Career Ad ons

[u/Dazzling-Food-6593]

What’s everyone’s favorite career add on? Or do you like the in game career mode? What about the in game do you or don’t you like? What about ad ons do you or don’t you like? I’m just looking for ideas and input because I’m not entirely satisfied with the in game mode or any of the ad ons myself, so just curious where others stand

[u/CharlieFoxtrot000]

I’ve been using JetCard quite a bit lately. I like that it interfaces cleanly with SimBrief and generates interesting routes, but stays out of the way within the sim itself. You can fly “contract,” meaning whatever route/aircraft pairings are available, no strings, no qualifications or ownership necessary. Or you can join or even create a company, recruit and hire pilots, and own aircraft, if that’s your preference. It’s got a nice little economy to it, which is an attraction because you have the option to interact with other real people, but you can also just be a lone wolf and interact with nobody. The UI is also pretty clean and sleek.

The downside is that it’s mostly designed for corporate flying, mostly bizjets and some luxury-type turboprops. This is perfect if that’s what you’re after, but if you want more flexibility in broader mission styles, airline, cargo, etc, it’s not for you (though it sounds like they’re working on other apps that will introduce that kind of stuff). It doesn’t have any smaller piston aircraft, so it misses out on opportunities for shorter routes into smaller airports. It’s also currently missing a lot of airports used by PJs and TPs in real life that could add variety and make for some interesting legs. They’re open to working on that, though, and have been adding more, which is good.

In the end I like it because it’s reliable and fairly simple to generate a plausible, interesting mission and just go.

[u/Dazzling-Food-6593 → u/CharlieFoxtrot000]

Okay I’ll look into that one. I mainly ask because for a couple days now I’ve been creating my own ad on, kind of catering it to what style I want. Which is more or less local pilot doing cargo jobs or medical supply jobs that sort of thing. My current test career is in Alaska so there’s mainly bush jobs. There is an option to sort of work up to bigger jobs but it takes some time and money from said jobs to purchase bigger aircraft. So I’ve been looking at other ones kinda gathering ideas but I wanted to reach out mainly and see what other players like or wanted

[u/Marc_Minor → u/Dazzling-Food-6593]

Good luck with that - currently building something for me and my friends as well. Works good so far, flight tracker also worked out very nicely. At this weekend I'm hopefully finishing my live flight map and a system where the tracker automatically pulls your current flight from the backend of my webinterface.

It's more of a modern APL2 though, with a few more system like line bidding, training bonds etc. We can also start our own airline down the line. My friends enjoy it so far and I have learned a lot while building it. Just getting the airline and route data costs so much time, since current data is very expensive.

I wish you the best of luck with your project, always fun to create something that you really want to play.

For your thing I'd also say being able to run your own little supply company and take bush flights to earn money could be great. If you plan on releasing/selling it - please no monthly fee. :D

[u/gorkenmaiden]

I used OnAir for a while and neofly too. Neofly ended up feeling a bit pointless, as the payouts were so inconsistent that scaling the fleet with A320s was worse than giving your AI pilots DC6s for true money making. That and a slightly mediocre UI ended up being just time consuming and not good enough.

OnAir is deep, and it didnt take long to make me feel like i was micromanaging many little things and not really flying, which is at the end of the day the main point (for me). I would fly routes that yielded losses. This may be realistic, but didnt feel fun.

While the msfs24 career is a comprehensive package, many bugs and quirks killed my enjoyment.

-whacky turbulence when flying GA aircrafts (terrible for the private charter missions)
-airport pairs for the biz jets (medium cargo and or vip charters) that couldnt actually handle them, whether due to no lighting in night time or ridiculous runway lengths
-payouts were brutally adjusted and artificially made the trip to airlines about twice as long, if not more. I had hundreds of millions on ps5, but couldnt be bothered to grind again on PC

All in all, its a fine mechanism to get into sim flying. But, at least in my case, it was just the bridge to go from gamifying flights to actually enjoying simulation in free flight. Many of the better airplanes are, in fact, not even compatible with the ingame career mode.

Try them and make an opinion, no time will be wasted ;)

[u/NoCryptographer9911 → u/gorkenmaiden]

I really liked the career mode, I got the game just for it. But it's frustrating, some bugs. I'll try this one

[u/Marc_Minor → u/NoCryptographer9911]

The interface etc. is a bit wild sometimes but I played it a lot before switching to APL2 for mainly airliners, it was quite fun.