Game Strategy: Circuits
INTRODUCTION
A
circuit, sometimes called a "circle", is
a way to combine routes,
allowing one or many aicrafts
to fly over this set of routes, providing back
a flat offer and a stable income, even with routes longer than 24h.
If we break down this definition, there are a few key points to elaborate:
1) A way to combine routes
A circuit usually combines around 6 or 7 routes. However, not any routes can make a good circuit.
Routes have to be taken based on their flight durations; and the sum of their durations must hit a specific duration (24, 84 or 168).
2) Allowing one or many aicrafts
Once the circuit is constructed, one or many aircrafts can use the circuit.
They are normally added by increment of 1 (for 24h circuits), or by increment of 7 for other circuits.
Aicrafts are added until they consumed the entire circuit passenger or cargo demand.
3) A flat offer and a stable income
This means that your aircrafts flying on the circuits provide, every day, the same offer (no fluctuation day over day).
It yelds to a stable and predictable income every day. In order to do so, the aircrafts are scheduled in a very specific way.
Topic in this chapter:
Note: this section covers specifically long-haul circuits.
For short-haul, please see @shorthaul vs longhaul secion.
CIRCUIT PART 1 - The Basics (24 hours circuit and waves)
To explain the basics of a circuit, lets start with a common example.
Assuming for this example that:
* You just bought the route from ALG to FIH.
* The flight time for your aircraft is 12 hours and 30 minutes (12h30).
* Your aircraft capacity is 500 seats
* The route has a demand of 2000 passengers per day.
Most people at the beginning of the game would try to schedule the route back-to-back for this aircraft, like so:
This has 2 major issues:
1) From Monday to Saturday, there will be 2 departure a day; but Sunday there is only 1
2) There are 5h and 30min of time wasted at the end.
Some people may try to purchase a route of 5h30; to fill the gap at the end.
However, this wont fix the first issue:
the offer is not constant throught the week.
The second route would have only one departure per week, on Sunday; while the first route still miss one depature on Sunday.
- Purchasing an initial route with a different length (a divider of 24, such as 6h, 8h or 12h) woud avoid the time-waste.
The second point could be avoided by using a route of a different length.
However the main point remains:
Because of odd-duration, it is hard to scale (adding more capacity/plane/frequency) while
maintaining an even offer "every day" through the week.
Therefore, doing 2 flights a day is perfect.
However the last day, only one plane took off, so there is a remaining demand of 1000.
This means that through the week, your income will fluctuate.
A simple solution would be to take two planes with the following schedule:
This would become a so-called "24 hours circuit".
Using a circuit like this, you would provide an even offer through the week (same number of departure every day).
Waves
If you have remaining demand, it is easy to add a second, or even a third plane with the exact same
sequence of routes, until you have comsume most of the demand for these routes.
This is commonly called "adding waves of planes" on a circuit.
Important: the flight time for each route depends the route length and the aircraft speed.
Normally you do not mix and match plane modelson a circuit, often due to different aircraft speed.
CIRCUIT PART 2 - 168 Hours Circuit
While doing 24 hours circuit is relatively easy, this is still sub optimal as it limits you to route of maximum 24 hours.
The solution to leveage longer routes is to use 168 hours circuit.
Instead of having one plane doing the same set of route every day,
you have take 7 planes doing the same set of routes every week; where each planes fly one day apart.
To start, you need select a set of unique routes where their total time is 168 hours (ie: the number of hours in a week).
In this example, from GHA: UPG (30h00), OKA(26h45), DPS(29h45), KJT(28h00), MNL(27h30), SIN(26h00) = 168h
Then, with 7 identical plane (same capacity, same seat distributions), schedule them as follow
on this "circuit of 6 routes":
The first plane would look like this (call it: "starting on Monday"):
The second plane would look like this ("starting on Tuesday"):
The third plane would look like this ("starting on Wednesday"):
The fourth plane would look like this ("starting on Thursday"):
The fifth plane would look like this ("starting on Friday"):
The sixth plane would look like this ("starting on Saturday"):
The seventh plane would look like this ("starting on Sunday"):
What is the most important to remember is, each day, exactly one plane among the 7th will take off from a given route.
As before, you can add more plane on the same circuit to consume most demand, however in this case, you need to add group of 7 planes.
3 waves would mean 21 planes where 3 of them follow the "starting on Monday", 3 others starts on tuesday, etc.
This technique is used by most players on AM2, it is the bread and butter to grow your airline:
- enabling routes longer than 24h
- easy to add more planes to consume the entire capacity
- flat recurring income (no offer fluctuation)
CIRCUIT PART 3 - 82 Hours Circuit
This is rarely use on AM2 and not often documented. Still, it is a valid way to make circuits.
The concept is to make a list of routes adding up to 82h, which is exactly half of 168.
Then, each plane will do this circuit "twice in a week".
You still need to have 7 planes, and off-set them like on the 168h circuits.
For the first plane, the schedule will look like this:
Note that the route capacity will be consume twice per day for each group of 7 planes (for each "wave").
This could be useful at the very early stage of the game when you dont have enough money to buy 6+ routes for a 168h circuit.
It may also be easier to find 3 routes with similar demand compare to 6+ (see next section for more details!).
CIRCUIT PART 4 - OPTIMISATION
Making good circuit is often considered an art. There are tools to help making circuit, but nothing can beat a properly hand-crafted circuits.
There are 3 rules (in priority order) to make excellent circuit:
1) Routes with similar demand
2) Long routes but less than 14,000km
3) Maximizing flying time.
Rule #1: Routes with similar demand.
This rule is key for two reasons:
A) Since your aircraft will fly along different routes, your seat configuration will remain the same for all the routes.
Therefore having similar demand across category is very helpful in order to pick the right seat configuration.
