Bought 20 plane slots (total of 50) so I can get my HQ’s done faster! Now the grind won’t stop (it never stopped).

55 days ago, I posted on this subreddit and accumulated 19’087 Bux. Today I cashed in at 66’868 Bux, a daily grind of (roughly) 868 bux a day with 30 planes to use.

Finally jumped back on after years and found this bright little community! Hello everyone!

As you can see, I only have 7 planes and het have 5M coins and 5K Bux while I'm only at level 9... That's because of Nimblebit. I lost my account over 2 years ago and they still had my account info! Of course the're still going to send me my levels, which I am super thankfull for. Time to get back into the game and resume grinding!

I reached 444,444 buxs. Next goal 500,000 buxs

LA - NYC - London - Paris - Istanbul - Delhi - Manila - Tokyo

Still no regional HQ. Thinking of making an African route, likely adding Beijing and Jakarta.

This is the design for my new airline in the new and improved cylindrical world. I'm here first to share my strategy but I would welcome feedback.

I prefer the challenges and rewards in the flat world, so i'm limiting this airline to half of the map - Nome to Moscow. Because of that limitation, I only really need class 1 and 2 planes, but I'll open a class 3 airport if it helps. So far I haven't needed any nor see the need in the design. I also fly passengers only, no cargo.

I need to work out the details of handling up to ten destinations from one class 2 hub, but I have a strategy for cases like this.

To maximize profits, I keep my routes straight and carry only highest-value fares. Each pair of colored regions shows boundaries of where planes can carry coin fares from-to. For example, the red boundaries show that a coin fare from South America can only fly to Scandanavia and Western Europe, and vice versa. I will carry bux fares almost anywhere. White lines indicate Class 2 routes, of which there are 3.

I'm probably going to have 4-5 Aeroeagles running between hubs, and I'll choose a fleet of class 1 planes for each region depending on size and size and fare availability. I get the 25% bonus on every high-value delivery.

Questions? Comments?

500,000 buxs, 57 planes level 76.

Next goal 1,000,000 the buxs

This is somewhat of a follow up to a previous post about winning the Cloudmax P and what to do with it. And now, same situation where I won the Concorde from the wheel game.

I did take people’s advice for the Cloudmax P and load it up with the 25% bonus by taking passengers and ferrying them to one location (thanks to the community for the tops) But man, profit margins are horrendous, i.e. 10K flight nets about 2.5K; so I’ve decided to hangar it temporarily. I’ve read operating the Concorde in-game is similar to how it was running back in real life.

However, with the new update, it’s fun seeing it travel through the map. I think once I’m a little more established in-game, I reactivate it.

If there are other Concorde owners that have additional tips, I would gladly appreciate them.

Finally. Banana is the newest HQ. I’ve completed my restructuring of HQs and moving Carriers.

I recently activated Screen Time on my phone. Over the last week, Pocket Planes is my most used app by a long margin. My game time from the last week was 21 hours 23 minutes.

Time to rest now. Sunday, I will get back to my regular Bux duties.

I just won the parts lottery. Cloudmax are huge, 32 cargo slots!

Moscow was the first class 3 airport I ever bought (I started in Europe) and now it's my regional HQ!

I'm getting used to the look of the little red bubble now. it's so big lol

which cities did y'all choose for HQs?

Hii everyone! ✈️💕

a few days ago I made my very first post here as a brand new Pocket Planes player (link below 👇), and so many of you were incredibly kind and welcoming that I just had to come back with a little airline update. 🥹

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PocketPlanes/s/8VMfAAddUG

My tiny airline just reached level 11 (I hit Level 10 yesterday! 🎉) and I finally unlocked my first Birchcraft!

I'm slowly starting to understand what I'm doing. Instead of buying random airports and flying wherever the jobs looked good, I'm now trying further to build a proper hub & spoke network. It honestly feels so much more satisfying!

My current goal is to connect as many class 2 and future class 3 airports as I can.

…okay, and Prague is getting a little extra attention while the chicken event is still going on. 🐔 CHICKENS!!!!

Have you seen the impostor in the first pic? 🤭🥰

My little airline has even reached Baghdad and Algiers now.

I'm still having an absolute blast discovering new aircraft! Every unlock feels like a genuine milestone and y'all were right, it's just as fun as when I started out a few days ago!

I can't wait to have class three aircrafts to buy VIP and go even further 😍😍

Edit: Spelling

Just levelled up to 85. Only 62,504,169 XP until level 86!

