What's up everybody, I'm back with a new update. This one's been 3 months in the making; I thank everyone on Steam & Discord who gave a ton of feedback and helped make this update fun to play. I'll be putting the game on sale to celebrate the new update, so if you haven't tried the game yet then be sure to check it out!
For this update I really wanted to do a total overhaul of the plane mechanics; I felt that ordering planes kind of lacked depth--you just clicked the button whenever you wanted more of them. So I redid that mechanic and now you need to compete against other airlines to place plane orders! Hopefully this feels more immersive! If you are too lazy to do plane order micromanagement, I also added a used plane marketplace so that you could always have something to fly...although no guarantee that it is in good condition...
That brings me to another new mechanic: plane health! and plane ages! Older planes are harder to maintain. Being in disrepair means that your plane is more likely to crash. You'll now need to make sure you have enough service points to keep your planes in good shape--you can get these by unlocking more airports and building more hangars.
There's a whole set of other features I added such as more planes, plane seating classes, and a reworked policy window. So please give the headlines below a good read, and if you're curious, you can also read the patch notes for other balancing changes and bugfixes. I hope you all enjoy the new update. If you have any ideas for future directions to take the game in, let me know!
Introducing two new birds
These birds have special benefits related to the new plane orders and plane maintenance mechanics.
New planes
- Levering Dynamics' lineup now consists of the Veteran, Veteran-ER, and the Roebling.
- Midvale Manufacturing has expanded their lineup to include the PAX-125, Pax-200, PAX-250, PAX-350, PAX-350ER, and PAX-600.
- Sawtelle Heavy Industries' new lineup includes the Atto, Pico, Micro and Macro.
Planes will now gradually unlock throughout the game as the manufacturers research them. Older plane models may sometimes become discontinued, and then after that you will only be able to find them on the used marketplace.
Plane health & aging
- Planes now have an age. Older planes will lose health faster, a.k.a. have more expensive upkeep. Low health will greatly increase crash risk. You can set the maintenance strategy of your airline based on your risk tolerance.
- Fleet Capacity has been replaced with a new Service Points mechanic. You will naturally gain service points over time, and this can be accelerated by unlocking more airports and building maintenance hangars. Planes will consume service points to repair themselves after flights.
New plane ordering system
- You must now compete with other airlines to order new planes. Don't worry, there's a shiny emergency button to jump the queue (although...you also need to compete to use that).
- You can place orders for the latest block of a given plane; manufacturers will prioritize finishing older blocks, and then those older blocks will be "retired" after all outstanding orders have been completed.
- Manufacturers now control production lines. They will open new production lines if backlogs for any model get too long. They will handle re-assigning production lines between models as needed.
The Great Aircraft Unabstraction
When creating a new route, rather than assigning a model, you now assign...an aircraft! You're playing Puffin Planes after all--not Puffin Plane Models! This ties in nicely with giving individual aircraft ages, etc. to create a more immersive system. In order to provide liquidity, the player has access to the used market, and the ability to spend reputation in order to source more used planes.
Seating Classes
Some players might call this complexity for complexity's sake. If that's you, then that's fine, I understand. You can honestly just ignore the seating class mechanic entirely and fly all your planes with the "Regional" preset and you will have plenty of fun. But for those of you looking for a bit more immersion, I added the ability to dictate the seating configurations of your plane. Airports vary in their demographics (budget, comfort or luxury) so different configurations may work better or worse in different parts of the world.
Reworked Policies Window
With the new airplane ordering & upgrade system, I had to get rid of the old tech tree. I hope players find the new mechanics more immersive though! Anyways I slimmed this menu down and added a few more options to choose from.
Full patch notes
v17
Features:
- The Penguin: 2x maintenance speed and -50% service point cost for regular maintenance.
- The Ostrich: 15% chance of receiving an extra plane whenever you take delivery from manufacturer.
- New planes
- Redone Midvale lineup: PAX-125 (discontinued), PAX-200, PAX-250, PAX-350, PAX-350ER, PAX-600
- Expanded Sawtelle lineup: Atto (discontinued), Pico, Micro, Macro
- Expanded Levering lineup: Veteran, Veteran-ER, Roebling
- Planes now have an age. Older planes will lose health faster, a.k.a. have more expensive upkeep.
- Now receive a notification once per quarter about your old planes.
- Planes will now lose health during flight, especially during takeoff and landing.
- Low health will greatly increase crash risk.
- Busy planes may have trouble maintaining themselves.
- You can set the maintenance strategy of your airline.
- Having a hangar at an airport will boost maintenance speed.
- Larger planes now cost 50% more miles to maintain than smaller planes.
- Fleet Capacity has been replaced with a new Service Points mechanic.
- You will naturally gain service points over time, and this can be accelerated by unlocking more airports and building maintenance hangars.
- Planes will consume service points to repair themselves after flights.
