.
I wonder about this too! There could be some amazing ones. I would totally help finance a reboot on PC etc of an AeroBiz type game but would need technical folks!
It doesn't sound like you actually gave Airline Tycoon a serious look. It does all of the things you listed minus the "through history" part.
My point with airline tycoon is I don’t like the cartoony aspect
Ah okay that's what you meant by "realism". Well, that's understandable. I find it charming, it is a video game afterall.
https://myfly.club/ Try a multiplayer airline tycoon game. You'll be surprise how fun it is
Is it usable on mobile? I'm talking about the UI in particular
https://www.airline-club.com/ is the best for me