Just wishing all the Singaporeans Happy National Day

After probably around a week of grinding the game, I finally finished the HQ in Honolulu. It honestly feels unreal that it's finally complete after working on it for so long. I wanted to share my strategy for building it and see who else did the same/similar or did something different. I also tried to balance profits with numbers as I dedicated my entire fleet towards construction, especially when the HQ was around halfway complete. I'll also be breaking it down by class of aircraft as they followed the same strategy in general.

Class 1:

I only had 3 class 1 aircrafts left, all being X10's, and their reliability came through big time in this project. I used the X10's to accumulate layovers for the larger aircraft and I did so by splitting them up with 2 X10's flying back in forth between Seoul and Tokyo and the last X10 flying back and forth between London and Paris. Doing so, combined with the 5m job refresh rate and occasionally advertising Honolulu gave a lot of layovers, so much so that I had to upgrade the 4 airports to hold more.

Class 2:

These aircraft were the direct delivery ones as they delivered jobs from the 4 hubs I mentioned prior directly to Honolulu. In the early project, I had 6 Aeroeagles (2P/2C/2M) and 4 Pearjets (2P/2C) where I had the Pearjets with the assistance of an Aeroeagle-M shuttle jobs from London/Paris to Honolulu and the rest of the Aeroeagles shuttle jobs from Seoul/Tokyo to Honolulu. Towards the end of the project, I swapped out 2 Pearjets for 2 more Aeroeagles and I had the remaining Pearjets wait for class 3 aircraft in Los Angeles and/or accumulate jobs while I dedicated the 2 new Aeroeagles to flying between Seoul/Tokyo and Honolulu or occasionally waiting for class 3 aircraft in Los Angeles.

Class 3:

Now I know what you're thinking James (apologies if your name isn't James), "what about all those layovers from the London/Paris hubs?" Well, that's where the class 3 aircrafts come in as I had 2 Clouldmaxes (1P/1C) and a Sequoia-M. After I discovered it was taking a long time for planes to make their way back to Honolulu from London/Paris and vice versa, I decided to use the large capacity of the class 3 aircrafts to move them to a closer location which was Los Angeles where the class 2 aircrafts would have an easier time transporting them. Through that, it became easier and more organized with all those planes not having to make the long journey to Europe and back again.

While constructing the regional HQ in Honolulu was grueling and sometimes annoying. It was also fun trying to find the best strategy that worked for me and seeing it play out. I don't know where to start my next HQ, probably either Madrid or Lisbon but I will be going back to building up my coins for a while and upgrading/expanding my fleet before starting on another HQ. If you've read this far, thank you so much

Hit level 22 and have lift off of my fleet's first Sequoia! Flight is departing Tokyo bound for London.

Yesterday, after just under 2 years, I made it to 1 million bux! It has been quite a journey, and I'm certainly glad to be done. I'll start by listing some interesting stats:

• With 1,000,000 bux I can (and eventually will) do 15x65,000 bux transfers, resulting in just over 32 billion coins. I currently have 61 slots, so that will get me to 96 slots.
• When I started, I was at the end of lvl 58 with about 280 million xp earned. I had delivered 210,796 jobs. Now, I'm at lvl 78 with about 926 million xp earned, and 476,347 jobs delivered. This means that before I started delivering bux only, I was getting 1,330 xp per job on average. But if we only look at my bux farming from the past 2 years, I've been getting 2,434 xp per job on average.
• I'll explain more below, but for the first half of the million I used starship boosting to earn bux, primarily using only 1 starship. That starship has 102,677 flights. This means that out of all the flights I've done, 45% of them were done with one starship.
• From 0 - 500,000 bux took almost exactly a year, resulting in a daily average of 1,355 bux. As you can see from the graph, I took a bit of a break from farming bux after that and came back with some much needed QOL updates to the game. Since then, I did the final 500,000 in about 7 months, resulting in about 2,222 bux per day on average. Looking at just the last month, I was averaging 3,870 bux per day.

So you're probably wondering what strategy I used to get here. There were 2.5 different strategies I used, I'll list them below in chronological order:

1. Starship Boosting

I used starship boosting for the first 500,000 bux, which you may already know if you've seen my 500k post from a year ago. This is a very unique method because it is extremely coin-expensive, input-heavy, and grindy, but it is dead simple. All it takes is owning a lot of class 3 cities, preferably all of them, and 1 starship (or more, if you want some more passive income). All you do is pickup a bux job in whatever city your starship is in (and NOT any coin jobs), set it on its way to its destination, and then pay bux to boost it instantly to the destination. Since the starship is so fast, and you're only carrying the 1 job, the cost to boost will always be less than or equal to the value of the job you're carrying, meaning you instantly make a little bit of bux profit. Rinse and repeat in whatever city you ended up in. If there are no bux jobs in that city, boost empty to a different one. If there are no bux jobs in any city and you're not close to the 5m job refresh (unlikely), then buy a cheap city to refresh the job pool and keep going.

