Rookie CEO asks some questions

Airport CEO Support
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Hi there, fellow CEOs. I started playing after a long pause just recently and enjoy what I see. Now - I got some questions on things I might do wrong or could do better or simply do not know the mechanism (yet). Maybe you might be so kind and help me or at least show me where to look.

Regarding GA:

  • How can I make GA happy? They seem to be stuck at 50% and will only drop, if their arrival/departure is delayed by CA waiting on the taxiway.

  • Is there a wise way of implementing or keeping GA at an airport? Sure, this does not earn big cash, but I like the idea of having small planes on my airport being serviced. The thing I have encountered is quite the opposite. Following the tutorial, they disturb my operations at some time and might be responsible for a delay cascade with my CA causing my airport to financially self-destruct.

  • Do GA require inspections by ramp agents? I can give them AVGAS LL for $, but do they need ramp agents as well or might require them, if my airport offers them?

Remote stands

  • linking more than one stand to a bus stop and service car stop causes problems and leaves disoriented ramp agents at the stop. Am I correct to only assign one single stand to each of those to have the game work correctly?

Check-in desks

  • how many do I really need? They eat up a lot of space in my terminal. I can build one per stand but I believe, in case of medium flights and planning the flights temporally separate, it could be possible to use less.

  • do I understand, that employees enter the stand from the front? Just leave 0.5x0.5 behind to make conveyor belts later?

Information desks and boards

  • do they have a reason to exist currently besides being eye-candy?

Fuel supply contracts

  • Do I understand correctly, that if the contract says “we deliver XXX” that this is the maximum of fuel gotten by capacity? So if I were to have 200k of storage tanks I would only pay for 200k but could get up to 800k per delivery if I expanded my tanks?

Employee skills

  • What skills are needed for which job? What are the benefits/drawbacks of having a wrong skillset?
  • Do they improve over time?

Possible bug here:

  • How to break free of CA planes not landing anymore because of “another plane is using the stand or about to use it”? I got this issues in my last 2 airports built and this is frustrating. Even when everything is clear the planes clog up in the sky and none will land causing my airport to commit financial sepuku.

Flight planner

  • I understand that there are benefits in not having all planes land/take off the same time. However, what is a reasonable schedule? How much time between two flights is sufficient? What dangers to avoid with the flight planner?

  • Is variety in the contracts better than quantity? I.e. is it beneficial to have many airlines?

Airlines

  • Do airlines that will appear once a medium stand has been built also offer small flights or are they stuck to medium and larger? I.e.: do they check for my capacities and offer accordingly or just ignore small stands?
  • Why do airlines seemingly reduce the amount of small flights offered if I build medium stands? I can do their small operations perfectly well so why not giving additional contracts instead of removing smaller ones?
  • Do airlines have preferences? In my game I get fewer flights from forest air while CLM throws them at me as if candy. Maple seems to offer me more of the consecutive ones. I just wonder.

That rounds it up for the moment. I would be happy to get some answers here :slight_smile:
Have a nice week.

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GA Happiness: I do not know too much on this, as I am a commercial nerd myself, but I experience an increase in happiness when AvGas is enabled, and the price for that is at least the game’s default or lower. If you manually make it higher, that costs more to the GA; so how do you feel when gas prices rise? :wink:

Remote stands: I have seen, but never done, two bus stops to a stand. I hear it is more realistic than packing 100+ people onto a shuttle bus. I don’t care to configure with 2 bus stops, just to save space. I feel like this would work best with 2 boarding desks, one for each bus. As for service car stops, I have only ever seen you be able to link 1 per stand. However, you can have 1 service car stop connected to multiple stands, and when you do, if a car is stuck waiting for a far away ramp agent, it will wait until all ramp agents coming to it are on board. This means any other cars hoping to use said car stop will have to wait. This is why I always do 1 medium stand per car stop and maybe 2-3 small stands per car stop.

Check-In Desks: Just have 2 per each stand you have, regardless of stand size. We all know here it may not be truly realistic, but the game thinks it is going to have 2 check-in desks for each flight, and each desk only handles one flight at a time. Therefore, anything less, and you run the high risk of getting many notifications that there are not enough check-in desks available during your peak times. Just do 2 check-in desks per each stand for now to ensure your airport operates smoothly. Yes, we all in this forum know the struggle on this one, and it just has to be for the time being.

