Hi all, hope you are having a good summer. After spending five months working on the Puffin Planes Planes Update, I decided to try and keep the scope for v18 smaller. It's kind of a grab bag of random tweaks and features so I'm just going to name it the Settings Update, after the new game settings overhaul.
4 New Soundtracks from Rodnie Vue
Rodnie has been fantastic to work with on the soundtrack for Puffin Planes. Let's hear from him about the four new tracks that he has hand-crafted for the game:
Vestmannaeyjar - This archipelago off the south coast of Iceland is known for its big puffin population; I'd imagine those puffins would be chatting a lot with each other.
Saxopuffins - I think puffins are the type of creatures to really like ambient saxophone music...
Beak into the Sea - Like many other seabirds, puffins dive into the ocean to hunt small fish for food, maybe even catching a glimpse of the underwater world.
Clifftops - Maybe puffins are like humans, wondering about the world on top of distant cliffs.
You can listen to these soundtracks in-game. If you love the tracks and want to take them with you, let us know! Maybe we can get Rodnie to upload the music to Spotify, Bandcamp or somewhere else.
Better Version Management
Some of you might not like my updates (I guess the game was already perfect), or maybe you are still working on a campaign in the older version. If so, I've improved the version management to enable you to play any previous major version (v17, v16 or v15).
Manufacturer Favor & Fleet Share
Manufacturer favor.
You get a small amount of favor for each plane order.
Favor gives passive bonuses; you may alternatively spend it on actions such as instant plane deliveries.
You can undermine the favor between a competitor airline and a manufacturer.
Gain fleet commonality bonuses dependent on what percent of your flying planes belong to a specific manufacturer.
Reduces your in-flight costs
Reduces your maintenance costs
Will also give you bonus favor each day with that manufacturer.
New Game Menu Enhancements
Basic View allows you to quickly customize your airline name, choose a preset, and other common tasks.
Airlines View allows you to customize each individual airline before game start.
Advanced View allows you to customize a whole list of new settings. I took a lot of feedback from the community on what sort of things they'd like to see, including things like Aircraft Repair Speed, Manufacturer Research Speed, Aircraft Deprecation and so much more.
Comfort Improvements
New 'Business' demographic of passengers who only want to sit in business class.
Comfort is now split between seat classes; each seat class has:
A base comfort, which is how comfortable it will be at the start of the game.
A max comfort, which you can try to reach through upgrades and policies.
Starting comforts are: 30 (standing), 55 (economy), 75 (business), 95 (first class).
Airplanes now provide a *comfort bonus* (or penalty). You can conduct body research to try and improve the comfort bonus. This is supposed to be an abstraction of how comfortable the cabin is. Smaller planes will naturally have a lower comfort bonus.
Passengers now have a probability ramp that determines how likely they are to board a given seat.
Budget passengers will always board a seat no matter its comfort.
Comfort passengers will have a 0% chance of boarding below 40 comfort, and a 100% chance above 70 comfort.
Luxury passengers will have a 0% chance of boarding below 70 comfort, and a 100% chance above 110 comfort.
Passengers now have a probability ramp that determines how likely you are to entice them from competitors.
Budget passengers will never switch airlines for comfort reasons.
Comfort, Business and Luxury passengers will switch airlines with 0% chance if comfort differential is less than 5, and 100% chance if comfort differential is more than 20.
Ticket price now only entices budget passengers and some comfort passengers from competitors.
Various policy changes
'Labyrinthine Boarding Groups' now gives +4 comfort to first and business class.
'Free-for-all Boarding' now gives +3 comfort to standing and economy class.
'Free snacks and movies' now gives +3 comfort to all seat classes.
Paid In-flight Restrooms' now gives -6 comfort to all seat classes.
'Free Checked Bags' now gives +3 comfort to all seat classes.
'First Class Experience' now gives +6 comfort to first class.
Network Overview improvements
Airplanes tab: Can now see the route of each airplane
Routes tab: New checkbox to keep the Network Overview open when clicking on "View Route".
Airports tab: Now shows boarding rate and market share. Lets you sort by those two options.
All views now show the count of the thing you have.
Other Features
New option to shuffle city sizes for increased replayability.
New "Expand Airport" button on the Infrastructure GUI panel that allows you to add another building slot.
Your airline now has a CRANE rating. This will affect how eager lenders are to give you money.
There are four new loans available for you to take out.
Whenever manufacturers launch a new model/block, they will offer discounts to each airline on their first 5 or 10 orders.
Changes
Can no longer do priority deals if you are already slated to receive most of the next 15 plane orders.
Priority deal cooldown lowered from an average of ~25 days down to ~18 days.
Priority deal success chance raised from 70% to 80%.
Credits now roll a bit faster, and even faster if you hold down LMB.
Changed how reputation is calculated but made it clearer in the tooltip.
Investing in a production line now gives favor rather than global reputation.
Improved searchbar has come to route manager view. Use tab+enter for easy completion.
Can now search across all developed airports in the route view, even ones that you don't have operating rights in.
Increased fuel efficiency of the Atto from 0.85 to 0.95
Reduced upkeep miles cost from 8/health to 7/health
Inflation is now ~25% of what it used to be. The old "Normal" inflation is now the new "High", for comparison. The idea is to try and increase plane costs and add early-game loans rather than rely on inflation for a more engaging early-mid game.
Rebalanced plane costs; smaller planes increased around ~2x, larger planes between ~3-5x.
Production line base capacity has been nerfed from 8/hr to 6/hr; I felt planes were being built too quickly. But starting efficiency has been boosted to 100% to compensate at least at the immediate start of the game.
Games now start with plane orders pre-populated for the Pico and Veteran. This was done to make game starts more 'fair' by making sure no one airline could hog up all of the planes and choke their competition immediately at the start of the game.
Sawtelle Pico labor unit cost has been reduced from 180 to 120, but miles cost has been bumped from 5000 to 7000.
AI will now be more aggressive in stockpiling planes.
Moderately decreased the cost for manufacturers to open new production lines.
Added a small tooltip to the Hangar view so that if the plane name gets truncated you can still figure out what block it is.
Changing to a conflicting airline policy will now cause a modal window popup.
Buffed standing passenger income from 60% to 85% in order to make up for the new comfort downsides.
Renamed 'creative' mode to 'sandbox' mode to better align with the sim/tycoon genre.
Increased the max tooltip width.
Bugfixes
Fixed bug where nonexistent gates would sometimes randomly pop up for a second or two.
Fixed Puffin Bay Planes Event sometimes giving you planes that had not yet been researched.
Fixed a bug where common infrastructure upgrades done by airports themselves would not be propagated back to the player until save reload or manual upgrade of other infrastructure.
Route manager arrows now show distance even when no plane is selected
Fixed bug where if your airline was named the same as another airline, sometimes you would end up playing their airline after loading a savefile.
Fixed bug where pressing 'DEL' while not having a savefile selected will still trigger the modal window.
Fixed bugs with display of market share in the route card (such as sometimes showing NaN).
Fixed broken achievements (Pico de Gallo, Westside, Flying Fast, Micro on a Macro Scale)
Modal windows now block tooltips.