One thing that finally struck home is that the simulation engine is just too darn complex. Building Soar Beyond has basically been my thesis on aviation, going back to a time in my career when I used to handle aircraft financial forecasts. Our financial forecasts were COMPLEX. At one point, we had a spreadsheet that took a literal 30 seconds to recalculate on any number change (though maybe that is a statement on the fantastic quality of Office for Mac which for some strange reason we were required to use).
When I started building the simulation engine, I wanted to bring in a lot of that. Major maintenance visits are in the game, the costs and downtime get calculated, reserves to pay for the maintenance are collected, etc. A checks, C checks, and D checks all get simulated.
And yet, I’m not sure in the grand scheme of the game how important that is. Because the reserves get collected, the cost of a shop visit is not a major dip in the players’ finances. The aircraft being out of service for 4-8 weeks gets simulated, and a spare aircraft gets pulled in if one is available. And if there is no spare, you see lost revenue. But in a game that lasts 20 years, that 1-2 month blip just doesn’t get felt as deeply as it did for that poor analyst who spent countless nights perfecting a costing forecast over the life of the aircraft lease.
It is one of the core reasons that selecting your maintenance bases became a part of the game. Instead, planning your network so that way routing a plane through a place where you have facilities saves you costs helps bring that critical piece of managing a fleet into more focus.
Still, I love knowing that getting down to those individual heavy maintenance checks and reserve analyses are deep down in the simulation engine. For that younger me just starting out, watching his hair turn gray as he tries to perfect every detail of the forecast, I think he would be proud.