After doing much research, both in game and out, I have come up with the following proposition. Flight times between all cities currently stands at 2 hours, unless of course you are flying cross-country, then the timer is 3 hours. What about a shorter time, say 1 hour, between closer cities. For instance;
Between Chicago and Detroit, it is 282 miles.
Between New York and Philadelphia it is 94 miles.
Between Los Angeles and Las Vegas it is 270 miles.
For comparison, from Los Angeles to Detroit is currently a 2 hour flight, the mileage there is 2280.
I am open to hearing any reason that this would perhaps not work. I believe it would be a great help with the game.

A similar idea was previously suggested, and this reply is the one that sums up how I feel the closest;

I've often toyed with this idea, but there are two factors to consider.


Planes in this time period traveled slightly over 130 miles per hour at normal cruising speed. Cars traveled at about 25 miles per hour. So even a flight from Philly to NYC would still be... over 2 hours when you factor time to airport, flight, time to destination from airport.


Also in this time period, most air travel was done during the day, so a flight from NY to LA would take place over several days and be a combination of train and plane :)


We have to also figure out the impact of the profit made from drug sales if we increase/decrease flight times. Right now at 2 hour flights you can only get in X number of drug sales in during a given time period, however decreasing the time required between close cities would mean an increase in the number of transactions you can make - this would probably result in a much great amount of money being introduced into the game. You would think it would be offset by the longer flight times of other cities, however, I would think most people would stop frequenting other cities that have a long travel time unless they have a very specific reason to go there. I think most people would just bounce between chicago/detroit, philly/newyork, la/lv, and new orleans kind of just get stands out on its own.


I think the end result would be that a very large portion of the game would just stay in NY/Philly a majority of the time due to the high crime prices, and the ability to fly faster than any other drug routes in the game.


I'm not sure if this end result is what we are actually looking for.
Reply by: ForkRourke at Feb 10, '09 11:15

You can find the whole suggestion and ensuing discussion here: https://mafiareturns.com/comm/thread/21250