Welcome to Automation: The Car Company Tycoon Game!
(https://i.imgur.com/s1L3C8W.jpg?1)
With your help, it's time to start an automotive company! Dwarves have long been renowned for their craftsmanship in architecture, weapons, and armor, but now we will demonstrate our mastery of engineering by conquering the multi-billion-dollar automotive industry! Or something.
What is Automation? It's an indie tycoon game about building and selling cars. Mostly building them: The game started years back with only an engine designer, then expanded to designing the whole car, and then added the actual business management side. Consequently, the car design is more detailed than the business side, so during a campaign, you'll spend most of your time staring down the car designer. In fact, the campaign is currently called the "Lite Campaign" (V4.0) because there's a lot more slated to go into it. Still, I've had a lot of fun playing it and I want to do a community game.
Also, Automation has my favorite feature of any of the games in the small Car Tycoon genre: The BeamNG exporter. It can export working cars into BeamNG, the soft body physics-based driving game, so you can actually drive your creations. If you have BeamNG, you can drive our awful creations, and wonder why we tuned the suspension so badly.
For this LP, I'll be doing the majority of the car designing- naturally, since there's a ton of fiddly little sliders. Think of me as the engineer. You'll be the board of directors. You'll give directives on what kind of car to design, major features, and how we spend our money otherwise- factory upgrades primarily, but also dealerships, advertising, and R&D.
To start, we need to decide what kind of company we are. I'll run through the basics of how this works, then summarize again at the end. The game normally starts in 1946:
First, our country:
(https://i.imgur.com/vOyvEbC.jpg)
There are five countries:
Gasmea is like the United States. They're the largest country in terms of number of car buyers, and those buyers are relatively wealthy. They prefer cars which are easy to drive, large, and comfortable. They also care about safety and gas mileage. It's also the most expensive country in which to buy land for factories, and labor isn't cheap either. Though they have the biggest market themselves, they only start able to export to Hetvesia. Fruinia doesn't unlock until 1970, and the rest of the countries in 1990, so we'd be selling most of our cars domestic.
Hetvesia is like Sweden. They have a small but wealthy market, and they value safety above all else, although they like good gas mileage too. They also have high labor cost, but the best labor skill level. They start with access to Gasmea and Fruinia, getting access to the eastern bloc of Archana and Dalluha in 1990.
Fruinia is best comparable to Italy. They have a strong taste for sporty and small cars, although they also highly value practicality (number of seats and cargo space). They have a small market but access to Hetvesia immediately, Dalluha almost immediately, Archana in 1960, and Gasmea in 1970. The fact that it can export to the East and West by mid-game makes it probably the best positioned country for exports. It has a small market itself with middling wealth, labor costs, and land prices.
Archana is basically Russia. They are dirt poor, and they only really buy utility, family, and delivery vehicles. They demand offroad performance, and in theory they like their cars comfortable, large, and easy to drive, but in practice they will buy the cheapest car you can put on the market. They have very weak safety laws and are the last country to ban leaded gas. Land and labor are both cheap, so it's a VERY appealing place to build a factory, but it has limited export: they start only with access to Dalluha, then Fruinia in 1960, and gain access to Hetvesia and Gasmea in 1990.
Dalluha is a filthy rich tax haven. They have the smallest, wealthiest market by far. They strongly prefer their vehicles to be as large and comfortable as possible, many of them will probably be driven by chauffeurs. It's only really profitable to sell to the Luxury and GT markets here, because the market sizes are small. They basically have the same export opportunities as Archana, being cut off from Hetvesia and Gasmea until 1990, but they do get access to Fruinia in 1950. Land and labor are expensive here.
Once we choose a country we need to choose a difficulty:
(https://i.imgur.com/9VUEUxv.jpg?1)
Everything we choose affects our score multiplier, if we care about getting a high score. Competition determines how good our competitor cars are. Most difficulties have this at less than 100%, but I like to leave it at 100% so we actually have to make good cars. Technology affects the quality of every component in the car, and the year at which certain features unlock. For example, bottom end affects how much power our pistons can take so it's good for performance cars. Fuel system affects fuel efficiency and power, transmission is most useful for unlocking front wheel drive and automatic transmissions early, and Body lets us unlock new shapes for our car early. This is by exactly 1 year ahead per tech level, and it can be a big effect. We can also get tech through R&D, after the game starts, but it costs us lots of money every month just to keep our tech level and stay ahead. Dealerships work similarly, they have a constant monthly cost and we can start with a higher base level.
The REAL determination of difficulty is our starting factory size. We need at least a Medium factory to build cars with steel body panels. This is the minimum size to add Steel Presses, and it's absolutely 100% necessary to target low or medium priced demographics, such as Family. By comparison, a Small factory can only work with aluminum in the early game- this limits us only to expensive demographics, and smaller numbers of cars. It takes a LOT of money to make cheap cars, and if you don't have a lot of money, you have to make expensive cars!
Main options would be:
Easy: Start with a large factory and tech. We'd basically be Ford or GM. People will have to buy our cars no matter how bad they are.
Medium Difficulty: Start with a Medium factory, money, and tech. Basically can't go wrong, good if you want a lot of input to make stupid cars though.
Hard Mode: Start with a medium factory, but no money or tech. The bare minimum to sell to large demographics like Family. This will probably produce the highest score, and it means we have to be savvy but we aren't restricted to luxury cars.
Super Cars: Start with money and tech so the game will be easy, but only a small factory. Good if you want to make the fastest car in the world.
Very Hard: No money or tech and a small factory. The Ferrari Experience.
Ultimate Insane: Start with $50M and no factory or land at all, in Dalluha if we want the highest score multiplier. We're just a rich person with dreams of entering the auto industry. One wrong move could bankrupt us and it will be touch and go the whole way, but it will certainly be dramatic.
DeLorean Challenge: Start in 1975 in Gasmea with $250M and a only a little tech. Can we live the dream of starting a new super car company, or is it too late to get into the industry?
Finally we need to decide what kind of cars we want to make first. Certain countries start with markets for certain kinds of cars, and then the rest unlock later. For example, Fruinia starts with no demand for regular Utility (trucks). Super Cars aren't in demand in any country until a few years after the start, and Hyper Cars come later. Remember, demographics like "family" and "utility" necessitate a Medium factory or larger.
There are a bunch of little variations, like convertibles and premium versions of main types, but the major groups are:
-Family cars
-City cars (small, saves gas)
-Premium/Luxury cars
-Sports cars (affordable for regular people, usually steel)
-Utility vehicles (trucks)
-Grand Touring (GT)- big, fast vehicles for highway use, can do with a small factory
-Track Cars- a very small demographic, I've never started off with track cars but I'm told it is possible.
If you want to get nitty gritty, here are the number of buyers (monthly) in each demographic in 1946, the start of the game. Many cars will sell to multiple demographics.
(https://i.imgur.com/ydOWRav.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/eOSfUQM.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/GsIoZyc.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/T263zv2.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/KZR91hB.jpg)
Let's get started!
Cast your vote for:
Country,
Difficulty,
and Car Type (you don't have to use specific game terms).
Most of all, what should we name our company?
If we want, we can even try making up a challenge- such as having to build the fastest car in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_car_speed_record) for every year, or trying to see if we can convince the world to keep buying RWD manual station wagons until 2020.
It looks like we're settled on Hard Mode. That means we'll have a medium factory and can sell to regular demographics, but we're not so rich as to have a big advantage over our competitors. Our nationality is down to just Fruinia or Archana- with two definite votes for Fruinia and just one for Archana, that seems to make Fruinia the decision!
The Bay 12 Motor Company: Founded in Fruinia, 1946
(https://i.imgur.com/XZirB5X.jpg?1)
After the war, the Bay 12 Motor Company has very few assets. As you can see, our "family connections" have sold off our dealerships to competitors, at least the ones that weren't confiscated for use as army motor pools- we have no dealerships. In terms of the consumer auto industry, we have only base level tech. Furthermore, we have no liquid assets to speak of.
That's all going to be okay though! We aren't ruined yet! We have... our factory!
(https://i.imgur.com/VdrxrbO.jpg)
It's a Medium 1 Car Factory with steel presses. That will let us make steel-bodied cars for regular consumers, probably around 2000 per month! We also have a Medium 1 Engine Factory, with iron casting facilities. These are respectively called Car Factory 1 and Engine Factory 1, in accordance with Fruinian military regulations. Those are over now, so I propose we come up with new names for our factories.
If we're penniless, how can we afford to manufacture cars? Well, that's simple. Here's a cut of the Hub screen (most of the information is blank until time starts passing).
(https://i.imgur.com/uEWIi65.jpg?1)
See where it says $1.4B? That's our Company Valuation- the worth of all of our assets, which right now is just our two factories and the property they're built on. That's 1,400,000,000 dollars, which is nothing to sneeze at. We also have a credit rating: A+. I don't know exactly how that's calculated, but it has to do with the ratio of our assets to our liabilities (debt) as well as profit projections, I think. In any case, this basically means that the Fruinian National Bank is willing to let us take out hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, because they can repossess the factories if we fail to pay them. That way we will have enough money to design our car, tool our factory, build dealerships, and pay our workers until we start turning a profit. Hopefully.
Now, we need to design a car.
This was something we didn't discuss much yet. We can currently sell to Fruinia and our neighboring country Hetvesia, which gives us a lot of opportunity. There's two important pieces of market research I need to show you. The first is the sizes of each demographic we can sell to, in cars purchased per month:
(https://i.imgur.com/0MZhVmK.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/pcKdn5b.jpg)
Once we decide who to target, we just need to build the perfect car for them! Here is a list of all the body types we can build, this will be the biggest factor because obviously each market has preferences for the shape of their car. Two important things. First, each row is one body type. That means, we can build all of them as variants of the same car model. We can build only one model per factory, but multiple variants, so we could have a hardtop and a convertible for example. These variants are called Trims. The second thing to keep in mind is that each body is labeled with a Year, and a Length, in meters. The older a body is, the less attractive it is to buyers. Certain markets prefer bigger or smaller cars- as a rule of thumb, Fruinia and Hetvesia both like their cars smaller than average for their markets. Specify a body like: '40 Hatchback, 2.1m so I know which one you mean.
(https://i.imgur.com/xeU9oLA.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/dLgeFSd.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/hyccDoT.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/QD2t5bY.jpg)
After we choose a body we have to choose our material (steel is the only real option), chassis type (ladder frame is almost certainly our choice, but we can go for space frame if we want fewer, more expensive sporty cars), engine placement (ladder frames do not allow rear engine!) and suspension. Unless we're making trucks, we can rule out solid axle, so I'd recommend double wishbone front and back for a premium car, or double wishbone front with semi-trailing arm in the back for cheaper cars. If you don't know what to pick here don't worry, I've got this part. However, we cannot change these later without designing a new car from scratch.
(https://i.imgur.com/y61Xssu.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/6pUzedB.jpg)
Don't worry about that, but you DO need to pick an engine type. I'll explain this but first, pictures!
(https://i.imgur.com/PsmaPA5.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/17Lst9r.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/q2QYVaQ.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/GVn5RPg.jpg)
The Engine is the heart of our car! The noise, the power, the spirit! In 1946, we don't have every type available to us. Also, like cars, engines have a Family and Variants, so we can make different versions of the same engine in one factory- usually, one for sportiness and one for more mild use. Remember, the more cylinders, the more expensive it is and the more time it takes to design it. I'll explain our options:
Inline Engines are the most basic type, they have pistons arranged in a line.
An I3, or 3-cylinder inline engine, is the smallest and cheapest engine we can make. They're great for fuel economy and demographics like City, but it's hard to make a lot of power and they vibrate horribly, so they aren't luxurious. If we build these, we will also gain Familiarity with V6 engines when we unlock them later, making them faster to design. Found on tiny economy cars, almost exclusively.
An I4 is much more balanced than an I3, it can be made to be powerful or fuel efficient, so it's very versatile, and still pretty cheap. A great choice for Family or Light Sport- or both at once. It's a good choice for front wheel drive cars, when we unlock them later. They will also make it easier to design V8's later.
An I6 is a great choice for luxury or sports cars. They're vastly smoother, which wealthy demographics like. Six cylinders allows a good amount of power, but they're still cheap to design and not too complex. The only downside is they are long, so they're almost always used in rear wheel drive cars. They will make it easier to design V12's later.
V Engines have two banks of cylinders at a V angle. Most very powerful cars use V engines. They will take a lot more time for use to design, so we might want familiarity from simpler engines first.
V8's are common on sports cars, big trucks, and muscle cars. They're the most common "big" engine. They're acceptably smooth. Most of all, they're as short as an I4, so it's easy to fit a V8 with huge displacement in a car.
V12's are the most expensive engine we can design, with the most cylinders. They're the absolute smoothest engine as well. They can have small cylinders for great performance relative to their displacement on luxury cars or premium sports cars. Alternatively, they can be the largest possible engines, for the fastest supercars. Like the I6, fitting them in a car can be difficult. Engine of choice for brands like Ferrari and Lamborghini.
Boxer Engines have cylinders sideways, directly opposite each other. They're smooth and very compact relative to their displacement, but wide instead of long. Engine of choice for rear engine cars with small rear space. Used in Volkswagen Beetles, Porsches, and Subarus. They come in 4 and 6 cylinder variants.
Hopefully that wasn't too much to take in! I can choose myself if you want, but you might also consider Valve Types. Like suspension, they can't be changed without making a new engine from scratch.
Pushrod: Simple and cheap. In 1946, used on most cars, in 2020, still found on some large American engines. Compact, but limits the top speed of the engine, so if you're going for performance, it has to be a BIG engine. Gives familiarity with SOHC.
Direct-Acting Overhead Cam: Good choice for performance cars in 1946. Smooth and not too expensive, but limited to 2 valves. Good for high revving engines. Gives familiary with DOHC.
SOHC: Common on modern economy and family cars, but advanced and expensive for 1946. Still OK if we want our engine type to be produced for many years, even forever. Best choice for ecnonomical cars but good for performance too.
DOHC: Two camshafts! Best performance all around, but very expensive and a little large too. In 1946, only a good choice for really top-end engines because of the expense, but it will let us reach crazy high RPM.
Choosing an engine type is a big choice for our company, because it will make newer engines of the same or related types (for example: I4 and V8 are cousins, as are I6 and V12) much cheaper and faster. So, we might want to pick one that does everything we want to do. Or, we can pick an inline whose V-engine cousin will serve us well later.
We also need to decide how big is our engine? We can make smaller variants, but not bigger ones, or we can design the engine large and make our first variant smaller if we really want- this will give us room to make a bigger one very easily later. For reference: ~1 Liter or less is smallish, but a good choice for 1946. 2-3 liters is good for more expensive cars and 4-6 is for seriously high-power cars. Lastly, is our engine undersquare (high torque, low revs), square (good balance of both) or oversquare (very high-revving performance or smooth luxury car).
Time to decide...
I know it's a lot to take in, but we need to start on the design because time is money! Answer these basic things, and you can give me more details to follow if you wish. I need at least these three details before I can fill in the rest:
What is our target market?
Which car body should we design?
Which engine type should we design?
Our First Car!
Well, we've settled on a family budget car, using the 2.6m 1945 station wagon body. As luck would have it, we can make a van variation of this too, so we're going to try to sell delivery vehicles as well. We're starting a new Model, which takes us to the market screen. Rolling over Family Budget, we can see what they like:
(https://i.imgur.com/pc6c0Rl.jpg?1)
From top to bottom, left column first, these stats are: Drivability, Sportiness, Comfort, Prestige, Safety, Practicality, Size, Offroad, Reliability, and Fuel Economy. So, we can tell right off that more than anything they like the car to be easy to drive and practical, and it has to be reliable too. They also highly value safety, comfort, and fuel economy. Fuel economy might look like the last of our top five, but it also has an effect on affordability, so it's going to be a big deal.
On our body type, we can see some more details as well. For example, the wagon we're looking at has 5 doors and 3 seat rows- great for practicality score.
(https://i.imgur.com/suU5wkk.jpg?1)
I've designed the whole car before taking screenshots, so the wheels are on in this picture, but this is the first thing we work with: the Chassis Screen.
(https://i.imgur.com/n9okHkL.jpg)
Every part in the car has three kinds of costs: Material Cost is raw materials we buy. Production Units are a somewhat abstract representation of labor hours. Engineering Time is how long it will take to design, which also directly affects how much money it takes to design. Material cost can effected by our Engineering Sliders (more on those later) a little but it's mostly going to stay the same. We have a Cost Per Production Unit that depends on our factory setup- various things affect efficiency but the main thing is that the bigger our factory is, the cheaper each production unit is, so big factories make it cheap to mass produce cars. Engineering Time has a cost that is spread across every car we make of this type, but also it takes up actual time, and the whole time we're designing our car, the competition is designing better cars too. We can make our engineering faster at considerable expense, or slow it down to save money and have other benefits.
One more thing- Engineering Time is vector added- values for different parts of the car are squared, added together, and then the square root is taken again. This means that whichever category is biggest has considerably more effect. By taking some quality off the chassis, I saved 6 months overall, and I took some production units off too.
Since this is our first car, I'm going to go through every screen. Normally I'll skip most of them, but you should at least know what all the parts are.
First we have to design the engine:
I've chosen a total displacement just under 1 liter, and about as undersquare as possible, which is the normal choice for a small and fuel efficient engine. On this screen I've also chosen our valve type- push rods! It's really our only option since we need to keep this as cheap as possible. This screen is like choosing the Body for our car. We can update this engine family later, but we can't change anything on this screen.
(https://i.imgur.com/5Ngsv5t.jpg)
Bottom End: Cast iron is the only option for our internal parts, we haven't unlocked anything better. Since our engine is small, I can safely reduce the quality to -9. We're making 44 ft-lbs of torque on this motor, and if I reduce the quality to -10, our maximum torque drops below 44 and we start to have stress on the components, which reduces the reliability. At -9 we lose some smoothness and reliability regardless of torque, but it's worth it for the cost savings. On this screen we can also make our engine variant smaller than the maximum family size (the outside stays the same but gets smaller cylinders inside). I haven't done this, though.
(https://i.imgur.com/Kzh5tx1.jpg)
Top End: The biggest thing we choose on this screen is our Compression. Basically the more we can compress our fuel, the more powerful and efficient our engine is. However, if we compress it too much, the engine begins to knock (blow up). There's a lot of things that can combat this, using better technology in general and also putting more fuel into the engine. Well, we're trying to save fuel and our tech is primitive, especially our choice of pushrod valves. So, all we can manage is 6.8. Our cam profile affects whether the valves open deeply and for a short time (high RPM performance, sporty) or shallow for a longer time (low RPM performance, fuel efficient). It's dialed in pretty low.
(https://i.imgur.com/HLzU6en.jpg)
Fuel Distribution: A carburetor mixes air and fuel, using only the vacuum force from the engine cylinder pulling air in. There's two types and we're using the Eco (fuel efficient) one. Improving our engine here is the best way to prevent knock so we can have better compression, which basically makes us better at everything. We're trying to stay cheap so we only have one carburetor. Adding a second would make the engine more expensive, but I have started with +1 Quality here. We also choose our top RPM here. Notice the power graph falls off at high RPM? This is because of our valves. The better valves, the higher we can run the engine. We have crap valves, but we don't want the engine to go fast anyway because we're trying to save fuel.
(https://i.imgur.com/3XTkFy2.jpg)
Exhaust: I went with the cheap components here, of course. We have a pretty narrow exhaust, which actually helps us with power on the low end due to some exhaust scavenging effect mumbo jumbo. We might want positive quality here because it helps fuel efficiency... but later.
(https://i.imgur.com/zWaIz0w.jpg)
Test Screen: You get to hear it on this screen. Vrooom! You probably already noticed, but we're making 27.8 horsepower. The fact that I've felt the need to include the decimal should tell you this is not an impressive number. This is about normal for budget car of this era though. On the top right you can see what is restricting the engine- intake air flow is our biggest factor at 7% loss. Adding a second carburetor would rectify this, but it's not worth the cost right now.
(https://i.imgur.com/HNIZusV.jpg)
Now, we build the car.
Technically, everything after this point is part of the "trim". We can change it later, and we can make multiple trims based on this model at once. In fact that's exactly what we're going to do. We can change our paint color and add appearance parts, as well as choose the actual body shape from the list. But, I'll skip forward to Gearing: I've chosen a two speed manual because it is cheap. Also, it's negative quality, which you're going to see... a lot of on this car. I've set our top gear to, uh... 145 miles per hour. This makes our high gear very, VERY high... so high that the car can't exceed 55 miles per hour with its puny engine.
(https://i.imgur.com/6mf3TCX.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/6Iw54DR.jpg)
Wheels: We're using cross-ply tires. Modern cars use radial tires, but we haven't unlocked that technology yet. This limits our tire width severely... which would be a problem if I already wasn't trying to make our tires absolutely as small as possible to keep costs down. We have 110mm rear tires and 105mm front tires (VERY SMALL). This makes the car have more grip in the rear so it can't go into a rear-first spin. The big graph in the center is the steering graph- all you really need to go is that the D should be right on the blue line for easy to drive cars and the S should be right on the red line for sporty cars. In our case, the car is prone to understeer- if you try to steer too hard, you go straight, instead of spinning.
(https://i.imgur.com/R90yzin.jpg)
Brakes: In 1946, all brakes suck. Not much choice on that. We have drum brakes on all 4 wheels. Also notice that we have more rear grip than front grip- our car is back-heavy.
(https://i.imgur.com/kJWRoAF.jpg)
Interior: Finally a screen where I don't need the graph. Our wagon allows us maximum seating capacity in the game, 3 rows of seats. I've chosen two full seats in the front, and the back two rows have "+3" bench seats. These aren't "full" seats, they're what you would expect to find in the back of a two door car that has extra seats, and they're less comfortable. However, our budget demographic prefers this because seats are expensive. You might think a 3-person front bench seat is a good idea, since real world cars of the time (especially american) often did this, but Automation demographics almost never like this. Because we have 8 seats, I've set the quality to -13 to get them absolutely as cheap as possible- they probably resemble portable camping benches.
We also have no radio. Our customers just can't afford it. Notice the lowest variety of radio is a "Premium AM Radio"? As the years pass, radios will become more common and cheaper, and we will get Standard AM Radio and Basic AM Radio. New tech always starts in "Luxury" and trickles down. I'll tell you this now: when Basic AM Radios unlock, budget demographics still won't be able to afford them.
(https://i.imgur.com/8ckrRwI.jpg?1)
Steering and Safety: Power steering doesn't exist yet, but we can add quality to our manual steering rack- or take it away. Safety features add a LOT of weight and engineering time. Like radios, they start off as "Advanced" for the decade and then the simpler, lighter Standard and Basic will unlock. I chose standard. We will have to keep our car's total safety rating in mind, there are minimums to sell in each country. Chassis type is the other big contributor to safety. If we ever sell a premium version of our car this will be the biggest thing to change.
(https://i.imgur.com/HJRSTQP.jpg?1)
Suspension is the last thing to set up! The steering graph comes back here because it's heavily affected by our settings on this page. But, the main reason I've kept the whole screen is the graph on the right. This includes a lot of different information- we care about maximum load (only 595lbs because the suspension is soft), roll angle (about 7 degrees is best for comfort, lower is more sporty but less comfortable) and tire wear factor (affected by camber). Our wear factor is the lowest possible, 0.85, which means tires last longer. Budget demographics care a lot about upkeep costs!
(https://i.imgur.com/CcWTxxE.jpg)
Here's our car! This post is long as hell and we aren't done yet, so I'm not talking about all the little stats. The only thing I really want to point out is the market scores, the big green squares on the left in most of the previous pictures. First- we're scoring well in a lot of markets. This isn't as good for Family Budget as a 2.1m prototype I put together, but this car has a very wide appeal. For each Market, the first number is the Competitiveness. The baseline is 100: that means we are equal to the top 3 competitor cars, not including ones we sell. 173 is very good, but of course we're better than the average "budget" car because that mostly represents used cars. The other number is our Affordability and this one isn't as good. Only 33.4% of Family Budget buyers (approximately- more on this later) can afford our car. The fact that various markets might buy the car makes up for this.
Oh yeah, I made a van version. This picture is the van. It scores 135 in Light Delivery and awful in standard Delivery and Heavy Delivery. I don't know what's whack with the suspension, but I could only tune it to a max load of 1000 pounds which is pretty poor. Actually this is the first time I made a delivery vehicle that doesn't score well in all three delivery versions, and I've made 3-cylinder versions.
(https://i.imgur.com/xuMT57n.jpg)
Victory Lap!
Oh yeah, just for fun, I took our car to the test track! We got a time of 4:32. That's just for the wagon version, but when I pull up with the van prototype, they told us we'd used up out allotted time for both cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/tO7g5QF.jpg)
Last Steps
Okay, so we have a car... on paper. Two, arguably: the wagon and the van. Here's a preview of our Factory configuration: there's a lot of inputs here but only three outputs we care about- well, four if you include cost. The total number of cars, cost per car, and recall chance all depend on our automation level (how many manufacturing steps are done by machines as opposed to hand built), tooling quality, and the other ones, you can read them. In short, the base cost was $100M dollars to set up our factory, and cars were going to cost $1.7k to manufacture, but I want to put $150M in to make a greater quantity of cars at lower price each. With this setup, we can make about 1500 of each of the two car types. I predict we'll have no trouble selling that many.
