Gerber Baby and Michael Irons

A few years ago a friend of mine mentioned that he had picked up an old Super Nintendo and asked if I wanted to come around and check it out.

What he didn't mention is that he also had a copy of Aerobiz Supersonic by KOEI, which is one of my all-time favorite comfort games. If you haven't played it before, you basically run an airline and set your routes and prices, in a bid to become the biggest airline in the world.

I always call mine The Air. It was funny in the 90s and it's still funny now.

I proceeded to blow on the cartridge and slam it in, zipping through the menus with pizzaz and panache (showcasing my excellent navigational abilities) and launched the game on Supersonic difficulty, the hardest on offer. As I played, more and more people joined to watch including a dude we called Gerber Baby (because he always referred to a gram of weed as a gerber for no apparent reason) and Michael Irons.

Michael Irons name has been changed to protect his identity. A couple weeks later he had an unsettling episode that culminated in him jumping off his second floor balcony naked whilst running from the cops yelling "Don't Shoot My D--k Off!", presumably brought on by an attempt to recreate my epic takedown of Aerobiz Supersonic.

You can hassle Gerber Baby all you want though.

_{Source: KlingAI}

I figured this would be a perfect first post for a new series of making games my absolute bitch, most humbly titled I AM THE GAME GENIE.

As a former EA Game Tester (and Developer) and current POE Ruthless Mode enjoyer (SEE: Superior Quicksteps from 1000 Hillock Kills on /r/poeruthless) I thought it might be interesting to explore and exploit some of my all time favorites in a public forum.

On to the game!

What Does Difficultly Do?

A few common things like smarter AI and way, way less starting cash of course, and one unique thing: at lower difficulties, your opponents will randomly choose home bases and hubs from all available airports. In Supersonic, they will always choose from the top tier airports; New York, London, Tokyo etc.

In theory this makes the game harder. In practice, it just means that if we go on the offensive immediately (which we certainly will) then all our gains are also their losses: if we can completely choke them out on their own turf early-game, they'll have a much tougher time developing their passenger base.

When Do I Start, Boss?

Before you select difficulty, you have to select a scenario, I like Supersonic Travel here, but Airlines Cover the Globe is pretty much the same. The earlier ones aren't as good for our strategy, as we are going to be fielding a single-model fleet and earlier planes have less range.

Next you'll be picking your home base. Realistically, you can pick anything and win, but we're looking to smash, so we're going straight for Tokyo. This gives us a slight advantage over New York and London, because route setup costs increase over time. The base cost of routes in South East Asia are higher than Europe or North America, so we want to lock in those lower route opening costs ASAP before they get way out of hand. Once you choose your home region and city, you earn yourself a cool promotion! All in a day's work!! Phew.

Turn 1 - Setting Yourself Up For Success

We're going to do a couple unexpected things on the first turn.

First we immediately sell every plane we own and buy ten 747s. They have the highest passenger capacity of any planes, which means we can get the most out of every slot/flight. And by only having a single model of plane to deal with, we can very easily optimize our routes. If a route is sitting around 50% capacity, we can remove a plane or two and deploy it literally anywhere else -- you can only have a single plane type per route, so if we eliminate the managing of multiple planes we can just cruise to victory in no time.

Next we look at starting slots. As Tokyo, you almost always start with slots in Fukuoka / Osaka / Sapporo, and hopefully one or two others. Those first three however, we are going to instantly remove. They are such short distances that the income we get from them is negligible, and while they will increase our passenger count, that doesn't help us much in the early game. Give 'em back immediately so you are not paying for them every quarter and forget they exist.

_{Source: Aerobiz Supersonic via Snes9x}

We got pretty lucky here, Seoul and Manila are two very good first slots. Negotiating for a first slot in any airport always takes longer than it takes to add slots at that airport. Seoul is the perfect distance away for a first route and has a huge population -- if it hadn't spawned with open slots I probably would have chosen it in my first round of negotiating anyway.

Last thing we need to do for Turn 1 is send out our 4 negotiators/pawns. I landed New York, Rome and Mexico City as my opponents, which is not too bad. I'm going to flip the script again here and completely ignore expansion in my own region, dropping my pawns in New York, London, Rome and Tokyo. I'm not too worried about Mexico City, they're essentially going to be trying to run routes out of New York which we've got covered.

The reasoning behind New York should be obvious, we want to go straight for the throat and block AirMex and MetLink. London is the best European airport and London->Rome is one of the best Euro routes already. More importantly Rome->London is THEIR best potential route, so we want to immediately throttle that income. We will NOT chase slots in Rome though, we reserve that just for our hubs.

Tokyo is our SEA hub, and more importantly, it's everyone's SEA hub. You can see I start with 36 out of the 122 slots there, I want them all so no one else can have 'em. While you can't completely block them - the airport reserves a certain small percentage for competitors - you can make it so that they are effectively useless. We also want to trigger airport expansions as fast as possible to add more total slots to our hub airports: we'll need 'em soon enough.