Info Desks/Boards: I believe you hit the nail on the head for this (for the time being).

Fuel Supply: I believe this is how much they deliver at one time. You will notice that one refuel truck will supply basically enough fuel to fill the initial depot, but none of the expansion tanks (stupidly frustrating if you ask me). Therefore, I notice if you click 2-3x on the request fuel button on the depot, it will request multiple trucks, enough to fill everything. Back to the stupidly frustrating - when this depot completely runs out (meaning the main tank finally depleted, as it is always last), it will receive just one refuel truck, again forcing you to request more. Trucks only get requested for refuel when the main tank is empty; it does not seem to function based off of empty expansion tanks at the moment.

Employee skills: You only need to worry about employee skills (for the time being) for Security Agents. They are the only employees whose efficiency is taken into account based off of their employee skills. My personal rule of thumb for Airport Staff, Janitors, and Security is to have just one yellow bar (the rest green), and the yellow bar can be either of the middle bars, as I personally value the outer bars a little more for employee efficiency, but outside of Security, it is preference. I do not believe they improve over time - great idea!

Possible bug: Not sure I completely understand the issue, sorry.

Flight planner: I find this to be the most intricate topic of the game. I honestly find that the size of the airport, and the location of the stands from the runways affect this greatly. Once a plane exits a runway, I believe its time begins, NOT when it parks at the gate. Therefore, incoming taxi time is taking away from your down time on the ground. I tend to like to recreate realistic airports, meaning a larger terminal/amount of gates, and longer taxi time. I don’t think any of my large-builds had less than 60 min in between each flight. I have a few smaller builds where I was able to get it down to 30 min. Another thing to note is the percentage of passengers in your game settings, as this will also increase plane downtime, as you would have to board more bodies.

Airlines: Yes, airlines that have medium and small aircraft will offer both if both stands are available for commercial flights. You will notice more medium sized aircraft, and I think that is just the nature of the game. I think it is recognized by everyone that if both stand sizes are allowed, you will get both offering, but just a higher amount of medium sized aircraft. Maybe the logic is, almost all aircraft fleets are medium-/large-sized dominant, and one would see them more often with that probability in mind. I do not believe airlines have preference, but rather you are experiencing a “feature” of the auto-flight planner. The flight planner just plops down a flight when it is available, and it is that time in the game to auto-schedule a few flights (it now does a few flights at a time in the auto scheduler, whereas in the past it would schedule all available, causing massive in-game freezes; so I’m sure some randomization is affecting your outcome as well). If CLM has a lot more offered at that point, and more gates are open around the same time frame, it will plop them all close to each other. The flight planner places a flight in the closest available slot; it cannot think to schedule flights “evenly” or distribute them so that they are in gates next to each other. Believe me, the devs have had earfuls one this one, and it is currently improved in comparison to the past.

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Thank you very much. This is very helpful. The issue you did not understand was simply:
No planes on my airport, but full flight plan. Airport open. Still getting a message ‘Flight XX cannot land because its stand (XX) is currently occupied or about to be used by another flight’. Which is somewhat funny, as nobody is on my airport. Like everybody is stuck in the air but cannot choose which one to land first. Runway is at 100% too, so not reason not to land. This happened twice yesterday and ruined 2 airports for me. They will not land and I will go broke. I cannot fathom what might have caused this.

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Is the runway enabled, and enable for the correct plane type? i.e. Commercial/GA? Small plane/medium plane? That and make sure you have an ATC tower. That is all I can think of. Would you be able to post some screenshots? Maybe of the runway pretty close, then the runway + some stands?

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That is the strange part. Everything worked and was enabled correctly. Flights - both GA and CA were serviced quite normally for weeks and yet - out of the blue - it is as if someone threw an iron bar into the cogwheels. I have sent a bug report instead. Maybe, the devs can sort that out.

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That is quite a long catalogue of questions.:thinking:
Unfortunately I can only help out with answers to a few of them.:face_with_monocle:

Regarding GA
I have the happiness issue with GA flights as well. I couldn’t manage to get them above 50% either, lowering the fuel price is the only way I can think of. To at least keep them at 50% I build a separate runway for GA only, a simple grass runway for them alone. And as far as I know, unfortunately there is no way to grant GA’s any service by ramp agents. (I like to have these little birds at my airport, too :unamused:)

Remote stands
I personally use one bus stop per stand. I even go so far as to use a separate service car stop for each remote stand. That way everything is running smoothly.

