Ooh downloading this!
Edit: my first card is a 1956 Boeing C-135 Stratolifter. Excellent start…
Thanks, I forgot about that post.
What made me give up on battles today was a whale leaving after winning the first 3 rounds (2 by XP tiebreakers). I don’t mind losing so much as not being able to see how close I got.
I saw that today, but not at Monaco. I saw a flight with no destination airport, but it was headed for Montserrat, and the fleet was Airmontserrat. After it landed at Montserrat, the destination changed to Montserrat, and then two more players caught it.
I wasn’t sure how much traffic there’d be to Montserrat these days, what with it being buried by a volcano a couple decades ago. I still need that airport, so I may have to compromise my principles as you described.
I haven’t tried a battle yet; what do you actually do? I know you pick a deck of 5 cards, but I don’t know what happens after that.
You pick a deck of 5 cards, place a bet, then pair up with a competitor. The game is 5 rounds and each player chooses one of the cards from their deck. A card can only be played once.
Each round has a victory criteria based on the highest or lowest of the 6 attributes on a card. If players use the same card, then the card with the highest XP wins. You are told the 5 victory conditions as the game starts. Examples are longest wingspan, slowest speed, heaviest craft. Each game has a random set of 5 victory conditions from the 12 possible.
Whichever player wins 3 or more rounds wins the bet.
Each week the battles have a theme that limits which cards can be used.
- Last week only military craft could be selected. Every whale had a F15 and a drone.
- This week is two-seaters only. Since most and least seats are still valid victory conditions, the XP tie-breaker is the defacto condition.
Each week has a theme for the battles. For example, this week’s theme is “Two Seater”. Your hand may consist only of cards for aircraft (including Santa’s sleigh, it turns out!) that have two seats.
You pick a hand of five cards, and bet an amount of coins. The betting amounts begin at 0, then 5, 10, 25, 50, 75, and finally 100 coins. The game tries to match you with an opponent making a similar bet, but if none are available, may match you with someone who has bet fewer coins than you did - which is how us newbies get into battles with cyber whales with a bet of only 10 coins.
Next, the game randomly determines five conditions for winning. They’ll be conditions based on measurable aircraft qualities such as number of seats (most/least), oldest/newest, heaviest/lightest, wingspan (shortest/longest), and so on. It changes every battle, so you might get lucky that you have just the right planes in your hand for the victory conditions the game has chosen… or they might be things you didn’t plan for in your hand, or that your opponent simply planned for better than you did.
Each player plays one of his cards per condition, one at a time. Whoever has the card with the winningest condition takes that point. If you both have the same condition - for example, both play a plane that has two seats when the win condition is “fewest seats” or “most seats” - then the point comes down to which card has the most XP on it … which is where you see the game’s veterans having a distinct advantage.
It’s still possible, however, that both players have the same card with the same XP, in which case that point is a tie, as shown here:
Best three out of five cards wins the coins bet. If the entire hand comes down to a tie, or if the bet is zero, no coins are exchanged.
Thanks, I had the rule about ties backwards (only for the same card).
I’m currently trying to use the Monaco method to grab the last airport I need for the Maple Leaf trophy (all Canadian Provinces). PEI is all I have left. There is an RCAF C-295 Persuader doing touch-and-goes at PEI Airport. They’ve done 10 so far; I’m hoping they’ll do a real landing there and not just go back to Greenwood Airport in Nova Scotia, where they originated. 
If that doesn’t work out, there looks to be a 737 cargo flight en route to Charlottetown Airport, the only other one on the island.
From my time in USAF:
I think that’s a pretty forlorn hope. Might happen, but not the way to bet. For accounting reasons if nothing else. Their budget is for X hours and Y flights = “missions” per month or year. “Wasting” a second mission by doing a full stop landing, even if they just taxiied back & took off again without shutting down, would be frowned upon.
There certainly are exceptions in early parts of pilot or crew training where going to strange airports and doing everything to complete & re-originate a flight from there back to home is itself a valid training event. But for qualified folks just flying for proficiency, that part doesn’t add much.
Not that it’s relevant to your current quest, but if you found out where RCAF does their initial C-295 training, you’d have a much better likelihood of catching a Monaco from one of the planes departing from there.
There is an A320 right now about to land at YYG.
