When in a dive searching for an amusing casual game it’s easy to get lost in the deep and vast ocean of options in the App Store or Google Play. But if you’re looking for something stress-free and all-fun, and your curious and discerning self has lead you to Level Winner, it is our pleasure to introduce you to Airport BillionAir.
Airport BillionAir is a casual tycoon game made by Rogue Harbor Game Studio Inc. which is technically a “young” game development team. As of date, they have released just two games and the other one is called Horse Ranch Tycoon. With both games belonging to the same genre, it is apparent to what the team’s focus and strengths are.
The Business Simulation genre (or tycoon games) is a crowded space and a game’s means to standout is to strike a memorable, humorous approach that players can remember it by. Airport BillionAir presents a fun, user-friendly virtual world that can get players of all ages hooked into it.
In Airport BillionAir, you are in charge of a derelict, one-runway airport (which the game fittingly calls a “dump”) into a fledging aviation travel wonder. The airport starts as almost literally barren with a lot of decommissioned amenities. You’re probably sensing the tall task at hand now. Fortunately, as hinted earlier, Airport BillionAir is a stress-free game with loads of cool features, witty script, and an eye-friendly, almost Nickelodeon-like cartoon style (and humor). That means you’ll have plenty of fun while fulfilling your duties.
So without further ado, let us take you through this Airport BillionAir beginner’s guide to make you more comfortable sitting at the cockpit towards hours and hours of enjoyment.
1. True To Tycoon Game Basics
The premise of tycoon games is to develop a property and turn it into a fledging enterprise and Airport BillionAir sticks to that. Guiding you in reviving the old airport is the game’s friendly guide interface. To improve the property, you should, of course, earn money for development. The cash that you’ll earn would be your means to upgrade and expand the available services to eventually bolster your airport’s earning capabilities.
Starting Out
The character you choose won’t essentially represent you, rather it will be the avatar of your guide or your in-game butler that will introduce the game’s features to you as you make progress. You can choose between a boy, a girl, or cat.
They would all bear the same set of scripts so choosing the one that best suits your preference is totally fine and won’t make you miss any features or “Easter eggs.”
While your guide will eventually present to you some of the features, not everything will be discussed or you might get lured to just tap-spam your way through the speech bubbles (as what normally happens) because we all have the tendency to enjoy and just play, right? That’s what usually happens especially with fun, engaging games.
Yes, Airport BillionAir might be a zero-stress game, but it has a limited in-game help function whenever you need a recap. But don’t worry, we got you covered in this Airport BillionAir beginner’s guide in case you skipped some of the tutorial phases and we’ll make sure to let you know key, “micro” facts to maximize your experience.
2. Familiarizing With The Interface
The top of the screen will show your guide’s avatar and your current level; tapping on the icon or the portrait will open the game menu. This part also displays your current resources: Cash, Passengers, and Review Stars.
Menu and Resources Overview
The game menu will show you Options which will give you a means to contact support, check Airport BillionAir’s compliance to EULA and privacy policies, a general guide, and set your preference about downloading game data.
Mail will have any communication from the devs to you, which will usually be about updates; you can also backtrack there when your first day in the game was. Vault will indicate the time buffer in which your cash inflow will continue even when you are offline. The Vault will be a service that would be unlockable in the early phase.
Cash – your main upgrade resource. Cash is earned by your amenities as you use them to serve passengers. Upgrading your amenities will cost cash. Reviving or unlocking amenities will usually require a lot of cash. In cases where your current cash is not enough to unlock something, the game will be nice enough to give you a time estimate on how long you have to wait based on your cash flow.
Passengers – the number of passengers your airport have served. Like cash, this resource also grows over time, but will not be capped by a similar vault mechanism; this means they will continue to accumulate no matter how long you’ve been offline.
The number of flight routes dictates your passenger flow. Upgrading your amenities will require a certain passenger count; treat this requirement as a proof that there is a need to upgrade—if there have not been enough passengers yet, why would you even upgrade, right? The game will also gladly give you an estimate amount of time on how long you have to wait to serve a certain number of passengers if your current count is not sufficient for an upgrade.
Review Stars – the positive ratings your airport receives for its services and amenities. Passengers will periodically leave star ratings for your amenities. Amassing reviews will improve your airport’s overall reputation which will attract new employees—your airport staff and flight crew. Thus, Review Stars are used to recruit or promote your employees.