Check-in desks [EDIT: mistaken info here, see comments below]
I don’t see a reason to use more than one check-in desk per stand, with small stands I even use a check-in desk per two stands (or 6 desks for 11 small stands to be precise). I play on 50% passenger amount per flight, maybe that’s the reason one desk per middle stand and one per two small stands is enough for me.
Employees do enter the desks from the front, don’t worry, they can reach them.
I leave two small squares behind the check-in desks to have one square for an above ground baggage belt and another square for an underground belt. If you directly connect an underground belt to the desk, the transfer opening from above to underground isn’t shown (it might still work, but it doesn’t look good).

Possible bug here
Are your small stands for commercial flights also open to GA. If so, do stands for commercial only and stands for GA only (those for GA can all be remote, I park GAs far away from the terminal where I have space for them). Might solve the problem.

Flight planner
Making money is pretty easy in Airport CEO (food and shops, that’s all I say, food and shops). Therefore I see no need to squeeze as many flights as possible into the flight planner. I use the auto-scheduler and leave the settings in the upper right of the flight planner at 90 minutes between flights and Always delay.

Airlines
If you want the airlines to offer less medium and more small flights, check out the settings at the upper right corner of the flight planner. There you find a slider to adjust the amount of each size you want airlines to offer, small, medium and even large (Well, you can set large to 100% of the bar, they still don’t appear :upside_down_face:).

That’s all little Sepone knows about Airport CEO. I hope it helps a bit.:small_airplane:

Hmm … maybe the taxiway is interrupted somewhere between the runway and the stand. Can happen pretty quickly when building new stuff. Press “T” and check if all the little dots on the taxiway are still highlighted.

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Regarding check-in desks, there are specific requirements. Two for a medium stand and one for a small. You can do some juggling to get better usage out of them though.

I’ll take a further read and update as well.

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Regarding the check-in desks: We build one item. It shows 2 ‘desks’ there with two persons working there. Is it regarded as one desk or two for game purposes? You guys (and maybe gals) are helping me a lot :slight_smile:

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One desk.

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Oops … you’re absolutely right.:roll_eyes:
Your comment made me curious, so I took a closer look at my airport.:face_with_monocle:

First things first, I counted again, and to really be precise: it is 7 check-in desks for 10 small stands.
At first everything seemed just fine, many check-in desks had nothing to do most of the time (NO FLIGHTS SCHEDULED) and I didn’t get any notifications regarding planes couldn’t land or being handled.:innocent:

But … after a while I realized that there are never more than 7 stands occupied at the same time. So, I deactivated auto-schedule and manually placed 10 flights at the very same time.:thinking:

And there it was, a notification I never got before: No available check-in desks for flight number due to no available time slots (more check-in desks required)!:pensive:

Nice, 70 hours into the game and I never realized that…:nerd_face:

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At that point, I would like to thank all who offered help and wish you a happy easter holidays.

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Happy easter everybody!:egg::rabbit:

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And here I go again:

I understand, that we need a conveyor belt system to have 3-Star flights as they want cargo handling. I can set up such a thing, all fine. But: What are the benefits of having scanners currently? Is there a penalty, if illicit goods go aboard or fines? Additionally: we have 3 levels of scanners. Is there a benefit of having them all? I could imagine that using only the lvl 3 will clog up the cargo as manual checking costs time. But what is the reason of having the 5 special detectors AND a generic one? Cargo could go through the level 2s and then have lvl 3 as last check to exclude faults. But having a level 1 when better ones are available? Strange. I do not get it.

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As far as I know, there isn’t any benefit to having them currently other than eye candy

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The level 1 scanner is perfect to sort out possible contraband in the first place, so not all the baggage has to run through your scanning area (and therefore through the manual scanner).

  • I build a level 1 at first, and everything that passes through without complaint goes straight to the baggage bay.:baggage_claim:

  • All the luggage that is getting sorted out by the level 1 gets to the scanning area.:no_entry:

I have no idea what the actual benefit of security scanning is right now, for me it is just building a proper airport. And we all agree: such an airport definitely needs a baggage scanning area.

Happy Easter, and have fun!:egg::rabbit:

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