Welcome back to another developer diary. This time, I will be talking about financials. More specifically, ticket prices and the new financial window. I will keep this brief because I have a headache from coding all weekend.
First, the new Finances GUI. Many have asked for it. I am hoping that it will be useful. Maybe you see your fuel costs are too high, so you go and purchase fuel hub at all of your airports. Maybe you see that your lounges are paying off, so you invest in opening more of them. Let me know what you think!
Next, ticket prices. The original design was supposed to be a slider from 50-150%, but this proved to require too much micromanagement. I would often forget to set the ticket price to 150% if I was alone on a route, and when others came in to try and destroy my monopoly I would forget to lower the ticket price so that I could compete effectively.
Well, my solution to that is the GUI you see right above with 'Low', 'Med', 'High' and 'Auto' as ticket price options. The default for any new route that you create will be 'Auto', which in turn will default to 'High'. But if some other airline comes onto your route and tries to compete by offering a lower ticket price, as long as you have it set to 'Auto' then your ticket price will automatically go down to match theirs. The reason this is important for gameplay is because passengers will be tempted to switch airlines if there is a ticket price differential.
Finally, you may have noticed that advertising became a line item in the financials GUI. That is because advertising is now a slider that you set between 0-100% in order to boost your market power at an airport. More on that later.