Passenger Congestion
Introducing passenger congestion. Passengers no longer despawn; instead, airports have a maximum capacity (both a preferred cap for your airline, as well as an open cap for all airlines). There are new demand suppression ramps that reduce passenger spawns when their route (origin, destination, or intermediate airports) is congested. Higher tier passengers, e.g. business or luxury, will downgrade to worse seats after ~24h, booting out comfort and budget passengers.
Bottom line: the game loop around pax accumulation and throughput management should be tighter.
Legible demand
The connections view was reworked to expose the core underlying demand between all unlocked city pairs, which should make it more useful. Additionally, statistics surrounding suppressed demand, give-up rate, etc. should be more legible. Overall, it should be easier for players to figure out which city they should expand to next for maximum profit.
On-time rate and passenger loyalty improvements
Delivery rate has been replaced with on-time rate. This is because pax no longer despawn, so delivery rate no longer makes any sense. Additionally, pax loyalty has been made more legible (including a detailed breakdown of your lounges' effects).
Smarter AI & autobalance
AI should be more profitable now, with reworked algorithms that make it expand more aggressively and intelligently. Also, the autobalance algorithm has received some deserved improvements to make it better handle most common game scenarios.
Realistic city-pair demand
I completely reworked how city-pair demand is calculated. Big cities now have a lot more demand between each other than small cities. In general, things should feel more realistic and intuitive (e.g. massive boost to SFO-LAX versus v19).
Full patch notes
v20
Features:
- Improved Connections view to help understand why passengers give up when trying to travel between cities.
- Reworked the Connections demand tooltip to be clearer.
- Connections list is now sorted by **underlying demand** (yep, this is now exposed) rather than observed traffic, so unserved-but-popular destinations appear at the top.
- Passenger queue system rework: passengers no longer despawn from airports.
- Instead, each airport has a capacity limit: a per-airline "preferred" cap and a shared "open" cap.
- Airport Overview now shows a "Suppressed Demand" stat: avg. pax/day who wanted to start a journey but couldn't due to congestion.
- Replaced delivery rate with a new "% on time" metric across the game. A pax counts as on time if they board within 24 hours of arriving at the gate.
- Each gate now shows the % of passengers boarding that route on time.
- Airport busyness now increases/decays based on on-time rate.
Changes:
- Globe pan moved from left-click drag to right-click drag.
- Rebalanced city-pair demand. Routes between large cities now generate substantially more passengers, and routes between large and small cities generate noticeably fewer.
- Removed the floating red "lost demand" numbers that appeared over cities.
- Some performance optimizations.
- Aircraft turnaround time at the gate is now random at 3-5h instead of the old 16h.
- Departure status tooltip now shows waking hours as a condition.
- Removed the per-leg "max wait time" and "next-stop passenger threshold" controls.
- AI improvements:
- AI airlines now build and expand airport concourses more aggressively.
- Major AI budget rebalance: more to airport infrastructure (concourses, buildings, operating agreements), and less to new plane orders.
- AI is now more intelligent about which airports and routes it expands to, prioritizing unserved demand.
- AI now uses the same plane autobalancing algorithm as players and regional carriers, which means improvements to the algorithm will benefit everyone.
- Autobalance improvements:
- Autobalance will now remove underperforming planes more aggressively.
- Autobalance can now add more planes at once when deemed prudent.
- Autobalance seat-layout no longer over-allocates Business at the expense of Economy.
- Autobalance now waits 1 in-game day before deploying freshly built airplanes by default, but it's configurable in the settings.
- Raised the base preferred-queue loyalty window from 16h to 20h.
- Flagship Lounge bonus increased from +8h to +12h.
- Loyalty window is now an Advanced Game Rule.
- Loyalty decay: passengers who wait too long for their preferred airline (based on the loyalty window) become "disloyal" and can be poached.
- The airport overview now shows a "(X disloyal)" sub-count on the preferred queue badge when passengers have waited past their loyalty threshold.
- Replaced the route on-time rate's flat 4-day window with an exponential moving average to more rapidly update on recent behavior.
- Added "Airline Airport Expansion Rate" and "Random Airport Spawn Rate" settings to Advanced Game Rules (new Airports section).
- Business and Luxury pax who wait 24+ hours at a gate will accept Economy or Standing seats at a reduced fare. Comfort pax will accept Standing. They pre-empt lower-priority pax.
- Replaced the old boarding-rate signal for demand suppression with a new Congestion metric (queued pax / total queue cap).
- Demand is suppressed linearly from 100% congestion up to full suppression at 500%.
- Instead of pax auto-giving up on flights more than 3x shortest path, it is now a ramp.
- Regional airline plane orders now show up in the manufacturer queues.
- Aircraft profit breakdown is now visible from route view, with percentages per category.
- Renamed 'upkeep' to 'maintenance' to be more consistent.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed an autobalance thrashing bug where new planes on fresh routes would seat-shuffle aggressively before any data came in.
- Fixed boarding throughput allocation so multiple planes from the same airline at the same gate destination now split boarding pax.
- Fixed bought-out regional carriers continuing to order planes and gain operating rights after the buyout.
- Fixed WASD pan and edge-pan moving the camera faster on high-refresh-rate monitors.
- Fixed a sudden camera jump that could occur when the game window regained focus mid-drag.
- Fixed an autobalancer bug where multi-airline routes prematurely cleared the "needs more planes" mark for all airlines after any one airline added a plane.
- Fixed passenger class distribution for small cities (pop. under 1M) summing to 110% instead of 100%, causing too many Business and Luxury pax.
- Fixed a bug where the Business pax boarding check would short-circuit, preventing other pax types (e.g. Luxury) from being considered.
- Fixed a bug where the advertising budget slider in the Airport Competition view was behaving incorrectly.
- Fixed a bug where autobalance might not work on routes that are shared with a regional airline.
- Fixed a bug where airport busyness was not being taken into account when spawning pax unless one of the two endpoints was a tourist destination.