My thoughts after 24 hours

[SaintAce]

Great game, I bought it during the sale and have been enjoying it a lot as someone who likes city building/simulation/economy management types of games. And while it has some great ideas, it seems to be trying to set itself apart in ways that are unnecessary and even annoying.

1. For one, it's very annoying how events pause the game and interrupt what you're doing, especially to tell you something you can't do anything about, like a city or country is blocked, or that you won an amount of money. I'd prefer a system similar to Civilizations or even Frostpunk, where you have a certain amount of time to click on the event to see more details, but even if you don't, the event still happens along with its consequences without getting in your way.
2. On the topic of the event system, it seems to be very uninspired and repetitive. There's only like 5 things that can happen and they keep looping. Even the more "interactive" choice-based ones only have two possible outcomes, and it's chance. Eventually you learn to game them for the best outcome. It's too predictable which aggravates the annoying factor mentioned earlier.
3. Last point on the event system, I promise. Why can there only be one event happening at once? Especially when you're operating on a global scale, there's always many things happening at any given time. And why are there no political events as well? It would be very interesting to add this dimension, exploring the economic and travel consequences of politics or wars. All you get is quarantine (mainly in Africa), some weird fireworks festival, olympics, new years, and Oktoberfest.
4. The main game mode is too confusing. The tutorial tells you what you can do, but doesn't explain when each action would be appropriate. Like when would I need to upgrade airports vs planes and what's the difference? I had to learn these things by bypassing the main game mode and playing the free play mode. In the main game mode I kept upgrading airports and losing, because the game tells me to "upgrade immediately". There's no hint that maybe you should try upgrading or adding planes instead, depending on the situation. Especially since there's never enough traffic to seemingly warrant upgrading or adding planes. So perhaps the speed of planes can also be explained better.
5. The game becomes extremely laggy when an airport is full. It took me a while to figure this out. After I connected Africa, the middle east, Europe, and Russia, I decided to unlock Brazil. I didn't connect it to my main map at first because it was prohibitively expensive, so I only connected Brazilian cities to each other, and the game slowed to a crawl. Turns out, that's because people in Europe and Africa wanted to go to Brazil, but since there was no connection, they would just fill up airports indefinitely. I had 10x the passenger limit in airports, meaning upgrading them was never going to fix the issue. I had to connect Brazil to Africa and only when all the passengers were able to move did the lag stop and the game performance returned to normal.
6. Eventually, after connecting North America to Europe via Greenland and making my way through central America to connect the Americas, the game crashed. Luckily I had task manager opened which showed me that the game was using half of my available system memory (7.9GB/16) before it crashed with an error about being unable to allocate virtual memory or something like that. I'm not sure if this is a misconfiguration on my part, but it feels like a bug. Especially combined with the overall lack of stability and performance optimizations.
7. The graph menu is a great idea, but it could be a lot more helpful. Rather than listing all routes and planes, it could simply give me a total number and only list problematic/congested ones so I can take action on them without needing to scroll through a list of hundreds or even thousands to find red/orange/yellow colors.
8. Finally, the numbers in the game make zero sense. Why is the game time not displayed permanently in the UI? The events talk about weeks, but the graph menu shows time in 00:00:00 which is not analogous to real world time and even if it was that would be very confusing. Especially since it doesn't seem to count days but instead reverts to 00:
9. Also on the numbers, but not about the time. When clicking on an airport, you see the number of passengers/capacity. Great. But then for each destination, you see a random number like 4. Is that 4 passengers? Then how are they filling up the 10k passenger capacity of the airport? Then in the graph menu, the "load" numbers don't match passenger numbers at all. Is this weekly? Annually? It's all very confusing.
10. Scaling. I feel like the game doesn't scale very well as you expand, making the process of connecting the whole world very prolonged and tedious. I'm not saying I want it to be easy, but as you expand you should encounter new challenges, so money shouldn't continue being an issue when you're operating in multiple continents but still desperately play the lottery of the airshow or pray for compensation due to birds while constantly fearing lawsuits that can put you in the red for several weeks. Whle perhaps outside of the scope of the game, I'd like to be able to tweak certain variables, like pricing, or perhaps negotiate with certain governments for cheaper airports/routes/planes or subsidies of some sort, and deal with the consequences of my decisions. There's just not much evolution to the gameplay once you've gotten the hang of it.