The bottom of the screen will have five tabs or panels which lets you to navigate through to key features. from left to right, you have Aircraft Routes, Staff Lounger, a switcher to Airport Map and Control Room views, New Airports, and the Duty Free.
Aircraft Routes
As the main point of an airport is to accommodate aircraft, the Aircraft Routes section allows you to open your airport to more routes and you can open up to six routes in your first airport. Opening routes will mean that there will be more planes that will travel to your airport. Naturally, as there will be more traffic, there will be more passengers which will bring you more income.
Once you have unlocked a route, you can tap on the plane that represents it to check its efficiency output. On the image below is a preview of the Flython where we can see its passenger capacity and cycle time. The details suggest that it brings 15 passengers to your airport every 4 minutes. Routes can be upgraded to increase their efficiency. Some upgrades will decrease the “cycle time” or increase the number of passengers per cycle.
Promoting an Airport Staff can multiply the earnings of the amenity they are in charge of or increase the speed of each cycle; promoting Flight Crew can increase the number of passengers they can carry per flight or make them complete each cycle time faster.
Each promotion will ask from you two requirements: 1) earn a certain number of Review Stars and 2) have enough cards of that particular employee. Unlike cash, passengers, and Review Stars, employee cards are technically just random drops whenever you open suitcases—and they are only available as task rewards (this is something we will discuss later).
If you are itching for an immediate promotion and do not wish to bank on luck, you can “buy” your way through it which will make you spend diamonds. Technically, diamonds are the most valuable and rare resource, they are earnable in the game and you can also purchase as much as you want using real currency. The number of requirements also increases as you progress your employees’ levels.
Airport Map and Control Room
Thetab where you can switch from the Airport Map and Control Room is probably meant to sit at the middle to mimic the nature of the home button on most mobile devices because it is essentially the function that will be used the most. In the said tab, you can open the Airport Map to give you a literal overview of your airport or access the Control Room where you can manage your amenities.
The Airport Map lets you pan up and down to observe your airport and appreciate your work—seeing the amenities you have already opened and see the cash popping out from them every now and then. More importantly, with this view up, you can see upgrade and development opportunities.
Upgrade opportunities will have an animated green arrowhead indicator on them. Once you have met the set conditions to revive certain amenities, you would know your airport is ready to reopen them as they will have a wrench indicator.
The Control Room is where you are very likely to spend most of your in-game time because it is where you can make your amenities work. Your amenities will all start as manually-operated and that means you have to tap the run button for each.
Each amenity will have varying output times relative to how convenient or complex they are to operate or manage in real life. Eventually, you’d be able to recruit Airport Staff to operate your amenities and we’d break these down in this Airport BillionAir beginner’s guide in better detail later.
True to its name, the Control Room basically offers most of the controls points in improving your overall resource earning potential—yes, not just the cash flow. The upper part will display up to three luggage/suitcases, each representing a task.
When you have completed a task, a luggage will be claimable (we’d leave it to you to discover how the game describes the angle about “claiming” suitcases. Clue: it is “not” stealing). If a luggage does not yet bear a claim button, you can tap on it to see what condition you need to meet first.
Opening suitcases gives you the same feeling you get when unwrapping presents — you don’t know what’s inside, but you simply feel glad and optimistic. For a free game, Airport BillionAir keeps the fun level up by keeping the tasks achievable and the flow of resources plentiful. As each luggage represents rewards for different tasks, they can bring all sorts of resource; you can get cash, Review Stars, diamonds, and staff cards.
Below the luggage line, you can find a little wheel of fortune icon. If you wish to maximize your farming potential in Airport BillionAir, do not miss to use this feature. It observes a 24-hour cooldown on your first lucky spin and you get 5 spins each day. The value of prizes scales up in relation to your game progress, which means cash prizes from it will be eventually by the millions if you progress quickly.
Once you have used your first free spin, you can use the 4 remaining spins by watching ads. The length of the ads varies from 15 seconds to 30 seconds before a closing prompt will be available. The potential prizes include cash, diamonds, and rare or epic rated staff cards so watching them is definitely a win-win situation.
Also, what’s good with this feature is that, each spin is a win; there would be no repeat prizes as it won’t stop on an already claimed prize making you always stand a chance to earn the more valuable loots AKA diamonds or rare/epic staff cards.
In the same line as the wheel of fortune you can see the name of the current airport you’re in (you start out with Regional) an upgrade multiplier toggle and a boost. Upgrade level toggle will give you the option to go for a x1, x10, next, and max upgrade.
