Twenty-four cities in SkyChart carry an economic value of 90 or higher. Riyadh is one of them, and its tourist appeal is 40. The next lowest score in that group is Houston at 50, then Frankfurt at 60. No other city in the game puts that much money that far from anybody’s holiday plans.

A capital with no harbor and no railway

When the SkyChart campaign opens in 1930, Riyadh is a walled town in the Nejd with roughly 27,000 residents. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would not be proclaimed under that name until September 1932, and for years afterward the country’s commercial and diplomatic business ran through Jeddah on the Red Sea, because that is where the ships and the pilgrims arrived. Riyadh sat about 850 km inland with a lot of desert in between.

Oil found on the Gulf coast in 1938 changed who cared about the interior, but not how hard it was to get there. The practical answer arrived as a gift. President Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz aboard the USS Quincy on 14 February 1945 and presented him with a Douglas DC-3, fitted with a rotating seat so the King could face Mecca in flight. That single airframe became the founding asset of Saudi Arabian Airlines in September 1945, and the King’s first flight in it ran from Afif to Hawiyah on 30 September. The airline started life as a government department rather than a company, which tells you what it was actually for.

Riyadh spent the next four decades on a modest field close to the city, sharing the site with the air force. Its replacement was not modest at all. King Khalid International Airport opened on 16 November 1983 and began scheduled flights on 5 December. The site covers something near 225 square kilometers, one of the largest airport land holdings anywhere, second in Saudi Arabia only to King Fahd International up at Dammam. A country that had spent centuries reaching its capital by camel built the runway version of overcompensation.

How Riyadh behaves in SkyChart

The 539-city database starts Riyadh at a base population of 27,000, which matches the real town closely enough. What sets it apart is the growth rate of 0.06. Only 33 cities in the game compound at 5% or better per year, and of those, only Dubai at 0.08 is both faster and richer. Six percent doubles a population roughly every twelve years, so a Riyadh that begins the campaign smaller than a lot of the game’s regional stops passes 590,000 around 1983 and clears 1.5 million by 2000 if you leave it alone.

The isolation is real and the numbers show it. Running great-circle distances from Riyadh across the rest of the map, only 24 of the other 538 cities fall inside the 1,300 km range of the Jäger Ju 52 you can buy from 1931. The Dawson DC-3 at 2,400 km brings that to 57, which ranks Riyadh 244th out of 539 cities by early-airliner reach. Seven of those 57 rate economic value 80 or above: Dubai, Kuwait City, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Tehran, Beirut, and Tel Aviv. The Bering 314 Clipper’s 5,900 km in 1938 finally opens things up to 289 destinations.

Riyadh also is not flagged as a hub. It sits at visibility tier 1, the second prestige bracket, alongside 74 other cities. Jeddah, at 853 km and economic value 75, is the hub, which is a fair reading of how Hajj traffic and Red Sea shipping shaped the country’s air map long before the capital caught up.

Playing a city that pays late

Riyadh in the early campaign will not fill airplanes. A tourist appeal of 40 means almost no leisure demand, the surrounding market is thin, and a route network anchored there in 1935 spends most of its time flying half-empty sectors to Kuwait City and Baghdad. Most players open somewhere with traffic and come back for the Gulf later.

The argument for taking it early is the compounding. Slots are cheap in a city of 27,000, and the 6% growth rate does not care whether you are serving it well. An airline that buys in during the 1930s and holds a small presence through the propeller era arrives in the jet age already established at a city whose population has multiplied twenty times over and whose economic value never dropped below 90. Range is what unlocks it, so the useful question is which airframe finally connects Riyadh to Europe and South Asia profitably rather than which one can technically make the hop.

Anyone coming from Aerobiz will recognize the shape of the bet, since that game also rewarded holding unglamorous cities through decades of low returns. With 539 cities and 144,991 possible pairs, SkyChart just gives the bet more places to pay off.

Get SkyChart on Steam

SkyChart: Airline Executive is a deep airline management simulation spanning five eras of aviation history, from the flying boats of 1930 to the speculative jets of 2095. It’s the spiritual successor to Aerobiz that fans have been waiting 30 years for, now in Early Access.

→ Buy SkyChart on Steam or grab it on itch.io.

Not ready to buy? Wishlist it on Steam and pick it up when you are.