(https://i.imgur.com/9HoTOS6.jpg)
Engineering is the process of actually creating the final design. By adding funding, we can finish it faster. Pressure can get it done faster too, but we lose reliability and we don't gain as much familiarity with the tech we use- familiarity is good because it makes engineering faster next time, for free. I like things that are free. We can also directly improve (or reduce) reliability, we can reduce the amount of materials wasted per car (decreasing cost but taking more production units per car) with Optimization, or we can increase Automation, which means cars cost less production units and we can make more for cheaper. All of this adds time and money. We had a base time of around 43 months, so I increased to 48 months for a few benefits. With this configuration we'd launch on January 1950.
(https://i.imgur.com/IFvksXr.jpg)
I also have to do the same process for our engine- it gets a factory configuration and engineering. Our factory is capable of making more engines than we can make cars, so it won't be working full time.
(https://i.imgur.com/CyJfOgh.jpg)
The Price
Once all is said and done we get to the market projection screen. This is where we can set the price of our car. I've set it to a 15% margin of profit (with factory tooling and engineering costs included for an estimated 5 years production run), so our car will cost $5,500. I didn't screencap the market screen with market budgets, but Family Budget averages around $4900 +/-2900 I think. This means, less than half of them can afford our car, but that's normal. There's 19000 of them or something, and we're only making 1500 wagons.
Also on this screen, you can see new competitiveness numbers. They're estimated, but they account for a couple things: new competitors coming out in the next four years, and the actual price of our car after tooling, engineering etc. They're a lot lower, of course- but these scores are still pretty good.
(https://i.imgur.com/17kTMK4.jpg)
The Sign-Off Screen is the last step before our car actually enters production. The thing I want to draw attention to is the loan slider- we can choose how much of the predicted $250M project cost we want our loan to cover. I suggest we get it covered- technically we can just go into negative money and pay no interest in the current game version, but I'm not 100% sure we won't go bankrupt. If our credit rating is F and we have negative money for 12 months, the game ends. I also suggest a 72 month loan term. That's two years after we start actually producing cars to pay it back.
(https://i.imgur.com/UfChyYI.jpg?1)
One last thing. We need to invest in dealerships, and we might want to invest in R&D and marketing. First, let's talk about Awareness. This is a percentage score that represents how many people even consider our brand when they go to buy a car. Awareness is on a per-market basis, and we mostly gain it by selling cars in that market. However, we have a maximum and minimum awareness based on our dealerships level. Our dealership level in each country incurs a monthly cost to upkeep, and it rises quickly depending on the level. Not only that, it takes a full year to level up our dealerships in a country, and we pay for it the whole time. I suggest we get our dealerships to level 2 in both Fruinia and Hetvesia, before our car comes out. We can also invest some in marketing, which I'm pretty sure increases the perceived competitiveness of our cars. This picture shows the cost and benefits of a level 2 dealership network in Fruinia.
(https://i.imgur.com/qdM9JjM.jpg)
We can also start now on R&D if we wish. Like dealerships, R&D costs us monthly upkeep, and it costs $25k per month at level 1 and doubles every level after. There is an R&D in each quality slider category. For each level we have, we get two effects: we unlock relevant technologies one year earlier, and we get +1 quality automatically, at no extra cost. This will be the key to world domination, if we can afford it. If we feel confident enough, we can get our Fuel System tech to +1 or +2 before our first car comes out, then immediately update it to benefit from the new tech. This will give better fuel efficiency and performance (we'll trade in the performance for even more efficiency), as well as better reliability, which budget customers love. We could also invest in drivetrain tech to unlock front wheel drive as early as possible. But, this is up to you. If we're not careful, the costs can be quite a lot.
That covers everything! Here's what I need from you...
Sorry, this got out of hand. It kind of turned into a comprehensive tutorial. I guess I don't know what to trim out- it took 40 minutes to design the car and all night to write this.
Is our plan good? There's still time to make changes to the car, in terms of both design and engineering.
-If we're feeling really ballsy, we could try to upgrade to a Medium 2 factory immediately.
-Alternatively, we could try to save money or get the car out faster.
-Are level 2 Dealerships (40% max awareness) good enough? Should we focus on just Fruinia, or Hetvesia too?
Research Plan? Should we start R&D now? What tech should we focus on?
We have to name our car!
-We need a name for the Model, and both Trims. Trim names can just be "1946 Wagon" type stuff if you want, though.
-We should also name our engine
-We should ALSO name our factory! Who wants to work at "Car Factory 1"?
What color should we paint it?
-I went for a low-flake mild blue as a generic 1946 paint. But we can paint it whatever we want. I suggest we pick a color to symbolize our company!
Also, how do you feel about live streaming? If we do live streams, you can have a lot more direct input. I should probably figure out how to get Discord to show a chat window in-game, or otherwise try Twitch or something.
Wew, that last post was long... I hope I didn't scare everyone off with it. >.>
1950: Our First Sale!
The Urist Wagon 46, in Dimple Dye Blue
(https://i.imgur.com/lnqqhEy.jpg?1)
...actually, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Most of this post is going to be the road leading up to the release of our car. But, I'll tell you some good news now: we didn't go bankrupt. (That's despite a bug which caused our credit rating to go to F for one month before suddenly springing back to A+, which had me really concerned because I already overwrote the autosave at that point).
It's still 1946. We've just been approved for our loan, and I'm taking our prototype for a test drive (I made a video in Beam hehe (https://streamable.com/z5kurm)). Here's the new naming convention:
(https://i.imgur.com/NmZ3M5K.jpg?1)
Our motors are also Urist MC 46.
Now time can start passing. This is the Hub Screen. Usually I'll refrain from showing the whole thing but we should cover the basics. On the top is our immediate financial information, such as our company valuation and current money. We get a graph of the general economy (good economy = more car buyers), some graphs of our revenue and expenses, etc. The most important part is in the center, our timeline. The red line is the current time, and the yellow bar is the time it will take to engineer the Urist. Below that is the time it will take to set up our factories. This is less than a year, so they won't start until we're almost done. News and research are on the right.
(https://i.imgur.com/b0Xv3K2.jpg)
6 months into development, and we have some expenses and revenue. We're spending money on the engineering for the Urist and on building dealerships. We're getting money in because the loan pays out on a monthly basis, equal to our engineering expense. In the research tab we can see upcoming tech: in 42 months we'll get automatic transmissions. This means if we want, we can begin adding them to our next version of the Urist immediately.
(https://i.imgur.com/iLgKj9K.jpg?1)
This, uh, scared me so I stopped paying into dealerships. I'm sure I didn't actually need to do that and it set our dealerships back a little.
(https://i.imgur.com/Va8e5r3.jpg?1)
Here's the dealership tab, it makes more sense now that we're in motion. Our target dealership level is 2, and we will have a minimum 5% Awareness and maximum 40%. That takes time and right now we're at level 0.98, with 3% minimum etc. It's costing us $42k per month- I also put some $14k into marketing, but I didn't screencap it. A dev in discord told me marketing increases awareness today, so now I know how that works!
(https://i.imgur.com/qH59NHr.jpg?1)
Factories are expensive! We're not even building new factories, just installing tools to produce the Urist. Both the car and engine factory are costing us.
(https://i.imgur.com/9BUSvgI.jpg?1)
Release Day! Our car has debuted with a 139 competitiveness for the Wagon, which is good, and 87 for the Van, which is poor. We sold 604 wagons and 133 vans in our first month. We made a lot more cars than that, so we're currently losing money, but the factory will slow down once we have enough cars to sell for 6 months (based on whatever the current sales rates are each month).
(https://i.imgur.com/1qdiEmR.jpg?1)
Six months later, our sales have improved and we're finally making a profit. Overall the company is still losing money because we're repaying $6 million per month for our loan, but as long as our credit rating is good this is fine. The van is now perceived as even worse. We have a ton of vans to sell off and we're not producing any more, but sales are slowly increasing. The wagon isn't being produced fast enough to keep up with demand. I'd call that a success!
(https://i.imgur.com/f4V1cVb.jpg?1)
The Market Data
Here is our current market Awareness. It's growing very fast, because we're selling cars. Currently we're at about 10% in the markets we actually sell into, and our baseline from our dealership level is nearly 5% now. This will continue to grow, meaning we can sell more cars... if we're producing enough.
(https://i.imgur.com/71zuMYp.jpg)
Here's our current sales numbers. The majority of our sales are indeed going to budget demographics, but regular Family is buying some too. We're selling well in Passenger Fleet which makes sense because they like fuel efficient cars. Notably, we're actually selling more to Utility Budget than Light Delivery. This might indicate that our van would do better if it was a pickup instead.
(https://i.imgur.com/M31WuE7.jpg)
Research
One thing I didn't cover in full last time is the research screen. Here it is, so you can see EVERY category. You can also see our unlocks, but you have to mouse over them so it's not much use in a screenshot. We're currently spending $50k on Fuel System research. Not only does this directly increase our fuel economy, it makes our car more reliable AND it means we unlock fuel systems a year earlier. In this case, we've unlocked Two Barrel Carburetors, which are only really of interest to performance engines. Some big ones to watch our for are:
-Monocoque Chassis in 1951- many benefits, but we need to design an entirely new car.
-Radial Tires in 1955- they're better in almost every way, although we'll see if our customers want to pay extra for them.
-Transverse Front Wheel Drive in 1962- almost an absolute must-have for cheap, fuel-efficient cars. But once again, it would need a new car design entirely.
One big thing to keep in mind is our Fuel System Research will benefit the Urist MC Engine next time we update it so we should do that soon.
(https://i.imgur.com/t0afjGM.jpg)
What Next?
It's time to update our car. We can change the actual features of the car and engine, and we can also change our engineering sliders. For example, increasing the Automation of our design will allow us to make more cars, for cheaper, but it can take a lot of time. Whatever we do, it might take a few years, so we should start soon.
Do we want to try Automatic Transmissions? In Automation, most demographics LOVE automatic transmissions. However, the budget demographics might not like it early on due to the expense, and they also cause a little power loss. We don't have a lot of power to spare.
What about the van? It looks like the factory can't just produce 3000 wagons when demand for the van dies down. If we can't make the van sell better, we're better off getting rid of it so we can make more wagons. We could see if we can improve it with an auto trans and a new tune, or we could also try replacing it with a pickup. If you want you can specify something like "get the design to 130 desirability or cancel it if you can't".
Research? Do we want to get more research? Any unlocks we should aim for? How much do we want to spend? Also, should we start our update of the Urist now, or wait another 6 months or so for our Fuel System to reach +2? Remember, everything has to be unlocked before we start engineering, and then the car comes out later.
Got Automation? Download the Urist 50 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1zenresz4hma7a5/Urist_-_Wagon_50.car?dl=0). You can try to beat my time in Beam, or do fixture design and post it here.
Urist 1950 Facelift
It's time to update our car! First and foremost are changes to the engine, since that will affect both trims (assuming we keep two trims in production). Every part of the engine benefits from the four years that have passed since our first version, so there's a few improvements we can make. The first thing to notice is that we have some octane to spare immediately from fuel system improvements. I also think we can afford to go to +2 Quality on our fuel system. With something like 86.2 out of our 87 octane budget used, I can knock the cams down from 24 to 17: the engine gains some fuel efficiency, some bottom-end torque, and loses a little power. According to the demographic affordability number, this has made it more affordable overall despite the added quality! I also reduce the quality of our bottom end to the bare minimum again, which is now -11. Exhaust quality goes up to 0 as well. In this graph you can see a directly comparison to our old engine.
(https://i.imgur.com/vZ8Pyeh.jpg?1)
Our tires are getting 5mm wider each to compensate for wheelspin. A couple things go up in quality, and it looks like our target of Family Budget buyers would actually like me to reduce the interior quality to -15, the absolute minimum, but I don't want to do that because it will bring our total safety rating below 10. That might get us banned in Hetvesia soon. I did, however, upgrade us to full-size seats!
(https://i.imgur.com/CXy0ung.jpg?1)
Also, something I forgot to do last time: I've tweaked the body morphs! You can click-and-drag the body around a little and it affects aero drag, footprint and interior space, as well as weight and material cost. Like most demographics, they like the windshield dragged forward for more room, although I couldn't go far. They also liked the back of the car dragged in as small as possible. That surprised me but they probably benefit from the smaller size for Drivability.
(https://i.imgur.com/1jaeGXy.jpg?1)
We are, however, sticking with the two-speed manual and a top speed of less than 55mph. It allegedly gets 27 mpg in this configuration. It drops to 19 the moment the car becomes capable of 56 mph, and that's probably a more honest number all around, but oh well. A little retune of the suspension and we're hitting almost 210 desirability in Family Utility Budget. You can see the colored numbers here are in comparison to the average of the top 3 competitor cars for the category on the right... we're worse in almost every way but we're cheap and have a lot of seats, as well as good gas mileage and reliability. I guess that makes us fully twice as good overall? You can also see we get a 15% penalty because the desired body type is a van. It's supposed to include windowed passenger vans (called "people movers" in Automation) and maybe wagons too, but it's bugged right now. Actual van bodies only have one row of seats, which basically disqualifies them from this category where 5 seats are a minimum. I'm not 100% certain but I think this affects the competitor cars too, so it cancels out.
(https://i.imgur.com/P4sYqAE.jpg?1)
Now on to the Van tuning! The wagon looks great, so this will be the hard part. A major sticking point seems to be our load capacity, I can't seem to get it much over 1000lb and if I do, the suspension is way too stiff. There are probably a couple tricks I'm missing, but at this point I decide to start fresh on pickup version. After doing just a couple basic things (most of all, set cooling airflow to 100- utility loves this) we're already at 140.
Either the base cost of the vehicle is a lot cheaper due to the lack 6 rear seats, or Utility Budget has more money, but our affordability is above 40% too. I can afford to turn quality up (to the low negatives) on a lot of features. We have even go for a truly "luxury" feature: upgrading from 10 to 11 inch wheels! Not only do they like the wheels themselves, but the added brake size this affords us helps too (utility cares a lot about stopping with heavy loads). Final score for Utility Budget is 149.9, which I think is good enough to go ahead. What's more, we're proud to announce the Urist Pickup in Magma Red!
(https://i.imgur.com/YXdxilE.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/Opf5qfx.jpg?1)
Edit: Actually it's 172 and even gets 128 in non-budget Utility but I don't want to take a new screenshot and upload it. I don't even remember what I changed.
In case you're curious, it doesn't score in delivery. That's mostly down to it not being a van, you can see there's a 25% penalty just for that. Even besides that it would probably have a lukewarm score though. I'm not sure if it's something about this body type but I can't get a good load capacity even with wide tires. Even the Urist Pickup is only rated to carry 900lb, higher than that and the suspension is too stiff.
(https://imgur.com/cRBkCtz?1)
Engineering! In the "Repair and Refresh" options for factory tooling, we can choose not to update our Building or Major Tooling. These are elements that don't have to be changed for the new facelift, but typically I like to keep them updated rather than try to save 3 million dollars. If our tools get worn out, recall chances increase. Since our cash is in the negative, I'm not improving our factory too much, although we could afford the loan if we wanted.
(https://imgur.com/hePqzzK.jpg?1)
Now, because we've changed so little, our base engineering time is only six months! Engineering Time is the column on the left. Remember it's vector added to get the sum on the bottom. This is the perfect opportunity to up some values to make more cars, for cheaper.
(https://i.imgur.com/7ieURqG.jpg?1)
By aiming for a total time of 16 months to upgrade, I've got a couple hundred more cars per month and the total price is down a little per car too. Similar story for the engines, although I'm not putting a lot of engineering into making more of them because our engine factory is already working around half-time. We can't really make them cheaper without making more of them.
(https://i.imgur.com/wpf0SI6.jpg)
Now our cars are really getting cheap! We have a base price of just $3.7k to sell our cars. Now, one catch to this is, our original design was priced to make back the money spent on tooling over 5 years, and it will have had only a 2 year run before being replaced. We're not spending nearly as much this time around (about $10M to retool instead of $150M!) but we want to set enough margin to help make up for that. When all is said and done, we're making a 20% margin on cars, and at a total price of just $4500!
(https://i.imgur.com/h8TSou2.jpg)
Keep in mind this means that the affordability numbers we saw in the designer were very conservative. Instead of 36% of budget buyers being able to afford our car, probably around 55% can. These are some cheap tin cans! Check out the predicted competitiveness too. It's actually gone up because of the pricing, even estimating for competitor cars to come out in the next 16 months.
(https://i.imgur.com/UjOg8YV.jpg?1)
That whole project will cost just 40 million too.
(https://i.imgur.com/qrZ1IvM.jpg?1)
Now here's the (three hundred) million dollar question:
Should we upgrade to Medium 2?
As you can see, it would cost us another $290M compared to the basic plan. However, it would jump our car production from 3200 per month all the way to 4900. We could do it in 16 months, although 8-12 months of that we won't be producing cars while the factory upgrades. We'd need to take out a big loan, or at least let our cash go way negative and tank our credit rating. But, we could make 50% more cars and probably tack another 5-10% margin on them too, since they'll be cheaper.
(https://i.imgur.com/BjDoeqQ.jpg)
Should we upgrade our factory size?
Do we need to change anything about the cars? If we DO upgrade the factory, should we aim for a longer engineering time so we can build up stock of the 1946 model? We can also still drop the pickup, since it is less competitive than the wagon, although I expect it will sell this time.
How do you like Magma Red?
Should we invest in more tech/etc?
I've also exported the final version of the Urist 1950 trims. Dropbox Folder (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0). Note the wagon has been renamed to "final" because the last .car I exported was already renamed the 1950 even though I hadn't changed it yet.
Selling the 1950 Urist
I've declined to take out a loan for the project. Strictly speaking, we are losing money at the instant we start the project- while we are making a profit on our Urist '46 sales, it's not enough to cover the 5 million dollar loan repayment from our first tooling costs. Incidentally, the loan repayment began only when our project finished, so in setting our loan repayment to 72 months, I kind of screwed up. Oh well. Also, our credit rating jumped to F and randomly recovered again. I don't know why this keeps happening.
(https://i.imgur.com/bbcZzU1.jpg?1)
Once our factory starts construction, we actually start turning a 10 million profit overall. This is because we're selling our back stock of cars, but it won't last. I have taken the liberty of upping our marketing slightly and starting Level 1 dealerships in Hetvesia, since it costs very little.
(https://i.imgur.com/Kk9cQ6U.jpg)
Once we sell off our stock of cars, we're losing about 10M per month, putting us well in the negatives.
(https://i.imgur.com/7yPgECj.jpg)
On launch day, we're doing great! Our cars are hugely competitive, and our Family Budget awareness has risen to almost 20%. What's more, our sales margins are up! At least, they are for the wagon. In the current version of the game, if your car is so desirable that you can't keep up with demand, dealerships will automatically increase the price until it balances out. Right now, our wagon is selling at a 40% profit margin instead of the baseline 20% we chose.
(https://i.imgur.com/jtPIeDX.jpg)
At the end of 1951, we paid $0 in taxes! Woo! Building up lots of cash on hand causes us to pay taxes, so it's important to keep investing our money into factories, engineering, and R&D/dealerships. Otherwise, it's just going to waste.
(https://i.imgur.com/Kk9cQ6U.jpg?1)
...Six months later, it's April, 1952. Time to review: our dealers are now selling the car at a 100% markup. We're bringing in $1.2M per month, total, and that's after 5M goes to paying back loans. Don't worry about the fact that our desirability dived from 200 to 110, that's just because of the price increase. They'll bring it back down automatically if we aren't selling all our cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/BEsScNA.jpg?1)
This markup has had some odd consequences: apparently our cars are desirable enough to sell to regular Family instead of Family Budget, so that's what they're doing. Also, our truck is hitting some weird demographics. It apparently accounts for the majority of our Light Sport Budget (???) sales. This is probably because it's lighter weight than the wagon, and there are no real competitors in these markets, so they're buying the cheapest car they can get, which is ours. Here's are most recent monthly sales numbers.
(https://i.imgur.com/EPJKXsn.jpg?1)
Here's our Market Awareness. This is an international average- the numbers for Fruinia are higher and the numbers for Hetvesia are lower.
(https://i.imgur.com/z9KHPv5.jpg)
There's a few concepts I haven't discussed much so far. Down on the factory timeline we can see our factory hitpoints, which are three bars for Building, Major Tooling, and Minor Tooling, the latter of which needs to be refreshed the most often. Next we can see our car factory is running 2.3 shifts, which is the maximum I set for it. Running more than two shifts costs us more money (overtime pay) and it causes the factory to lose hit points much faster, because the maintenance team gets less time with with factory themselves. With our current demand and quick engineering turnarounds (with re-tooling) I could probably set it higher though. Next is our build quality: we're at 104% because our workers have been experienced making the car for a while, at least I think that's how it works. This pertains to those curve graphs on the factory setup screen. Next is Slowdown, which is a consequence of our quality control. Like Build Quality, it's dependent on worker experience and tooling hit points, so it gets a little better in the first few months and then decays when the factory has been running for too long without a refresh. Then we our Recall Chance. It's at 0.5, which is to say, we have a 0.5% chance every month of having a factory recall event. I'll discuss those more when we come to it, but they're bad. Sometimes a little annoying, sometimes very bad.
(https://i.imgur.com/Xih85fE.jpg?1)
Up top, we also have our Company Prestige (diamond icon), Company Reputation (star icon), and Score (trophy icon). Score is based on number of cars sold, and smaller demographics are worth more. It doesn't care at all about out profitability, our goal is to sell a lot of cars. Prestige is based on selling cars with a high Prestige stat, as seen in the designer. Selling cars with low prestige decreases it and high prestige increases it- I think it's based on some sort of average score of competitors or something. A lot of things affect prestige, such as high quality, exotic materials, larger engines with more cylinders, luxury features, and high top speed. It's no surprise that ours is negative. Reputation is based on Reliability. It can also be affected by recalls. Our cars have above average reliability thanks to choosing simple tech and a bonus from engineering.
(https://i.imgur.com/tm58NM8.jpg?1)
Now, here's the thing: while we can have a different prestige and reputation on a per-country basis (for example, if we only sold luxury cars in Dalluha) it does affect every model sold by our company. Certain demographics favor Reputation and certain ones favor Prestige to greater or lesser degrees, it applies a coefficient to their desirability. This is a hidden stat but you can probably take an intuitive guess which likes which. Also, Killrob said in the Automation Discord that negative numbers have a much stronger effect than positive numbers. At +100, there's a 125% competitiveness multiplier, and at -100, it goes to 0%. I've never really gotten further than 25 either way in a normal game.
R&D: This could certainly be a good time to invest more. Right now we're bringing in about 1 million profit per month, so spending 100-200k per month on R&D might be wise. We can always increase fuel system further, and family type demographics love interior quality too. We could also target specific upcoming technologies. We can also target specific upcoming technologies. Exhaust and Top End are also techs that help a lot with fuel efficiency.
(https://i.imgur.com/Aw5kL4x.jpg)
With regards to upgrading the Urist, the only relevant new technology we have is two-shoe drum brakes. We probably want to run a facelift anyway, we can improve our engineering sliders and benefit from another year of general tech improvements. There's a number of big things coming up in 33 months: Radial Tires (wheel tech) are a big upgrade, Progressive Springs (suspension tech) make the car more comfortable and improve load capacity, and Standard 50's Safety (safety tech) may be a good upgrade, although it will take a lot of time to add it to the design and we're currently meeting foreseeable safety minimums. Also coming up at 21 months is the Basic AM Radio (interior tech). They're going to finally be cheap enough for everyone to afford... maybe.
There's one BIG tech coming in 1962- Tranverse Front Wheel Drive (drivetrain tech). If we are still aiming for the cheap, economical market, this would be a must-have for us and we probably want to design our next model of car around it. If we want to start work on our next model sooner, unlocking this early would be the way to go.
What Next?
We're starting to have a little money to throw around, or at least some credit rating and company valuation to throw around. Since we've now reached the point where our factory can't keep up with demand, I think we'd be crazy not to go for a Medium 2 factory soon. If we keep our engineering under 33 months, we can add a few new technologies to our next facelift as well. The factory upgrade, for reference would be around $300 million. If we really want to go all-in, we could spring for Medium 3 car factory and a necessary Medium 2 engine factory at the same time, which would cost us around $875M. That would be really touch and go with our credit rating, however. Or, we could open a second factory and make a new model for another demographic on the side.
Also, if we want, we could start targeting our car more towards regular than budget demographics. It's apparently doing good there, at least for 1952, and we could potentially make more money this way. We also might consider replacing the Urist MC Engine with an Overhead Cam version which will be more fuel efficient and long-lived. One way to go about this would be to design a non-production prototype which will take a few years, then quickly revise it and add it to our next facelift without a long wait.