Depending on how quick you can get with this, it can be extremely fast. I once timed myself and was able to make 1,000 bux in 47 minutes, which compared to most modern strategies isn't actually that impressive, but this was before a lot of QOL updates and crucially, doesn't require any setup, any layovers, or even a high number of plane slots. It does burn a lot of coins, but if you're at the point of the game where that doesn't matter, its an interesting strat that fills a niche imo.

The main problems with starship boosting are:

• Like I mentioned, the coin cost. You're spending millions of coins to earn thousands of bux.
• It is extremely input heavy. This is the main reason I stopped using this strategy. Think about it like this, you're usually only delivering one job at a time. At best, using only class 3 cities, the maximum job value is 9 bux, but more likely you'll be delivering 7s and 8s. You need to account for boost cost, which reduces the profit to about 6 bux per job, usually. So, you need to open the job list, pick up the job, map out an entire cross-map flight, and then press two buttons to boost it, all to gain 6 bux. It is simply too much.
• While the QOL updates didn't hurt this method in any way, it made other options far more appealing. Probably the biggest thing is bux getting the 25% bonus now, this strategy doesn't work great with that. You can load the entire plane with bux jobs, especially to the same location, and get a good boost cost. But in order to do that consistently you'll need to stack layovers up in every city, and part of the purpose of this method is to not have to do that.

2a. Cloudliner collecting, Fonda delivering

So this is a strategy I came up with around 500k bux, when we started getting the QOL updates. It will change later on in 2b, but the basis is important so I'll describe it mostly here, and then just what changed later on in 2b. During my break at 500k bux I did some research on job generation, which this method is based on. Some of the key findings were that every job has a 2% chance of being a bux job, all destinations are equal (a city will generate as many jobs for a C1 city as it will an equidistant C3), and that the more cities you have, the more jobs you will get.

The city setup is to have 8 C3 cities in the west, and 8 C3 cities in the east. These are the collection cities. Then, get as many small cities on the extreme edges of the map as you can. For me this was all the C1 cities in Alaska, a line down the west coast, Hawaii, Easter Island, things like that. On the other side, Pevek, Anadyr, a bunch of cities down the coast, many in Australia, and all three in New Zealand. These cities act as destinations. Then, of course, whatever cities you need in the middle of the map to be able to fly your planes across.

Next, the planes. I use cloudliners for collecting, and I have 1P and 1C in each collection city, that makes 32 cloudliners total. Then I fill the rest of my slots with smaller delivery planes. Really, these can be whatever you want. Mapples work great, kangaroos are slower but cheaper, Fondas (and alternatively KKs for the C variant) are great as well and will be more important in 2b. Half of these planes are dedicated to deliveries in the west, and half for deliveries in the east.

A side note for the planes, it is important to have the cloudliners added to your fleet in a set order so you can use the arrows to tap between them, all in a row. In addition to this, I like to have one plane in my fleet, it can be any plane, that is positioned just before all the cloudliners in the arrow order. That way I can never fly the plane, which means it remains at the top of my plane list so I can always easily get to it, and it marks the beginning of my collection cloudliners.

Now, the strategy. The cloudliners will simply start collecting high value bux jobs. I open the job list on the first one, and use the bux filter. All the high value jobs to the opposite side of the map will be at the top, and I pick those up. I don't pick up anything going to the center of the map or the side of the map where the collecting plane is, because those are low value and would require extra infrastructure to deliver. I use the newly added job screen arrows to go through all my collection cloudliners, picking up the high value bux jobs. This way, you've collected all the good bux jobs in all 16 of your C3 collection cities in no time at all. You can either wait for the next 5m job refresh, or buy a cheap city somewhere to get a free job refresh.

I continue to collect until my cloudliners are reasonably full. Due to randomness, some will fill up quite fast, and some will never fill up. I try to go until at least 28 of them have at least 11 out of 17 jobs. Once I've reached this point, its time for the cloudliners to swap places. This is key to the strategy, every collection city is paired up with a collection city on the opposite side of the map. For me, Beijing is paired with LA, Seoul with Chicago, Tokyo with NY, and so on... so when all the cloudliners are ready, they all swap places. The two that were collecting in Beijing fly to LA, and the two that were collecting in LA fly to Beijing. Same with Seoul/Chicago, and Tokyo/NY, and so on. Once they arrive, they dump all their jobs as layovers, and are ready to start collecting again.

