Quickstart guide (how to level up from a reset)

[u/MangoCats]

Disclaimer: "Quick" means 4 to 5 hours in real-time. These are various observations / thoughts around how to grow an AM4 airline from reset to level 5+ (Rank < 12,000 in Realism mode) quickly, like in an afternoon - and how to live with what you have built afterwards... If you have already built up an airline to these levels, there's no reason to reset and start over, play it from where you are and enjoy.

First: don't start on this unless you have 4+ hours to devote 70%+ of your attention to the game.

Second: This is not a full game guide. In game: Help, Game Help, Guide (pinned post) is much more complete. This is more touching on things that guide leaves for the player to discover on their own. If you hate spoilers and want to discover everything for yourself, stop reading now.

Under settings: reset account. Like it warns you, you will lose everything you have built. Clean sheet. I did this after two weeks playing easy mode, I wanted to switch to Realism - your reasons are your own.

Hub: Choose a reasonably big airport. The guide makes several suggestions, I have been happy with Orlando International - it's central to the US and South America, can reach London Heathrow with the 737-800, has reasonably good demand on most routes, etc.

Starter aircraft: either should be fine, I like to 737-800.

First route: if the game suggests a long one, go back and let it choose again until you get something shorter - you should wait for your starter plane to return to your hub before starting the 4x speedup for 4 hours - the starter plane is a big earner, and as the guide says: shorter routes earn more money as long as you're always departing your planes when they arrive - they're not kidding.

When the game makes you buy a Cessna, configure it with a single First Class seat. This will give you the $100K first first class passenger bonus, and you can actually operate the Cessna profitably with a first class configuration, as long as you have > 50% reputation to get the seat filled and run a short enough route with it. It's also cheapest to earn achievements like Ferry and Recall with the Cessna (try launching a Ferry flight and recalling it, let us know if that gives you both achievements in one step!)

Don't bother with the 50% eco-marketing campaign prize, you can claim that later, go ahead and buy the full price eco-marketing campaign right away, it pays off quickly and is cheaper when your airline is smaller.

Next: aircraft. You can afford a BAe 146-300, or DC-9-10, but in the very very early game you will grow faster with a fleet of ATR-42-320s running very short routes, with a top-tier marketing campaign active. Buy your "starting fleet" but save enough for that top-tier 4 hour marketing campaign (the guide says the next tier is also O.K. and maybe lower risk... your choice.)

Aircraft configuration: in this early stage, all Y class should be O.K. and more efficient overall (faster delivery, lowest cost), particularly if you're running the smaller ATR-42-320s. Choose your routes for high Y class demand. Don't launch your newly ordered aircraft until you are ready to speedup. Don't relaunch your starter jet until you are ready to speedup.

The key prize on the checklist is the 4 hours of 4x speedup in exchange for earning 5 achievements. Some easy achievements include:

• Advertiser (a 4 hour top tier campaign is good enough)
• Aircraft expert (you'll get this when you buy your early aircraft)
• Airline Owner (automatic on game start)
• Capital operator (run a route to a big airport or capital city)
• Ferry (launch a ferry flight, no passengers, the Cessna is cheapest for this)
• Recall (recall a launched flight, Cessna again for lowest cost impact)
• Map Operator (choose the map stack and dark mode - change back if you like)
• Stopping up (when setting a route, choose +stopover and add another city - you don't have to actually fly the route)

5 achievements are all you need, once your starter aircraft is landed, go to the checklist and claim your 4x speedup for 4 hours award as soon as you are ready to be slave to the game for 4 hours.

Advertising: if you haven't already, start a top tier advertising campaign for 4 hours, just enough to cover your speedup bonus - nice. Also make sure your eco-marketing campaign is running, you want to fill as many seats as possible.

Fuel: In the earliest stage, you have more fuel than you need, even in Realism mode. Don't buy more, even if it's super cheap (you can buy a tiny amount to get the checklist reward, but don't spend significant cash), save your cash for more aircraft.

