So, I get a good location; I restart a few times to get AI to pick crappy locations. Then I proceed to do great for so long, until near towards the end, mostly after 1965, once the other companies (usually jsut one) tends to catch up and then killing my market share on certain routes.

In general, I tend to buy the shittiest planes that go the shortest distances, but that doesn't really seem to help. So, I keep ending up in second, and not getting the winning screen. Is it the planes I'm getting that causes to eventually lose so much in profit and market share?

Thanks in advance.

In scenario one I would suggest that you purchase only McDonnell Douglas DC-8's. Other aircraft might be cheaper, but no other early plane in scenario one can beat the DC-8 for fuel economy, available seating and flight distance. I would also suggest starting in London or New York so that you have the strongest monetary start possible. Because slots in certain cities can be slow to refill, focus on creating routes which use three to six slots instead of fourteen slots. Although we do want some profit -- and fourteen slot routes can certainly generate a bunch of profit -- we also want to 'sprint' across the world as fast as we can. Waiting to build several fourteen slot routes will slow us down to a crawl and allow our opponents time to expand.

On the 'Beginner' difficulty, one of the requirements for victory is to have 2500K passengers per year which equates to 625,000 passengers each quarter during that year. Knowing that, we can use a bit of math to narrow down exactly how many slots in each city we will need and how many planes we need to purchase. A DC-8 that is using six slots on a route and has no empty seats will generate 38,736 passengers per quarter. A DC-8 that is using three slots on a route and has no empty seats will generate 19,368 passengers per quarter. Therefore, thirteen six slot routes and eight three slot routes should cover the 625,000 passenger requirement and then some ( 625000-(38736x13)+(19368x8)). In total we will need 34 DC-8's at a cost of 2108000K which will be purchased throughout our campaign of worldwide domination. Personally I tend to factor in a bit of 'overkill' into the equation in terms of passengers because I am usually connecting the last few cities in the final quarters of the year which means those cities have not been generating any passengers for me during that time.

You can check how many passengers per quarter a route is generating by going into 'Routes' (the first option on the left on the main screen), selecting 'Change', selecting the route you want to check, and pressing the A button once. On the far right side of the screen you will see two num bers. The one on top is the passengers per quarter.

Also, if the white stick figure passengers beneath the green sales bar and red expenditures bar of the route does not fill the entire space, you have empty seats and are not generating the maximum amount of passengers. To fix this you can either lower the price per ticket, remove aircraft or run an advertisement. If you are in direct competition with a computer player, I would suggest lowering the price to at least -15% or -20%. Doing so will generally allow you to scramble back on top and win the battle for more passengers. I would not suggest setting a ticket price above 0% if the route is near an opponent. If an opponent opens a route in direct competition you will then want to lower the ticket price, which means that you will have to do a bunch of menuing that will slow you down. On other routes, adding +5% to +15% onto the ticket price should be fine.

Thanks. I seem to have the basic idea down then. I'm just going to have to better predict what routes are actually going to get competition by the end of the game and preemptively set those prices low so I don't have to menu later on when they get competition, and keep the ones without competition high priced the entire time.

All of appears to go well until I get the competition, and then I appear to lose enough passengers (even when reducing my rates) to hurt my revenue and profit just enough that the other company somehow stays ahead of me. Even when I try to open out new routes on their best routes just to introduce some competition and hurt their routes.

So far in game play, it appears that I "win the scenario." By that I mean, I get my 22 routes, and I get enough money and passenger early on where the advice lady even states victory conditions are already met. But I still end up in "2nd place." This seems to generate a different "end game" screen. I can't find at the moment, as I'm at work but usually talks about "competition happening for the next 15 years" are something. I'm not even sure if that end screen is even allowed for the purposes of a run?

In any case, I'm still slightly under 2 hours. RIP.

Hey, NCH. I caught a good portion of one of your recent streams. Keep up the good work

Ossra laid out a pretty good guide. Definitely stick to it as much as you can.

A good goal would be to have your last turn be January of 1968/1969. After that, new planes come onto the market and really help the competition. If you win within that timeframe, you shouldn't have too much to worry about. Once you have that down, you can use the same strats to try and win after January of 1967.

Keep at it and good luck. Stay positive and don't get discouraged. My first few runs took over an hour. :)