Humble Bundle had posted their weekly bundle featuring the Kalypso games. I love time sink games a.k.a strategy games because of its open possibilities and many different endings. This is also the reason why I love games like Chrono Trigger, Dragon Age 1 & 2, Mass Effect 2 (never played ME and I don’t like ME3’s ending). So I’ve picked up 7 games for merely $5.00.
The first game I tried was Disciples 3. This game is too similar to Might and Magic Heroes and King’s Bounty. The big difference is, MMH makes sense and have a very balance progression. D3 is just too bland and difficult for no reason. I mean, my hero is level 1 fighting level 9s…where’s the sense in that? Thus, I deemed thee trash.
Next game I tried is Airline Tycoon 2…and that’s the end of this story. I’ve sinked my weekend with this game and have not tried the other games yet.
Albeit, I’m not actively playing it and just watching a movie, reading and probably taking a nap the whole time (typical airline tycoon day-to-day “work”) it qualifies to my collection of good games. If it can grab my attention for more than 2hrs (I do give any game 2hrs to convince me), it is a good game. So far my tycoon is making millions while one of my competition just reached $1 Billion.
I was playing in the sandbox mode after learning the gist from the tutorial. There are some campaign mission, but I don’t want objectives. This is why I don’t play Roman in Rome: Total War, objectives are annoying.
I choose the military tycoon since I’m a firm believer in discounts, else I won’t purchase through Humble Bundle. Ahem. Anyway, so I choose a route with high demands, LAX (Los Angeles) to JFK (New York) but I’ve chosen the wrong plane. What I found out the hard way is that, I have to make a small calculation. If there are 1000 fliers per day in my route, either I purchase a plane that can make 10 trips with 100 passengers each within the 24hrs period, or 2 trips with 500 passengers each, and everything else in between.
I purchased a plane that can carry 100 passengers, but even with the maximum upgrade, it can only make 5 trips in one day. So it’s either 3 trips from LAX and 2 trips from JFK or the other way around. So I purchased another plane by replicating this one so they both can fly in opposite direction but that only covers 5 trips from both airports. Then I saw my competitors. They use slow, 50 capacity plane but have multiple of them on the same route leaving at 2hr interval each. While my competitors are bulding Embraer 145 planes, I’m trying to have Concords. This is a costly mistake since those planes only costs around $15M, my plane costs $100M each. Ouch. But it’s too late now. Their sale value is only $55M and I’m not ready to lose more money so I’ll squeeze as much cash as I can from these 3 planes. Yes 3, I purchased a 3rd one and was aiming for 4th one before I overcome my stubbornness.
I set the flight plan for those 3 planes and when I made enough cash, I purchased another plane. This time it’s the small one with 50 seats. Then I leased the LAX to HNL (Hawaii) route just to create a competition with my competitor. She was sending 4-5 planes on that route, so I decided to send 4 planes with 2 slow planes and 2 fast planes. Since fast planes can transfer passengers sooner, there are less and less passengers choosing my competitor. After a while, the fast plane is actually doing better than the slow plane, so I will change this to have fast planes once money starts to come in.
One thing that adds flavor to this game is the random events. It can delay my flights due to volcano eruption and hurricane, give a VIP named “B.Favre” *wink *wink* a ride, delivering the Pope to some place or you have a choice to accommodate an extraterrestrial trying to go home.
Before I went to bed last night, I have added a couple more routes and purchased more planes to cover the new routes. However, seeing that my competition is now sitting at $1B while I’m sitting on $250M, it’s not a good game going forward due to my bad start. So I’ll be scrapping this save and restart.