As of 1950, we've gained access to Dalluha. They basically only buy luxury cars, although if we open a dealership there, we could probably hit the Passenger Fleet demographic. Or if we want to, uh, REALLY diversify our brand, we could definitely afford to open up a Small size factory and start making luxury or performance cars. They cost a lot less startup than medium factories and it would give us a way to gain familiarity with new tech that's initially too expensive for our regular cars. It would also give us some income for the times when our main factories are upgrading.
Should we upgrade our factory, and how much?
Do we keep the Urist on the track it's on, or should we shift to target our new middle-class buyers?
Should we start another project? We could do a small-factory demographic on the side, or maybe start a new high-tech economy engine ahead of time.
Should we open dealerships in Dalluha? If we upgrade our factory we might want more dealerships in Fruinia too, but for now they're plenty.
Should we invest more in R&D? Think about what tech we want in the long term.
This post got long again, sorry. I think I've really covered all the game concepts we care about this time, though.
Bonus Pic: The Urist Drivetrain. I couldn't get a good angle of the engine with the body showing, but it's truly minuscule, it fills like 1/4 of the engine bay. Note you can also see the different front and rear suspension types.
(https://i.imgur.com/zyzTqCl.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/yHjZQIo.png)
beep beep
Mini update with regards to cost and markets.
Here is what it will cost us to do most of the options that have been discussed:
Start designing a new engine to replace the Urist MC Engine:
~$10-40M. It won't be ready for a few years, of course. Then we would have to spend maybe $100-200M on the facelift to re-tool the engine factory.
Start a new small Car Factory and Engine Factory:
~$250-400M (depending on if we go for Small 2 or something starting off). Also, allow 4-6 years for designing a new car and engine.
Upgrade our Urist factory to Medium 2:
~$300M. This will not necessitate an upgrade to the Urist MC Engine factory.
Upgrade our Urist factory to Medium 3 AND engine factory to medium 2:
~$875M. We will need more engine factory capacity if we go to medium 3 car factory. About $260M of this is the engine factory upgrade.
Start a new Medium 1 factory AND upgrade engine factory to medium 2:
~$1200M. We probably cannot afford this. So, if we want to open a second line of low-priced cars, this will have to wait, even though we can save money by sharing an engine.
Loans: We can take out loans without starting a project, but I usually don't prefer to do this. For starters, I know for sure that we don't have to start paying back our loan until the project is completed if it's attached to a project. I'm not exactly sure how to use loans outside of projects in a way that's actually advantageous and doesn't just tank our credit rating. As long as your company valuation is greater than your liabilities (including negative accounts, which you currently do not pay interest on) you usually have an ok credit rating and can keep operating. This is a little cheesy but it's what I usually do.
In conclusion, we could probably afford to go to Medium 3, or go to Medium 2 as well as open up a second line of automobiles, but they would have to be coming from a small factory, which means they would have to be aluminum based, which means they would have to be for high-class markets. We could still do just one or the other if we want to focus on actually getting our finances in the black, but we can cruise on negative money basically forever if we have good company valuation/credit rating.
What Country? Hetvesia has cheaper land prices right now compared to Fruinia. They have higher labor costs and better build quality, making them a good choice for premium cars. Archana opens up in 1960. That's a little ways off but it's going to be a big deal when they do. They have the cheapest land and the cheapest labor so they're possibly the best place to open factories, although labor quality can be an issue. They also have a moderate sized market (less total spending power than Fruinia or Hetvesia) with an extreme focus on low budget cars, and they prefer offroad. If we want to start a second model that's also made of steel, or put our main line of cars in a Large factory (if our finances do well enough) waiting until Archana opens up could be an option.
What kind of car/engine? If we do start a new model, like the first time I will need suggestions as to what body, engine, and target demographic we're going for. If we only start an engine, I'll need the type for that too. Now might be a good time to invest in a Single Overhead Cam (SOHC) motor, which is very high tech for 1952 but still not horribly expensive to produce and it should last us a long time- maybe the whole game (in economy markets) if we spring for 4-valve. I'll list new bodies below.
Market Data
Here's the total sizes of each market, in Fruinia and Hetvesia combined. The first picture is the total sizes. Note that the color is based on their rate of growth: green is growing and red is shrinking. Super Cars and Convertible Super Cars are growing crazy fast percentage-wise because that market only just came into existence, but they still are small.
(https://i.imgur.com/PlGBtKd.jpg)
The second picture is the size of each market limited to our Awareness. This is how many cars we can actually sell at maximum, but we will always sell at least a little bit less due to competition. We can improve this with more spending on advertising and dealerships. It will also grow up close to the dealership cap (right now: 40% of market size in Fruinia and 25% of market size in Hetvesia) over time, as we continue to sell cars. Most of the markets we've never sold a car in are around 5% Awareness, our minimum Awareness, which will help us start selling cars when we enter a new market.
(https://i.imgur.com/JyIA6He.jpg)
Bodies
Here's what we have unlocked. Remember that if we want to unlock bodies ahead of time, we need to spend on R&D. Since it will take a few years to actually bring a car with a new body to market, this can help us keep our cars looking new. In this picture, the highlighted body line has a truck and van variant which are not currently visible, and the two below have a truck variant but no van. The '46 2.9m on the bottom was already unlocked at the start of the game- apparently 1950 is not a big year for body unlocks. As a rule of thumb, we can expect a large number of bodies to unlock every 5 years (eg 1950, 1955, 1960) with bodies appearing in between those years only occasionally, at least until later in the game.
(https://i.imgur.com/lbIYLms.jpg)
Edit to Add: Q&A:
As of current votes, it looks like we would upgrade the Urist factory to Medium 2, and keep it on track for budget markets. We maybe have enough support to build a separate luxury car if there's support for a specific design- a V8 or an I6 would both be logical choices (I6 is cheaper to engineer, but V8 has more longevity and will fit in most cars that fit an I4... probably).
...we might want to work on improving engine architecture instead.
To the best of my knowledge, engine architecture is the one research that doesn't have a quality slider associated... I don't THINK it actually makes engines lighter or smoother. It does unlock new engine shapes and materials. I5, V6, and V10 engines can be unlocked early as well as Magnesium, Aluminum, and AlSi block materials, the latter two of which might be justifiable for premium eco cars, or maybe regular ones if we are selling enough volume. There's also 60 degree bank angle V8's, which are weird less-smooth V8's that are more compact and likely to fit in transverse FWD cars.
I think for the next facelift you should either design an SUV for Offroad, or fit offroad features in the truck.
We can look into it, but chances are the truck is not going to get much more offroad than it is due to the suspension type. It's maybe possible we could make a solid-axle truck for offroad/heavy utility/delivery, but these are not very big or profitable markets- ESPECIALLY in Fruinia. This might be an option when Archana opens up, however.
The dealerships/marketing in Dalluha are kinda expensive, although selling a decent car there would offset our Prestige negative score.
Keep in mind that this is on a per-country basis! If we sell luxury cars and have a high prestige score in Dalluha, that's good for continuing to sell luxury cars in Dalluha. However, it won't make a difference in Fruinia. The Prestige on the top of the hub screen is our Home Country (Fruinia) value. In the market screenshots on the bottom you can see our averaged values for all selected countries. In this case they're both closer to 0 since we've sold less cars in Hetvesia to have an effect either way.
Also keep in mind that convertibles are one of those markets where your competitiveness is always high because there's little competition... but there's little competition because they are small market sizes, overall. It's best to target them with a secondary trim unless regular demographics like the convertible too.
1952 Urist and Factory Upgrade
Few changes to the Urist MC Engine. I've crept the quality up in areas where fuel efficiency is improved- fuel system, top end, and exhaust, and I managed to get 0.1 more compression by making the cams a little steeper again. This added power, so to keep the car budget-friendly I had to alter the gearing to once again make it incapable of exceeding 56mph. Actually... maybe I don't have to?
Here's the car re-tuned with slighter wider tires (again) and a top speed which gets us above 56mph! This adds a tiny bit of appeal to the regular family market, but it loses us a few points in most of the others. My hope is that we can make up for that because our cars will be cheaper when we upgrade our factory.
(https://i.imgur.com/hGEXQOg.jpg?1)
Now back to the engine: do they like it with a dual carburetor? It would get better gas mileage, more power... but no, the added price simply reduces the desirability. Back to the rest of car, we've upgraded to two-shoe front drum brakes, and 11 inch wheels to match the truck version of the Urist. Every demographic likes the added braking. Upping our interior quality from -13 to 0 makes big gains in Family especially, as well as other demographics. We lose some affordability but, again, hopefully we'll make it up on factory size. The very last tick from -1 to 0 makes up a whole 6 desirability points for Family.
(https://i.imgur.com/Dmeqr1u.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/0HebuLx.jpg?1)
The truck version of the Urist can stay slow, but it gets a few tweaks: better brakes and brake re-tune makes them both cheaper and better. It also gets a 0-quality interior, since affordability is already very good. The biggest change is actually a major offroad feature: manual locking differential! Back in 46 the budget demographics didn't want to pay out for this, but now they love it. Note the "offroad" score in this picture, it's gone up to 26. The number on the right, 16, is what we had with an open differential.
(https://i.imgur.com/p2RLP3G.jpg?1)
Our engineering plan includes upgrading the Carsmith's Workshop to level 2! Also, I remember to rename it so it's not Car Factory 1 anymore. Oops. Anyway, behold its glory! If you're curious about addons like the QA testing and staff facilities, well, in my opinion they're just too expensive in the early game, but we can talk about them later.
(https://i.imgur.com/R4fGS9g.jpg)
With about $30M worth of tooling improvements over the baseline $40M retooling cost, we've got our base cost per car down to around $1000! That doesn't include the engine but it's still great.
(https://i.imgur.com/CuH1Re5.jpg)
Finalizing everything (including engineering and tooling costs) we're back to an average price in the short history of the Urist, despite many quality improvements. I'd consider that a success. Of course, projected desirability is so high that dealers will probably set a higher margin than this.
(https://i.imgur.com/eUkZ1YH.jpg)
Also, there's this "factory utilization percentage" pertaining to how much of either trim the factory will produce... I don't know if it's dynamic or how to change it or anything else though. Mysteries!
(https://i.imgur.com/edg7EdR.jpg?1)
I've got both the car and engine engineering for 24 months- that should let us take advantage of some new tech in 33 months for our next facelift, after we've had some time to see how our improved model is selling. Also, I've got a more aggressive payback plan for our loan this time, and I'm even trying to take a loan that only covers 75%. Here goes!
(https://i.imgur.com/tyYSNjG.jpg?1)
Looks like our factory upgrade will be taking up a large portion of our engineering time, which means we're going to run out of cars again. I also put some more cash into R&D, we'll check up on our progress later.
(https://i.imgur.com/ppTCwbo.jpg?1)
For whatever reason, dealers seem to still be selling the Urist 50 Pickup at a crazy markup even though it's no longer competitive at that price and their stock will last 24 months. Maybe because we're not making any more right now? In this image you can also see the mouse-over competitiveness graph for the Urist Pickup. Basically it dives immediately, but only because of the margins set by the dealer. The number "23.1" is the estimated number of months it will take to sell the current amount of cars we have.
(https://i.imgur.com/G2YX9wC.jpg?1)
Launch day! Margins are high immediately and steadily climb! We have to build our awareness back up after being basically out of the market for a year. I've taken the liberty of upgrading our dealerships and advertising in Fruinia and Hetvesia, we're now spending about $300k per month on those in total. That's actually so small it gets folded into an "other" category along with R&D on the pie chart.
(https://i.imgur.com/9AO6nak.jpg)
February, 1955 Review: We've now unlocked the various tech I was talking about last time. Notice we're bringing $10M in profit every month! We can definitely afford to start spending some money now.
(https://i.imgur.com/vAXTSW0.jpg?1)
Here's our total market awareness. Our largest demographics are actually around 25% if we just look at Fruinia. All the Utility is in Hetvesia because Fruinia only has Utility Budget as a category.
(https://i.imgur.com/LMoDBtI.jpg)
Here's our sales numbers. According to the Competitiveness screen (not shown- it relies heavily on mouse-over tooltips) the pickup is accounting for some weird categories, including Light Sport Budget, City Budget, and City Eco. Anyway, notice our main money is now coming from Family. In short, if our car is competitive at a high price, that's what dealers are going to go for. We are still making insane margins, so it's not an invalid strategy, but we aren't actually selling to budget because are cars are desirable enough that people who are willing to pay more have bought nearly all of them.
(https://i.imgur.com/e2YmYIA.jpg)
Bonus market graph: here's where our money is coming from.
(https://i.imgur.com/BUULKIA.jpg)
Here's our research spending and progress. No big tech we're aiming for except Transverse FWD, I think. We're also due to unlock hydraulic power steering in about a year, but it might be too expensive to use at first. Some of the stuff that's coming up includes: Solid Disc Brakes in 1959 (a must-have for most cars). Light Truck Monocoque Chassis in 1960 (safety of monocoque with load capacity of a ladder, priced in between the two). Aluminum engine headers in 1960 (we can make aluminum blocks but only cast iron heads right now, which sucks). Torsion Beam suspension in 1962 (chassis tech actually) which, I believe, is a very inexpensive suspension for economy cars. And, way out there, Mechanical Fuel Injection in 1964. This is kind of expensive to engineer, but good for gas mileage and gains familiarity with electronic fuel injection later, which will be a must-have but crazy expensive in terms of engineering time when it unlocks. Oh and of the course, the one I'm always banging on about, Transverse FWD in 1962 (more accurately 1960 because of our R&D spending).
(https://i.imgur.com/a03gLAk.jpg)
Body unlocks:
(https://i.imgur.com/wLwGgOq.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/MpZcxgO.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/q2voKRF.jpg)
What Next?
New models? With our income, we can probably afford to start work on a second model now. It will take 4-6 years to engineer and factory construction won't start until the last 2-3 years of that, and we have income from the Urist to prop us up. We could also wait until Transverse FWD unlocks. That would be a good time to replace the Urist, whether or not we have a second model, as long as we're not financially reeling from startup costs. Keep in mind that if we want to share an engine between the Urist and a second model, it will definitely need an engine factory upgrade or a second engine factory working in parallel.
New engine? We can start working on a replacement to the Urist MC Engine or something different if we want. Now would be the time if we want a mature new engine in a ~1960 model.
R&D? If we want, we can afford to start spending a couple million per month on R&D and be a really high tech company. We don't have to, though.
Urist facelift? We're going to want to incorporate some of the new tech we've unlocked- or, at least, I'll try it out in the designer and see if the markets like it. The big question is whether we want to go from Standard 40's Safety to Standard 50's Safety. This will probably take more time than it's worth if we're replacing the Urist soon, but we gain familiarity. We also need to decide if we want to include a Basic AM Radio. This will help us a lot in Family (probably) but would probably price us out of the budget segments, at least until that feature decreases in price with later facelifts.
What about Familiarity? I'll do another mini-update on this feature later.
Bonus bullshit: Our Automation Test Track Time hasn't really improved much, at 4:29. But did you know you can add other tracks to automation? Here's the Nurburgring, AKA the Green Hell, one of the most famous race tracks in world, known for being the ultimate test of car and driver. Manufacturers are constantly competing to set the world record. In the modern day, the Lamborghini Aventador holds the world record of just under 6:45, and in 1955, I couldn't find the world record for that year on Wikipedia but it's at least under 10 minutes. We got... 18:30. This is almost exactly the same time that Toyota set with a Prius in a PR event where they went out of their way to record the slowest lap ever and demonstrate their gas mileage. It also puts us behind the Trabant P50. To be fair that won't actually come out for a couple years, but it only has 20 horsepower, and it's built by communists. (Wait, are dwarves communists?) Other fun numbers on this screen include our quarter mile drag race time, of 29.5 seconds.
(https://i.imgur.com/tVeD2Hh.jpg)
Well, it's time to design a new car, and it looks like the Baron is our main pick.I understand the appeal of waiting for unlocks, but I'm sensing that there will almost always be something more just around the corner. Tell those lazy design dwarves to finish quaffing the break room ale and get back to work.
Proposal: the Bay 12 Baron
Target demo: Premium?*
Body type: '55 2.5m 4-door; possibility for a wagon trim aimed at Family P to hit the Family market from both sides
Engine: 90° V8 SOHC (assuming it fits)
Other Stuff: Yes
Color: how about Plump Helmet Noble Purple
*I'm not totally sure what the difference between, say, Premium and Luxury segments entails.
For research, I rather fancy the "go wild" plan, let's show the world what a real masterwork automobile can be!
With priority toward safety, driver assists, and more engine techs.
It also looks like demand is for a wagon version too. Nobody's said it explicitly, but I take it to mean we're aiming for Steel construction and the Medium factory that's necessary for that. I also didn't get to that Familiarity mini update, so it looks like we'll be talking about that while we go through the design for the Baron.
Oh, but FIRST first, here's what we're targeting: Premium, and Family Premium. Notice that they both have a specific desired body type, the Sedan. By the way, the money values for these screens are new category, Untapped Revenue- the total amount of spending in each market, minus what we're currently earning. It's not limited to awareness, so the numbers are 2-4 times what's realistic. But of course, if it was it would assume we're stuck at 5% awareness in Premium, which will change as soon as we actually start selling.
(https://i.imgur.com/P1Cwvns.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/2uyZeS7.jpg?1)
Also, since it came up, here's City- they prefer hatchbacks. Family itself has no desired body type, but they are limited to certain body types by their seating requirements.
(https://i.imgur.com/bexs4wr.jpg?1)
Now, of course, here's the big tradeoff in Automation: you can directly target a demographic, or try to hit multiple. For example, family probably prefers a wagon due to the cargo space, and possibly a third row of seats. Premium tends to prefer four seats instead of five, because it's more comfortable, and it has to be a sedan. But, a five-seat sedan will hit both, just not as competitive in either. What will sell more? Hard to judge.
On to the Baron! One more market screen before we start. Market budgets! It looks like Premium runs a bit more expensive than Family Premium. A car in the $20-25k range could hit both, and convertible too- although the '55 2.5m body does not have a convertible variant. In fact, if we want a car with a convertible AND a wagon (or, at least, four doors) to hit family, we basically have to go all the way back to '46. So, it looks like a convertible is out for this model.
(https://i.imgur.com/rkieaWB.jpg?1)
The chassis will be steel, monocoque, and double wishbones all around. For these screenshots I'm keeping familiarity highlight on- this makes the options more yellow the more familiarity you have. We have 12.2% familiarity in steel body panels, which directly reduces the engineering time by that much. Also, Monocoque Chassis has 0 familiarity and an engineering time of 30 months, which is enormous (Ladder Frame takes 6). We really should just bite the cost though. This is supposed to be a high-tech car, and monocoque is the choice of chassis type for basically all modern cars, so building familiarity now is good. The suspension is also potentially expensive, but hey, premium. You can also see that we have familiarity in front double wishbone, but not rear.
(https://i.imgur.com/I5E9KIw.jpg?1)
We've decided on a V8 for this car, but for reference, we've built up 16.6% Familiarity in Inline 4 motors, and a 9.4% familiarity with I6, and I3. Now, every time we engineer (or facelift) something, we gain a certain amount of familiarity. We also gain familiarity in other things which are similar, according to some hidden ratio. Furthermore, we lose familiarity after not engineering things for a while. If I had to guess, we gain 0.6 times the I4 familiarity in I6 and I3, and then we lose 4% of the familiarity we had, or so, but I don't really know for sure how it works. In any case, the familiarity conversion factor between I4 to I6 and I3 is the same, and it's a little more than half.
(https://i.imgur.com/zN9ZmE0.jpg?1)
It also turns out, we have exactly 9.6% familiarity with V8's, saving us a little over 4 months. We have no familiarity at all in V12, or boxers. Presumably if we had been making I6 motors this whole time, we would have 9.6% familiarity with V12 instead of V8. Since none of this is actually labeled we just have to make intuitive guesses.
(https://i.imgur.com/c8PnQQE.jpg?1)
Pushrod valves have given us familiarity in SOHC, but very little (3.3%) and even less if I want to spring for high-tech 4-valve (1.1%) which I'll decide if it's worth the engineering time cost later. Presumably we only gained familiarity when we first made the Urist MC engine family, because we don't re-engineer this part during facelifts.
(https://i.imgur.com/JFCXIQC.jpg?1)
Also not pictured: we have around 15% familiarity with the engine block material (cast iron) itself, and the bottom end parts. We haven't unlocked new options in these areas. One thing to think about with Familiarity is it doesn't just give bonuses to stuff we have, it also gives bonuses to future tech! For example at some point we'll unlocked Forged engine internals, as well as Low Friction Cast. We'll start with familiarity in the newer cast stuff as soon as it unlocks. This also affects some other areas we can easily predict. For example, if we usually go with Standard safety systems- say, Standard 40's, we gain familiarity with the next two generations, Standard 50's and a little in Standard 60's (in addition to other 40's era types). This also affects entertainment systems in a similar way- I think. I'm pretty sure that covers what I have to say about Familiarity, except for specific techs. Oh, and one more thing- the Pressure slider in the Engineering tab has a big effect on familiarity gains. So, if we want to focus on research, we can allow a project to take longer.
(https://i.imgur.com/TQ3mgWs.jpg?1)
I ended up going with Advanced 50's- premium demands good safety. I also got our V8 up to 200 horsepower with a 3.7 liter displacement. And it's cool but... look at the top right corner of the second pic- 7.8% wheelspin! And with fancy new Radial tire tech and very wide tires, it's still not enough to counteract, plus our material cost for tires is now up to an insane $2300 at 150mm width. Even though our affordability percentage is good, our competitiveness is actually getting dinged from the cost compared to narrower tires. It looks like I'm going to need to de-tune the engine a bit so I can cancel out wheelspin with narrower tires.
(https://i.imgur.com/abe2R2p.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/HnWsl2m.jpg?1)
...so here's what we ended up with. A little under 3.5L, 142 horsepower. Besides being smaller, I choked it with a small exhaust and brought the cams WAY down. At least we know there's a lot more power potential in this engine.
(https://i.imgur.com/t2Fw0ap.jpg?1)
After fine tuning I can get it to 158 in Premium with 5 seats (also 141 in Family Premium) or 173 in Premium with 4 seats, but Family Premium goes down to 130. This is also assuming we're willing to take advantage of Luxury interior, which gives us a "Reduced Production Efficiency" penalty- like the Limited Production from Aluminum, but less severe, this hurts our car output and scales with factory size. (In the case of a medium 1 factory we go from about 1000 cars made with Premium Interior to about 850 with Luxury Interior). For now let's assume our Sedan is a 4-seater and see what the wagon can do.
(https://i.imgur.com/O2pK4jA.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/4TVa3eH.jpg)
The wagon initially does worse than the sedan in family premium, but I haven't tuned it yet. It does offer a third seat row, but nobody seems to like actually have seats there- including Family, who isn't interested in this car at all because we have a V8 that isn't tuned for fuel efficiency. Incidentally we CAN make multiple engine variants, such as a variation of the V8 for utility purposes.
(https://i.imgur.com/VrBoDrK.jpg)
...try as I might, I can't actually make this wagon perform better than the sedan in basically any category. Looks like premium buyers really don't like sedans. But what if we put the humble Urist MC engine in?
(https://i.imgur.com/wjGztkl.jpg?1)
Our base engineering time is a ridiculous 94 months. Maybe I went a little ham with the new tech- but some of the huge stuff, like monocoque chassis, we basically have to do sooner or later. Also, basically every interior feature is new. In fact many of the mechanical features, such as an automatic transmission, are new too, and having different stuff on the sedan and the wagon does not help. First I can save a few months (although at some competitiveness cost) by ticking chassis quality to -1, but we get to the real issue...
(https://i.imgur.com/PXCev82.jpg?1)
...usually for a premium car, you save on engineering time by tanking the reliability, because they don't care much. Of course, if we want the sedan AND the wagon, that really hurts the wagon. Here's an example with engineering time down to 55 months. But, we might consider dropping the wagon, or at least dropping it for our initial run and re-introducing it later. Notice the wagon's predicted competitiveness has suffered a lot more than the sedan.
(https://i.imgur.com/u7UQVnJ.jpg)
Our predicted launch competitiveness is just OK, so cutting down the engineering time even further might be beneficial. Still, this is probably viable if it's the strategy we want to take.
(https://i.imgur.com/uS5csEh.jpg?1)
The whole project is predicted to cost 1.4 Billion. This should be possible to pull off, but we will be going all in on it for a while. Also that cost is for a Small engine factory building our V8. If we want a medium factory so we can more easily expand our premium car production it will be more like 1.8 Billion, which will be really touch and go. Either way the bank won't even give us a loan for the full value- but we do have good income from the Urist.
(https://i.imgur.com/CQOKeGG.jpg?1)
Well, here's what our pre-production prototype looks like, in Noble Purple:
(https://i.imgur.com/26kXCfu.jpg?1)
I didn't have an HSV reference for the paint so I just eyeballed. Also, it gets sparkly flakes, because what better way to say premium in 1960 when this hits market?
Wagon too: it gets dimple dye blue, of course.
(https://i.imgur.com/6c67hkq.jpg?1)
Meeting Time!
