AM4 Info

Beginners Guide and AM4 General Information

A little guide for those airlines that are new to the game and general reference. This basically covers the fundamentals of the game:

Reputation: The higher your reputation, the more passengers you can carry resulting to higher income.

- Purchase up to 9 more hubs. Reputation increases by 1% for every hub you own so having 10 hubs raises your base reputation to 54% permanently.

- Perform Marketing. You have a chance to get 35% maximum airline reputation.

- Perform Eco-friendly campaign for additional 10% . Total : 99% maximum for pax and 94% for cargo

Fuel and CO2 quota: Purchase fuel when the price is below $1000 and CO2 when below $150. You can receive low fuel cost notification on No Access.

Bonus Points: BPs are in-game currency used to buy upgrades. You earn BPs by:

- Flying. You randomly get up to 4BP while departing planes. Adding catering will increase the chances of getting them.

- Purchasing Bonus Packs using real $.

- Winning awards

- Claiming 100 BP from Dev's New Year post on the game boards

- By completing achievements. (You can find achievement solutions on YouTube. Simply google "AM4 achievement guides).

- Occasional giveaways on servers

Best uses of points are:

- Cargo ops (Unlock cargo but wait until you generate enough revenue to purchase one B747-8F every day to start cargo operations)

- Purchase of hubs. (To know best hubs refer to guide Best Hubs)

- Fuel & CO2 tank upgrades

Training Points:

You will receive 1 training point every time you level up in the game. You level up by departing planes. Here's the recommended training order:

a. Management training -> Staff Morale

b. Operation Training -> Technician

c. Operation Training -> Pilot

d. Fleet Manager Training

e. Management training -> Negotiation

f. Cargo Training

g. Catering & Lounges Training

h. Event Training

Fleet Management:

Avoid planes with capacity of less than 50 pax as they do not give substantial income. We recommend you build a strong fleet of BAe-146-300, DC-9-10 or B727-100 (see Routes) to start with. Once you have 60 planes for realism and 100 for easy, then fill the rest of the fleet with MC-21-400.

Awards:

The airplane of choice here is the Embraer Phenom 100, due to its cheap price and very low maintenance costs, you can choose to compete for Best CEO and Best A/C Service awards. You can contact the admins for guidance when you are ready to compete. Upon winning both awards, you can replace your Embraer Phenom 100s with MC-21-400, and then buy 60 of B757F or B7478F/A380F cargo planes and go for Contribution award.

Market & Demand:

The market% that you find in the Fleet/Research/Route Search Tab does not in any way affect the passenger demand to/from that airport but only the resale value of your aircraft. Resale value = Current Value x Market% When selling your aircraft, reroute it to the nearest airport with 90% market to sell it. This is only effective in easy mode since route fee is lower than revenue generated per flight. Check the am4info.com map for the red pins representing the 90% hubs.

General Tips

Aircraft speed (and capacity) is one of the most important factors in AM4. If you have to choose between similar aircraft, always take the faster one (and have a look at engine options, see ‘Aircraft’ section) as long as profitability is ensured. You find a bunch of good aircraft also under ‘Aircraft’, in end-game the best options are MC-21-400 and B747F, though.
Try to buy 1-2 airplanes per day as long as you haven’t reached the fleet limit yet. Your daily income indicates which price class you should choose.
Aircraft hanging around on airports generate neither income nor contribution. So depart your planes no matter how expensive fuel or CO2 is! If you focus on the aircraft listed below under ‘aircraft’, they guarantee for a positive income even with maximum fuel and CO2 prices (£3,000 fuel and $200 CO2!)
From an income point of view, shorter routes are more profitable than longer ones (as long as you manage to keep your fleet in the air).
From a contribution point of view, the best range are routes between 1,000km and 6,000km distance. No matter which plane you use, as long as you make sure there are at least 12 pax on board you will always contribute the highest value to the alliance.
Marketing affects your profits, but not contribution. Saying this, in end-game you can waive marketing if you have enough cash anyway.
If you buy marketing, try to get most out of it. Some key rules could be:
Buy fuel-efficiency marketing (and CO2 quotas) from the beginning. This marketing is not expensive, but generates enough additional income.
Regarding pax and cargo reputation marketing: Try to adapt the length of the campaign to your daily schedule. If you are online all the time for 18 hours, go for the 18 hours campaign. If you are online only four times a day, it might be better to choose four times 4hr campaign (or two times 8hrs). This way you save money, because you don’t need a high reputation when your fleet is flying or on the ground anyway (marketing is only important at the moment of departure).
When you have enough bonus points, focus on purchases in the following order:
- Cargo Option (200 points)
- Increase tanks (400 points for fuel [prioritize], 300 points for CO2) You also need bonus points for new hubs. When buying them, find hubs that have as many interesting routes as possible (best would be 1,000 – 6,000km length while having enough demand to be served all day long). Another tip for realism players in particular: The price of buying a new hub increases with your fleet size. Thus, if you can afford it, buy some hubs before you expand your fleet to save a bunch of money.