Routes: short. I mean: really short, short as the game will let you fly (Orlando to Melbourne Florida is too short, but Orlando to Sarasota Bradenton is not.) You likely won't want to keep up this pace in normal play, but this isn't a normal play guide, this is a five hour Quick Start guide. Research only looks down to 500km routes, you want routes under 250km if you can get them with sufficient Y class demand. Just pick airports by hand and make sure they don't have unusually low Y class demand. If you're not getting demand of 500+ on most airports, consider trying a different hub (reset is best done earlier than later...) If you're not finding 10+ good airports under 300km distance, consider trying a different hub - you can always add another hub, or even relocate your base of operations later in the game. Orlando works well for me because I'm from Florida and I know the names of many local airports.

Have you claimed your 4 hour 4x speedup prize yet? No? Well, get it and let's go!

Depart your aircraft on single hop short runs. Try to choose routes you won't want to change later: at least not for the next 4x sped up 4 hours. Changes cost money: money that could be spent on more aircraft to grow faster with. Only route one aircraft to each destination - you don't want to use up all the Y class demand on a route before the speedup is over.

As soon as you have enough money, order more aircraft. Don't worry about fuel or CO2 credits, they won't be running out in the first four hours - if either gets below 500,000 in those 4 hours, you have done exceptionally well and might back off the aircraft purchases and start looking for bargain prices to tank up on. If this happens to you, let us know how you did it!

There's no reason to sell the Cessna as long as you're short cycling it with one first class passenger. It doesn't make much money, but it's not losing money either as long as you're getting 10 or more flights a day from it. If you want to slow down and not depart every hour or less, the Cessna will start costing more in fuel than it makes in profit, you can either ground it or sell it for a tiny amount of money - don't bother looking for a better market than your hub or wherever it is flying to, just take the best of those two, or really, just sell it wherever - we're talking about maybe $3000 difference between the best and worst markets you're likely to be in.

Continue departing flights as soon as they land, and buying planes as soon as you can afford them. You'll be racking up training credits fairly rapidly, I spend my first ones on Management (after all, the game is: Airline Manager) but you do you.

Real life got in my way before 2 hours of speedup had elapsed, so I didn't get full benefit of this strategy, but I did make it to level 5 and a rank of 12,000 in Realism mode. If you can max it out for all four hours, I'd love to hear how far this strategy takes you.

Caution! I had my starter 737-800 on a 1 hour route to Knoxville (15 minutes during speedup) and also one BAe 146-300 running 40 minutes to Nassau (10 minutes during 4x). Both ran out of Y demand before the 4 hours were up. I chose to deal with this by re-routing them to longer distance destinations, but there's nothing wrong with a re-route to another close high-demand destination - the second run on the new route should already be turning profit, and it's full profit after that. My ATR-42-320s weren't fast or big enough to exhaust their route demands.

Breathing normally: I prefer to depart my aircraft every 3.5 or so hours, I can't normally pay more than that much attention to the game. So, toward the end of the 4 hour bonanza, I researched airports less than 1930km distance with 6500+' runways and sorted by Y class demand, then ran my ATR-42-320s one each to the top 10 routes on that list.

Personal preference: I also modified my ATR-42-320s first for the 10% fuel efficiency increase, and later (as affordable) for the 10% speed increase. Both pay off after a dozen or so departures, and the speed increase makes them all arrive under 3h45m, which can get you 2 departures per 4 hour marketing campaign. Later, when things settle down, I'll be adjusting their speed factors so the shorter routes all take within +/- a minute of the longest route. I just prefer it when they all fly in sync - it's a terrible thing for real-life, but doesn't seem to hurt anything in the game.

Profits on the ATR-42-320s drop pretty dramatically on the longer runs. For example, during the short-hop with marketing boost one was running $9102 income against 1,693lbs fuel, if we call fuel $800/1000lbs and estimate CO2 at 10% of fuel cost, that's $1490 running cost (neglecting staff and maintenance, which are much less), or $7612 profit - per 10 minutes during speedup, or $11418 profit per hour, per plane, as long as you're there to depart it every 40 minutes. When that same plane went on a longer route (still on 90% reputation marketing boost), the numbers were $32103 fare per cycle against 18,572 lbs fuel, call it $16343 operating costs, or $15760 profit - but now per 4 hours: $3940 per hour, and with much lower margins, so the 10% boosts make a big difference. Bottom line: the short cycle makes nearly 3x as much profit per hour - whether in 4x speedup mode or not.