Yep, I gave up on the RCAF touch-and-goes and grabbed a flight coming in to CYYG. Thanks! Have my Maple Leaf trophy now. I have free travel to CYUL for the rest of the week so will knock out as many Air Canada and Porter Air regs as I can, I’m close to completing the fleets for those two airlines.
Are the weekly missions at airports completely random or are they based on typical traffic? For example with the “catch aircraft X two times”, is aircraft X likely to be around the airport at some point?
In my experience, yes, airport missions can usually be completed with local-ish traffic. I’ve had to buy a range expender a couple of times, and others, I missed out on one aircraft before my 30 mins was up just due to bad timing, but it did eventually show up in the area.
Thank you both for the explanations. Let me make sure I know the full picture. People have hacked the game so that they have cards and points that they couldn’t have gotten legitimately. They use these cards to win battles within the game. Winning battles gets them coins. Those coins can be used to buy things to catch more planes, which they don’t need because they’ve hacked the game.
I’ll probably still try a battle at some point.
I don’t think they have necessarily hacked or cheated, just that they have played a lot since release and they are very far ahead.
Many online games have a matchmaking system based on ELO, or they have seasons that reset progress. SkyCards doesn’t have enough players to do this so the battles end up being a free for all.
Definitely try the battles to see what they are like. They are quick and low pressure. I had fun for a bit until I realized it was unbalanced.
I saw something interesting today. There was a flight headed for Montserrat. The destination was blank, but it was on a direct line for the island and losing altitude, so I figured that’s where it was headed. I was planning to use this technique to capture it after it landed. Then I noticed another plane at the airport. I clicked on it, and the destination was Montserrat. I figured it had landed and I just hadn’t noticed it before, or there was some glitch that had kept it from displaying. I quickly caught it, and added Montserrat to my list of countries and airports. Then I clicked on the same plane and now it had Montserrat as the origin, and someplace else (Anguilla, I think) as the destination. All I can figure is that when the pilot was ready to takeoff and activated the transponder, it still retained the settings from the previous flight (the one that took it to Montserrat). I don’t know if this is a known exploit or not. I caught the other plane, too, so I do have a legit Montserrat arrival.
I got Monaco, too.
Any tips on getting NW Territories or Yukon? I have YYZed unlocked for the week, but maybe I need something from BC?
I’m pretty sure I got all of the western provinces from a visit to Vancouver Intl.
Okay been playing for a few days. I’m well positioned in north London so my circle is basically the entire south east of England which must be one of the busiest and most interesting areas for aviation in the world. It’s not just London traffic but many transatlantic flights to Europe and the middle east tend to also pass higher up above me. There are regular Spitfire flights near London which people can pay to ride in. So I’m closing in on a gold card for that, even though it’s probably not the most efficient use of my photos.
I still don’t get how the airport missions work. I don’t see anything about that. Sometimes it tells me I’ve unlocked an airport but I don’t really know what that means as I can’t take pictures of flights near that airport anyway without spending coins or using a special token.
Also, today’s daily missions including capturing a flight travelling over 600 fps. How on earth will I find one of them? I haven’t seen any planes moving that fast, even when I look over an ocean!
There are two types of airport goals:
Unlocking an airport by capturing a flight with it as its destination; this airport is permanently unlocked for you but you have to pay to travel directly to it
Owning…not sure the right term, close enough…an airport such that, until the next Sunday night reset, you can travel to that airport for free. You must complete all 6 of the airport tasks within the week to do so.
For the latter, it makes the most sense to get them early in the week. Most busy airports I can do all 6 tasks in 15-20 minutes.
Assuming you’ve posted what you mean without typo or confusion …
Feet per second is not a typical unit of measurement for aircraft speed. But 600 fps is a mere 355 knots. Given the details of ADS-B data, the game might mean that qualification as either ground speed or true air speed.
In any case, by jet standards that’s slow. Substantially every jet in climb, cruise, or descent above about 30,000 feet (FL300) will be going that fast. Unless a) the parameter you need is ground speed, and b) they’re driving westboud into a monster headwind.
Eastbound in the jetstream I’ve know I’ve done 550 knots groundspeed which is just shy of 1,000 fps. Pretty good bet I’ve broken the 1,000 barrier at least once in an airliner.