Every so often something lands on your desk that no spreadsheet will answer. The union wants a raise. A supplier offers a discount in exchange for exclusivity. An environmental campaign has picked your airline as its example of the week. You choose, and you live with it.
These are decisions, and they are the part of the game that is deliberately not optimisable.
Decisions are handed out by the world as it ticks forward. Not everybody gets one at the same time, and most ticks most airlines get nothing — the flow is uneven on purpose, so that a decision feels like something that happened to you rather than a scheduled event.
Each one sits on your desk for somewhere between six and eighteen hours of real time. There is no penalty for thinking about it. There is also no way to postpone it past the deadline: let it run out and the moment passes, which is itself a kind of answer.
The same sort of decision will not come back to you for at least a week.
Every decision has two or three choices. You are told what each one is — accept the claim, refuse it, try to negotiate — and given a short line about what that choice is about. You are never told what it will do.
That is not information being withheld for the sake of it. The outcome is genuinely not fixed. Each choice leads to a range of possible results, the ranges overlap between choices, and which one you get is drawn when you decide. Refusing the union's claim might cost you nothing at all, or it might cost you a day of departures and a great deal of goodwill. Both are real outcomes of the same choice.
So there is no correct answer to look up, and this wiki will never publish the table. The most it will ever say is what the game already tells you: this choice is the cautious one, that one is the expensive one, and the third is a gamble.
Outcomes act on the things you already care about:
Grounding is the one that hurts most, and it is worth knowing that it can follow from choices that looked like the safe ones. Grounding your own fleet for an engine inspection costs you a day of flying and buys you something the regulator remembers.
Do not look for the optimal branch, because there is not one. Ask instead what kind of risk you can carry this week. An airline sitting on cash can absorb an expensive settlement and would rather not gamble on a strike; an airline that is stretched may have to take the gamble and hope. A young airline that has not built a reputation yet has less to lose from a bad headline than one that has spent months building brand-loyal traffic — and correspondingly more to gain from a good one.
That is the whole mechanic: not a puzzle with a solution, but a running series of judgements where reasonable people would answer differently.
See also The stock market and Who flies with you.
Start your airline