Aircraft

Every member is free to choose their fleet composition. Howevere, there are some planes that have proven to be better suiting than others. Much depends on the stage the airline is currently in. As general rules the following shall apply:

When choosing an aircraft, speed and capacity are much more important than fuel or CO2 efficiency. You should have a look at maintenance cost and interval, though. High maintenance cost indicates a long maintenance time, saying your aircraft won’t be able to fly (end generate income) in these hours.
Don't sell aircraft before you have reached the fleet limit. Every aircraft that is profitable (there are some that are not) contributes to your growth by generating income, so selling one before reaching the fleet limit constrains your growth opportunities. You can increase our fleet limit with staff training (pax aircraft +28, cargo aircraft + 10) so that you end up with a maximum fleet size of 238 (178 pax, 60 cargo).

Don't save money to buy expensive aircraft in the early or middle game. Buying cheaper aircraft increases your income growth and alliance contribution much more. Only buy endgame aircraft when you can afford one or better two per day.
Buy cargo aircraft only when you've maxed your pax fleet. Pax aircraft generate more income in general, so try to focus on them first. When reaching 178 pax aircraft, directly buy B747-8F (by far the best) then, you should be able to afford them at this stage. After maximizing your cargo fleet you can optimize your pax fleet (as there might still be older aircraft in it).
Suitable pax aircraft are DC-9-10 (early game), MC-21-400 (middle and endgame), IL-96-400 (middle game), B737-MAX 10 (middle game), B747-8 (endgame) and A380-800 with RR Trent 972 engine (endgame). Avoid Concorde as long as you cannot balance possible losses from it.
Take care about the engine when buying an aircraft, they cannot be changed afterwards. In general, use the fastest engine available. Although seat configuration can be changed later, that costs money and shall be avoided where possible. Try to configure your aircraft in advance, i.e. first find a route (see --> Routes), then configure your aircraft accordingly.
When you have handled the initial bank balance issues, buy the aircraft modifications (10 % less fuel and CO2 consumption, 10 % more speed). But do this only with end-game aircraft that you don't intend to sell any more.
Keep your fleet maintained! The best strategy is to do A-checks before your aircraft get below the 20-hour edge, because an aircraft departure that makes your aircraft go under that mark generates no contribution at all. If you start A checks at about 20-30 hours left, this should work fine.

Routes

One of the most important aspects in AM4 is an appropriate choice of your route network. The best aircraft won’t help you if you choose the wrong routes, while you can nearly always improve your network by finding better routes. It is important to find profitable routes especially in the early and middle game, whereas you can change your focus more to alliance contribution in the end-game when you have a money bin like Dagobert Duck. The following shall help you to find your personal suitable strategy:
You find a bunch of routes in the Codeshare discord guide channel and their am4-bot, and on am4info.com. Try to find promising hubs with several interesting routes. You can also find route spreadsheets in Supernova's discord channel.

• Most important is that you need to know how often you are able to send out your aircraft.

If you manage to go online four times a day, you can go for a strategy where maximum demand needs to be higher than four times your aircraft configuration. Example: You configure an MC-21-400 with 100 Y, 35 J and 20 F seats. If you want to send out your aircraft four times a day (provided that you buy reputation and eco-friendly marketing to reach a reputation of (maximum) 99 %) you need a route with a demand of 400-140-80 at least. Going for a bit more is never wrong, so that if you want to send out your aircraft more often someday, you do not need to re-set up your whole network.
In general, shorter routes provide for more income than longer routes because there is a fixed component in the income formulas. So you get this fixed component multiplied by the number of departures per day. Example: Taking the MC-21-400 from above (100-35-20 configuration), with the fixed components of 170 $ (Y), 560 $ (J) and 1,200 $ (F) in easy game mode (they’re 150, 500 and 1,000 in realism) you get 170 $ 100 + 560 $ * 35 + 1,200 $ * 20 = 60,600 $ fixed income per flight (if your aircraft is fully seated). So, any additional departure per day increases your income by that value, no matter how long the route distance is. Hence, the shorter the distance of your route (provided demand doesn’t run out), the more departures you can make a day, the more money you generate.*
Contribution (total contribution, not daily) only depends on the distance of a route, and it is generated according to linear correlation. But according to some deep analysis, there are five ranges where five different correlations are used: Easy game mode: 0 to 500km: 0 $ contribution per flight 500 to 998km: 1-2 $ contribution per flight 999 to 6,000km: contribution = 0.0064 * distance 6000 to 10,000km: contribution = 0.0058 * distance – 1 10,000km and more: contribution = 0.0048 * distance + 1 For realism game mode simply multiply those values by 1.5. These formulas are not exact and only go for the average contribution per flight. The exact value varies plus/minus 10 %. The approximations are gained from hundreds of observations. They allow for the following conclusions:
- Avoid routes shorter than 1,000km! From an income view they’re more profitable than longer ones, but once you don’t depend on money any more, get rid of those routes as they serve nearly nothing to the alliance value!
- Try to focus on routes between 999 and 6,000km. They provide the best contribution per day ratio.
- Contribution is not dependent upon marketing.
Example: Given you have two routes of 5,999km and 6,001km. According to the formulas mentioned above, you can expect contributions of 0.0064 5,999 = 38 $ and 0.0058 * 6,001 – 1 = 34 $. So, although the routes are nearly exactly the same length, the shorter one generates more contribution. On the other hand, you would need a route of 6,792km to gain the same contribution as with 5,999km. But because you can fly a shorter route more often, the total contribution you can generate per day is much higher than for the longer route.*

