Route economics

Now that we can create routes, it's time to ship some people and take their money! But how many people? How much money? What are the costs of flying a route?

Since this is a video game we don't need to study an economics textbook and derive scientific algorithms, just build some calculations that feel good to play with. Things like bigger cities should generate more passengers and longer flights should cost more in fuel.

We have some general city population data already tho in the future it would be nice to make it grow over time, and add other statistics like tourism and commerce multipliers. I also found a chart of annual oil prices and loaded it in to have a bit of a dynamic fuel cost that will change over time.

Via some very wild guessing, I've setup simple calculations for passenger demand, and fees for the route. For now that's good enough, we can correct and polish the numbers over time.

I decided at this point to just ignore inflation, so we'll see how that goes. It might be nice to think about later to add another variable to the mix. But the number of years a game goes through might not be enough to make it have a real effect on gameplay. It would have a noticeable effect on prices tho, with them no longer being nice round numbers that slowly go up every turn.

And to see the results of this, and to help the player manage their routes, I've started on a overview screen to view all the players routes.