Having enjoyed Airline Tycoon Deluxe for a long time, I finally downloaded AT2 last week from Steam... (much to my dismay it is being offered there today at 33% of the price I payed then).

This game has everything I wanted as far as customizing plane specs. This was all I felt missing from the previous version. I don't care that the current planes are cartoony and not representative of actual planes in existence. I just wanted to be able to fine tune the specs to fit a route or contract hauls... kudos. This works well in AT2...

Now to my wish:

I hesitate to pack up ATDeluxe and dive into this completely because it is missing one key ingredient that gave the other game an international flair... contracts between airports that are not your home airport.

In Deluxe you could network contracts worldwide and never have to come back to your home airport. In AT2 it appears contracts are only available from or to your home airport, which makes staggering long contract runs hard without long gaps of deadhead runs.

This does not have to be a major new implementation such as adding phones and setting up branch offices... infact the way I would do it within this new existing framework would be to simply add contracts too and from any location that is already rented by the player, and have them appear in the home airport travel agency / last minute / cargo contract list along with the already existing home airport contracts.

Then give it some simple sort functions to sort through all the airports you will eventually have in your network.

This would vastly open up the contract side of this game and give contract players a reason to rent out branches that they currently avoid when not focusing on routes.

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Without these contracts the game feels too isolated to the one airport and has a considerably less international feel than the previous versions.

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I can do without the better financial statements, better loan system, and better stock market of the previous versions. But contract management is exactly one half of the ultimate idea behind the planning and simulation side of this game, the other being route management, and as it stands contract management is so limited that any more than a couple planes dedicated to contract runs will eliminate ALL the good contracts from the game making any more than a couple planes doing contracts useless. At least with a contract network the supply of contracts increases with each branch obtained.

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This is a huge issue for me when deciding which game I want to play, this or the ATDeluxe. That game was much harder to find the exact plane for the job, but much easier to find the job--by virtue of simply having much more jobs to offer.

AT2 has given me the plane-spec diversity I so longed for in that game... but with muted contract diversity I fear that no matter your playing style going in, the game will eventually become a matter of setting up routes and simply spam clicking the end of day.

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For the time being, I am going to stick with AT2 as it does appear to have active and responsive, current development. If it stays in development, I love the potential... But I do have to say, limited contract management is the one thing keeping me from going all in on this game and the only reason ATDeluxe is still on my hard drive.

Each DLC adds some additional features; in particular, the Falcon Lines DLC actually adds branch offices and the last-minute counter, which seems like it would satisfy your request. (The Honey Airlines DLC adds cargo flights.)

You might want to grab them both now they're on sale; it's only $2.71/€2.37/£2.03 for each, and since they're already 66% off, it's unlikely they'll show up in a daily or flash deal.

Not sure if this answers some of your question: If you fly a route more than 50% capacity then other routes open up. For example: Berlin to London. Fly it to at least 50% and then you'll get other flights originating from London, such as London to Madrid.

Yeah, I got both expansions. I understand new routes open up from a city when you have ran the image up on a route to that city. I'm talking about new contracts for the in-between cities that aren't your home port. Say you start in London. You accept a contract to Kingston. Now that you are in Kingston you can either try and find a contract from a near-bye airport back to London, wait until a contract comes up from Kingston back to London which could take many days, or simply deadhead back to London, empty.

But what if you could take another contract from Kingston to New York. And then Pick up a contract from New York back to London. Or even New York on to Los Angeles and then back to London. I enjoy routing here in AT2--I believe the routing screen is a great improvement on the previous editions, heck I'm enjoying almost all of this current game--but the contract jumping was essentially the heart of gameplay for myself in ATDeluxe. Contracts do require a lot more micromanaging, which is what I enjoy. Routes, when optimized become fire and forget. Once you have them in place it becomes a matter of clicking 'next day' after you checked the new days stats right after the meeting. Although they require more work, contracts provide more money per-plane. Early in the game they can really get you to that second or third plane faster than routes. But this becomes limited, as I have mentioned, after a couple of planes due to only one airport providing contracts.

You can do all this via routing but you have to work the airport before this becomes available. And if you are already working the far off airports via routes, contracts aren't as meaningful.