The x1 simply gives a single upgrade instance on your amenities; the x10, of course does 10. The next and max options are normally useable for when you return to the game after being idle or offline for a while as you would likely have enough resource to perform upgrades—with the next option, upgrading an amenity will upgrade it up to a tier where a task can be met; if there is no task it will simply do a x5 upgrade.
Meanwhile, if the max option is selected, an upgrade will push your amenity to its maximum, possible upgraded state up until your resources allow. Upgrading amenities will make way for them to reach their next level.
The boost feature is yet another generous feature of the game, it lets you watch short ads in exchange of 2-4 hours income boosts–totally a fair trade for your time. You may want to capitalize on this if you wish your amenities to earn more.
New Airport
The fourth tab of the bottom panel will be for New Airports which is technically outside of a beginner’s guide scope. For the sake of giving you a preview, let’s just say it lets you join a periodic event where you should speed run and test your acquired airport management skills on new, barren airports.
We got to add that the devs wonderfully thought it out to only make it be unlockable once you have ranked up to level 12. It essentially closes your main airport (Regional) instance, thus setting you offline for it.
We say speed run because the event will only be open for 48 hours and it will give a set of requirements to meet within that time. The rewards will be in form of resources (diamonds, cash, staff cards, Review Stars) and it offers a lot—but you’d have a limited. If the normal, default mode does not challenge you, this shall.
Duty Free
Finally, the fifth tab is the Duty-Free shop. What good is an airport without a Duty-Free shop, right? In contrast to the real-world Duty Free where what you usually buy are for people outside of the airport, what’s purchasable in it will be the useful resources for airport improvements.
In it, you can purchase diamonds, staff cards, and boosts in the game which you can pay for real currency. The boost available in it is called Time Warp which essentially fast-forwards your in-game timer for the set period an item bears, essentially making you gain a huge bulk of passengers and cash in an instant.
The Duty Free will also let you take free staff cards and suitcases in exchange of watching short ads. The first free suitcase each day, however, will not require ad viewing. We encourage you to maximize this earning mechanism as well.
3. Passive Income, Active Fun
Airport BillionAir is reminiscent to the hit Facebook Game in 2018 called Big Fish. In that game, you buy fishes each with a different gold per time amount and combine similar ones to upgrade them which will increase their earning potential over time. The main satisfaction driver in Big Fish, however, is competing with your friends and eclipsing them in the leaderboards; in Airport BillionAir, there is no such competition because your single purpose is to have fun enhancing your airport.
The amenities (or what the game calls as businesses) in Airport BillionAir is what makes you accumulate wealth over time and just like in Big Fish, your wealth increases even if you are offline—that’s if you have already acquired the necessary staff to automate them.
Each amenity will have a different default cash output and the bigger their potential inflow, the longer it is for them to complete one cycle. No worries as you won’t have to worry about the time discrepancies after you have automated them. Therefore, a major aim for you is to get them automated ASAP.
Opening Amenities and Maximizing them
The first of the many amenities you can open is the vending machine. It gives you quick bucks, earning cash every 2 seconds by default. You can increase its cash flow by adding more items (upgrade). Promoting the staff the assigned to a business will either increase its cash output or cut down the cycle time.
Eventually joining the vending machine will be a coffee shop and a sandwich store. Keep upgrading them as long as your resources allow. It wouldn’t take much manual tapping through before tasks can be accomplished and these tasks are designed to give you the staff cards you need to hire the employees required to automate everything. You will also notice how the names of the Airport Staff and Flight Crew suit them in their roles. We won’t enumerate their names so you can have the fun in meeting them.
Opening new businesses will require a big sum of cash and if you currently don’t have enough, the game will have its friendly way to tell you to wait. It will be a good idea to return to the game after any prescribed wait time so you can open a business and get them started to earn for you.
We cannot further stress the importance of upgrades, just take them whenever available and doable. They are your airports earning lifeblood and your focus should be on them.
By now, you already know about the things that matter in Airport BillionAir and are informed about the different resources, how to get them, and how to maximize your airport’s earning potential. With this, we conclude our Airport BillionAir beginner’s guide. We hope you were able to learn the game basics and have already absorbed the right approach in farming resources. If you’ve been playing Airport BillionAir yourself and we seem to have missed some fundamentals, feel free to use the comment section below. See you in the skies!
heartfilia
Wednesday 11th of May 2022
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