What should we do with the Baron design? Should we keep or drop the wagon? Does it need engineering changes? We could go longer with better reliability and production numbers at release, or even faster.
Names: The model is called the Baron, but we have two trims to name. We could also use a cool name for our V8 engine. Maybe rename our I4 to something like the Urist MC Hauler and call the V8 Urist MC something else?
The Urist can get a standard update regardless. If we make the Baron Wagon, the Urist can probably remain out ultra-budget car and the Baron Wagon can be our mid-market family car.
A couple questions: Regarding bodies whose pages go off the screen, I don't want to screenshot them all, but basically if it goes off the screen you can usually assume it has a van and a truck variant, and you'll be right 90% of the time. You can always specify that you're only interested if it it has a certain option. Also, the Urist transmission has a ridiculous overdrive- if it had the horsepower, it would redline at 140 miles per hour in top gear. Of course, it doesn't have the horsepower, so its top speed is at 50 miles per hour, with the engine running at a very low RPM.
Release the Baron
For the final production, I've played around with the engineering a little more and decided that extending to 60 months, plus increasing the chassis quality up to 0 (since we can't change that later) will give our model a lot more longevity. That's an 895 million dollar loan with 161 million in interest- oof.
(https://i.imgur.com/O3lT17S.jpg?1)
Also, hopefully we stay nice and profitable, because I've gone and dumped a LOT of money into R&D. That's 1.5 million per month in total on top- there's a bonus cost to investing in multiple different categories.
(https://i.imgur.com/7TRduA1.jpg)
We might be pushing it with no Urist sales for the whole factory retooling time, a downside of not building a second car factory. But, the Urists's successor can be built in a new, cheaper to operate factory in Archana. ...hopefully this is all worth it, because the Urist factory will be offline for a full 2 years while it upgrades from Medium 2 to Medium 3 and re-tools. That's around 300 million in lost profits.
(https://i.imgur.com/QK8IOV6.jpg?1)
As time rolls on, we've repaid our original loans, and our profits have grown. I'm trying desperately to build up extra stock, but our cars are selling fast and the factory still can't keep up. By the way, the partially filled red bar on the timeline represents our back-stock of cars, it's long because I've set a target of 18 months or something. We also got on the hook for taxes. $1.9M per month!
(https://i.imgur.com/ORmj4eI.jpg?1)
...and make that $4M per month. Ouch! If only we could hide our money somewhere it wouldn't be taxed. Or funnel it into lobbying or something.
(https://i.imgur.com/LjCApR4.jpg?1)
First month of factory construction. We're selling cars faster than we were ever producing them. I actually wonder if we might have been okay without the billion-dollar loan we took out. At this stage our net income is 15M, with 26M of monthly payouts from the loan, so we could probably be less than 500M in the red by completion without the loan. That's cheesy, of course (you don't pay interest on negative balance, just lose credit rating), but it works in the current version of Automation. In the expenses pie chart, red is the car factory construction cost (per month), blue in the engine factory, and green is taxes- apparently selling all these cars means we need to pay for roads.
(https://i.imgur.com/b6LPnoJ.jpg?1)
Since we're selling premium cars, I'm taking the liberty of opening dealerships in Dalluha a year before release. I'm also upping our advertising in Fruinia to increase our awareness for premium markets.
(https://i.imgur.com/kJiyjXw.jpg)
Launch day! You can see the competitiveness of the new Baron on the timeline- it's so-so.
(https://i.imgur.com/cVcmVKu.jpg?1)
Oh no- our first Production Issue! Despite having the lowest chance (0.4%) of our three facilities for a production issue to occur, the Engine Smelter's Workshop has had a problem with our Urist MC Engines, we've made a bunch of bad gaskets that are springing oil leaks or something, and it's affected our engines made in the last month or two. We can basically choose whether we want to issue a full recall, with mail-out letters and everything. Our alternatives would be to pay for it when it gets fixed, but not advertise the issue (Quiet Recall), or try to ignore it. As you can see, this has various expenses and consequences to our Reputation and Prestige. Our reputation gets dinged a little in a full recall, but a lot more if we ignore it and it gets discovered. Our prestige isn't hurt at all by a full recall, it's what a high-end manufacturer would do for their customers, but it IS hurt if a cover-up is discovered. In this case, I'm going to do the full recall, I don't think 2.2M and 1.0 Reputation cost is all that bad. If we get a big one in the future though, I'll pause for you guys to decide.
(https://i.imgur.com/4coNwzV.jpg?1)
June, 1960 Review: The Baron has been out for a few months now and its sales aren't as stellar as the Urist. Right now we're making less profit than we did before, and it's not close to our loan repayments- we're trying to pay back a billion dollars in four years, which may have been aggressive in retrospect. Our credit rating has dropped to B+. You can see on the timeline that the competitiveness of the Wagon is much higher than that of the Sedan, which is sub-par. So overall, keeping the Urist as our main car seems like it may have been the better strategy in retrospect...
(https://i.imgur.com/l3Ccucr.jpg?1)
Here's our market awareness numbers for Fruinia and Internationally, as well as our total sales numbers. As you can see, it's getting a little hard to judge anything from overall awareness, since some countries have lower numbers overall, or in specific markets.
(https://i.imgur.com/ymjsRJ0.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/nOhwBaz.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/6dnU4mW.jpg)
Another important thing: new safety ratings! The Urist would be barely passing the 10 mark at this point. By 1970 safety ratings are climbing fast, but we don't need to worry about the Baron, it's well ahead of its time.
(https://i.imgur.com/sFStIV5.jpg?1)
In R&D, there's not a lot of big stuff on the horizon, but we have unlocked a lot of things, and we have more quality numbers to play with, which will take effect for facelifts and new models. Of the major new techs, Transverse FWD will be a boon for cheap cars. We also have Light Truck Monocoque chassis, which is pretty specifically useful for trucks and vans. Disc brakes will benefit our current car lineup considerably. We also have a couple techs that will require a little more decision making as to whether we should implement them: Advanced 60's Safety, and Mechanical Fuel Injection. The safety would be great for the Baron, but re-engineering the safety basically adds one to two years of engineering just on its own, so we might wait for a new model or a later facelift. MFI is a similar story but for engines: it would be a large benefit to both power and fuel economy, but time consuming to engineer.
(https://i.imgur.com/ClfNJ8r.jpg)
What Next?
The Baron needs a Facelift pronto, with better engineering and new features such as disc brakes. The only controversial part is whether or not we should update to the new safety features which just unlocked.
Do we need a new model? It's probably time we replaced the Urist. However, we're not well positioned to build a new factory because, well, we don't have income from the Urist. If we share our existing engine factory which is currently underused, we can afford a Medium 1, maybe a Medium 2 or 3 car factory if we're feeling ballsy, but we definitely won't be able to afford a Large. At least land is about 40% cheaper in Archana, where we will probably want to build our new factory.
New economy engine? If we're making a new economy model, then having a new economy engine to go with it makes sense. We can install it in the Baron Wagon too. If we want, we could always start a prototype now. I would recommend doing this instead of putting it into the Baron Wagon on the first try, because otherwise we won't be able to finish the Baron Wagon's next facelift until the engine is done, leaving crappy Gen 1 Barons on the market for years.
Bonus: Hot Lap
The Baron, an actual performance vehicle, has completed the Test Track in 3:01! It even passed through the Slingshot at a blistering 103MPH! I've recorded a video of me trying to match this time in BeamNG (https://streamable.com/gq39ol).
(https://i.imgur.com/lox6HRq.jpg)
Oh yeah, and the Dropbox folder (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) has been updated with the new cars. Go try them yourself!
Replies to posts while I was writing this post: Pumpstack, heh. As for B4, I don't think it's likely to be worth it over an I4 at this point, but I'll do it if people vote for it. Either way, it's time to design a new engine model... PROBABLY. If we want our car to UNBELIEVABLY CHEAP then there is still no beating pushrods, which means we can still stay with the Urist MC for a while. But, in my opinion it would be very wise to design a SOHC economy engine.
Whatever else we do, get the Baron refreshed as quickly as we can this time around.
It appears in the screenshots that any given project has a unified design time? Maybe we can work on the new cheapo engine and the the new cheapo car side by side, using the Urist MC as a stand-in to get the Migrant started, and then a pre-production "refresh" to combine the two? Does that make any sense?
Projects don't automatically have unified design times, but I almost always tune them so that they're unified. There are a few reasons for this. If I were to start an engine facelift that takes 12 months and a car refresh that takes 32 months, and assign the engine refresh to the old engine factory, then there would be a gap between the engine being done and the car being done- during which we couldn't manufacture the old car, because the factory has already been re-tooled to the new engine and we have no old engines to put in them. Similarly we can't finish the new car before the new engine. So, you can leave those little tick boxes checked on the sign-off screen, which they are by default, and they'll all get done at the same time. But, then you're wasting potential engineering benefits. So, I go back and give the Urist MC Engine 100 Reliability etc until it takes the same number of months.
This can get pretty inconvenient later. I think we can re-tool factories without a project facelift, or maybe that's in a coming update, but I've never done it, and you can't see tooling/construction times easily. So once we have multiple cars using the same engine, basically everything has to update in lock step. If there is a new engine type, all cars must use it instead of the old engine type, and you can't leave some on the old one. So they need to be facelifted, so the engine needs to get done at the same time, etc etc. It can be very inconvenient, especially if you do something like make a new model with an old engine which will take a long time- you can't update the engine in the middle, or if you do, the new model of car will find itself with no engines.
Anyway, I came in because I forgot something: new bodies! Don't forget the '55 2.0m "mini cooper" style body either, if we're going for an ultra-cheap car, small can do well. It will just tend to overlap with city/commuter instead of family utility. The trucks that go off the screen have convertible and non-convertible 2 and 4 door utility variants, and vans, I believe.
(https://i.imgur.com/GYwUUI6.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/beEZL1p.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/XZfTzzp.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/e4ssby5.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/kMKflqy.png)
more car
In my own Automation game, Linguini Motors has thus far not survived past about 1960 on three attempts—I don't have a very good sense for when I have enough money to expand.
If you're not sure, just go to the sign-off screen and see if you are able to get 100% loan coverage. If you can- great, you're good for it! Possibly without the loan, but weird stuff happens when your income source gets cut off for a long time. Otherwise the other big number to keep an eye on is your company valuation. As a rule of thumb, if your negative cash-on-hand is less than half your company valuation, you're good to go. Again, estimate this with the total projected cost on the project sign-off screen (and of course your current funds). If you're not hitting these marks, wait and keep selling out of your current factory. Of course, this gets trickier if you're on an insane difficulty run where it can be hard to sell competitive cars out of a small factory, but if you have a medium factory and some design sense this should rarely be a problem.
Well Sensei, I think you'll have to give up on your career as a Gran Turismo driver, but you could probably find work as an announcer. :P
Hah, I actually consider myself good at racing games, but trying to drive an Automation car in Beam completely blind is nightmarish. I'll never give up my racing career- not unless I crash and die! Which, with the BaronTM's new state of the art safety features, is less likely than ever!
Baron '60 and the Migrant
Just starting off with the refresh, it seems like the Baron is more competitive for Premium Budget than Premium, and pretty affordable in that market too. I wonder what we're missing to make this a more "premium" car- there's a chance it's just a matter of sheer body size, but unfortunately we can't really make it bigger.
(https://i.imgur.com/eJKuXJv.jpg?1)
...actually, they like it (just a little) more when I drag the front of the car way out. Oh god, this is hideous. I mean, it's bold and aggressive. Muscle cars are coming soon, right? Well, it will be good, uh, challenge, for our fixture design team to make it look good.
(https://i.imgur.com/nl8R7z7.jpg?1)
Dragging the Trunk ALL the way out gives us a couple more points but... I just can't do it. I can't sell a car whose trunk is as long as its wheelbase, I have to put it somewhere more reasonable. This is one thing that annoys me in this game, I wish you could do a little more with body morphs, like alter the actual wheelbase. I guess the logic is that since morphs can be different between trims of the same model, it wouldn't make sense for differences like that to exist and still be the "same model".
(https://i.imgur.com/feMF6Ve.jpg?1)
New disc brakes all around, still less grippy than the tires can handle- the solid "Braking Force" line is below the dotted "grip" line at most speeds. The rear dotted line decreases on the high speed side of the graph because of lift. In high performance cars, this can be corrected with a wing, but this isn't really that kind of car. We're using brake pad material biased towards comfort, so we could get more braking performance if we wanted to, but these feel smooth as butter, or something, and apparently that justifies not stopping very quickly.
(https://i.imgur.com/A0uHYWh.jpg?1)
Just adding power steering makes a HUGE difference. We go up to 162 in Premium, and the Drivability climbed by 7 points. It looks like this heavy car really needed it.
(https://i.imgur.com/gOw3LTq.jpg?1)
Engine tweaks- it looks like they don't want more power, basically no matter what I do. I played around and found they DO like Premium Leaded fuel with much higher compression, and even more restricted exhaust and lower cams. Quiet, with power starting from the bottom, but I don't think it will be smashing the '55 Baron's test track record. Incidentally, the engine's fuel efficiency is surprisingly good for a big (well, medium) V8. That all gets lost in gearing, but hey, it's something.
(https://i.imgur.com/MIYzT3u.jpg?1)
It gets a new, 3-speed automatic transmission to replace the old 2-speed. As you can see, we only get 110 horsepower down to the wheels through this awful slushbox. Now this car has mushy throttle, mushy steering, and mushy suspension.
(https://i.imgur.com/6kQNmdA.jpg?1)
Market survey says it's a great premium car, with some appeal to muscle car buyers (new category as of this year!) and Family Sport Premium too. Also, Commuter Premium, because apparently our 15MPG gas mileage can be overlooked in favor of the high quality luxury interior, even though Commuters value fuel economy more than anyone else except City Eco.
(https://i.imgur.com/FeDR25R.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/QR9PhDB.jpg?1)
The Wagon update isn't producing crazy numbers, but it was selling fine already. I have made some strides with the Urist MC engine: for about a 10% increase in cost, we've got dual carbs, higher compression, more power, more fuel efficiency, and the redline has increased from 4700RPM to 5400RPM. This engine is no longer the absolute bare minimum in technology, although it's still incredibly cheap. I hope the increased fuel economy will make up for the change in price. The new 34 horsepower Urist should be a great improvement.
(https://i.imgur.com/DbfdfjK.jpg?1)
Other than that, not much changes. It's staying on drum brakes, because that's all it takes to provide as much braking force as the narrow tires can provide grip. It also looks like standard interiors are considered to be an improvement over premium, but only if we take Archana into account. I'm going to leave the Premium interior where it is and save us a couple months engineering. It does get power steering just like its Sedan cousin. This actually reduces our engineering time compared to having one car use power steering and one not- from 30 months to 25 months! Irritatingly this number does not show in the designer- you only see the engineering cost as if you were making the car from scratch. But, repeatedly going between the designer and the engineering screen reveals this to be the case. Effectively, it's cheaper to give the wagon power steering than not to do so, if we've committed to giving the sedan power steering.
Now's a good time to talk about Archana. Archana is such an outlier than unless I'm specifically targeting them, I prefer to disable them in the market screen in the designer, because they want totally different things from everybody else. The Baron Wagon's a great example of this. If you take the average of all countries, it scores 140 or so in Family. Without Archana, 150. in only Archana, 120- and they can barely afford it (30% affordability). You have to be careful of this or it can lead you to weird design decisions- like downgrading the interior quality when most countries prefer premium interior. Often times Archana won't buy your car at all anyway, instead it will sell in countries where it can get a better margin.
(https://i.imgur.com/Cv7XICo.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/yZ9GYUo.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/9rro4Cx.jpg?1)
This is Archana's demographic sizes. They're decently sized. The next picture is Archana's budgets. They're not.
(https://i.imgur.com/T4Y4INu.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/6tdy8F4.jpg)
Total design time for the Baron is 29 months. It's not the quick turnaround I was hoping for, but I think it really needs added reliability and tooling. Predicted Sedan competitiveness remains bad, let's hope that's just plain wrong.
(https://i.imgur.com/sexNyat.jpg)
Baseline cost is WAY down. Once again this is sort of a trick: we haven't really paid back the tooling from the first time. I've set much higher margins to compensate. Still, both cars have come down in price compared to before, which should really help them sell. I think the Baron is going to take off when this is done.
(https://i.imgur.com/e69zKRm.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/dVSleVU.jpg?1)
The Migrant
Well, this will be a challenge. I basically never use these van bodies. Furthermore, we're talking low-income with it, which has various meanings now. The actual Budget demographics in Archana can barely afford the minimum price for the old Urist model. The Migrant is going to be more expensive just by virtue of being larger, and we probably will have to push it out of a smaller factory too, which tends to make the car more expensive. Since we want the "absolute cheapest engine" there's truly no replacement for the Urist MC engine. It's tiny, it has pushrods, and its engineering is basically maxed out to make it cheaper, which took us 14 years of revisions to accomplish. I WILL test a version with a newer engine later though. Just for starters on the Migrant, most of the time I'm targeting Archana-only Family demographic. That should put us close to Family Budget range for the other countries, or at least get us crazy margins like the Urist had. It's getting a front transverse engine, and some cheap suspension (but not solid axle, they like it close to ground for ease of access), as well as negative chassis quality to help offset the cost of the large body. I know some vans like this were rear or mid engined, but this body only allows front. There's a real lack of rear-engine non-sporty body options in Automation.
(https://i.imgur.com/si76Xie.jpg?1)
Preferred body morphs seem to be rear dragged out as large as possible, but the front made as streamlined as possible for fuel efficiency. That's okay by me, it means we can actually tell which end is the front from a glance. By this point I've spent a lot of time fiddling with wheel sizes and suspension tuning but I'm not done yet.
(https://i.imgur.com/vSne01d.jpg?1)
They seem to like drum brakes, and small ones- apparently large brakes of any kind are just prohibitively expensive, affordability drops like a rock. I assume they are actually "balanced" for regular use, in that the rear grip line would be a lot higher if there were passengers and cargo in the car, so both braking lines would be similarly below the grip.
(https://i.imgur.com/QWF9b50.jpg)
Naturally, power steering is a must for such a heavy vehicle. Also, with enough other parts of the car made cheaper, even Archana tolerates Advanced 60's Safety despite a 3% affordability cost over Standard 50's, which is a lot. This will help it sell in other countries too. Not pictured: I gave it 100 cooling airflow for extra reliability and utility. Family loses a little competitiveness from this, but Family Utility gains a lot more.
(https://i.imgur.com/cxVZFuL.jpg?1)
Suspension tuning is a nightmare but this seems to be the best I can do. 80% comfort multiplier- this thing is kind of a bumpy ride! Apparently that's necessary to make it easier to drive.
(https://i.imgur.com/AdP6ZeL.jpg?1)
Here's the overall competitiveness scores. It hits Family Utility Premium in Archana despite having a basic interior and no radio at all. It also scores 96 in Utility in Hetvesia despite not being a utility vehicle, which bodes well for a truck variant. In demographics such as Family, it actually scores very close to 160 if you take Hetvesia out of the equation. None of these numbers are mind blowing but it's cheap and hits a wide spread, so this could be viable. For the record, we're looking at 5 years engineering time on the dot.
(https://i.imgur.com/xdf37Yy.jpg?1)
Variants:
You're getting your money's worth this episode (if you amortize the cost of your ISP bill across the time you've spent using the internet, this thread probably cost a dollar or two) because I'm going to work up a few alternatives too. First, the Delivery Van variant has scores that are off the charts with very little tuning.
(https://i.imgur.com/u9ls3pN.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/182syzm.jpg?1)
Like our other semi-trailing-arm car, a Utility variant has miserable carrying capacity at around 1000lb, but this doesn't stop it from being a hit (according to market projections anyway). Just keep in mind that Delivery and Utility are both smaller demographics than Family, so it's normal to see higher scores if you directly target them.
(https://i.imgur.com/eIgMn5b.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/TLNXmEx.jpg?1)
Now motors. What would it look like with a SOHC I4? On my first crack at it, I came up with a 1.3L 3-valve that makes 53 horsepower, and better fuel efficiency too. It's not fuel injected or anything crazy, so the base engineering time is 62 months- we can have a prototype out in time to revise into the first facelift. It's about 25% more expensive than the Urist MC Engine. It scores about 10 points higher in Family and Family Utility for most countries, and 5 higher in Passenger Fleet. I didn't do pickup/delivery mockups.
(https://i.imgur.com/IjlrDDC.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/08JegtX.jpg?1)
We could also try a SOHC H4 (that's a boxer, the pistons make an H shape). At the initial piston size of 86mm it's too large for front wheel drive, but once I size it down similar to the I4, it works out fine. In fact, in tuning it for Family competitiveness, I got very nearly the exact same stats with a 1.3L setup of the same bore and stroke as the I4 prototype. This graph is a comparison of the two power curves (they overlap) and stats. Notably, the boxer engine is a hair better in a few ways. It makes the tiniest bit more horsepower AND fuel efficiency, which might be down to some setting I didn't get exactly the same but I'm not sure. It's also smoother and quieter, and has 0.5 more reliability, which I'm not sure how much that actually matters but it's something. It also takes 10% more Production Units to make, meaning the same factory makes that much less engines for that much more price each. Unfortunately there is one bigger difference: it will take about 13 more months to engineer. We're comparing a 36 month base time with no familiarity to a 24 month base time with 22% familiarity.
(https://i.imgur.com/SOkmFtX.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/nGngVTc.jpg?1)
In my opinion, the logical choice is still the boring I4.
Back to the main Migrant: Putting aside crazy variants and estimating for a Medium 2 factory, we're looking at a launch price of $6500, approximately, which puts us on the upper end of budget cars in most countries and well affordable by Archana standard markets. We have a good forecast too.
(https://i.imgur.com/KPy1jHd.jpg?1)
The projected cost of building a Medium 2 factory is $1.5 billion. The bank will loan us, at most, 500 million. That means we have to be sure we're good for 1 billion in cash during factory construction without going bankrupt. I think we can, but with our other loan going on as well, this will be really pushing it. Medium 3 is probably out because it would ALSO need our engine factory to upgrade to at least Medium 2. We may be looking at an engine factory upgrade either way when we introduce a new engine; we will be producing fewer engines per factory shift because they cost more production units than the Urist MC.
(https://i.imgur.com/BEHlG5v.jpg)
Boardroom Meeting:
The Migrant: Should we go ahead? Should we make any changes? Is Medium 2 a good factory size? Should we start with just the family version, or utility/delivery too?
New Engine: We should definitely engineer one of these. What should we call it? Do we need to assess the viabilty of introducing a new engine with the first generation Migrant (and an upcoming Baron Wagon) instead of a facelift? This would probably require reducing the Migrant to a Medium 1 factory to start off.
Marketing: Once the Migrant comes out, it's probably time to introduce our dealerships to Archana. Should we wait until later, or open up now and see if our current cars can sell?
Keep in mind, even though I've designed these cars, we can still cancel them or make major changes before I've signed off. So far I've mostly led you guys on to the next car, but I'm open to trying different things, and we can also make changes contingent on them actually getting better market scores if we want.
Bonus Pic: Migrant FWD drivetrain.
(https://i.imgur.com/iS7Y5kg.jpg?1)
Changing the name of our prototype to the Hauler! I don't see a ton of replies, so it seems like it's time to move forward. I'll go ahead and try to start us with a Medium 2 factory. Factory construction times are so inconvenient that it's usually good to build the biggest factory you can all at once. Chances are that after this, we'll spend the rest of the 60's just selling the Hauler and the Baron until we are out of debt and have a few billion dollars to go all-in on a Large car and engine factory. Since people are a little cautious and I'm making the decision to move forward just keep the show going, I'll buy us a little insurance policy.
(https://i.imgur.com/3XysoIk.jpg?1)
For now, we're just making the passenger and delivery van, and shelving the pickup. We lose about 200 cars per month to inefficiency by adding the third trim. Note that baseline recall percentage start pretty high at 1.17%- this is partly because it's a new model, but it's also a downside that comes with cheap Archana labor. Oh yeah, since I don't think I did a closeup of this before, the left-most number is the efficiency and the second from the left is production units. Those together with the factory's PU output result in the third number, the number of cars made. Certain features like luxury interior are less efficient in large factories, and automation is more efficient in large factories too. It helps to keep the level of automation in factory tooling close to the level of automation in your engineering sliders. If they're far apart, you can actually lose efficiency and make less cars when increasing as automation increases, despite spending more time and money on the added automation.
(https://i.imgur.com/B2eLqVp.jpg?1)
Considering the cost of this project, I'm going to try going for Staff Facilities for just $100M more. Or should I get a QA facility for 200?
(https://i.imgur.com/dooKlvB.jpg?1)
Nah forget it we're already spending too much. Maybe we'll be able to add that stuff later. This is the final factory setup, anyway. Also, in cutting the extra trims from engineering, I saved some time, so I was able to improve the automation level a little keeping it at the par time of 5 years. Factory automation is lower than default because it helps reducing recall chance. I still don't know exactly how to read those bell curves, but notice in the Quality Assurance Threshold box how slowdown and recall chance start high at year 0, get better at year 3, and get worse at year 5 again.
