Pocket Planes on iOS (Flight Crew #gamingforce)
 

Since there's a whole bunch of iOS gamers here on Gamingforce I figured I'd start a thread for a game many might end up playing (there's at least a few of us so far). Pocket Planes is the new one from the guys behind Tiny Tower and is a much more solid experience all-round so far and one I'm really enjoying.

Figure if people begin to work things out - like exactly what upgrading an airport does beside allow different class planes through, which is my assumption at the moment - or comes across good tips and tricks this could be a good place to share such information.

Also if you are playing the game then join the Flight Crew Mo0, nutty and I have going: #gamingforce

This game has been taking a huge bite out of my productivity, much to my shame! (Lvl 12 now.)

A couple of things:

Upgrading airports DOES NOT allow for different class planes, I think - black airports will only ever take Class 1 planes. Therefore, I never bought any, and in fact, after saving up money to buy my first red airport, I sold off my starting black airport for cash. At this point, I only have red airports.

Saving money to buy only red airports is slow for the first one, but they have a lot more jobs for your planes. It annoyed me how my starting black airports sometimes didn't have any jobs at all. I think upgrading and advertising your airports might help to increase the number of jobs they have, but I haven't done that - too busy saving my cash for my crazy dash for more red airports.

That said, I'm not really convinced my growth strategy is optimal for making money - long-haul flights cost more, and take more time, which means that per time, running flights between only red airports may not make me as much as if I had some blues along the way for my short-hauls. I'm basically doing this for my sanity.. not having to check my flights every 5 minutes :P Also, it really only is viable in Asia as an initial growth strategy, where there is the highest density of high population airports. My plan is to build a line of red airports across the world for my long-haul flights, and concentrate my short-haul flights around Asia to continue making money that way when I want to.

I started out in Osaka, bought airports in Korea and China and quickly shut down my Japanese operations, though I may go back for Tokyo at some point. My line now stretches from Seoul to Tehran, and I'm probably going for Istanbul after this as I try to expand into Europe.

Also: the world is flat! No transpacific flights allowed, which is lame. Just keep that in mind!

I saw a bunch of my friends playing this the other day and I was wondering what the big deal about this one.

I should be getting an iPad in the extremely near future, so I'll take a look at this game and join up with you guys.

I chose to start in Australia, which is proving difficult to expand out of. I built airports in New Zealand, but most of my planes can't reach it. Now I'm focusing on expanding across the continent, and up into Asia. I just reached level 8 this morning, but once I get back to work and have time on my hands to futz around with the game, I should go way up.

At least with Tiny Tower, the developers released quite a few updates and fixes based on user feedback. I'd hope one of the things they fix is the flat world.

Sadly, it looks like the devs are not really interested in changing that right now, it seems, judging from eeenmachine's post on NeoGAF:

I started in South America, only level 3 right now, but curious to see how the rest of my experience goes. Definitely feels like a game I could get into; after all, I have been playing the shit out of Sid Meier's Railroads!.

These may be obvious to most but thought I'd share some stuff I've figured out since the in-game help isn't overly descriptive...

Layovers
When you look at an airport's details you'll see it has a stay for 'layovers' with an x/y type values. I wasn't quite sure what that allowed and thought it might be the number of simultaneous planes routing through an airport, but what it actually is is the number of items (passengers or cargo) you can leave for later collection. If you load up a plane and fly it to another airport, not the actual one for the contents of the plane, you can choose to unload the items and it'll say in red 'layover' over the item. That'll leave it there for another plane to collect or the same one to pick up later. You can do this for the 'y' number in the layover stat. Can be used to earn the 25% boost by leaving items all due for the same destination in one place.

Edit: Forgot to mention that on the overview map you can also see how many layovers are at an airport as after the population amount will be something like "1L" to indicate 1 layover in this case.

Costumes
This is a bit crap but if you buy a costume it is only for that one pilot alone, it is not transferable to another pilot or anything like that. If you scrap the plane you lose the costumer. What's super crap is that if you accidentally hit the arrows by the pilot to cycle the normal outfits they have available you will also lose the costume. If you remove a costume you have to pay again to get it back: so be careful.

