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TL;DR: Planes go fly
After 15 years, I can finally and proudly say to have truly «beaten» the Free Game mode of Airline Tycoon, one of my favourite games of my childhood, by flying all routes not only sustainably, but also profitably.
I never got how routes worked as a child, but recently, after well over a decade of not playing, I picked the game up again and tried them out. Turns out they can be very profitable (some more than others of course) and way less work than the orders I used to do. So the natural progerssion is, of course, to fly ALL OF THEM.
I’m not the first one to do this, of course. /u/ikarami posted about his achievement two years ago (I stumbled upon his post while researching how to fly the notorious Tokyo-Santiago de Chile route). So I’d just like to contrast our two playthroughs a bit:
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All routes are sustainable, i.e: at least 10% utilization (no easy way to prove this with a single screenshot, but you can just download my save file and check for yourself — I also included my safe progression from start to finish to prove that this run wasn’t just cheated into being)
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All routes are profitable (if any plane would fly in the negative, it would be shown on the first page (this one) in red).
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Played on version 1.03 (the one you get when you download it from Steam)
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It took me 330 in-game days and 38 IRL hours to complete (though I only started working towards this goal at about day 100. If you really put your mind to it, I guess you could finish as early as day 250 or maybe even day 200. The main constraint in the long run is not the amount of money you make, but the number of reasonably qualified Staff you can hire. If you start hiring as much as possible starting from day one, you could easily beat my record)
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I employ 553 pilots and 1173 flight attendants, all with qualifications of at least «average»
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Home airport is my current IRL residence of Vienna, Austria
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I have one million barrel worth of tanks, which cost about half a billion dollar to fill up and last about 12 days
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I have daily profits of about 130 million Dollar, though I started working towards my goal of «flying all routes sustainably and profitably in less than a year» quite early on (many routes in this game are only barely profitable).
I intend to start maximizing profits now and see if I can beat the claimed 550 mil profit/day of /u/ikarami before my 486th day is up -
I use 216 planes (9 different types) for the 175 routes in the game (one route per plane, if necessary multiple planes per route):
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24x Hopper 95 for ultra-low demand routes
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30x Hopper 190 for low demand routes
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54x Boeing 737-800 for medium demand routes with less than 5000km range
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42x Boeing 767-300 ER for other medium demand routes (These need one more attendant per plane than the 737, but otherwise are my favourite type of plane in the game for their very long range and extremely low fuel consumption)
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6x Airbus A310 I bought these in the early game when I could not yet afford to buy new planes and the 767s were not available at the museum. Otherwise these are worse in every aspect to the 767, but fill a similar role
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12x Airbus A300 as a very economical alternative to the 777s and 747s for high demand routes below 8000km
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30x Boeing 777-300 for high demand routes in general (on the right routes, this is the most profitable (non-custom) plane in the game)
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12x Boeing 747-400 for high demand routes above 10000km distance (which the 777s can’t fly)
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6x DN Long Range for the Tokyo-Santiago de Chile route, pulling some insane profits (more than 3x that of my other best planes (777s), though I have to admit, these are one of the few routes I really optimized with ticket pricing, etc.