(https://i.imgur.com/DyLVLkv.jpg)
Here's the final pricing and output. The Pre-Production box shows that our car factory will take 30 months to build from new and the engine factory will take 7 months to re-tool.
(https://i.imgur.com/WdAvdUq.jpg?1)
I'm also signing off the SOHC I4 prototype. At the cost of 14 pounds and $25 material cost for engine, I've made it possible to increase its size to 1.5L later. The variant has the same bore and stroke for 1.3L displacement, this just gives us a little room to expand later if we want to, without designing a new engine.
(https://i.imgur.com/rN6Rmsk.jpg?2)(https://i.imgur.com/SE3Kiwz.jpg?1)
Here's the timeline!
(https://i.imgur.com/hYf7qUU.jpg?1)
As our awareness grows, our sales price margins fluctuate up and down. First the dealers set it too high, then competitiveness plummets, then it goes back up... also, our credit rating slipped to a C.
(https://i.imgur.com/Vkz3Tjz.jpg?1)
Selling off our back stock of 1955 type Barons has returned our credit rating to A+. The 1960 Baron has launched at great margins too.
(https://i.imgur.com/hYf7qUU.jpg?1)
When factory construction begins, the construction costs basically wipe out all our profit from the new and improved Baron. Notice how the green income line on the finances graph goes up, but so does the red expenses line. Also, we're getting more money per month from the Baron profits than our loan. Now I'm back to wondering if we should have gone for a Medium 3 factory for the Hauler. Oh well!
(https://i.imgur.com/ItdXHnB.jpg?1)
I've planned a minor refresh of the Baron. Aside from some tiny tuning changes, the Baron Sedan gets lightweight magnesium wheels. I think these benefit us more in terms of sounding cool (added Prestige) than actually improving performance on our already-heavy car. But the big difference is the engineering sliders, I'm pushing to improve the reliability a lot. We've actually come to have more Prestige than Reputation, so this should help alleviate the reputation loss.
(https://i.imgur.com/VCKJNyj.jpg?1)
Ouch- another production issue. I'm just doing the full recall again, though.
(https://i.imgur.com/lCXkjmI.jpg?1)
Launch day for the Hauler! This is doing strong right from release. I think starting with a Medium 2 factory instead of Medium 1 made a big difference.
(https://i.imgur.com/9lCFgne.jpg?1)
I pretty much forgot to open up in Archana. Look how cheap it is though! Because dealerships take time, we won't actually start selling much there until later.
(https://i.imgur.com/XIrwhyw.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/XIrwhyw.jpg)
February, 1966 Review:
We did it, you hairy slobs! We are in the money! Both factories are fully operational, and we're bringing in a profit of more than $25M per month, even after our loan repayment. This is the point where the game starts getting easier. There's a number of things to talk about just on this hub screen:
(https://i.imgur.com/re1Gm9Q.jpg)
First, our finances are looking good. Technically we still have negative company funds, but cash is coming in at a steady pace, and our valuation has gone way up to $4.4 billion. We are probably in position to open up some large factories, or we certainly will be after another facelift of the Hauler at least.
(https://i.imgur.com/re1Gm9Q.jpg?1)
Our production numbers are a little weird. We're producing way more of the Hauler Delivery than the Hauler Wagon- that's fine, the delivery is earning a larger margin so this makes sense. We're also producing WAY more of the Baron Sedan than the Baron Wagon, in fact wagon production is almost at a standstill. However, as a percentage margin, we're selling the wagon higher than the sedan. I'm not sure what's happening here. It could be that the absolute margin is much higher than the percentage would indicate (quick maffs: $10k margin on Sedan and $8.4k on Wagon right now) and that's why the factory is making almost exclusively sedans, or it could be that there's sort of a feedback loop. Wagon has a high margin, few wagons are made, high margins are set to profit on the few wagons that were made. Either way, it's clear that the factory split between trims is much more dynamic than I thought it was.
(https://i.imgur.com/VVujakr.jpg?1)
...as a consequence of the Carsmith's Workshop making almost exclusively sedans, the factory making Pumpstack V8's is overworked. Its minor tooling hitpoints are at less than half and it needs to be re-tooled soon, so whatever facelift affects that factory had better be in a hurry or otherwise I just have to order it to re-tool on its own, with some downtime accordingly (assuming I can actually do that, I might be confusing this with an upcoming feature). Also, you can see that the factory making Haulers is working maximum overtime at 2.7 shifts.
(https://i.imgur.com/0pHazsD.jpg?1)
We're at the highest global economy it's been in ages. That probably causes markets to lean more towards premium too.
(https://i.imgur.com/Hu30FKl.jpg?1)
For our income, the Baron is making about twice as much as the Hauler, not surprising since it's a larger factory and our manufacturing costs are higher too. You can see in our expenses that R&D (mustard) is very small and other expenses such as dealerships are a tiny sliver. We can afford to spend more on these. Also, the damn government came again and demanded $84M over the course of the next year (green, 7M per month).
(https://i.imgur.com/YRxNVpi.jpg?1)
Our Prestige got a lot higher than our reputation due to selling mostly Baron Sedans. Now it's moving back the other way due to Hauler sales (note the colors), and probably increasing the reliability of the Baron helps too.
(https://i.imgur.com/W1INk7H.jpg?1)
Monthly Sales: Here they are. Without showing you a bunch of screens, I'll also tell you that right now, Archana is only buying Delivery, probably due to our margins. Hetvesia (surprisingly) has the vast majority of our sales to Premium and Luxury markets, and about half of our Family sales. Fruinia has most of our remaining family sales, and (also surprisingly?) the vast majority of our delivery sales. Perhaps Fruinians don't like the Baron Sedan because it's not very sporty. ...on further inspection: Hetvesians have 27k median Premium budget while Fruinians have 21k. This also explains why our GT sales, a relatively high price market, are all in Fruinia. Take note also of the colors and percentages: if it's green/high%, we're selling to the majority of people who are aware of us in the category. This usually indicates we stand to gain from more awareness.
(https://i.imgur.com/DkvHOo5.jpg)
R&D: Since we last met, we've unlocked Standard 60's Safety, 2-piston disc brakes (no more not being able to make as much braking force as grip), and a couple suspension options: Gas Mono-Tube Shocks (better at everything except offroad) and Hydropneumatic Springs. The latter of the two is a very expensive, but very comfortable (and not-at-all sporty) suspension option which could be a good choice for the Baron Sedan.
(https://i.imgur.com/b9jRR6q.jpg)
In any case, we can probably afford to double or triple our R&D spending, so specify categories if you want.
Gasmea is unlocking in 1970. This is the largest country, economically speaking: with 54% of the world economic power, they have more spending on cars than any other country. Of course, I'm not actually sure what that means, since the total economic power of the other four countries adds up to 91%. Anyway, they really are a big market. They prefer large cars and value prestige over sportiness, which tends to mean they value power and speed over handling. In contradiction, they also care a lot about fuel economy. They'll be open after our next facelift and before our next model, so we might plan accordingly.
(https://i.imgur.com/zw2Do1R.jpg?1)
Body Unlocks:
All the cars which extend off the screen have wagon, pickup, and van variants. The '65 2.4m and 2.8m on the third and fourth screen have all of those plus some two door variants and a mustang-style sporty coupe.
(https://i.imgur.com/tuMXulV.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/DDSS9Cx.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/2qH7pvp.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/tBABhnm.jpg)
What Next?
R&D and Dealerships: Our spending in both of these categories is now a tiny fraction of our income, so it's time to expand. You can specify where and how much, of course, especially with regards to R&D.
New Engine: Our SOHC I4 which needs a name is about ready. With our next facelift, we can use it to replace the motor in both Hauler trims and the Baron Wagon. It will probably necessitate an engine factory upgrade.
Facelifts: Of course, we always need to keep updating our cars. The Hauler is probably not going to see much changes, but we could add a pickup variant, especially if we're expanding the factory. The Baron Sedan might benefit from hydropneumatic (squishy water bag) suspension, if we want to try that.
New Model? Right now we're making tons of money, so we may as well start looking for ways to spend it. We have enough money to start new projects and target anything we want- a tiny city car, an enormous luxury car, a replacement for the Baron, or a sports or super car. The Muscle Car market will get much bigger for us when Gasmea opens up too.
New Factory? If we want, we could go for a new Large car factory for one of our existing models. We would upgrade our engine factory as well. We could even go for a Large car and engine factory, but it might be best to do that one refresh from now so we can afford it more comfortably.
New Paint? The 70's are coming, so we might modernize our look.
As usual, new cars are in the Dropbox folder (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0). In the interest of thoroughness, I've also uploaded facelift versions of the Urist which weren't originally in. Since there are now a number of files in there, models have their own subfolders as well.
Hot Laps:
-The new Baron is about 3 seconds slower than the old one. Boring!
-The Baron Wagon does the test track in 3:43 while the Hauler Wagon does it in 3:37. I think this is due to lower gearing, as they have the same engine.
-The Hauler Delivery, being slightly lighter than the wagon, gets a time of 3:36. Honestly, for having 34 horsepower, that's closer to the 134 horsepower Baron Sedan's 3:04 than I would expect. Maybe it... handles really well? Find out in the video! (https://streamable.com/om5qkx)
(https://i.imgur.com/moFoaW3.jpg)
Bonus Pic: Pumpstack V8 under the hood of the '63 Baron.
(https://i.imgur.com/p2rZmZM.jpg?1)
I accidentally deleted the draft of this post when it was almost done so forgive me if it's missing a few details.
The Baron
The Baron Sedan gets a large boost from new hydropneumatic suspension. The wagon gets its main improvement from the new engine, although that also requires a suspension and tire re-tune. I looked into a muscle variant a bit, and it only scored 120, so I don't think it's worthwhile. Meanwhile, tweaking the regular variant of the Pumpstack for the Baron Sedan has me finding that premium customers like their engine even more exhaust-choked, even at the cost of some compression, so we're down to 120 horsepower now. There's probably hot rodders buying our car and getting 30% more horsepower out of it with nothing but a bigger exhaust. The Sedan is getting 132 in Luxury, while the Wagon is scoring well in Family Utility and Family Utility Premium. It's down to about 110 in Passenger Fleet- they would like cheaper interiors and more seats, but this would be to the detriment of other markets. I also considered upgrading to Advanced 60's Safety, but I would probably recommend against it unless we really want the familiarity. It would bring our base engineering time from 29 months to 40 months. Most of that 29 months is from the hydro suspension.
(https://i.imgur.com/5hGy6WC.jpg?1)
Incidentally, the Baron Sedan is starting to get a body age penalty. This really illustrates how it's much stronger in certain demographics, depending on how premium they are. Don't worry about it though, right now this is still basically a placeholder in the game. They say they're going to much it much more serious in a later update though...
(https://i.imgur.com/UXyvnf9.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/fnXVmTs.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/WAgeVR7.jpg?1)
Here's the forecast for both Baron trims. Once again, it seems like the Sedan is doing much stronger. We might consider dropping the Wagon. I'd estimate that would take another 6-10 months off of our 29 month engineering time, but I'm not certain since to look I'd have to actually delete the wagon trim and then re-make it or juggle save files if we're keeping it.
(https://i.imgur.com/bnqThBb.jpg?1)
The Hauler
It's time for our first facelift, with the new engine! Which, I'm leaning towards calling the Windmill, but the vote is still out. Just adding in the new engine and re-tuning the gears has us up 20 points in Family Utility. Once again they like it geared so it doesn't reach 70 miles per hour because of fuel economy calculations.
(https://i.imgur.com/sq6xamw.jpg?1)
Regular Fuel is here! Compared to the leaded fuel we're using now, it's just slightly worse. The 1 octane difference means we would have to take out about two ticks of compression, which hurts power and fuel economy. However, leaded fuel is going to be made illegal eventually, probably in 1980 in most countries. Note how the fuel availability is 100%- that means there's no real market penalty for using it. Soon we'll start unlocking unleaded Premium, Super and Ultimate, and they'll start with low availability, then increase. This can vary based on both country and target market, so we'll have to be careful about using fancy fuel. I'm pretty sure Ultimate never reaches 100% availability except for markets like Track, GT and Super.
(https://i.imgur.com/ufgE88P.jpg?1)
The Delivery version of the hauler also gets very few changes aside from the new engine, but it's ridiculously competitive.
(https://i.imgur.com/kDzM7Zo.jpg?1)
I'm also testing a Utility version- it doesn't seem to do as well as the van. In fact, I think this body type (and possibly the use of FWD) skews more towards Delivery than Utility.
(https://i.imgur.com/EhNtBji.jpg?1)
One snag- our base engineering time is 10 months, but it will take 26 months to go from Medium 2 to Medium 3 car factory. The existing engine factory can cover us, but we might as well upgrade it anyway if we're going to stop making Haulers for that long. Also, here's the market forecast. The Utility is the least profitable of the 3, I think, so it's debatable if we should produce it or not.
(https://i.imgur.com/yIlFTSG.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/g7ZLmLo.jpg)
The Minecart
I've started a prototype with the 1.9m body, front transverse as I usually recommend for an economy car. Here's what it looks like after paint and body morphs! It will be the 70's when we release this car, so I'm taking suggestions for a new paint color. This is extremely competitive in city/commuter type demographics, and I think it might even have the potential for a sporty trim with a faster engine variant.
(https://i.imgur.com/qWDBIB6.jpg?1)
So, the main issue is this. There's two ways we can take this car: the first is a more expensive version. This would have double wishbone suspension front and rear, and advanced safety, maybe even power steering. We're looking For this option we would be looking at 68 months base engineering time and 74 PU per car. The markets would look like this: take note of the affordability as well as the competitiveness. This will be a big investment at first, but it might be worthwhile after a facelift and getting our engineering sliders up.
(https://i.imgur.com/GWVHIYa.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/MhbgAWC.jpg)
We could, instead, make a more budget oriented car. We'd go for more simplistic Macpherson/Semi-trailing suspension, Standard safety, and couple other tweaks. This would bring us down to 54 months base engineering and 69 PU, and a little material cost and weight savings. The big saving is the 14 months engineering time. With this, we could bring it to 60 months and launch immediately with positive automation sliders and other benefits, which would usually be our first facelift. We could genuinely target budget markets, and/or make huge margins immediately. Our markets would look like this:
(https://i.imgur.com/KZutrnC.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/2sDEcPs.jpg)
Then there is the matter of factories. A Large 1 factory (don't even think about L2 or L3) for cars or engines costs about $2.5B, and takes 51 months to build. Suppose we're building the Minecart out of a Large car factory. If we upgrade our existing engine factory to Medium 3 and drop the Baron Wagon, we can just barely support the Minecart and the Hauler. Of course, that gives us a lot of downtime, haulers won't be produced while that factory upgrades. Alternatively, we could go all in on a large car and engine factory. I think we can afford to do this if Baron and Hauler sales keep up while those factories are under construction. However, I probably need to make sure that we can finish the revision of our new engine into the medium factory and have it start producing before our large factory is finished. This might necessitate some gymnastics with starting the large factory in the background and adding it to the engine production with a non-engineering facelift or some nonsense, I'm not sure.
R&D: It's not related to any car in particular, but here's what I'm going with for now.
(https://i.imgur.com/Nb3bIYj.jpg)
Extra car: I decided to make "a sports car with the 3.2m wagon" and I thought it was going absolutely nowhere, but then I realized I needed to remove Archana from the market averages. I thought it would do OK in Family Sport, since they don't have a preferred body type, but it actually didn't. They seem to rely on a "circle test" stat, which is based on the size of the car and is worse with larger cars. However, it DID do well in Muscle. It would look like this:
(https://i.imgur.com/nr1DOoN.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/dN9ozoO.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/gt0aVkJ.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/OUlk1eT.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/HoQI1Qc.jpg?1)
Meeting Time:
The Baron: Do we want to drop the Wagon? We could also consider trying to make a two variants of the sedan, one with Premium interior (and no production penalty) and one with Luxury interior, like we are doing now. We could even move our more expensive one with hand-built interiors to really target the high-price Luxury segment. Those have an even worse production penalty than luxury, but a Leatherworks factory upgrade can reduce it to the same as Luxury.
The Hauler: It looks like the Utility trim would be the least profitable, so we might not want to produce it, but we can if we want to.
The Minecart: Which direction should we take this in- the more expensive, or less expensive version? Do we want to go for a large factory?
Factories: We also have to decide what size factory our new engine should be made in. This will be shared between the Minecart, Hauler, and possibly the Baron Wagon and future models as well.
Alternative Projects? We don't necessarily have to go with the Minecart, or exclusively with the Minecart. We could investigate other options as well, such as the enormous 3.2m body. It's relatively fast for me to do a quick eyeball of a car if I don't tune it perfectly, so we can see if crazy ideas have legs.
Bonus Pic:
STANCE LIFE
(https://i.imgur.com/KcrxPIa.jpg?1)
STANCE LIFE
maybe I should drive this in Beam lmao
1970s city car? clearly it needs to be bright orange or yellow. Of course, then it should be called the Cheesemaker, but... Yeah, large factory, and I would actually say do both a cheapo and a slightly premium should we go with it.
Well, the big choice is whether to go with the cheap or expensive suspension option. That can't change between trims, it's a permanent part of the model. I did feel out a City Premium trim with a nice interior, it scored about 132, which is okay but I suspect the factory will just make the other trim. Might be something for a facelift.
On the Hauler Utility, how does it compare to utility vehicles as is? the numbers Im seeing say its worth it, but if all utility models are at that, yeah...
Not sure. It's a little weird since I sprung for the front wheel drive, they actually get a penalty for that- Utility likes rear wheel drive, or AWD biased to the rear, because that helps pull a trailer.
Alternative projects... I still really want a B6 developed fer a GT vehicle at some stage. Dont need it to be used in a car anytime soon, but a familiarity and "what stupid tech can we shove on this" engine project might be good..?
Perhaps a offload-focused vehicle based on the '60 3m?
I know you want a boxer, if someone else votes for it too we can try it out. I don't actually know how well GT likes boxers, but we can probably try it. I've never known Offroad to be a very profitable segment, it's small, but we can still look into a proper utility vehicle with solid axles and at least an offroad trim, since it looks like the Hauler is so-so in Utility. Now, we'll see what we can do with the bodies coming up. I recall some good-looking utility bodies in the 70's are actually bugged, they get an absurd integer-overflow level penalty for "accessibility" because something is weird with how it calculates height from the ground.
Ya sure that capping max speed is how ya get the best fuel economy, and not having a tiny engine that has what is essentially a coasting gear? Thats the impression I get being best watching the devs dick about anyhow. :P Please dont take any of this as criticism, please dont take any of this as criticism...
Yeah I'm sure. Unless it's a Utility vehicle, they tend to prefer capping the speed with an extreme overdrive rather than capping the speed at redline. If you're hitting top speed in overdrive, you're running the engine at a low RPM and good fuel economy in that speed. If you're hitting top speed at redline, you're getting awful fuel economy at top speed. In the case of the current Minecart setup, it's even realistic, the middle speed overlaps the overdrive speed, so you're in low gear accelerating up to speed and then shift into overdrive to maintain speed. just to prove it though, here's what it would score if I reduced the top speed:
(https://i.imgur.com/0JVk7Z4.jpg?1)
-Hauler
I see how the Utility version drops off over time, but so does the delivery version. (It's impressive how the wagon stays so strong.) Gotta figure we're doing at least one tune-up during that run, so I think it's mostly a matter of bringing it to production and getting familiarity.
One thing to be cautious about with the market projections is that they try to take into account our Awareness. Since we haven't sold a Utility vehicle in years our awareness is probably low, and would be higher going into a later facelift. That's assuming we don't have a customer base that will suck up all the delivery vehicles at a high margin before the factory can make any utility or something. However, I think the Baron is an especially egregious case because of how much more the luxury version costs compared to the basic version.
-Other Projects
I honestly have no clue about factory sizes. I can assume bigger is better, but I don't know which model(s) will benefit most from the boost.
Generally you can estimate this with market sizes. If 50% (or whatever our max awareness is) of the market is larger than the number of the cars the factory makes, then bigger is always better. Sometimes you can get away with making a trim that targets a smaller market too. Markets like Super are so small they're often best served with small factories, but if you can get them to like a car that shares a body with a larger market (like muscle, GT, luxury even) you can make a car for them in a medium/large factory.
With Gasmea opening soon I was thinking it could be time to make a proper muscle car. The '66 2.8m 2-door body has aggressive lines I like. (Convertible, anyone?) We could call it the Wartiger and paint it orange. That row of bodies also has other options in case we want – well, just about anything.
We can maybe look into that as a possibility for a muscle car soon. I had a very brief look at this and didn't manage to get it up as high as the 3.2m, but it could just need more tuning.
The "muscle wagon" results are fascinating. What if we put the standard 'smooth' V8 in the Baron Wagon instead of the low-rated engine? Are the engine qualities holding it back? We have the Hauler Wagon to fill the low-end niche now, Baron variants should be strictly upscale.
At a glance, the Baron Wagon with the V8 isn't grabbing much. Many of the markets the Baron Sedan hits have sedans as a preferred body type. This isn't tuned fully, but I don't think there's a ton of potential. I also tried a leaned-out version of the V8 for fuel economy and got similar results- I think it' too expensive maybe?
(https://i.imgur.com/00BsM0r.jpg)
As for wagons, the couple market tests I tried did better in muscle than family sport. I think muscle might actually like the added weight on the rear? Also it's a size thing. Or I am missing something and need to keep trying, that is possible too.
Yeah, but there are like 100 total Muscle consumers, and like 4,000 Family Sport customers, and they have about the same budgets.
Oh, that's my bad, I should be giving you more up-to-date market information. Muscle is currently emerging as a new market and growing fast, although Family Sport is about twice the size.
Here is the market sizes for the countries we currently have unlocked:
(https://i.imgur.com/RGdIDx5.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/psbrNXW.jpg)
Since we're on the topic, here are the desires for Family Sport, and for Muscle. Both of them use a couple symbols that aren't common among the other demographics, but I have some guesses as to what they are.
(https://i.imgur.com/rdkYEXe.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/2CmIa90.jpg?1)
Muscle seems suited to a sports trim of a premium or luxury car. They have an 18% preference, their single biggest category, for... I think that symbol actually represents engine displacement, it looks like it's pointing at the area and height of a cylinder. They have three different extra stats related to speed or engine power, and they don't give a damn about fuel economy or reliability. They also care less about the car being easy to drive and practical than Family Sport does.
In retrospect, it looks like both markets have a 5.4% preference for larger footprints. However, Family Sport values cornering intrinsically and Muscle only cares about cornering insofar as it increases Sportiness.
If I'm correct about that symbol being engine displacement, then specifically targeting Muscle might call for a new engine. Now of course, in trying to figure out what exactly these markets want, I guess there's no avoiding it...
Let's Talk About Detail Stats
The detail stats screen is one of the more frustrating parts of Automation. It can provide useful information, but it also leaves me wanting for more details. It uses some of the same symbols as other screens, but it often uses different symbols to mean the same thing, or the same symbol to mean different things. Worst of all, I can't see these values change in real time as I change things on the car, I have to change something, make several clicks to get to the relevant detail stat, and then go back to the screen where I can change something on the car.
Most of the main stats you see in the designer, like Drivability and Sportiness, have a detail stats page explaining how they're calculated. Here are all of the categories:
(https://i.imgur.com/PSzViwL.jpg?1)
Here's a circle symbol, on the Drivability detail stat screen:
(https://i.imgur.com/zcpiArQ.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/GlErqJW.jpg?2)
(https://i.imgur.com/r2R5wMM.jpg?1)
As for the power symbols in Muscle? They're not in the detail stats screen, but they are in the engine screen. Or, one of them is.
(https://i.imgur.com/HUwdmc6.jpg?1)
Performance Index is some kind of calculation of peak horsepower and the width of the power band, it's supposed to be more useful than peak horsepower. If I had to guess, the lightning bolt symbol on its own in the Muscle desires chart represents peak horsepower directly, which makes sense for that market. But, the symbol used for Performance Index appears twice, presumably being used for two different things. Maybe the second one is torque? I have no idea.
The only real moral of the story that I can think of is, figuring out what markets actually want takes a lot of guesswork. We'll just have to try designing some cars, some might be canceled and some might surprise us with good market competitiveness.
I'll go ahead with the Minecart cheap version sometime soon unless I hear otherwise, because that's what's received actual votes. We probably won't start another project immediately, I think, but there will be an opportunity when the Minecart releases.
Edit to add: Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) is updated.
The Minecart, and Other Facelifts
Building our first Large factory is going to be a big deal! I believe the plan is to build both a large car and engine factory. First though, our existing models: They're important because they'll be keeping us afloat during this enormous expenditure.
The Baron is dropping the Sedan wagon trim. Unfortunately this means we have to upgrade our engine factory which makes V8s to Medium 2, and in turn, there will be 15 months downtime. It's projected to be ridiculously profitable, and I think the price has come down. Almost 3700 cars per year isn't bad for a car with a luxury interior, although we may have do something about that 72% efficiency if we can- again that's mostly got to do with the luxury interior. At a glance right now, though, changing it or especially creating two different trims with separate interiors would put our engineering time above 4 years, and I want to start selling obscene amounts of premium sedans now!