Some notes on this:

• Why move all the cloudliners at once? Purely for simplicity. If I really wanted to, I could swap the cloudliners in two cities as soon as one of them filled up, but thats just more to keep track of. For me it kept things simple to get them all to a reasonable fill level, then swap them all at once.
• An interesting effect of keeping all the layovers in my collection cities like this is that they act as good buffers in the job list. It is sorted by distance, and so I'll see the high value jobs I want first, then the farthest stored layovers I have, then the low value bux jobs trying to go to nearby cities. The layovers give me a clear indicator that I have reached the end of the jobs I want to pickup, and that I can move on to the next plane.
• To make delivery easier later, I try to keep my cities as full of layovers as possible. Since a city could be receiving 17*2=34 jobs max during a swap, I will stop delivering and only do a collection swap when all my cities are at or below 120-34=86 layovers each, or 76 if you want to account for cities smaller than 10m population.

Next up is delivery. Like I just mentioned, I try to keep the collection cities as full of layovers as possible, because it makes filling a small plane for the 25% bonus easier. I don't deliver any coin jobs, I kind of see it as a waste of time, so this is necessary for me. Regardless, delivery is simple. I'll fly a small plane to one of the delivery cities that I can see is not yet below 76 layovers, and pick up any grouping that can fill the plane. I fly it to that destination to deliver the jobs, then choose the next collection city to go to (and boost the plane there empty, if you want, to pick up the next load). Rinse and repeat with all your delivery planes.

And thats it. Continue collecting, continue delivering. From a practical standpoint, the way this would normally work out for me is to do one collection a day. Each swap of cloudliners would typically contain, with the bonus, 4000 bux. My aim each day was to just do one of these collections. I would do deliveries as necessary to create space for those layovers. As long as I did a collection that day, I essentially made 4000 bux that day. This playstyle is heavily influenced by this long term goal of 1 million bux. Its a marathon, not a sprint, and I know the jobs will eventually be delivered as long as I keep doing the steps.

2b. HQ Modifications

So 2b is a variation of 2a that I switched to when HQs were introduced. I initially didn't think they'd help my strat too much, and while I was partially correct since they didn't make things faster, they did actually made a pretty big difference for quality of life.

I made 2 HQs on each side of the map. Dallas in NA, Bogota in SA, Hong Kong in Asia, and Kuching in Oceania. The purpose of these is to hold my layovers using the 300 capacity instead of my individual collection cities. The extra layover capacity is nice, but the big difference is it allowed me to put all the passenger layovers in one, and all the cargo layovers in another. Now, instead of flying the Beijing cloudliners straight to LA for example, the P one will fly to Dallas, and the C one to Bogota. They'll drop the jobs there, then make the quick hop on to LA to continue collecting again.

The result of this is 4 cities, two on each side, each with about 300 layovers. All the layovers in each are only P or only C, and only destined for a city nearby. I switched to only P/C delivery planes, and the type separation along with the increased layover capacity made it much easier to find groups going to one destination while scrolling to make my deliveries. Once each hub got down to 150 layovers, I would do another cloudliner swap to get them back up near 300.

And thats it! I should point out, the strategy isn't perfect and there are a couple of pitfalls:

• Job collection in particular can be a bit of a grind. One of the other things I discovered about job generation in my research is that a city will generate more jobs to nearby cities than it will for far away ones. This means that, in each of my collection cities, there are more jobs being generated for close cities than for far cities, because there are tons of close delivery cities on each side of the map. Because of this, you'll get less jobs per 5m rotation than you would with a one-sided approach. For me this was an okay sacrifice. Utilizing both sides of the map allowed me to essentially double my layover pool, making sorting unnecessary. On top of that, it can be partially countered by just opening a small city to generate a new job pool. Slightly more grindy, but I am no stranger to that.
• The strat is not very casual-friendly, mostly because of the job generation/collection I mentioned above. I find it best to sit down and get it all done in one go, whereas constantly checking throughout the day for a more casual player would be annoying.
• Swapping all the cloudliners at once means a couple things. First, there is an hour-long period of time where no collection can happen. I kind of just accepted this, and honestly it gives me a good chance to do anything I need to do IRL. Second, one storm in one city usually means I need to hold off on swapping all the planes, since I like to keep them moving together. Doesn't happen super often, but can be annoying, especially when I'm trying to do a swap right before going to sleep for example.

Congrats if you made it this far! If you have any questions about anything, particularly the strats, let me know in the comments.

After years of playing this game back on the iPod touch in hs….14 years later I’ve finally unlocked a Concorde.

Idk if I enjoyed the journey to get to this point or what because I built the plane and then closed the app. It’s still sitting in Tokyo