I've been so busy with work that when I do look at Pocket Planes, I barely pay attention to what I'm doing to my planes, so I'm fucking up a lot and sending people to the wrong places.

YOU WANT TO GO TO ISTANBUL? NO, FUCK YOU, YOU'RE GOING TO SEOUL

(This actually happened. :tpg: )

Anybody got a P-40 Warhawk Engine they'd like to trade for a P-40 Warhawk Body (or something else)? I got 3 bodies and one control, but no engine in the Brisbane event.

No, though I do have a Navigator-M Controls I'm willing to gift to someone if they can make use of it.

Can any of the #gamingforce Flight Crew do the current objective? Would be great to get into the top 1000 at least. I have just unlocked Casablanca so will be aiming to try and get as many people there as possible.

Sorry, no. I've conquered Australia, and am on the verge of branching into Asia. On the plus side, you get random parts just in the course of doing the event. Like I said, I got 3 parts from the Brisbane event that just ended, plus the extra part for officially participating. They show up as "mystery parts" and the jobs are coded in yellow.

Ah cool, that's neat. Well hopefully it'll start updating our Flight Crew rank soon as I've just shut and opened some airports to help drive stuff in the right direction.

Not sure if it was supposed to happen but I've been given all the parts to a Huey a couple of times over as a prize for the Casablanca event. If someone has a part or two for an AeroEagle or Pearjet they'd be willing to trade I'm sure we can arrange something if anyone has interest in having a Huey.

I have a feeling that I'm still too early in the game (level 9) for needing any of that. As it is, I'm struggling to expand my empire in South America and now there's an event in Santiago, CHI that is teasing me because I don't have the funds to reach it. And bux, man, they don't come that often, huh?

The Huey is a Class 1 aircraft (2P/1C) but only has a range of 600 otherwise I'd send you parts to help out with reaching Santiago (I'll have a look and see if I can send you something class 1 with decent range). One thing to bear in mind is that if you're waiting on airport slots you can always close another airport; that's what I did to rearrange my set up to give me access to Casablanca).

As for Bux I find that surprising as I've not been finding Bux that much of an issue; I have something like 420 of them at the moment. I tend to focus on completing jobs that reward Bux as they're always useful and despite it looking on the face of it like a loss you have to remember each one is worth about 500 coins so if you needed to you'd get more money out of them in the end.

Oh, I always try to complete the jobs for Bux when they're available, it just seems that they aren't coming around that often.

As for reaching Santiago, there's another city on the way that could help me reach it better, but I still need 30,000-something coins to buy an airport there.

Thanks for the donation though, Ben. I could always use more planes!

It seems like the higher level you go, the more bucks you get. I'm seeing multiple jobs where the rewards are 2-3 bucks.

I think that's based on distance more than level as the 2-3 bux jobs are the longer distance ones for me.

OK I have the following I can gift if anyone needs/wants them:

- Airvan-C Body
- Airvan-M Body

Some additional parts I have to give away:

- Birchcraft-M Engine
- Equinox-C Controls
- Pearjet-P Controls

If I don't near in the next day I'll assume I can just sell them as they're no good to anyone.

Anyone still playing this? I downloaded it the other day cuz I saw this thread and it's been a pretty decent time waster.

I started out in Japan and so far I've managed to just barely expand outside of it by way of Harbin and Seoul. I'm just trying to upgrade my fleet, but I hate how the market can go forever without giving me the parts that I want.

I've rather given up on this now. I was enjoying it as it's a good game but once I got to the point where I had spanned the entire width of the map and found I was generating enough money to re-organise my airports to get anywhere, well the challenge was gone. Whilst I was still growing and expanding I loved it, but there's little to sustain it once you've got an efficient engine going other than to keep it going.

Shame really.

Yeah, I can see that. I think I'm really only playing just for the heck of it. I imagine by the time I get to larger aircraft with faster speeds, I'll have totally lost interest.

Ah well. It still gives me something to do every 10-15 minutes or so.