(https://i.imgur.com/L2imDau.jpg)
The Hauler is skipping the Utility for now, but upgrading to a Medium 3 car factory, which again causes 26 months of down time. I've tweaked the engineering times for both the car and our update for the Windmill engine's first market release to match.
(https://i.imgur.com/L2imDau.jpg)
The Minecart is staying as cheap as possible: simple suspension, standard safety, no radio and no power steering (it turns out power steering loses us 2 miles per gallon, by the way). In fact I must say we are looking at 38 miles per gallon (US gallons, not cheater UK gallons). That is not bad for a car releasing in... what, 1971 I think? And capable of American Gasmean highway speed? It even gets a non-zero score in Sportiness, which is more than I can say for our current lineup.
Here it is in "Cheese Yellow" but... wow that is a loud color.
(https://i.imgur.com/0NlcoXL.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/lvdSTuV.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/98LeJfX.jpg?1)
Okay, ready to sign off!
(https://i.imgur.com/DFNYSbt.jpg?1)
Well, there's a problem. Not that the bank will only give us 26% loan coverage, although that is a little scary. But notice how the SOHC I4 (Windmill) project takes 50 months? Well, that means we can't start selling Haulers with the new engine in 26 months like we hoped. It takes 50 months to build the large engine factory, but it won't let the Medium factory finish re-tooling before then. The project is only "complete" when all factories are done and you can't have one done early. Normally I'd just give up and sell Haulers with the old engine for two years longer than I hoped, but today I'm in a mood to experiment.
Building Factories
First I'm going to save my game. Next sign everything off- the two 15 months projects (Baron and engine), then the two 26 month projects separately (Hauler and engine) then 60 months and a billion dollar loan for the Minecart. We still don't actually have the large engine factory building though, so our engine factory will be way overworked trying to supply to Minecart when it comes out.
(https://i.imgur.com/yvvyVXR.jpg?1)
If everything works like I'm hoping it works, we will have that large factory up and running before this is an issue.
There's a "factory management" screen I rarely visit. You can start a new factory project without having anything to build in it. When we get to Huge factories this will be super useful, because they take 80 months to construct.
(https://i.imgur.com/c3qGk2w.jpg?1)
Then we can see the configuration for our beautiful Large factory, with an iron foundry.
(https://i.imgur.com/FyLHXcR.jpg)
Now on the timeline we can see that our new engine factory will get done a few months before the new car factory, because of the extra engineering time. I hope it will be able to tool up in time; apparently building a factory with no tooling saves you no time even though tooling takes a long time on its own. I've cropped the names for size but you can probably guess which is which by the order they finish in.
(https://i.imgur.com/Ng0sq05.jpg?1)
Before advancing the timeline, I also pump some more money into marketing and dealerships. I'm not really sure what the optimal return on investment for this is, but I'm being relatively conservative. For a little while, we're losing money because we have no cars: both our main lines are waiting for a factory upgrade. Then, the new Baron launches!
(https://i.imgur.com/bzDYFFZ.jpg?1)
The Hauler launches! It's selling absurdly well, getting 140% margins! The Baron sales have slowed just a little bit. We're still technically losing money, but as we continue to gain equity in our partially-completed factories (at least I assume this is how it works) our credit rating stays good enough to avoid bankruptcy! We now have, uh... negative 3 billion dollars. It sure is good we don't have to pay interest on that.
(https://i.imgur.com/3vo3mLF.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/rG2AxRG.jpg?1)
While we're waiting for the Minecart to come out, the Hauler gets a small refresh. This is mostly to take advantage of new quality bonuses from R&D, but of course, we can't update the engine. The price comes down a little further and it gets the middle pair of seats changed to a 3-seat bench. The Baron gets a similar treatment, although it can have an engine update as well. Tires seem to have improved purely based on the year, we can get some lower gearing (and faster 0-60 times) without wheelspin. At a glance, engineering time is long (22 months) no matter what because of safety, apparently, I have no idea why when I haven't changed it. Since, you know, vector addition, I may as well look at other engineering-heavy features.
(https://i.imgur.com/RrA8rTg.jpg?1)
Holy Spirit of Radio that is expensive! Expensive enough to make me consider maybe having two separate Baron trims, something I had discounted due to engineering time earlier.
Well, I'm trying it out. The engineering time is kind of crazy at 4 years, but on the other hand, it's not like I can't just keep selling the Baron 66 during that time. The new DeLuxe variant will have a Luxury 8-track and a hand-made interior, hugely expensive options, the latter of which calls for a factory addon. The standard Baron is getting downgraded to a Premium interior to reduce price and increase production efficiency.
(https://i.imgur.com/eYHHbad.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/OcDjWdj.jpg)
A few months later, the '68 version of the Hauler is so good it actually helps us turn our funds around, we're bringing in a profit overall despite construction! That or we paid off a loan. Actually, it's probably the latter; the Baron is still our more profitable model.
(https://i.imgur.com/cjQ3fRW.jpg)
Oh yeah, as was announced on the last screen: Gasmea opened up! I'll open dealerships and see what happens.
Finally, the Large Engine Factory is done!
(https://i.imgur.com/Uc8V0sd.jpg?1)
Now I have to hope that the game, uh, works like I think it does. Can we create a "facelift" of the windmill motor which adds the new factory but keeps compatibility with our in-progress Minecart design? Yes, we can!
(https://i.imgur.com/4eAd1Rn.jpg?1)
And in 8 months too- just in time! I'm glad I was correct about how this game feature I never used before works, because it would have been a huge problem otherwise. Curiously, our total cost per engine is slightly higher in the large factory. I think this is because I had to turn the QA threshold way up to get recall chance down, and I also reduced tooling quality and automation. It would have been making too many engines anyway and I saved us a few hundred million upfront, but that is one of the downsides of a new factory, it's not as efficient at first. I expect it will catch up as staff skill improves.
One thing to watch out for- safety regulations are on the way up. Our most unsafe vehicle is the Minecart, at 27 safety, and Fruinia has the highest safety requirements. Even the 22 is 10 years out from now, but this is something to keep an eye on.
(https://i.imgur.com/RmAne8R.jpg?1)
Launch day for the Minecart! Finally! It's a hit, as predicted.
(https://i.imgur.com/V8YA4lQ.jpg?1)
June, 1971 Review
How time flies! It's now the 70's! It's time to import some bell bottoms from Gasmea, and start groovin' to your 8-track player (which we're going to bring to market in cars soon, hopefully). Well, unless you have a Hauler or Minecart, because those probably still aren't getting any entertainment system. Huff the lead fumes while you can because leaded gas is becoming illegal soon! We're bringing in a monumental amount of money, from three separate manufacturing lines. We even have a Medium 1 engine factory that we basically don't need right now, so we can start producing a new engine type if we wish. Actually, we can do almost whatever we want, because we have a ton of money. Or, a ton of income, anyway. We technically have enormously negative amounts of money, but as long as our company valuation balances it out this doesn't matter much. One day they're going to update the game so that you have to pay interest on negative accounts and it's going to be a very different experience.
(https://i.imgur.com/PwjHEcW.jpg)
The most profitable line is still, funny enough, the Baron Sedan, despite being in a medium factory. Hopefully I haven't screwed the pooch by changing it into two trims again- that update doesn't hit for a couple years to come still. Either way we may think about replacing that with a more modern luxury car and a new, bigger engine. As for the Hauler, the factory has stopped producing wagons entirely in favor of delivery Haulers, so we once again have a trim that's being left behind. It's possible we can cure this with a Large factory instead of eliminating the wagon, however. The Minecart will certainly be improved with a facelift- added automation would be good because the factory is working maximum overtime already. We could consider adding a premium or sporty version. It might need a larger factory already, but I hate to put it out of commission while the factory upgrades.
Here's our current sales: I've separated it into Gasmea and non-Gasmea since they're a new market. Our dealerships aren't fully set-up yet, but they're mostly buying the same cars in the same categories as everyone else. The only abberation is Gasmea accounts for most of our GT sales, perhaps their preferences allow the Baron to qualify as a GT car while it's considered not sporty enough in other countries. The Minecart accounts for most of our Passenger Fleet sales.
(https://i.imgur.com/B3AGyDU.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/Z9cZdt2.jpg?1)
Here's demographic sizes, followed by potential revenue. Basically everything is growing except budget markets, who we don't actually sell to ever since we got good awareness.
(https://i.imgur.com/gz1psnY.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/IH7gqF2.jpg?1)
R&D: Here's a potential spending plan, and our current progess. It's expensive, but I figure we have money now. Let me know if we want to target anything. Since we last met, we've unlocked Alloy Wheels, which are lighter weight wheels that aren't as expensive as magnesium. We can make this standard pretty early if we want, but I think our budget cars will still prefer steel. We also unlocked 8-track players: Luxury, Premium and Standard. AM radios are almost completely phased out, but these new technologies start off comparatively expensive. We also got Advanced 70's Safety, Lightweight Forged engine internals (expensive but good for extreme high-revving engines) and I5 engines. There's also Hypereutectic Cast Pistons (it's a metallurgy term) which are... good for emissions, I think?
(https://i.imgur.com/FkPOeap.jpg)
Meeting Time!
The Minecart is due for a basic engineering improvement, but we could look into added trims or a Large 2 factory if we really want.
The Hauler is suffering from single-trim-dominance again. We might want to consider upgrading it to a large factory, though. This would have to be a brand new factory, leaving us with our existing Medium 3 factory that could produce Haulers or something else.
We have an extra engine factory that is currently making Windmills, but we will be able to supply enough windmills even if it is making something else. We could start a new motor. Perhaps a large motor for luxury and muscle cars, a small but powerful sports/GT motor, or we could also think about beginning to develop a more high-tech replacement for the windmill, with 4 valves or an aluminum block.
The Baron might be due for a replacement or at least a new engine soon. Of course, we haven't even seen what the latest facelift will accomplish yet.
We can do new stuff! We could comfortably start a new Large car factory, or multiple smaller factories. If we move the Hauler to a large factory, we'll have a medium factory left over that's well suited to sports or muscle cars. We could afford to start a super car project no problem. We could also try to make a proper, normal family car (probably a wagon) instead of coming at that market with modifications of a Premium or City car. We could do a proper heavy utility/offroad. Really the sky's the limit.
Hot Lap: The Hauler with the new engine does the test track in 3:20, but I know you're all here to see how the Minecart does.
(https://i.imgur.com/FkPOeap.jpg)
Bonus Pic: Moving parts in the Windmill
(https://i.imgur.com/5wOX2DD.jpg?1)
We can indeed make the same model of car in multiple factories, and I can also restrict factories to only making certain trims. This would be one way of guaranteeing that less-competitive trims actually get made and we don't lose all our awareness. The only downside is they all have to finish engineering at the same time for each facelift. This isn't really annoying unless we want to upgrade one factory and not the other, but even then, the factory that's not upgrading will continue to produce the old facelift while the other factory upgrades, so it's not too bad.
Regarding bad handling from the Minecart in Beam, I think that's entirely down to incredibly narrow tires. They're 120mm front and rear. This is good for price and gas mileage, but not grip. Even crappy drum brakes have no problem locking up the tires. I actually wanted to make them narrower for even better gas mileage (we're in no danger of wheelspin), but I couldn't stop it from being even more terribly understeer-prone.
New Bodies
I forgot to include these in the last post! Kind of important if we're thinking about new models, right? The '74 hatch/sedans that go off the screen have ugly van variants, but no pickup.
(https://i.imgur.com/obbOUdN.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/dmudrcl.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/5MGORYu.jpg?1)
Minecart Facelift
Remember how I said the tires were too narrow? Well a few years of tire improvements and I can make them even narrower! Misers rejoice, a full set of tires costs just $146! There's no inflation in Automation, all prices are estimate relative to 2010 money (I think) so that's the equivalent of $26 in 1971- makes for a hell of an advertisement. I did switch alloy wheels which cost a little more though.
(https://i.imgur.com/Y63p98a.jpg?1)
The new Windmill engine was up several points for improved fuel efficiency. I decided to go ahead and switch to unleaded gas now though, and that pretty much cancels out all our gains. I also shaved off a whole PU by reducing piston quality to -7, because it's not exactly like this engine is stressing them to the limit. That allowed me to improve exhaust quality and still come out cheaper. Once again tweaking reveals they like lower cams, so we've lost a little power.
(https://i.imgur.com/K3gXPzn.jpg?1)
Hauler Facelift
The Hauler gets the new Windmill of course, and a similar gearing to the minecart where the theoretical top speed is in second gear and third is a long overdrive. The Hauler still has enough material costs already that switching to alloy wheels doesn't give a positive impact. Adding a Basic AM radio gives us a tiny hit on Family Utility and Passenger Fleet appeal (is costs about $40 and 2 PU) but a gain in Family, so I think we can try it out. At a glance it looked like the Basic AM Radio did a lot more harm than it actually did: the added weight, mostly towards the front of the vehicle, called for a suspension re-tuning. In fact, what the heck, I'll try alloy wheels again- we're still affordable in Family utility and might make up the material cost with engineering improvements. Passenger fleet takes the biggest hit but they're dominated by the Minecart anyway.
(https://i.imgur.com/cBodUaE.jpg?1)
The Delivery version of the hauler gets alloy wheels not because they like it, but because I'm pretty sure it will save engineering time not to have to make two separate types of wheels. Otherwise, they like the new engine tweaks, so they're doing just fine.
(https://i.imgur.com/MoxKCVw.jpg?1)
There's also a little to think about with engineering the Windmill. With the Large factory sitting at 45 Automation, increasing the automation of the motor's engineering slider actually reduces efficiency. So, I'm going to have to improve the large engine factory's tooling- wow that is expensive! It will be running at reduced shifts but at least our cost per engine comes down. I'm also officially shutting down the medium engine factory, it will sit idle until we have a new engine type or a shortage of an existing engine type.
(https://i.imgur.com/L4dNxHF.jpg)
Everything will be ready in 18 months, and both cars are set to a 50% markup minimum (except the Hauler Wagon at 25% to stay competitive) which means that the Minecart is available for under $6000. They'll probably all end up selling at 150% as usual but they're going to be profitable no matter what.
Now that we have seen the new body types, we should definitely try to think of a new project. We can start a Large factory now for the Hauler if we want, but meanwhile I'd like to see something new. If the Hauler is getting a large factory, it'd make sense to make a Sport, Muscle/GT or Super car. If we're dedicating a large factory to something new, a family or utility vehicle might be reasonable. We can also consider replacing the Baron: if it's not trying to split between Family and Premium, a large body which Premium/Luxury/Muscle prefers would be beneficial. For new cars and engines, try to specify suspension and valve type. I can still pick those out if you don't specify, but it has a big effect on whether the car leans towards longer engineering or not.
I agree there's something wrong with the dynamic pricing here, they shouldn't be trying to sell a 70 rated car without adjusting the markup. Could it be that when they don't have any wagons to sell, they never recalculate? And then they aren't selling any so the factory never makes them? ::) :'(
Economic silliness aside, I have a couple proposals to share.
A new passenger-first wagon is the best way to prevent this ridiculous problem. The Family market yearns for Bay12's affordable, modest automobiles.
Trim name: Alpaca
Body: '74 2.7m wagon
Materials: thrifty steel
Suspension: MacPherson front, Torsion rear? - economical without totally compromising handling, from what I can tell
Engine: Windmill I4 mounted transverse front - Windmill isn't great but it still seems fine for fuel efficiency
Drive: FWD
Color: ? "Copper" - HSV(28,72,72) or "Cinnamon" - HSV(30,100,48)
Interior: Basic, only such amenities as Family demo can afford (after markups)
Factory: L1
And Baron is showing its age. The one objection is that I dislike the idea of putting our current most profitable model on long hiatus while the factory retools. But this thing is old in car years.
Trim names: Peregrine / Unicorn <- that's Premium / deluxe Luxury
Body: '74 2.7m 4-door sedan - note: NOT same project as Alpaca, we've had enough of that nonsense
Materials: Steel? - would taking low availability materials here stack or overlap with luxury interior penalties??
Suspension: Double Wishbone all - would seem to be necessary for deluxe customers
Engine: *undecided, see notes below
Drive: AWD?? - not sure if there's any advantage over FWD but it is fancier
Color: "Cinnamon" - HSV(30,100,48) / White with max sparkle
Interior: Fancy / Super fancy
Factory: ? I assume an M3 at first, as we'll probably be building a large factory for something else
*Engine Thoughts
The Pumpstack V8 was also designed and debuted with the original Baron. Engines can have longer lives than body styles, though.
I am amenable to let Aseaheru finally try out a Boxer-6 engine for the Peregrine at least; I don't know if piston count envy will negatively effect the Unicorn market.
If we split engine types our factories may be underworked. We'd want other new models for one or both engine designs. Six cylinders might suit an offroad/utility type vehicle, balancing power with affordability? And/or roll out a V10 if we intend to enter the muscle/sports/performance categories.
We seem to have a lot of candidates. Instead of making you all vote on one before seeing how well it does, I'm going to try to demonstrate most of them.
Migrant: This is a small offroad utility vehicle. I don't think it has any alternate trim appeal, but given how that usually goes it's fine. The small size probably helps budget appeal. They seem to prefer Transverse FWD, which means no proper 4x4 but we will unlock Transverse AWD in time for a facelift. It has Macpherson front suspension, and solid axle with coil springs in the rear. Almost every other feature is dedicated to offroad: Manual locker, skid tray, BIG tires with Chunky Offroad tread. This version has Advanced Safety (improves regular Utility appeal at the cost of budget/offroad) and galvanized steel chassis material (adds 5 competitiveness or so across the board, but costs more and requires a factory add-on). Bare bones otherwise, no entertainment, drum brakes. Archana is included in this screen, it has good budget affordability in other countries. Note that the standard "offroad" demographic prefers an SUV. Also, it has a front bench- they get a practicality penalty otherwise. Lots of features I don't normally use in this car.
(https://i.imgur.com/jgc77lS.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/VKk2V5P.jpg?1)
Alpaca: This is our first candidate for a new family car. For tuning I'm targeting Family specifically (it's an enormous demographic) and excluding Archana so they don't trick us into unduly cheaping out. I came up with a standard interior, basic radio, and surprisingly, maximum ride height. I found they prefer (as does almost everyone?) semi-trailing arm rear suspension instead of torsion beam. Sorry, maybe you'll have your day, torsion beam. It also gets front disc but rear drum brakes, and advanced safety of course. Oh, and alloy wheels. We're probably going to be seeing those on most of our medium budget cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/73HKWXQ.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/j2B8kkT.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/mJylTFt.jpg)
Peregrine: Once again I've run into a bit of an odd circumstance: they prefer transverse FWD. That is with the Pumpjack V8 by the way- it generates some warnings about increased maintenance costs and narrow engine space, but it fits! I tried tuning it for transverse and longitudinal, and transverse just came out ahead. Transverse tends to be very driveable while longitudinal requires staggered tires and some serious suspension tuning to make it stop oversteering. This example is targeted at Premium, and it has disc brakes all around and premium interior and entertainment. Luxury adds ten points straight up, but of course that gives a factory penalty. Besides that, it's got power steering, hydro suspension, the works. It also has extra interior and steering quality, as is typical for this sort of car. Also, unfortunately, they REALLY like the back dragged out all huge, even if it ruins the lines. I didn't even go as far as I could, I sacrificed a couple points just to make it not look like a hearse.
(https://i.imgur.com/DHj4vat.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/13a0VxY.jpg?1)
A Boxer 6, still in FWD, gets us to 4 liters pretty comfortably, with a SOHC. I didn't tune it or the car to the absolute maximum, so there's a little score left on the table, but after putting on a very quiet exhaust and giving it shallow cams, it's doing better than the Pumpstack. I think they really like the added displacement and smoothness. I might be missing some pumpstack tuning tricks, but this example engine seems to be better and slightly cheaper. I did give it a higher tech 4-valve head instead of 3-valve like in the pumpstack, but I think we can afford it with our familiarity. This chart compares the B6 to the Pumpstack. Note that this B6 also runs on regular gas, while the current tune of the Pumpstack runs premium leaded.
(https://i.imgur.com/6yQnOtt.jpg?1)
What about a new V8 just for reference? Let's stick with our somewhat goofy transverse FWD big-engine setup. Also SOHC 4-valve. A 4 liter V8 is only a slightly tighter fit than the B6, although I might tweak it bigger (remember per-cylinder size). Well, it scores slightly worse in every area that I think matters to the Premium market: this chart compares it to our B6 prototype. The V8 scores slightly worse in power, loudness, smoothness, and it's fully 7 PU more expensive (38 vs 31). Also, if I make the V8's bore 0.1mm bigger the car instantly loses affordability (and competitiveness) due to difficult maintenance. However, overall competitiveness is slightly better.
(https://i.imgur.com/b8qQONi.jpg?1)
Of course, what if we want a BIG V8? Going to longitudinal RWD, we drop from 168 to 160 (after a quick tire/suspension tune) in Premium. But, we can fit a huge V8. Let's say... 6.7 liters. Actually no, that's going to need forged pistons, let's do 6 liters. At this point we have an engine bay fill factor of 38 months, which is horrible, but I'm immediately seeing 160 competitiveness in Muscle. A little gear tuning and wider tires to stop wheelspin, and they rather like our big engine: we're at 165 in Premium, basically having caught up with the FWD counterpart. While that's the same, the secondary markets we score in are a lot different.
(https://i.imgur.com/27tXKEd.jpg?1)
So, hopefully that gives you some idea of the tradeoffs. Vote for your favorite prototype or ask for more!
Bonus: The Pumpstack V8 really is small for a V8. Guess what other car can fit the Pumpstack?
(https://i.imgur.com/uZDKzos.jpg?1)
If we had put double wishbone suspension in this thing, I bet we could actually sell it with the V8. It took a lot of tuning but looks better than I expected. I don't normally put non-production cars in the dropbox but I may have to make an exception.
(https://i.imgur.com/hq716lK.jpg?1)
Please do add the V8 Minecart! I must drive it.
I actually put it in the Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) last night. I even did a video (https://streamable.com/14ny5n).
And, wow, it can score in Convertible categories without being a convertible. "Hey, Imma go buy this fancy schmancy new car and take a hacksaw to the roof." I laugh but I know there's aftermarket alterations that do exactly that.
Yeah, the AI (or list of competitor cars? I don't really know how it works) doesn't make a lot of convertibles, because they're a small market compared to stuff like Family and Premium, so cars with no business in that category still do well. I guess that basically represents prospective convertible buyers giving up and buying a hardtop because there's no recent convertibles they're aware of.
I took a look at an Alpaca Premium. My initial thought was, the main thing holding it back would be the small engine. However, it did pretty well with just the Windmill. Also, they like every morph drawn out the make the car larger. Ugh. It's like they want a wagon because of the size, but they want it to technically be a sedan because that sounds nicer. I honestly wonder if it isn't worth just eating the 5% penalty in Family Premium for being a wagon, that's not that bad anyway.
(https://i.imgur.com/r21PgK6.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/rcmwuPJ.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/MDtpNIW.jpg?1)
Selling the Alpaca
It's time to go ahead! Since the Alpaca would be competing with the Baron in the premium category, I'm making an executive decision to cut the premium trim at least for our first run of the car. This will save us a year of engineering, meaning we can get to our next decision sooner.
The Alpaca is going to be built in a Large 1 factory. If we wanted to be absolutely using all our resources, we could probably afford a Large 2 factory, but that would mean upgrading our engine factory as well. As it stands our Large 1 engine factory will be supplying two Large 1 and one Medium 3 car factories- a feat made possible by our engine's simplicity.
(https://i.imgur.com/5d82PSz.jpg?1)
Before we finalize the Alpaca, I've got to see what more tuning I can get out of it. I thought I was on pretty close, but I found several points with slightly narrower tires and further suspension adjustments. It also gets maximum engine cooling factor in the aero screen (at the cost of a little top speed and fuel efficiency) for Family Utility appeal. Base engineering time was 6 years and I tuned it down to 59 months, so these competitiveness numbers are from after losing a few points to rushed engineering. I had about 164 in the designer before that, which is a little higher than where I started.
(https://i.imgur.com/LSz8ZRp.jpg?1)
When all is said and done, we're looking at selling it for just under $10,000, making it more expensive than our previous family cars. It's still well below the median family budget of $12000 though- that number has grown in the past decade.
(https://i.imgur.com/Tczfgqr.jpg?1)
To keep up with engine demand, I'm adding expanded offices to the engine factory. This brings our tooling downtime from an already-painful 11 months to 16 months, but I think it will be worth the investment. Despite the window which says it costs $240M, it only increases our total costs by $40M- vector addition is used for the price and construction time of factory add-on buildings.