- Service points now briefly flash red on navbar when they hit 0
- Airplane Manufacturers. Sawtelle, Midvale and Levering have each been given a neat logo and a little flavor.
- You will usually see them saving up money but sometimes they might go and open a new production line.
- They will research new plane models if there are any for them to research.
- New method of ordering planes.
- Compete with other airlines.
- Includes a feature to jump the queue.
- You can now only order the latest block of a given plane.
- Older blocks will be "retired" after all outstanding orders have been completed.
- Manufacturers will prioritize finishing outstanding orders for older blocks before moving on to newer ones.
- New 'Priority Deal' mechanic. Priority Deals are first-come-first-serve and result in any existing orders being moved up in the queue rather than being put into a separate queue.
- Production lines, which are assigned to plane orders.
- Production lines live on the Investment page.
- Production lines have cities and randomly generated names.
- Sabotage or improve the efficiency of the production line.
- Production lines should slowly reassign to models with busier backlogs (threshold is 2x total length in days)
- If a new model is researched and there are no production lines to steal, then the manufacturer will go into debt to open a new one.
- New airplane used market.
- Can now 'find more planes' to immediately source some extra used planes, which will be extra expensive.
- Planes will now sit on the used market for longer before despawning.
- Blocks. Airplane models have blocks, which determine their stats. You can help research more advanced blocks to improve your planes.
- Seating presets. Choose from available presets or save your own to specify standing, economy, premium and lie-flat seats.
- Passengers now spawn as either Budget, Comfort or Luxury. This determines what seating class(es) they are willing to fly.
- Reworked Policies window. Removed aircraft policies and tried to merge some of them into airline policies.
- Bold orange text that lets you know that you will overwrite your other choice when switching between conflicting policies.
Changes:
- Hummingbird bonus has been adjusted to a flat 300 km/h bonus to all small plane speeds.
- Tutorial now explains ordering new planes
- Some plane models, such as the PAX-200, can now become obsolete.
- Airplane view in Network Overview now shows the model.
- Debug menu will now show you airports that you have never unlocked before, for help with the Completionist achievement.
- Nerfs to % income policies such as the "Status Program" and "Low Cost Carrier" policies (now just a 2.5% boost across the board except for LCC)
- Nerfed the Puffin % income bonus from 15% to 10%
- Significantly increased crew costs (50% increase); aiming for plane operating costs to be around ~80% of revenue
- ...to compensate, base income is back! Should help you out early game; 500 per day.
- Route Ruler will now by default only show models that you have in your hangar, rather than all models. Configurable.
- Raised the amount of starting miles from 25K to 30K
- Significantly increased most plane prices
- Roebling speed now starts at 1900 kph.
- Unified dropdowns for sorting airplanes across network overview and flight assignment windows.
- Improved the Planes View tooltip to now show you exactly why a plane is taking off or not.
- Pressing 'esc' will now always close sub-windows rather than the parent if open (e.g. select aircraft sub-window).
- Consistent sound effect now plays whenever creating or updating a plane.
- Airport gate view now shows passenger demographics
- Streamlined navbar
- Improved Airplane GUI (and renamed it)
- Redone location, daily profit and turnaround time badges.
- Now pick from existing planes rather than model+block combinations; can purchase used planes if desired.
- Can now view your hangar via the renamed "Network & Hangar overview"
- Total rewrite of how aircraft work in the code.
- Aircraft size has been streamlined to 'Small' and 'Large'.
- New passenger spawning algorithm that should be a lot more consistent than the old one. Instead of only trying to spawn between active airports, it tries to spawn between all possible city pairs. This should eliminate issues with one player expanding too fast and hogging all of the passenger spawns.
- All airlines will receive a small base "income" of passengers spawning to make early game more fair.
- Improved End Screen OST by Rod
- Game Over screen now stops music
- Passengers will now refuse to fly crazy routes like Los Angeles -> New York City -> Seattle.
- New warning sign in the route card when you have a significant flow imbalance on a route.
- Next stop pax wait threshold now has two new options, 500+ and 1K+
Bugfixes:
- Fixed bug where planes would not obey the pax count at next stop threshold button.
- Fixed bug where when you buy out another airline, they would still show under the list of who serves each route.
- Fixed a slight bug with the Completionist achievement that could have been affecting some players.
- Fixed a typo in teh "Establish a Hub" contract.
- Fixed bug where destroyed planes were not being handled properly.
- Fixed bug with long runways not being taken into account in some circumstances.
- Fixed bug where AI would try and use tiny planes like the Pico to cross oceans.
- Fixed an ancient bug with repositioning where planes did not take into account planes already flying to the next destination.
- Fixed bug where planes would not depart even when full (apparently an eight month old bug...? confused why it has never been reported until now)
- Fixed a bug with repositioning where planes would try to get a takeoff slot from the first airport of their route, regardless of whether they are repositioning from there or not.
- Fixed the puffinBay event.