As the game develops we'll almost always have someone in London, NY or Tokyo securing more slots. At this point, any normal player (human or computer) would typically start a new route or two, but we can't do that since we sold all our planes.

Turn 2 - 3: Circling the Globe

On Turn Two we receive our planes, and get our pawn back from Tokyo. The other three pawns will still be another three month turn getting those first international slots so we'll need to wait on those and send this guy back to Tokyo for another round of max slots.

We will create new routes to Seoul and Manila though, with one plane each, at 20% above average fare. We will set the flights to 3 each since we only have 3 slots at each airport, but as we go forward, we will match the number of slots to the number of flights possible with one plane. For instance Manila gives us 5 flights with one plane, so later we'll want to grab another 2 slots there.

We're also going to buy more planes. First you want to look at route set-up costs for Tokyo to London, and Tokyo to New York. We won't be able to see (or build) NY to London until we have a hub in one or the other, but we'll guesstimate it to be about the same, roughly 250k each if you're in the 2000-2020 scenario. So set aside that 700-750k, spend the rest on 747s and End Turn.

On turn 3 we build our routes to NY and London with the full 5 possible flights, then send a pawn to each to Negotiate a Regional Hub in those cities. This takes one turn, lets us send flights from those airports, and lets us negotiate for 14 slots at a time instead of 5. We send the other two pawns to Mexico City to steal Mexico's best route as soon as we can afford to, and to a destination in NA. MetLink has routes to San Fran and Hawaii already, but I'm going straight for a close high population center instead, in this case Chicago. More Flights = More Passengers for those international routes.

Routes established and pawns engaged, we're ready to End Turn 3. We'll hold off on buying new planes for the moment until we start making some money.

Oh look we're making some money! That was fast. Not too bad for 3 turns, 4 routes, and 5 minutes of gameplay!

Most of our cash flow is going to come from these international routes; as long as we have passengers flowing in from our feeder lines we're gravy. And that 87.6k profit alone is almost enough to cover the 91k for a route from London to Rome.

We're going to temporarily remove two flights from Tokyo->London and one from Tokyo->New York so we can open that London->Rome and London->NY right now with a single flight each. We'll finish by dropping our two pawns right back into London and NY to grab up as many slots as possible, and that's the end of Year 1 with us already circling the entire globe with Hubs in the top three cities in the game!

Congratulations! If you've been following along at home, you've basically won!

Year 2 and Beyond.

Now things start heating up, but we're not too worried. Our opponents each set up their first international route -- Air Mex predictably flew into NY, Roma went to Tokyo, MetLink went to London. We made some money, not as much as last time, but that's okay, it's all about positioning. We don't have enough to establish NY->Chicago, but that's okay, we should be able to afford it next turn. Once we have 5 flights to Chicago and 5 flights to Rome, we can just keep adding planes to our internationals and watch the money roll in.

For now London pawn is still going, so we're going to drop our three pawns into NY and Tokyo again, and the third into Sydney. From here on out our priorities are slots in NY, Tokyo and London, followed by a new slots in new spots. Money (and soon planes) will be our bottleneck, not destinations. We don't need to go too hard on picking up new locations as much as we need to minimize the number of slots available to the other players in the key regions. That said, some airports take as much as a year to negotiate slots in, so be aware.

Eventually we want Cairo and Tehran as our last two hubs, but the core game here is Tokyo, NY, London and their feeder routes. Oceania, South American, Africa and the Middle East will all be very easy to take over at the end of the game once we are rich beyond our wildest dreams -- we can easily sacrifice all our profits to punching up our passenger counts in the final year; to win you just need to be #1 (by passenger count) in every region for a whole year.

The Rest of The Owl

I'm not going to do a play by play for the whole run, this article has gotten absurdly long already. For the most part it's just a waiting game while we develop our routes and watch the other players flounder about. They will look like they're winning occasionally, but once they burn through their massive bankrolls, they'll start closing routes instead of opening them. We're basically going to spend the rest of the game buying planes and buying routes on alternating turns.

Special events can pretty much be ignored. If some country comes to you, begging, hat in hand, looking for you to donate to their infrastructure project? Tell 'em to shove it. The only exception is the event where a "Representative from [x] manufacturer wants to speak to you." For this one, you get 50% off any purchases from them. So you immediately buy as many as you can of whatever the newest model is -- and then sell them back the following turn for some easy cash. Other than that, ignore events, ignore advertising, ignore businesses, ignore any planes that aren't 747s, and most importantly, ignore anything your advisors recommend.

I will leave a little cheat sheet of my suggested best routes in our main regions, in the rough order I usually select them:

North America	Europe	Southeast Asia
Chicago	Rome	Seoul
Atlanta	Madrid	Hong Kong
Houston	Athens	Shanghai
LA	Berlin	Manilla
Dallas	Frankfurt	Bangkok

The other regions are not even worth listing, because by the time you're ready for them you should have a really good handle on how things work as you sweep your way to victory.

Speaking of victory...