(https://i.imgur.com/x4tKnZd.jpg?1)
Everything else hasn't changed since the previous post, except the engine factory tweaks reduced their cost very slightly. The timeline now looks like this. The red engineering bars on the timeline are the Beast and the Migrant, I've decided not to delete their designs, but they aren't signed off. As you can see, the timeline screen becomes a mess when we have a lot of models and trims. It's supposedly getting improved somehow later, I don't recall exactly what the plan was. Oh, and I decided not to take out a loan for the new Large factory. I think we can cover it (with negative account balance that we pay no interest on).
(https://i.imgur.com/XRQu1gv.jpg?1)
We have 18 months of engineering for our existing models and the main engine factory will take 16 months to retool, so after just 2 months the only source of Windmill engines for the next year is our medium 1 factory. This leaves our car factories running at greatly reduced shifts, but at least we're still selling cars and bringing in money. Well, until those start retooling too a few months later. By the time 18 months are up, we're another billion into the negatives. But, it's okay because our company valuation is through the roof!
(https://i.imgur.com/RQhLIKo.jpg?1)
Our updated cars are making a great profit! While both trims of the Baron are selling, I think my attempt to make an upmarket luxury trim ultimately just resulted in slightly less total profit. Perhaps part of the issue is that it's very easy to get access to a market larger than your factory production. Funny enough, the Baron still is giving us profit about equal to both of our other models combined, for much less factory investment. Targeting Premium was evidently a very good choice.
(https://i.imgur.com/teBXda5.jpg?2)
...Never mind, once our stock has stabilized a little the Minecart is bringing in the most money, as one would hope for a large factory.
(https://i.imgur.com/QGdA2If.jpg?2)
We've also just unlocked single-point EFI. I don't normally just start projects on my own, but I figure I'll make a prototype engine using it. This example is 1.7 liters. Playing around with the Minecart, they don't like the added size and weight even if I make the variant size smaller, but the larger engine is actually more fuel efficient. I considered aluminum as a block material but I don't like the added PU. We don't necessarily have to use this engine anyway, if we don't the familiarity would help the Windmill make the jump to EFI later. I just wanted to do something while windmill updates are on hold because we're engineering the Alpaca.
(https://i.imgur.com/VJhX3HQ.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/8iV9r5k.jpg)
Uh-oh, good reminder! I still need to get the Baron off of leaded fuel.
(https://i.imgur.com/EA31hab.jpg?1)
Working on the baron again, I've thought to check our current revenue. Most of our sales to Luxury are the DeLuxe and they're almost equaled Premium in revenue. Come to think of it we could probably be making barons (or their replacement) in a large factory. I've included the rest of the screen if you're curious where our money is coming from in general. Anyway, that's all the evidence I need to keep the DeLuxe Sedan around.
(https://i.imgur.com/nldBeDQ.jpg?1)
Immediately on switching from 93 octane Premium Leaded fuel to 86 octane Regular Unleaded, I have to take the engine from 9.4:1 compression ratio all the way down to 8.0. It loses several horsepower and some fuel efficiency in the process.
(https://i.imgur.com/6ppkBp4.jpg?1)
In the profitable but ever-frustrating process of trying out more engine tuning, I find that they like their exhaust even smaller, again. This time I'll splurge on a dual exhaust. The Premium demographic still prefers a 90hp engine absolutely choked by a single exhaust, but this is pretty close and hopefully doesn't take as big a hit on Family Sport Premium. Once again the Baron v8 gets a new, less impressive power curve. At least I was able to bring the redline up thanks to improving tech. Still, I think car enthusiasts will refer to this as our "malaise years". But, we've achieved a new low noise rating of 18.2, which is what they really care about.
(https://i.imgur.com/CAPMJIM.jpg?1)
The Baron also gets a new, 4-speed automatic. This will eventually make its way to our economy cars, with any luck. The only other interesting thing of note, is that now that our factory is very mature (and located in Fruinia) we can set the QA threshold to absolute minimum and still not have a bad recall chance. This helps our car output.
(https://i.imgur.com/WqCmBYQ.jpg?1)
Since I'm at it I'll also tweak the Minecart and Hauler, although they don't get any engine changes. They both get the new 4-speed, and not much else is different. Tooling improvements for the Miner have the Windmill factory threatening to be overloaded again soon. In the next episode we might have to bite the bullet and upgrade the Windmill factory, with the associated downtime... or build a second factory to run in parallel.
Two things on this screen: First, we're bringing in lots of profit despite the factory construction, which is excellent. Second, the Hauler Delivery hit infinite stock/zero sales somehow. I have no idea what caused this, but it recovered after a few months of being like that. The factory wasn't maxed out on Hauler Wagon production either, so I think something's buggy unless we had a problem with engine supply (and there's no reason we should have). I think maybe what fixed it was new competitors coming out, which caused it to recalculate competitiveness or something.
(https://i.imgur.com/9o6RLub.jpg?1)
I got like six recalls and three were from the hauler factory. No particular reason, the chance is still less than 1%, it just happened a bunch. I paid the full recall every time since it's always like a week's worth of profit at most but it's added up to a bit of a reputation ding. Should I start doing quiet recalls if the discovery chance is low?
(https://i.imgur.com/UIN7rUz.jpg?1)
The Alpaca Releases! Not surprisingly, it's doing well right off the bat.
(https://i.imgur.com/zGwgMya.jpg?1)
March, 1977 Review:
I've waited just a little longer than usual after the Alpaca release because I really wanted to unlock Advanced Automatic transmissions before we start facelifting. There's a couple other tempting techs up soon but we'll get to those. The Alpaca is doing well, it's providing a little less profit than the Minecart but it also has less advanced engineering since it hasn't been facelifted. We're stressing out our engine factory and we're going to need to get more capacity soon, if we're going to actually start making more Alpacas. Also, we're back in the black! Our cash accounts are positive, as of just a couple months ago. Our company valuation is also insanely high.
(https://i.imgur.com/NwyarCT.jpg?1)
Markets: Fuck it here's all the market data.
(https://i.imgur.com/tYBnfGN.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/z1nRV4t.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/tHQ7Zqk.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/mt9n64A.jpg?1)
R&D: We've unlocked turbos, which can make a huge difference in almost any engine. We'll probably be considering turbo engine designs soon. We've also unlocked Advanced Automatic Transmissions which are basically just better in every way. Single and multi-point EFI is unlocked, so we can start fuel injecting as soon as we want to pay the engineering cost. We've also got Advanced 80's Safety (this is when safety starts getting more expensive).
(https://i.imgur.com/A6xmtQq.jpg)
Bodies: So many. SO MANY. For just one example, I took a picture scrolled to the right. That one actually had about four pages worth of options though, I just took a picture in a spot that covered the main variants (look at that insane van/ambulance thing). There's a ton of combinations of doors, with/without windows, a normal van rear, etc. Otherwise if it goes off screen it has a pickup and a van usually, maybe a convertible. Sorry, I just can't be bothered to take like 12 more screenshots. Some of these I had to retry uploading to imgur a bunch of times for some reason too.
(https://i.imgur.com/8sNhmUs.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/s4nvp0l.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/vkkAvfI.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/g4eOtGq.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/zzcXY6O.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/d8uVxgB.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/mrQc4xU.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/ABFUtti.jpg)
Meeting Time!
Engine Improvements: We've got access to EFI and turbos now. If we take advantage of these, it will be big changes to our existing engines, or a good time for all new engines. Turbos are optional, in real life not many cars have them but in Automation most demographics like them. EFI is something we're going to have to do at some point. We can pretty quickly add single point. If we want to do the more advanced Multipoint, and save ourselves upgrading to that later, it will be a little longer engineering since right now, we mostly just have familiarity with single point. It will also need to start at negative quality, because we're unlocking it well ahead of time. This would still get better performance but less reliability compared to single point.
Alpaca: Should we add a premium trim?
New Factories: to make maximum profit, we should keep expanding. If we want to go all-in, we might try for a Huge car and engine factory. These cost about $8B each, and the other problem is, they take 80 months to build. We could also more comfortable afford a Large 3. It might be wise to build parallel factories instead of upgrading existing ones, because construction downtime will be multiple years. We're probably going to need to do something to expand our engine output in a hurry: we're at the point where just improving engineering on the Alpaca will make the engine factory overworked. It will only be worse if we add EFI or turbo to our standard engines, as these add PU. New factories can benefit new or existing projects.
New Cars: We can comfortably afford to start up a new main-line car, such as the Migrant. In fact, unless we're targeting a Huge factory, we can afford to start up two main line cars. We should probably replace the Baron. We've got a lot of flexibility to try new stuff in general now. We can also try new trims.
R&D: We're currently spending $10M. We can leave it where it is, up it a little, or invest heavily with the hope of breaking the game with improbably futuristic cars. Let me know if we should target anything.
Hot Lap: How does our new family car, the Alpaca handle? Well, it's a FWD, so presumably it does just fine. It gets a leisurely 3:22 on the test track. I'm a bit tired to think of funny commentary so I'll skip the lap video tonight.
(https://i.imgur.com/Ve03dST.jpg)
Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) has all the new cars. Drive them, or decorate them!
Bonus Pic: The Urist Wagon compared to the Alpaca Wagon
(https://i.imgur.com/2P7yiMr.jpg?1)
Markets at the highest end of the spectrum (Luxury, Sport, GT) are so small – and like to have components that are penalized or impossible in mass production – that it's hard to conceive needing a huge factory ever. But for standard appeal cars, yeah. We should be thinking big from here on out.
Theoretically, you could target these with a specialized trim of your car which also has appeal to something like Family. However, usually this hasn't worked for us in practice: it makes the most sense when your awareness would prevent you from selling all of your cars to the main demographic. However, we can easily afford insane amounts of awareness and our cars are extremely competitive. It almost makes me want to try playing on 120% competition.
1977 Prototypes
The Noble is so large it's obnoxious to other drivers on the road. That is exactly what upmarket buyers want. We should make blinkers an optional feature, as seen on upper-trim BMW models (ba-dum tish).
(https://i.imgur.com/KDInS2P.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/eldC8QA.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/empT1rN.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/Q2532Xl.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/JJERwiY.jpg?1)
More prototypes to come!
Migrant Prototype 2
This is the body:
(https://i.imgur.com/4oNT9rd.jpg?2)
It's kinda ugly, but it works. I think it'll need another color scheme though. I'm currently testing this with an updated Windmill engine, with more displacement but still carburated. EFI would give it 5-6 years of engineering time and we really may as well make a replacement engine with 4-valve SOHC and that sort of thing. I also stuck with Advanced 70's safety even though we have Advanced 80's. Wanna know why?
(https://i.imgur.com/uu1kBis.jpg?2)
I wasn't kidding when I said this where safety gets expensive. It takes a big affordability hit, and affordability is already low in Offroad Utility. Actually, I'm not sure why that is exactly, I think the body might just be a lot more expensive than the tiny one we used for the last Migrant candidate. It's actually huge in comparison. Also, our offroad score is not that great even with totally offroad features. I think this is why:
(https://i.imgur.com/CCtEZ9E.jpg?2)
I tried this even with galvanized steel and it wasn't that great. So, it might be the soft top that's doing this. Or just the size again. You wouldn't guess it but this thing has four seat rows inside! I went with 2+2 seating because that gives us eligibility for Heavy Utility. Markets look like this:
(https://i.imgur.com/wjoCfyl.jpg?1)
I tried the four door option and was not impressed with the results. Offroad, the category it should be good for, was around 110 even though its affordability was around 70%. I think that, due to questionable game balance choices, this Jeep-looking body is not very good for offroad. :(
About Fuel Systems: I tried the Windmill with Single-Point EFI and Multi-Point EFI. Single point actually did not impress: compared to two eco carburetors, the performance is about the same. It might be better on V engines where you can have paradoxical multiple-point single point EFI (lol they should just call it throttle body EFI and be more clear) but not for the windmill. This would use about 58 months engineering, which isn't worth it at all. Multi-point EFI saw huge gains but with engineering around 70 months. This will be worth it eventually but we should update our current engine quicker than that, and probably replace it with a new one soon.
New City Car
The Minecart's not that old, but why not see what we can do with a new city car? It will be replacing the minecart, so engineering time is not much of an issue: we can just keep selling the minecart in the meantime. Let's try double wishbone all around so it has more appeal to Fun and City Premium. Actually wait, what if we did make a Fun version of the minecart first?
(https://i.imgur.com/wF4rmpA.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/wF4rmpA.jpg?1)
Okay, actual replacement car though: Once again, and this will be a pattern for the next 25 years probably, it is ugly as sin.
(https://i.imgur.com/QZy7j2C.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/1cmJCTO.jpg?1)
This one was a nightmare to tune. I spent way too long trying to do it with 12-inch wheels like the Minecart, but I ultimately had to put it on 13's. It was looking for a while like the tune they liked the most was going to have terminal oversteer. I think small tires were forcing me to give it weird suspension characteristics to avoid bottoming out, due to the shape and weight of the body. Now that I got it set up, this car is basically a more premium version of the Minecart in every way. It's almost 25% more PU but it has good suspension, much bigger and wider wheels, and I even splurged on a basic 8-track. It has family appeal that seriously competes with the Alpaca (don't worry about internal competition unless we have multiple Huge factories though). It also hits Fun, and I'm sure Premium trim could be successful if we need a second trim.
But damn, it is ugly.
So, we'll want to think about if we we're going to go with Advanced 80's safety or not. It's awfully expensive. A little more tech could help in this regard too, we'd be able to put some negative quality on and save engineering.
As it is, the new Minecart (or whatever we're calling it) seems like a very solid choice. We can probably go ahead with the Noble too. This version of the Migrant might not be a great choice, we could consider another body. I think there was also interest in "something fast"... a variant of our new V8 would certainly do the trick. But what body?
1977 and Onward
Before I finalize our Minecart and Baron replacements, it's time to update our existing cars. Especially, the windmill engine powering them hasn't been touched since 1971 and we've gained a lot of new tech since then. They also will benefit from Advanced Auto transmissions. But there's another thing: I always want to replace the Windmill with a higher-tech engine. Last time I market tested my new prototype 1.8L, the City demographic at least didn't like its size. This time, I'm going to use the Alpaca as a test bed. Here's the baseline with the 1977 Windmill update. They liked a switch back from Standard 8-track down to Basic 8-track, even with Archana excluded. What can you do? Again, these numbers are nuts because we're comparing our car with an advanced automatic to competitors who haven't come out with those yet.
(https://i.imgur.com/5d9QTH4.jpg?1)
Turbo Windmill: This setup works well. It's very close to the fuel economy preset for turbo tuning, I didn't have to do much except change the intercooler size, which doesn't get adjusted automatically. Somehow (exhaust scavenging effect?) our turbo motor not only makes more torque when the turbo spools, but on the very low end too! This is... possibly unrealistic, but hey, I'll take it. Besides making more power, it's smoother, quieter, and fully 10% more fuel efficient. All this for 1 PU (some of which is an improved muffler!), $100 material cost, and 5 months engineering.
(https://i.imgur.com/PxOzr1x.jpg?1)
...actually, wait a minute, I left the Windmill update on multi-point EFI for both NA and Turbo variants from when I was comparing engineering times earlier. Let's roll that back to carburetors, for turbo and non-turbo, because we want this out of engineering before we're elderly. Here's the new engine numbers: they're all lower, but the turbo is still better than the NA.
(https://i.imgur.com/gzg8I81.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/7ptrwac.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/g2lF6tY.jpg?1)
Now the... wait dammit.
(https://i.imgur.com/vNvX2DQ.jpg?2)
Yup, new turbo is going to take four years. Even though the total engineering time only increases by five months, it makes a bunch of the engineering 'new' so there we are. Probably, turbo is going to have to wait until the Big Update.
While I'm on that topic, we run into another issue with the Minecart. If I want the New Minecart to begin engineering ASAP, and occupy the Minecart's factory we can't update the existing Minecart. This is because we can only have one project using the factory, even if the completion dates are different. If I start one project using the minecart factory, whether that's the replacement model in 6 years or the current model in one year, I can't sign off the other project while the factory is "reserved". Then we run into yet another issue: if I don't update the Minecart, I can't use the 1977 Windmill in it. If I can't use the 1977 windmill in the Minecart, I also can't use the 1977 windmill in the Alpaca without stopping production of the Minecart because we're making our engines in the same factory. There's a spare Medium factory, but it can't keep up with Minecart production and I'm not even sure I can tell it to make an older version of an engine if the newer version has come out.
In short, I either have to delay the engineering of the New Minecart until I can get done with a rush job of updating the old minecart, or skip putting an Advanced Auto in the old minecart, and leave the new Alpaca with the aging 1971 Windmill. Unfortunately that means everything you've read up to this point is useless. I'm still putting an Advanced Auto in the Alpaca, but that's about it.
So, I'm making an executive decision in order to keep things moving: the Minecart and Windmill can stay on the old engine to get the Minecart 2 out faster. I'm going to start replacing the Windmill entirely since if we're doing this much engineering, we might as well at least get 4-valve SOHC. That puts us back to square one again with deciding which engine project to use: my possibly too-large 1.7L or something smaller. So, using the Alpaca as a test bed, I'll compare them. This might bring me to an engine that's a little bigger than what the Minecart likes, but I think I'm okay since the Alpaca is a pretty big seller for us.
Here's the 1.7L in the Alpaca: This version has Multi-point EFI, unlike the last version we tried which had single point.
(https://i.imgur.com/qqVCePO.jpg?1)
And here's a 1.4L:
(https://i.imgur.com/KWStdNp.jpg?1)
New Minecart: I've decided it will come out with the new engine. This required some re-tuning, we even ended up with different body morphs, as the original had the back ALL the way out for added weight over the rear. I've also put it in the same yellow as the Minecart, and since this will be releasing in the 80's, it's officially time for unpainted plastic bumpers. Notice it gets 35 miles per gallon- not bad!
(https://i.imgur.com/sQKdGal.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/GgI6ZdQ.jpg?1)
It's scheduled to come out in five years with the new engine. Because the Multi-point EFI is an early unlock, its engineering time is vastly inflated. This can be countered with negative quality. Going to -8 quality for the fuel injection against our +7 R&D gives us an effective quality of -1, and takes us from 100 months to 50 months to get it finished. This is still a lot better than carburetors, too. We can add the quality back for cheaper later, when it's no longer considered ahead of its time. I realized Advanced 80's safety was also expensive for this reason. Although it's less competitive for now, I put in Advanced 80's safety at -2 quality. Again, it will be good when we bring it up later.
(https://i.imgur.com/lIHkP9d.jpg?1)
The Noble: Like the Minecart, I'm putting the Noble's new 6.2L Noble V8 on MP-EFI with a lot of negative quality to get it done. This investment will be worth it in the long run, we can probably use this thing through 2020 if we want. Same story with the safety, it's a little less competitive now but it will be worth it when we bring the quality back up later. Once again, I managed to get it down to 5 years with engineering sliders.
Here's the markets. It's hitting a pretty wide area, so we could definitely afford to put this in a large factory later. It's just getting one trim for now in the name of expediency, we will add the Luxury trim on a facelift. It might even have a dedicated muscle trim in it if we want to do that.
(https://i.imgur.com/a1rpFSl.jpg?1)
Altogether, our new and updated models come to almost a couple billion. Most of that money is re-tooling costs. Re-tooling large factories eats up a lot of money, but we can afford it. I also sprung for a QA addon on our large engine factory to squeeze the most I could out of it without a 27-month downtime for upgrading to Large 2.
(https://i.imgur.com/z5Ia8Zg.jpg?1)
Huge Factories: this is the part that could bankrupt us if I've miscalculated. Two huge factories (one for cars, one for engines) with no loan. They are beautiful to behold. Look at all that industry! All they lack is a proper drawbridge. Also, plots are getting expensive at half a billion. They slowly go up as the game goes on, and they fluctuate with economy too.
(https://i.imgur.com/q5iqzi1.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/ApBFGTy.jpg?1)
Time to hit the "play" button!
(https://i.imgur.com/vrlwWcJ.jpg?1)
Shortly after starting, our cash on hand goes to about -$700M, since we just bough $1.1B worth of land. The factory construction expenses will be paid over the coming years, but the good news is, our current revenue has us profiting by $60M per month even after paying for that!
Oof! Goodbye, this month's profits. We might need better QA at some point. Our monthly chance in most factories isn't that bad, but now that we have a lot of factories this is getting annoying.
(https://i.imgur.com/M7ih0PZ.jpg?1)
At the start of 1978, the first leaded fuel bans for new vehicles hit. Fortunately, we prepared both our engines. I'm really glad I put the Windmill on Unleaded way back in 1971, otherwise we'd have a problem.
In 1979, the updated Alpaca wagon comes out and it's doing absolutely insane margins. We're doing well in general, almost well enough to start a second pair of Huge factories, but I won't for now. I do crank our R&D up to the level of questionable realism, however. You can see we're "losing money" on the New Minecart and Noble, which is our engineering expenses.
(https://i.imgur.com/NsKYNz3.jpg?1)
At this point, it's also time to update the Alpaca again! I want it to use the Waterwheel motor as soon as our factory switches over, otherwise there will be a gap in production. It gets new variable hydraulic power steering and some slider improvements. Market numbers look great with the Waterwheel, of course.
God damn, you guys!
(https://i.imgur.com/NE7EaQJ.jpg?1)
In 1981, all three of our active car factories enter re-tooling. The Alpaca is getting is upgrade to the Waterwheel engine, and the Minecart and Baron are being replaced. We start losing more than $100M a month. This climbs to $300M when the last of our stock is sold. At this point I realize I made a glaring mistake: The Hauler! I just plain didn't update it. Deadass forgot. Well, that's not going into production until a facelift is done... just like I was worried about happening to the Minecart, it can't use the updated engines.
The Hauler gets a new engine and transmission, like the rest of our cars. Even so, the Wagon version is doing pretty weak:
(https://i.imgur.com/2XsIZln.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/zrRZ7Zb.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/YohOJf8.jpg?1)
But there's another problem with the Hauler...
(https://i.imgur.com/NbtAlb7.jpg?1)
This has truly been an episode of problems! Granted, this one's my fault. Even this monstrous engineering time would not have been a problem if I planned ahead. Still, how the hell can a facelift like this take five years, even with 1/3 of that being from engineering sliders. The single largest category, at 38.6 months, is Safety which is just insane. I think it's a bug, as I seem to recall having this issue with the Hauler in the past as well. I went back and double checked to make sure I didn't accidentally click something: no ABS (we unlocked that, by the way), Advanced 70's safety, same on both trims. I hate to say it (especially since the Hauler is so stylish) but we're better off replacing it than paying 38 months for the same safety features every time, or reducing our engineering sliders for a model that we first engineered in 1960. Once again, I really wish the interface showed what changed in engineering so I could try to diagnose this, but for now I have to conclude that the Hauler is now a cursed item which maddens and frustrates any engineers who attempt to tinker with its design.
Rather than tie up our factory doing nothing for 3-5 years before we can update a 20-year old design, I'm just going to accept that the Hauler is lost. Next episode we will need to pick a successor for the Hauler, maybe a Migrant.
July, 1982 Review:
Wow, the 70's went by in a hurry. It's now '82, and it's time to take the company in a new, Huge direction. 8-tracks are out, Cassettes are in (we unlock Basic in 6 months). We've got great research, on the border of game-breaking research. Of the four models we had in production in 70's, we've replaced two of them, and are about to replace the third. Our Huge factories will complete construction in January, 1984, so we'll have them operational sometime in 1985 with any luck. We've moved to high tech fuel-injected, turbocharged engines and don't sell a single naturally-aspirated car. Our engines and transmissions are run by on-board computers! When we started this company, computers were only for the military, and they took up a whole room.
(https://i.imgur.com/Z0fqKvA.jpg?1)
Also, big shout-out to the skilled craftsmen in our Baron Workshop (now making Nobles) who have managed to reach 0.0% recall chance with 0.0% slowdown! It's almost like they're not human...
(https://i.imgur.com/Z0Jxl7C.jpg?1)
Markets:
Here's our monthly sales data. It doesn't tell the whole story without a lot of separate screens and mouse-over tooltips, so I'll explain a little further.
(https://i.imgur.com/YklSklz.jpg?1)
Here's current market sizes:
(https://i.imgur.com/D9JZZRy.jpg?1)
And here's our awareness: I've upped our dealerships again, and in Luxury/Premium we're already close to or equal to max awareness, I think, which varies depending on country because I haven't leveled them up all at the same time.
(https://i.imgur.com/7vOg4Rd.jpg?1)
R&D:
Since we last left off, we've unlocked Longitudinal AWD (not transverse- my mistake, I think). We've also got Ball Bearings for our turbos (they're just better) and ABS, antilock brakes. I have mixed feelings about these because they're expensive to engineer, and while they're common on real cars the automation markets don't usually seem all that enthusiastic for them. We've also unlocked Partial Aluminum and Carbon Fibre body panels. Partial Aluminum is lighter than steel, because some of the panels have been replaced with aluminum, but can be made on steel presses because the panels which are hard to press are done on a separate machine. Carbon Fibre is light weight and extremely expensive, for supercars only.
