Increase salary costs & required staff to reduce Op Profit Margin and to closer reflect real world
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Detailed Description
As discussed on Discord, it's still too easy for established players to end up with Operating profit margins of +60%. Revenue Tax was brought in as an arbitrary way to remove cash from airlines to stem growth, which works but it doesn't address the root cause.
Currently, salary levels required to receive 100% employee sat, are too low. Looking at my airline, I pay my flight crew substantially more than required and easily receive 100% sat, $43 per hour = £89,440 per year based on a 40 hour week. Real world, no experienced captain is going to be earning so little. Whilst flight crew is fairly complicated as it will depend on aircraft type and seniority, it would be easy to increase the default parameter to even double this to achieve 100% sat.
Ditto executives, I pay way more than required - $74 per hour / $153,920.00. Again, for senior management, this seems too low. Again, increase the parameter required to achieve 100%. You could also look to increase the number of staff required as an airline grows. Currently, I have approx. 350 aircraft in operation and only require 10 executives and 679 Corp. Operations staff (18% reserve). In total, for the size of my airline I have 10,500 staff which includes generous reserves. BA, pre-pandemic had less aircraft but over 20,000 staff on payroll - not including all of the outsourced staff they use. You can see that would lead to a huge difference in salary cost and therefore hit to the bottom line.
Rinse and repeat for the other categories.
Originally, I thought insurance was too low. But actually in May, my insurance cost was $9m. That would be $108m per year which seems high (but OK).
Maintenance is another obvious one but this is known so won't go into detail as you know the issues.
Context
It will make the expenses of the game more realistic and drive down the Operating Profits that are too high. In turn Revenue Tax could be turned down a bit, so the month end hammering of profit becomes less, as the costs will be incurred throughout the month.
Will help to constrain growth in a realistic way. It will also stop the game almost coming to a halt for the first couple of weeks of the month when airlines are seriously in the red as a result of revenue tax being taken. If the costs per flight / day / week are more in line with real world, it will reduce profit throughout and not result in a huge debit on the first of the month when Revenue Tax tries to readdress the high profitability.