B) It is easier to add waves on a circuits when all the routes have a very similar demand.
Example #1
In this example, the route #1 (PVG) has much more demand than the others, while the last one, #6 (YIA) has a demand much lower.
Example #2
In the example above, there is very little variance in economy demand, while there are a bit in business, first and cargo.
With such circuits, it is easy to have a sigle configuration of seats, and add extra waves until you consume ~3450 economy passengers.
See also: Seat Configurator
Rule #2: Long routes but less than 14,000km
This goes two folds:
A) As a route gets longer, it generates higher price (more income).
B) However when a route exceed 14,000km, the bonus of entertainement is dropping significatively (impacting negatively the demand)
Note that it would be difficult to follow the rule #1 (even capacity) while mixing routes longer and shorter than 14,000km (although not impossible).
See also: Route Finder!
Rule #3: Maximizing flying time.
There are a few points here:
A) Minimizing Takeoff/Landing:
In the game, a singe take-off or landing consume 30min of your total flight time
Since a route is a round trip (ex LAX -> HKG -> LAX), it implies 2 take-off and 2 landing, so 2h wasted.
This is indirectly described in "longer routes generates more incomes" as proportionally more time is spent in the air.
If a 168hours circuits is made of 6 routes, this means 2h x 6 routes = 12h are wasted (12h/168h = ~7%).
Meanwhile if your circuit has 10 routes, this would lead to 2h x 10 routes = 20h wasted (~12%)
In addition, each take-off/landing adds extra airport tax. As mentioned in the game menachic section, this is
consider negligeable, although still worth minimizing it.
B) Minimizing non-flying time.
It is not always easy fo find a circuit matching "exacly" 168 hours (while following rule #1 and #2!).
Therefore it is common to have a circuit having 167h for example. That being said, each 1h left out increase your time wasted by ~0.6%
| 168-Hours Circuits Effeciency |
| Actual Duration |
5 routes |
6 routes |
7 routes |
8 routes |
9 routes |
10 routes |
| 168h00 |
94.05% |
92.86% |
91.67% |
90.48% |
89.29% |
88.10% |
| 167h45 |
93.90% |
92.71% |
91.52% |
90.33% |
89.14% |
87.95% |
| 167h30 |
93.75% |
92.56% |
91.37% |
90.18% |
88.99% |
87.80% |
| 167h15 |
93.60% |
92.41% |
91.22% |
90.03% |
88.84% |
87.65% |
| 167h00 |
93.45% |
92.26% |
91.07% |
89.88% |
88.69% |
87.50% |
| 166h45 |
93.30% |
92.11% |
90.92% |
89.73% |
88.54% |
87.35% |
| 166h30 |
93.15% |
91.96% |
90.77% |
89.58% |
88.39% |
87.20% |
| 166h15 |
93.01% |
91.82% |
90.63% |
89.43% |
88.24% |
87.05% |
| 166h00 |
92.86% |
91.67% |
90.48% |
89.29% |
88.10% |
86.90% |
| (Higher the better) |
| 84-Hours Circuits Effeciency |
| Actual Duration |
3 routes |
4 routes |
5 routes |
6 routes |
| 84h00 |
92.86% |
90.48% |
88.10% |
85.71% |
| 83h45 |
92.56% |
90.18% |
87.80% |
85.42% |
| 83h30 |
92.26% |
89.88% |
87.50% |
85.12% |
| 83h15 |
91.96% |
89.58% |
87.20% |
84.82% |
| 83h00 |
91.67% |
89.29% |
86.90% |
84.52% |
| 82h45 |
91.37% |
88.99% |
86.61% |
84.23% |
| 82h30 |
91.07% |
88.69% |
86.31% |
83.93% |
| 82h15 |
90.77% |
88.39% |
86.01% |
83.63% |
| 82h00 |
90.48% |
88.10% |
85.71% |
83.33% |
| (Higher the better) |
| 24-Hours Circuits Effeciency |
| Actual Duration |
1 route |
2 routes |
3 routes |
| 24h00 |
91.67% |
83.33% |
75.00% |
| 23h45 |
90.63% |
82.29% |
73.96% |
| 23h30 |
89.58% |
81.25% |
72.92% |
| 23h15 |
88.54% |
80.21% |
71.88% |
| 23h00 |
87.50% |
79.17% |
70.83% |
| 22h45 |
86.46% |
78.13% |
69.79% |
| 22h30 |
85.42% |
77.08% |
68.75% |
| 22h15 |
84.38% |
76.04% |
67.71% |
| 22h00 |
83.33% |
75.00% |
66.67% |
| (Higher the better) |
We would normally not recommand circuits:
made of 5 routes (at least one route would exceed 14000 km),
circuits with less than 166h
circuit with more than 9 routes.
Considere those as extreme, it does not mean there is no exception.
On the other hand:
- Aim at circuit 6 routes when possible
- Aim at circuit as close at possible to 168h (167h and up are fine!)
See also Circuit Finder
FINAL THOUGHTS
Practical example, what is tolerable?
No perfect science, but here are some rules of thumb:
- deviation of eco pax max ~10%, (lower the better)
- one route could be higher or lower than all others (especially if it is shorter)
- For 168h:
ideally 6 routes, sometime 7 routes, rarely more.
flight time of 167h or higher, except if the circuit is "exceptional"
(extreme high demand but cant make it closer to 168)
- For 84h:
ideally 3 routes, rarely 4, no more
Flight time of 83.5h or higher
- For 24:
ideally a single route of 24h, rarely route of 23.5;
What can go wrong:
- reusing a route across circuit
- different plane model (different flying speed?)
- different seating configuration
- schedule offset incorrect
see also: plane naming convension
AM2: The Final Guide.