Of course game gives the possibility, to build “dead ends”, where pax can not move anymore, see xample of one-way-door to bathroom.
But in reality
So I do not understand, why there is so much worring about “dead ends”.
And for mor complex “misdesigns”:
I have never understood, why pax can not restart their path, if anything malfunctioned.
E.g. if a pax -because of stupid behaivour or “wrong” airport design- suddenly finds itself at a point, where it can only exit a secure zone or can not reach it’s actual destination, out of any reason: Why pax can not reset it’s path, walk back to where it entered airport (bus stop/metro). and there restart it’s path? Yes, there is risk of circulating pax, but this could be prevented by
- if you only allow this reset one time, afterwards giving either an incident report or use a “vanish-solution”
- sooner or later, plane will leave without him, which sets pax to “leave airport”.
- if “leave airport” or “got to entrypoint and restart” (which is in fact the same, here) is not possible, again, pax will pile up and incident report says “can’t find way out of airport”.
So this should work for outgoing and incoming pax.
If I understood devs explanaitons correctly, this wouldn’t raise pathfinding calculations a lot, as these pax would -as usual- calculate one step after the other. Except of massive desing errors - but in these case it normally is very fastly obvious what went wrong. And an “halt-and-catch-fire”-solution for this worst cases should not be too difficult, I guess.
I am not a coder, so I really would appreciate, if community or devs could point out, if there is a massive misunderstanding in this proposal.
In general, all the concerns about players building “wrong” are imho “easy” to solve. There always will be some customers, not willing to dig in deep enough, and finally leaving frustrated. This is imho not avoidable. But you can minimise these, by additional work in tutorial, better incident reports, better/more tooltip-explanations, good FAQs, perhaps a kind of manual, and one or two sample-airports, delivered with the game. With a steep learning curve, when players start the game, they normaly stick with it and dig in and it needs a high level of frustration to step back from it, if they have reached some reasonable succeses before and if there is some additional explanation, they can read up on “advanced features”/problem solutions.
In the end, I estimate 90% of target group of this game will be able and willing to go for this “journey” and finally be happy. That’s not a professional estimation, but my personal experience from playing this type of games for >25years.