Passenger desicions

[slo]

How do the passengers decide who to fly?
What am I trying to do to make someone pick my airline over the ai?
Thanks..

love the game, nicely done.

[revco696]

As far as I can tell, it mostly has to do with "market power." There's two things that control this. Hotels increase it, as does the advertising budget at a given airport. There's also likely final destination factored in. Like if it takes them 3x flights on your airline, but two on your competitor's, they'd likely choose less flights.

[Mike Takumi]

Before anything else, they pick a destination. A bit of combination of proximity and size (of the city dot) for every PAX that spawns. The bigger a city is, the more likely that's ultimately where a spawned PAX wants to go, closer cities also will have more rng weight to them. They can only select airports that are unlocked, whether there's any route to them or not. If not, then they despawn as a turn down.

Then they check if there's a direct enough path. Fairly generous over longer paths, someone going from Africa to China isn't going to be turned down by a route via Moscow. But if they have to fly 400 miles north to a hub to travel 300 miles back south, they will turn that down and decide to drive instead. Note this part doesn't care if it's a 10 hop flight, as long as the travel distance isn't egregious compared to what the "as the bird flies" distance would be.

The previous two are basically absolute. Nothing below matters if the previous two fail. After this point it's much more rng if a PAX will still take a flight and which one they will take. The below are not still generally in order of importance as PAX will still take valid routes that are the worst but mostly will trend towards better ones.

They look at the complexity of the route. Do they need to change flights multiple times? Do they require changing airlines that aren't sharing? The more complex a flight path is, the more likely they will be to not select it, or if routes are too complex, just despawn entirely. If there's multiple possible routes, they will fairly heavily tend towards the least complicated one without the other factors playing as much a role.

They'll look at the comfort of the route. More comfy routes will be more likely to be selected, 100% comfort will be neither penalized or rewarded, and less comfy routes will be more likely to be rejected for another one.

And lastly they'll look at the market power, pretty simple, more MP, more PAX will select that airline from that city.

[slo]

thanks, so to protect your routes, its all about market power?

[Mike Takumi]

In the late game if you still have AI kicking around by then, or in heavily developed areas when both of you have more or less direct routes between all points, yes. Comfort is going to play a fair factor if there's a difference between you and the AI/other players

[CATINRAIN LLC]

Mike is pretty much correct. Though I'll be making some tweaks sometime soon because I'm not fully satisfied with the comfort mechanic among other things.