As many of you have pointed out the current maintenance formula for aircraft needs to be changed, as older aircraft have a much higher ROI than new aircraft and it makes gameplay fairly unbalanced.
I have been developing a new formula that uses exponential growth based on cycles and aircraft size. I'd like everyone's thoughts on how they think something like this might work and any adjustments that may need to be made.
The goal is essentially to make maintenance costs for older aircraft roughly 3x what they are now. It depends on the aircraft, number of engines, etc but for the most part the new formula accomplishes this, around the 35-40k cycles range. Beyond that costs continue to increase exponentially.
If you want to play with the numbers here is the link to spreadhseet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...sp=sharing (you need to download to edit)
Some screenshots of old vs new formula for various sized aircraft: https://imgur.com/a/XVZ8Rot
As you can see the formulas are very similar up until around 10k cycles and then the new formula starts to make things more expensive. The only concern I have is I don't want to completely eliminate the ability to use older aircraft. One thing I can do is adjust the used market generation script to reduce the cycle count for generated aircraft just a bit, I notice a lot of the older aircraft are upwards of 50k cycles which can make starting off with used aircraft no longer viable, and I don't want that to happen.
I have been developing a new formula that uses exponential growth based on cycles and aircraft size. I'd like everyone's thoughts on how they think something like this might work and any adjustments that may need to be made.
The goal is essentially to make maintenance costs for older aircraft roughly 3x what they are now. It depends on the aircraft, number of engines, etc but for the most part the new formula accomplishes this, around the 35-40k cycles range. Beyond that costs continue to increase exponentially.
If you want to play with the numbers here is the link to spreadhseet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...sp=sharing (you need to download to edit)
Some screenshots of old vs new formula for various sized aircraft: https://imgur.com/a/XVZ8Rot
As you can see the formulas are very similar up until around 10k cycles and then the new formula starts to make things more expensive. The only concern I have is I don't want to completely eliminate the ability to use older aircraft. One thing I can do is adjust the used market generation script to reduce the cycle count for generated aircraft just a bit, I notice a lot of the older aircraft are upwards of 50k cycles which can make starting off with used aircraft no longer viable, and I don't want that to happen.
I am the developer of Airline Enterprise