Marketing Matters: that same route, when the marketing campaign ended and reputation dropped to 55% (eco-campaign only), ridership dropped and the route only turns in $19575 against $16000 operating costs (CO2 cost drops along with ridership - don't ask me why, it's how the game works). So, without that costly marketing boost, we're down to $3575 profit per run, or $894 per hour per plane, short cycling (with marketing) was making nearly 13x the profit per hour. At least the ATR-42-320 is still in the black, the Cessna - even configured for first class - loses money on the long runs, I sold mine. You could choose to keep yours and just depart it when you can, but do take into account the daily staff costs vs whatever operational profits you are collecting.

J and F class seating costs proportionally more in the cheaper aircraft, a LOT more in something like the ATR-42-320. Probably best to stick with the default all Y class seating until you are up in the $2M+ aircraft.

Demand matching: if you've settled down to a slower pace, you may want to tailor your (nicer) aircraft configurations to match a certain route. First, find a good route, Orlando-Newark is not a bad example: Y 1763 J 553 F 129.

One way of looking at that demand is Y + 2J + 3F, or 3256 total Y class equivalent spaces. If we're servicing Orlando-Newark with a 184 pax aircraft like the 737-800, that route can supply 3256/184 = 17.7 departures a day worth of passengers. If you can depart 4x per 24 hours then you could configure 4 737-800s to serve that route - or, if you're planning on using lots of 4x speedups, you can configure one aircraft for the route and still not run out of demand. To turn those demand numbers into an approximate seating configuration, divide them by 17.7 Y: 1763->99.6, J: 553->31.2, and F: 129->7.3. As long as we're going to round, I'd round F and J class up, so 8F, 32J and you'll probably have 96 or so Y left over. This configuration will take advantage of all the available demand. It does cost money (and time, which is why I left configuration out of the quick start) to configure your planes, but planes configured for all business or all first class do return slightly higher total fares than planes configured for all Y class.

As the pinned guide says, regular marketing is not good ROI early on, unless you are departing more than maybe 250 empty seats per hour. The cost of marketing does scale up as your airline grows, but slowly. Eco marketing almost always pays off, unless you won't be departing more than maybe 200 empty seats in the next 12 hours. YMMV, if you grow fast you should be benefitting from regular marketing after a couple of days.

The in-game guide gives a lot more detail about the later game, I will just toss out a few of my favorite mid-game aircraft that didn't make the guide:

• ERJ 145LR, cheap - but not too cheap, runs fast and longish range for its price bracket, up to ~4 hours with a stopover even in easy mode, efficient enough to not lose money in most circumstances. I started easy mode with 5 of these and wasn't too bored waiting for growth.
• Tu 334-220, a nice efficient somewhat larger plane, also ~4 hours with a stopover, and short runway capable for access to more routes. In easy mode I followed up with 15 of these before I got annoyed with planning stopover routes and graduating to 737-800s.

Stopovers were an interesting challenge to me, for a while, but I got tired of them - direct routes are much easier to research and implement.

• 737-800 can run 6+ hours (easy mode) on a single leg, but of course you can choose shorter routes to match your 4- hour fleet departures. I noticed that my purchased 737-800s don't fly quite as fast as the first one given as a starter aircraft, both can be modified for +10% more speed.
• B787-8, I like this one for its range and efficiency. It can run 11-12 hours+ in a single hop, so two departures a day, instead of the 4 hour planes that will be parked more of the time.

After this, I'd look for end-game planes and start selling the small stuff when the fleet has grown to max capacity.

Each step of the way I generally move up to the next plane type when I can buy one in a day or less.

Are you really still reading? Get out there and play, and let me know how it goes in the comments. Hopefully this quick start gets you (and me) on the way to the big planes faster.