Activity

- The most important factor is activity. We all have our private life and this is fully respected. But there are some principles everyone should adhere to:
  1. Try to maintain a certain schedule. If you configure your fleet to a four-departuresper-day schedule, try to keep it up.
  2. Tell the admins when you intend to be absent for a longer time. Otherwise if we don’t get an answer to our messages if someone is absent for a longer time, we do not hesitate to say goodbye.
  3. Use Discord actively. Nearly all communication is done on our Discord channel. If you’ve gotten this guide, you are already on Discord though, well done!

Quick Tips:

You need 10 hubs (base+9) to maximize your permanent reputation (reputation % is directly bonded to % how full your planes will be). Do research. Don't buy just any hub. Find those with great demand. Buy additional hubs asap since their prices grow with every aircraft you've ever bought. (Same with marketing costs so be careful what planes you are buying!)
Choose planes you would like to fly (if you are profit oriented I suggest B727-100 at beginning and MC-21-400 after your daily profit is 3M-5M) Avoid planes with pax capacity lower than 100 (even better have planes pax cap > 120). Higher pax cap - better marketing effectiveness.
Find route suitable to the plane you are going to buy (use bot or am4info.com) - when purchasing plane, set seat configuration according to data you get calculated.
Completely modify your plane as soon as it is delivered. - use marketing! (25-35% category / time is your active time)
Avoid Cargo until your daily income is at least 500M and you have at least 2-3 billion on your account.
Spend BPs for increasing Fuel & CO2 capacities

Alliance Contributions

Just a simple guide:

Number of pax carried: You need to carry a minimum of 14 PAX to contribute to the alliance. So get rid of those private jets and get yourself some profitable planes.
Reputation levels/marketing and revenue generated: Marketing and reputation levels do not effect the contribution. Neither does the revenue or profit you make per flight. This means given the same route distance, a cheap plane with 200 PAX will make the same contribution as a fully loaded A380 with 600 PAX.
Various flight speeds and cost index: We have found that contribution per flight increases up to 3x when cost index is 40-50 in easy and 80-100 in realism. Although speed of aircraft does not have any direct effect on the contribution, they help you depart more often and thus increase contribution.
Hub and base types: The type of hubs or base does not affect your contribution. However, all your routes must originate from a hub or base to contribute to the alliance.
Aircraft condition:
- Wear: Contribution start reducing at 30% aircraft wear. At 50% wear the aircraft stops contributing all together.
- Checks: Aircraft stops contributing to alliance when the hours to check is below 20 hours. So keep your fleet well maintained.
Route distance: This is the main factor in deciding the alliance contribution. Short routes departed multiple times contributes the highest. The ideal range is from 1000 km to 5999 km. For long haul, always go above 10,000km. Distances between 650-999km and 6000-10,000km contribute the lowest and the contribution is zero for flights under 650km.
Flight recall: When you recall a flight, the penalty also includes a contribution deduction. The deduction is in fact more than what the flight contributed in first place. So make sure you do not make any unnecessary flight recalls.
Codeshare: The codeshare numbers shown while departing planes are merely a decorative feature and does not indicate the contributions in any way. So, what is the secret sauce to maximize your contribution?
- Purchase fast aircraft, with speed over 1000 km/hr and increase their speed further through modification. Remember higher speed = more departs = higher contribution.
- Set them on routes between 5000km and 5999km for MC-21-400, 12,000 - 13999k A380-800/B747-8.
- Adjust their CI (as given above) so that the flight covers these routes in 7 to 8 hours.
- Depart 3 times a day.

Which aircraft is ideal for contributions?

PAX:

0. Concorde is the best aircraft for contributions purely due to its speed. You will be able to depart several times a day, maximizing your contribution. However they make a loss and we do not recommend it.

1. MC 21-400: Cheap, decent capacity and fast. It's the obvious choice for everyone.

2. A380-800: Most profitable plane in the game. Finding short routes with sufficient demand will be a challenge.

3. B747-8: Fast, good capacity and good profits.

Cargo:

1. B747-8F: It is the fastest cargo plane and one of the most profitable planes.

2. A380F: Like its PAX variant, this is a very profitable plane with the same challenge for finding routes with sufficient demand.

3. B757F: Although not as fast as the above options, it is cheaper and finding routes should not be a problem.