v19 is upon us! Cleaned up more rough edges regarding buy-outs, contracts, CEO rating, plane management and more.
New Bird: The Dove
Stock Trading
Stock trading is the new method for taking over airlines. You can collect other bonuses along the way, such as mandatory codeshares, the ability to redirect plane orders, and even the ability to steal their planes in operation!
6 New Contracts
Strengthen Hub: Add additional routes to a certain hub.
Fleet Share: Reach X% fleet share with a certain manufacturer.
City Dominance: Become dominant (>66% market share) at a certain airport.
Strategic Partnership: Own some number of shares in a certain airline.
Share Buyback: Buy back your own shares until you reach some target number.
Fleet Modernization: Reduce the average age of your airline's planes to some number.
Route Autobalancing
You can now autobalance your routes. The game will handle automatically adding and removing planes as necessary. You can configure playthrough defaults in the policies and upgrades view, and you can configure game defaults in the settings view.
Advanced Aircraft Management
You can now perform actions like swapping plane models, upgrading planes from one model to another, or mass-retiring planes at once. New selection and filter buttons have been added to the Network Overview to make this ergonomic.
More Immersive CEO Rating
Your CEO rating is now dependent on performance metrics. You need to continuously grow your airline in order to meet these new performance metrics. Additionally, depending on your CEO rating, you will have different passive effects. And you can now spend down CEO rating on certain actions.
Regional Airlines
Regional airlines are intended to make the early game more interesting. They stick to a certain hub and are colored grey on the world map. You can acquire them more easily than major airlines.
Full Patch Notes
Features
- New bird, the Dove. Gain +10 comfort for all seat classes and +2.5% passenger income after all other modifiers.
- Stocks and share trading
- Can buy shares from other airlines directly or via shell company
- Can sell shares to the open market
- Can force codeshares
- Can redirect plane orders
- Can repossess planes
- Can takeover at 51 shares
- Can complain to regulators
- Can do heists
- Target symbol to show what airlines are at risk of being acquired.
- Need to pay money when buying out to buy out the remaining shareholders.
- Market Disruption, a speedbump for buying shares too fast
- Sales have a chance to trigger panic sell-offs by other airlines
- New contracts
- Strengthen Hub: Add additional routes to one of your hubs.
- Fleet Share: Reach X% fleet share with a manufacturer.
- City Dominance: Become dominant at some airport.
- Strategic Partnership: Own some number of shares in some airline.
- Share Buyback: Buy back your own shares.
- Fleet Modernization: Reduce the average age of your airline's planes.
- Route Autobalancing. Lets you automate the addition and removal of planes from a given route.
- Autobalancing settings to control which planes are eligible to be used.
- Automatically update planes' seating classes to better match the demand on their route.
- Customizable global settings to control autobalancing behavior.
- Can now cancel your operating rights in a city.
- New advanced aircraft management view.
- Mass-replace planes with different models
- Mass-upgrade plane blocks
- Mass-refresh planes with newer airframes
- Mass-reassign the routes of planes
- Mass-send to hangar and mass-sell planes.
- Hangar tab in Network Overview has been absorbed into the Airplanes tab; use the new state filter in order to select between viewing just hangar planes, just assigned planes, or both.
- Flight delays. Aircraft now have a small chance to have their taxiing and takeoff delayed.
- CEO Rating now has passive effects and is spendable on actions
- Passive effects:
- Boost/penalty to manufacturer favor gain.
- Boost/penalty to operating rights costs.
- Boost/penalty to share price.
- Small chance to reposition instantly.
- Chance for quarterly bonus (miles+Puffin tokens)
- Actions (costs CEO rating)
- PR Blitz which increases your global reputation.
- Pay some CEO rating to reduce your market disruption.
- Conduct mass layoffs to reduce your operating costs.
- CEO Rating now has a dedicated chart and more space on the navbar for intuitive visualization.
- New growth metrics that affect your CEO rating; if you keep growth high, you will not need to take on contracts.
- Plane crashes will now cause sell-offs.
- New airlines will now occasionally spawn during the game to take the empty slots of old ones.
- Can now play with up to 16 major airlines.
- Regional carriers
- These guys are present at game start and don't do much expansion.
- They're also easier to buy out.
- New permission setting "Everyone can do this, but not to players" for sabotage, buyouts, etc.
- Can now decide which assets to keep versus liquidate when purchasing another airline.
- Can now see the abilities of each bird as a hoverable tooltip in the right-hand Airline GUI (F2).
- Can now see your own bird in the bottom center of the navbar.
- Can now assign multiple planes to a route at once
Changes
- Tweaked CEO rating chart to have its origin be the value at which you get fired.
- Planes on the same route can now take off 15 minutes apart, down from 30 minutes apart.
- AI should hopefully be more intelligent on its budgeting decisions.
- Route GUI now auto-centers when clicked, since it is much larger now.
- Manufacturers will now more aggressively retool production lines.
- Reduced CEO Rating decay speed.
- You will now win the game as long as you are the only *major* carrier alive.
- Can now click on the airline icon in the navbar to navigate to your CEO rating overview.
- Airline buyouts now require a minimum CEO reputation of 80% (B-).
Bugfixes
- Fixed major bug with throughput calculation that was preventing it from being fully utilized.
- Fixed throwing a lavish party sometimes lowering your CEO rating. In exchange, CEO rating now decays much more aggressively when over 100%.
- Fixed bug where the tutorial would not work if you opted to choose your starting airport.
- Fixed bug where some planes could become significantly overfilled.
- Fixed very top of screen being unclickable in some cases.
- Fixed duplicate model name entry in standard plane tooltip.
- Fixed erroneous chance for concourses to remain in the hands of the old owner when buying out an airline.
- Fixed some obscure bugs with airplane ownership that may have been causing some issues, especially with some airplane-count related achievements.
- Fixed bug where the Advanced Logistics policy did not work.
- Clicking 'Details' in the Airline Side Item (F2 menu) will now bring up the Competition GUI.
- Fixed tooltip not working for regional carriers in the F2 menu.
- Fixed AI airlines sometimes spawning unusually close to players.
- "Offeror would gain control" penalty now only applies when crossing the 51-share threshold
- Fixed AI being able to unlock the Westside achievement for you.
- Fixed dead airlines being able to order new planes.
- Fixed bug where, when a plane collides with another plane upon landing at the airport, it will still try to disembark all of its passengers at the gate as if nothing had happened.
- Fixed boarding rate being an unreadable mint green in the Airport GUI.
- Made the "Better with friends" achievement easier to acquire.