I'm currently trying something with the demand formula. On the routes research page, when you research a route you will notice some new information. The weekly demand will be displayed at the top of the page for every route. This is a calculated number based off of annual passengers and the airport ranks. What this attempts to do is calculate an estimated weekly demand for flights between the two airports. It may need some additional tweaking to get it more accurate to real life numbers.
Weekly demand will work in conjunction with the competition portion of the demand formula. If a particular route has no or very little competition, to the point where actual passengers flown in the past 7 days is LESS than the calculated weekly demand, you will receive a bonus to your passengers on that route. The bonus you receive is shown in blue, in the estimated passengers section of the research page.
Now keep in mind as soon as a flight is made, that bonus will drop by the amount of passengers flown. So for example lets assume a particular route has a normal demand of 150 passengers, and a bonus of 500. If you fly that route and transport 200 passengers, the bonus will immediately drop to 300. If another airline flies the same route and also transports 200 passengers, the bonus will drop an additional 200 passengers. The remaining bonus for the week is now only 100. So the bonus passengers are assigned on a first come first serve basis.
As of right now, this feature is disabled and does not have any actual effect. It will only display the bonus numbers on the route research page. Once I can do a bit more research and determine if the calculated weekly demand is accurate or not I think I will enable this feature to see how it plays out.
One potential side effect, for high-demand routes with low competition, if this is enabled you will basically always have a 100% loadfactor. But that's caused by a low player count, not necessarily a bad formula. Not sure what we can do about that at this stage other than try to get more players.
Weekly demand will work in conjunction with the competition portion of the demand formula. If a particular route has no or very little competition, to the point where actual passengers flown in the past 7 days is LESS than the calculated weekly demand, you will receive a bonus to your passengers on that route. The bonus you receive is shown in blue, in the estimated passengers section of the research page.
Now keep in mind as soon as a flight is made, that bonus will drop by the amount of passengers flown. So for example lets assume a particular route has a normal demand of 150 passengers, and a bonus of 500. If you fly that route and transport 200 passengers, the bonus will immediately drop to 300. If another airline flies the same route and also transports 200 passengers, the bonus will drop an additional 200 passengers. The remaining bonus for the week is now only 100. So the bonus passengers are assigned on a first come first serve basis.
As of right now, this feature is disabled and does not have any actual effect. It will only display the bonus numbers on the route research page. Once I can do a bit more research and determine if the calculated weekly demand is accurate or not I think I will enable this feature to see how it plays out.
One potential side effect, for high-demand routes with low competition, if this is enabled you will basically always have a 100% loadfactor. But that's caused by a low player count, not necessarily a bad formula. Not sure what we can do about that at this stage other than try to get more players.
I am the developer of Airline Enterprise