(https://i.imgur.com/eTj2z04.jpg?1)
Upcoming unlocks that we might care about: Basic Cassettes are 6 months out, we already have Luxury through Standard ones and the price is becoming reasonable. Since they're an early unlock, they might benefit from a little negative quality if they're actually supposed to be cheap though, but this causes problems because their quality is tied to the car's interior. In 14 months we're getting new suspension types. Multilink is a rear-only suspension which is more expensive than double wishbone, but highly desirable for comfort and drivability, basically everyone loves it if we're willing to put the engineering in. Pushrod suspension has the springs on sideways, connected to the wheel hub by a vertical rod and hinge. This is for super/sports cars, it allows the lowest possible ride height and it's very sporty. Traction control, a more advanced tech on the ABS line (you can't have it without ABS) is coming in a couple years, and Transverse AWD is coming in 3 years (sorry). We're also unlocking Variable Valve timing, which makes engines more economical, in a couple years. Much later (in 1990, with our current R&D) we'll get Variable Valve Lift, which basically lets us have two separate cam profiles, and makes for engines that are economical and sporty in a wide rev range, rather than being only tuned for low or high revs like engines we can make now. That's the last major feature we will unlock that requires a new engine family to take advantage of.
Bodies: There's a number of good choices. If we want to go huge, we have our biggest second biggest truck bodies yet (there's a '78 3.8m wheelbase), as well as the '85 2.2m or 2.5m for a potential Migrant. The '84 classic honda body has ute, van and coupe variants. We also have our first (Automation's only?) proper looking minivan, and what might be the last bus-looking body. There's a handful of great sports/super bodies as well. If you want details on body variants, ask about them and I can get more screenshots if anything is interesting.
(https://i.imgur.com/8ehm0eB.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/EK5SXMW.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/mOncrF1.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/XYJMZWZ.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/r1StbJT.jpg)
Meeting Time:
By now you know the usual stuff, but we do have a few new questions.
What's going in the Huge factory? The Alpaca and New Minecart are our main candidates.
More Huge Factories? We can pretty much afford another pair. We don't NEED to, but if we want to absolutely maximize our score that would be the way to go.
New models? We definitely want a Utility/Delivery model now that the Hauler is, uh, cursed. I'd suggest we make new trims, but aside from the Noble getting a proper Luxury trim (and maybe a new factory just for the cheaper trim) I can't think of any niches that wouldn't be overrun by their main market right now. We can, of course, put trims in separate factories if we just really want to sell a Sport Minecart or something.
Break the game? More R&D will get ridiculous, but once our Huge factory is up we can afford it. It's more a matter of whether we want our cars to be unrealistic, or very unrealistic.
Names and paint colors? Our new engines don't have board-vetted names yet, so we can rename them. We can also come up with a new color palette to bring us into the new decade. The New Minecart might need a better name too, it's not like we had a gap in Minecart production. On the other hand, if Honda can have 9 completely different chassis types and call them all the Civic then maybe we can keep our names too.
Hot Laps: EDIT: Now with video! (https://youtu.be/Jb0n1kMFn24)
We have three cars that deserve a proper lap. The Alpaca has a new engine, and the New Minecart and Noble are all-new models.
The Alpaca is a car we've been making for a while, though it's just been updated with the Waterwheel Turbo, a significant power increase. I'm betting this will be our slowest car due to its size and weight, but it also has wider tires than the Minecart. It comes in at 3:09, with a top speed of about 94mph.
(https://i.imgur.com/rdBwrhF.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/aErpPqx.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/QT36rOC.jpg?1)
I hope to do some lap videos tonight.
Dropbox: It's updated! (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) I think I didn't miss any cars this time.
Bonus Pic:
No, the Noble V8 does not fit in the New Minecart.
It is a cool-looking engine though. Notice the fuel injector rails.
(https://i.imgur.com/4N9nuGb.jpg?1)
This thread is awesome! Really great insight into how people play the campaign :D
I certainly didn't expect to see you here! I was going to type up my thoughts after this, but hey, maybe if you actually read this whole thing you already know what I'm thinking. It's a little different than a normal playthrough of course, because I'm taking suggestions and trying to keep it on-pace for the Let's Play, but you get to see me complaining about factories as usual so there's that. I'd like to say I don't normally do something like forgetting to update the Hauler but, I probably do that at least once per campaign.
I've made a video of the new cars, but it's too long for Streamable, so it's on youtube (https://youtu.be/Jb0n1kMFn24)
Sheriff Prototype
This one's a little weird- it's one of those big truck bodies that seems to be fighting between not having enough ride height and having too much ride height. Here's what I mean:
(https://i.imgur.com/1O8pnsz.jpg?1)
We start out getting a penalty for low practicality. In the detail stats, we can see that Practicality is getting an "Accessibility" penalty- that is to say, the truck is too tall and it's hard to climb in and out of, or hard to access the bed. At the same time, Utility wants lots of suspension travel. Now, this is after I managed to improve it some- I made the tires as small as they can be on this body, which is still very large.
(https://i.imgur.com/lOKLmhf.jpg?1)
I can't make the tires smaller than 700mm total diameter, and I still have an 8% penalty for accessibility. We're already low on practicality, because this body has two doors and one seat row (surprising since the 3.0m we tried had two seat rows). Yet, if I make the suspension any lower, the score gets worse for other reasons. I'm not sure if it's just tire size, but some other bodies don't seem to have this problem.
(https://i.imgur.com/3M34yXg.jpg?1)
You can see above, our Practicality is MUCH lower than the 'average competitor'. Automation seems to really like 4-door pickups, which have more seats and doors, but unfortunately this body doesn't have such a variant. You can see I did at least get it up to 164 in Utility with some tuning. If you're curious, this example is a longitudinal AWD. This could be viable to sell, but it's not got a lot of multi-demographic appeal nor a record utility score, which is disappointing for using new tech like AWD.
Hauler Mk2
This one wasn't nearly as much of a headache to design, and it's got good scores. Delivery vehicles aren't too hard. This one has a massive cargo area and holds 1500lb. I went for Transverse FWD, disc brakes (included front vented discs), absolute bare minimum interior, and... double wishbones all around! Or, we can go machpherson/torsion beam and Delivery likes it slightly more, but I want to give it some potential for Family Utility too.
(https://i.imgur.com/r8GWonT.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/WvyYfS2.jpg?1)
The Minivan version does great scores as well. It seems to be better than the Hauler Wagon ever was. It's even "fun" apparently. It gets 6 seats (2 per row, the most comfortable configuration) with standard interior and a basic 8-track.
(https://i.imgur.com/O7yXqvt.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/qxuAJ8F.jpg?1)
Migrant Prototype 5 already?
This version of the migrant bears a visual resemblance to a lifted, offroad version of the New Minecart. Offroad is a weird demogaphic, and it has some truly outrageous suspension tuning.
(https://i.imgur.com/1MUrdXI.jpg?1)
Actually, it's still crazy, but the roll angle was 10.4 degrees before I did some body morphs and wheel offset. Still odd how they like the shocks to be much stiffer than the springs. It might make sense, I don't know much about offroad suspension. This version also has 2+3 seating, standard interior with a basic 8-track, variable hydraulic steering, standard safety. Suspesion is solid axles on all wheels, and it's got all the little offroad features like lockers and an undertray.
(https://i.imgur.com/ZlIHd6G.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/nImeiuW.jpg?2)
I've also put together an Offroad Utility version. It does okay. However, this one I REALLY haven't got tuned properly, or at least I think I don't. There's a lot of factors fighting each other, and I ultimately settled on a version with extreme understeer. Things that might counter this, like more sway bars, wider tires, or lower tire profile were all anathema to Offroad Utility market scores.
(https://i.imgur.com/96eQfck.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/BJMDoLd.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/QTQ3W4x.jpg?1)
Okay, so the Sheriff prototype didn't come out as well as I expected. No big deal, that's what prototypes are for.
Hauler 2 looks ready for the green light though.
My completely different plan is to at long last try a proper Fruinese sports/GT car. Since all my knowledge comes from watching this playthrough, and this is new territory, some parts of this may be a little – lacking.
Proposal: Rapture
Target(s): Sport*
Body: '85 2.5m convertible coupe
Engine: V8
All-Wheel Drive? Can't tell from the screen if engine will fit longitudinally
Maybe somewhat more expensive body panels to reduce weight?
Nice or premium interior
Color: "Azure blue" HSV(180,75,100) with a white soft top
*Bearing in mind what I said earlier about our cars always selling upward, we might even be able to design for Sports Budget and still reach our goal.
Hey, let's try it!
I started with a longitudinal AWD (generally, you can fit larger V8 engines in a longitudinal setup, but also, the only AWD we have is longitudinal) with the Noble V8 and they love it. It scores in Sport and Muscle handily. I gave it a premium interior with a premium cassette, and it only has one seat row, so only two seats. It also have double wishbones and vented disc brakes on both axles. They like a slight FWD bias on the AWD. It's not right on the handling mark for 100% sportiness, but it does very well. They also like a new feature: ABS! It's advanced so that its base engineering time is 54 months, but I can give it some negative quality. This is a good way to gain familiarity so we can add ABS to our passenger cars later. Also, the market score you see here is with a version of the Noble V8 with exhaust opened up a little, to 250 horsepower or so. It can easily make 300, but the market doesn't seem to like it, even without wheelspin. I might be missing something in tuning, or maybe it's just the sheer noise.
(https://i.imgur.com/VDz6pnB.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/ksbO6K6.jpg?1)
So, next I tried updating the Baron V8. We have an unoccupied engine factory anyway. This version of the Baron has the latest tech with EFI and a turbo. It will cost almost as much time to engineer as a new engine but if it's only going in a new model, that's not a big logistical problem. The Baron looks a lot meaner when you loosen it up! Mouse is on the right hand side so it's showing horsepower at max RPM in this pic, but peak horsepower is 281.
(https://i.imgur.com/6GzjUIy.jpg?1)
When it's set up, this is what the car looks like: compared to using the Noble V8, we have lost a lot of Muscle appeal, but Sport likes it more.
(https://i.imgur.com/MfYBfbi.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/bZ36cUU.jpg?1)
While we're trying stuff, what about a hard-top?
(https://i.imgur.com/5lvWx5B.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/LFhvnnO.jpg?1)
Wait a minute... are you seeing something strange? Yes, Sport likes the soft-top more and Convertible Sport likes the hard-top more! Now, I was wracking my brain thinking what was going on and I was about to report it as a bug, but it turns out that this hard-top is actually a convertible hard top. So, that makes a little more sense. I still don't know why they prefer one or the other, though, it could be down to price difference. Convertibles are apparently getting a big overhaul in a coming update anyway.
Here is an actual, non-convertible hard top: (sorry for large)
(https://i.imgur.com/pkfk1o0.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/UxCbXjo.jpg)
Base running time: 10s.
Splice alternating segments from two scenes. (Longer version can stretch these out more.)
- First scene, a classically beautiful female model in a photo shoot with Roman architecture as a backdrop – aqueducts or similar subtly implying a tradition of engineering.
- Second scene, the car itself driving alone along the winding Fruinese coastal road; from the hair caught in the wind it might be the model in the car, but we never see a face.
The photo cameras focus on the model, yet she is remembering-or-anticipating the drive.
- A violin concerto accompanies the images.
- At 7 seconds a male voiceover intones, "Rapture."
- At 9.25 seconds a female voiceover says, "Bay 12." Display logo. Fade to black.
Well, one more thing to check before we go on: What about a Boxer for the LMP car? We couldn't fit a 6.2L V8 in this body, but it fits a 6.2L B6 no problem at all. This might actually be too big, in that the enormous cylinders might demand plus-quality cast or even forged internals, but I'll see if we can't turn this into a true supercar. If it's getting made in a medium factory, 173 is the Super demographic score to beat (that's with Luxury interior).
(https://i.imgur.com/F2Y0G8S.jpg?1)
Eventually, I came up with a 186 score. This is after decreasing the size of the engine and I still have a ton of part stress, and that's with high-quality forged internals- this engine is made of fancy metal and it's still threatening to blow up. For now, I'm going to say this probably isn't worthwhile compared to sharing the Baron engine. I'll hold on to the design for this engine in case we change our minds though.
(https://i.imgur.com/siLMepZ.jpg?1)
In the interest of preventing TOO much overlap with the Rapture, I'm giving the LMP (it's going to have to stick with the placeholder name now I guess) a limited-slip diff, and a luxury interior, expensive features which appeal a little more to Super customers. We'll find out if producing both of these cars in Medium factories is too much for the market.
(https://i.imgur.com/te2f1Rd.jpg?1)
I'm putting the LMP in the unoccupied Hauler factory, and cranking down some sliders to get it done in 5 years. Not extra pressure though. We want to gain familiarity with cool features like ABS, which may later become standard on our cars. I did give it maximum on the funding slider- we ended up with $133M engineering costs, and that's less than a month's profit right now. All told we're expected to make about 3200 cars per month and the forecaster estimates they will be most profitable at a 40% markup, for a final price of $32k. I expect that price will go up when we get more Super awareness.
(https://i.imgur.com/JYJQETi.jpg?1)
The Rapture is also getting a Medium 3 factory, and it should have greater production output with any luck. It's getting made in the soft-top version. Funny enough, it gets a better 0-60 time than the LMP. Also unusual, is that I didn't optimize the handling for Sportiness. Normally I'd try to get it to 100% for a car like this, but everything I do to bring the modifier up they dislike for one reason or another.
(https://i.imgur.com/v60o4PO.jpg?1)
I also tweaked it with a front lip. Very shallow aero angle, but it helps cancel out some lift. If you ever do a fixture design on this car, you might take into account the big brake vents! Also, this car has only a Premium interior and is pretty well price-optimized for Sport. This is important because they're both 2-seater cars, so this can't do well in categories such as GT.
(https://i.imgur.com/pbvehA2.jpg?1)
Engineering is similar to the LMP, although I didn't have to make cuts nearly as much to hit 5 years. You can see in this screenshot that the Baron engine factory will be a little overworked, I need to go spend more on its engineering and tooling, but I should be able to supply both the Rapture and LMP with engines made in one factory.
(https://i.imgur.com/8P1VHDw.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/qIQJnFs.jpg?1)
The Baron V8 factory is getting really aggressive sliders, as well as engineering changes on the engine itself. I sprung for a QA facility to maximize efficiency and a Maintenance facility to save us money on keeping our expensive tooling in good order.
(https://i.imgur.com/ZySKVtr.jpg?1)
The New Minecart is getting Variable Hydraulic steering, but not ABS. It's getting the safety quality brought up from -3 to 0, and the Waterwheel engine is getting some negative qualities removed as well. Nothing crazy for the screenshots, but it should have a little better production numbers than before. However, the engine tweaks will affect all models using the Windmill, which right now is a lot of them!
The Hauler gets some better scores with the new engine. I've pinned it for a Large 2 factory, and the predicted profits are large.
(https://i.imgur.com/9Ac1uWP.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/G1wqOep.jpg?1)
The Migrant gets a few tweaks. I played around with it while converting back to SUV body (I didn't make a separate variant to test the pickup, oops) and came up with a slightly different scheme: I can up the comfort a lot by switching to a Premium interior and Basic 8-track. This gets us almost an equal score in Sport Utility as Offroad, which is actually a larger demographic. We're still not scoring in Offroad Premium, because we have terrible prestige, a small car, and a small engine (they seem to directly value displacement, like Muscle) but this is a good find. Of course, the Hauler actually scores better in Sport Utility... so, I'm going for a Large 1 factory for the Migrant.
(https://i.imgur.com/nVg7atf.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/f87j6gc.jpg?1)
At this point, our engine factory making Waterwheels would be significantly overworked. Instead of upgrading its size and having a lot of downtime, I am hoping we can get the Huge engine factory tooled before our new models come out.
The Noble receives a new, DeLuxe trim, as the Baron has before it. This has a hand-made interior, and Luxury Cassette player. The top-level cassette player is so expensive even the Luxury demographic would prefer going down to Premium, but I'm hoping this will save engineering time in the next facelift, when the price goes down automatically. Also, you can see the comparison window's title is running out of space here...
(https://i.imgur.com/qK3WvKp.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/us1GPAt.jpg?1)
The Noble is set for a good markup. Notice the engine graph? I've upgraded the engine factory size and tooled it very aggressively in preparation for a Large factory to be added to the Noble production later.
(https://i.imgur.com/EMEYqxS.jpg?1)
1982: Passing Time
(https://i.imgur.com/vAmD6mQ.jpg?1)
{No Data} isn't a very nice thing to read in the revenue screen! Our existing Windmill-based models, the Alpaca and the New Minecart, all start retooling at the same time and we're losing money fast. Incidentally, I've sometimes started unticking that "major tooling" box on facelifts. It saves a lot of time in the factory retooling. However, in this case we need to major tooling updated.
(https://i.imgur.com/m2jlZY1.jpg?1)
Once the new revisions of the Alpaca and Minecart are out, we're making money again. We're 3.6 billion in the red and our credit rating is still A+. Automation bankers are truly generous.
(https://i.imgur.com/NUJkE2u.jpg?1)
This also means it's time to start tooling up our Huge factories. The Alpaca will be the first car to go Huge. Once again though, we can't update the engine until the models which will use the 82 Waterwheel version complete engineering. I don't remember if it was already like this, but the market scores are weirdly flat- it scores almost exactly the same in a wide variety of categories.
(https://i.imgur.com/o9my3Y2.jpg?1)
In retrospect the Large 1 Alpaca factory probably could have done just fine for the Noble instead of a new factory. Well, at least I can say all the Nobles are made in Fruinia, where the work quality is better than Archana. For now, I'll just make it in both factories.
(https://i.imgur.com/aA2DNe3.jpg?1)
In the Huge factory, tooling will cost fully 1.1 billion dollars, and it will take 15 months. Not pictured, the engine factory will cost another 1.2 billion. I wanted to give it very high automation sliders to match with Windmill's engineering, but I actually found that tooling sliders affect tooling time. I didn't know that before! Anyway, I had to keep them lower to get it done in 15 months. Anyway, the most important thing is we're about to start pumping out 30,000 Alpacas a month (more like 40,000 with both factories).
(https://i.imgur.com/mvxV7c2.jpg?1)
The New Minecart also gets a small update, including a Basic Cassette. I'm not sure why, but its market scores actually seem to have surpassed the Alpaca quite a bit now. Maybe it has to do with the nature of new competitors, or maybe the economy is down and people prefer the cheaper car.
(https://i.imgur.com/IojM7LQ.jpg?1)
Once again we start losing disturbing amounts of cash as all of our Windmill related cars stop production due to re-tooling. The expenses of tooling the new Huge factories are enormous as well. We're not approaching $8 billion in the red... still A+ credit rating though, nothing to worry about I guess. I'm pretty sure in most business games, this is the part where you'd start panic-selling your stock and end up at risk of a hostile takeover.
(https://i.imgur.com/ijyX6lR.jpg?1)
1985: Huge Profits
Now that we've started our Huge factory up, the Alpaca is making big money. We're turning a profit despite building several other factories, as well. Despite selling almost 40,000 Alpacas, we still can't keep up with demand. It's still selling at 146% margins. Basically people are on a waiting list just to pay double MSRP for our goofy turbo-charged station wagons.
(https://i.imgur.com/GsJPbpD.jpg?1)
You know what? Naw, executive decision, I'll make two pairs of Huge factories. Hopefully that wasn't the wrong move, because it put our income in the negative again, but I'm pretty sure we'll be making money once our new models come out. In case you're curious, the revenue pie chart has Alpaca as the largest segment, Noble as the second largest, and New Minecart as the third.
(https://i.imgur.com/Maht5ng.jpg?1)
I had hoped to upgrade the Noble to being produced in two separate factories at this point, but the new Large factory I set aside for it won't actually finish until all of our new models do. Still, it's time to do small model updates: the Noble gets about $600 off material costs just for new cassette players. It always struck me as strange that apparently if we don't update the car, we don't benefit from cassette player prices coming down naturally. I guess we got locked in on a contract price until we re-engineer the car. It's also getting ABS, we've gained some familiarity from our sports models even though they aren't done yet. The engineering time is still very high even with a negative quality slider, which Noble buyers aren't a fan of.
(https://i.imgur.com/X2CzbL8.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/BPAOZ4o.jpg?1)
The New Minecart and Alpaca could possible benefit from a facelift, but instead of trying to squeeze improvements into the 19 month window before the new models come out, I'll wait until then, and there can be engine updates too.
January, 1988: New Models Review
6 months after the release of our new models, sales numbers have stabilized and they're looking great. I can only barely fit all of them on one screen for the timeline, and that's cutting off a few details for the Alpaca (95% factory utilization, 149% profit margin). We're raking in half a billion per month in profit, and that's after about a billion in expenses. Considering that, the $600M taxes we have to pay this year don't seem too bad... that's owed to keeping our expenses up with factory construction.
(https://i.imgur.com/ELtfjiL.jpg?1)
Also, we're scoring a lot more than Killrob in his current campaign (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg4nkC8OUSc) (that's not really fair of course, he sticks to one model at time for shorter session lengths).
Markets:
I've upped our dealerships a bunch again, no surprise there. We're now spending $55M/month, which seems about right relative to our profits. Here's our monthly sales data, and our Awareness: it seems we're currently selling almost as much as our awareness will allow to Super, Muscle Premium and Luxury Premium. In the case of the first two, our awareness hasn't caught up with our dealership max yet since we're newly entering these markets. Simply due to its production numbers, the Alpaca Wagon is our "most competitive" car in markets which would normally be better served by other cars- such as City Eco, which is squarely the Minecart's domain. However, the Minecart has smaller production numbers and a larger markup. The Migrant is selling the most in Utility and everything adjacent to it, including Utility Sport which we saw some of our other cars originally claimed better scores in. For the Hauler, it's actually selling better as a Wagon than a Delivery Van, but it's more balanced this time.
(https://i.imgur.com/GWuyjaE.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/wTztnkN.jpg?1)
Also, here's our current revenue, and demographic sizes as a bonus. You can see Family Premium is our biggest earner, I think this may see some overlap between the Alpaca and Noble (imagine picking between those two cars!) but I'm not sure. Many demographics are shrinking, I think this may be the result of a recent economic downturn, but Muscle might also simply shrink into the 90's and onward.
(https://i.imgur.com/okThJoT.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/OCLLBB9.jpg?1)
R&D: I've held off spending more for a moment. We could safely up our spending tenfold if we want to though, we're at the point where the costs of everything are shrinking relative to our revenue and worrying about being cost efficient is becoming a memory. We've unlocked some cool tech: Variable Valve Timing makes our engines more fuel efficient by advancing or retarding the cam rotation at certain rev ranges. Multilink suspension is here, if we want upcoming models to be luxurious as possible this is the way to go. We also unlocked Transverse AWD, which is too late for our offroad cars because we made them longitudinal, but will probably benefit premium cars like the Noble. Luxury CD players are here but probably too expensive to really use yet. We also got Advanced 90's safety, and Traction Control, another expensive (in terms of engineering time) feature in the ABS line, but fortunately ABS gives a lot of familiarity.
(https://i.imgur.com/2GM89cG.jpg?1)
Bodies:
Not so many bodies this time. 1990 wasn't a big unlock year and we didn't quite hit the 1995 mark.
(https://i.imgur.com/hClLKuO.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/YOgUbSe.jpg)
Factories:
We're starting to have an enormous list of factories. Now that we can readily afford Huge factories, it's not extremely important for you guys to keep track of them, I can mostly start them up as needed. We have two sets of Huge factories which will finish in 1992 (these things really do involve planning ahead). Any factory smaller than Large 3 usually won't take longer than the time it takes to engineer a new model.
The Factory Management screen has a complete list of our active factories, and there's one screen for Car Factories and a separate screen for Engine Factories. We're just filling the car factory screen, although the two on top are under construction and the Noble Workshop L1 hasn't been tooled up yet, so it's a Noble Workshop in name only. I've named every factory for its size for ease of reading on the Hub screen. You might think that we wouldn't need to luck at factories on the Hub screen any more with this handy screen around, but unfortunately that's not true, this seems to be a work in progress.
(https://i.imgur.com/RbpyDMZ.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/BkXTAcY.jpg?1)
busted (actually, advancing a month fixed them). First we can see the name, size, and a color indicator describing whether it's active. The grey section below each indicator says "engine status" as a rollover, but it's always grey. We can also see what project it's making, and the year that project was started(?) on the left, but all the years are wrong. To the right of that I think is the months until production begins, for factories which aren't finished but are associated with a project.
There's a bunch of information in the next table: Number of Shifts is the most important one that works. Remember, 2 shifts is the maximum without causing extra damage to tooling and paying employees overtime (I think). More than that, and the factory is overworked. We can see the total staff employed by the factory, and the number of production units created by the factory in total. Next is Tooling Quality and Automation, the sliders from tooling setup. For some reason, Automation is rounded to the nearest 0.1 and while Tooling Quality is not, I'm surprised they're not just integers out of 100 either way. Next is Production Units per Worker per Day and Efficiency. Efficiency seems to be some weird algorithm taking into account a lot of things, but larger factories like more automation slider and the automation tooling also has to be close to the automation engineering. We can see that the Huge factory is more efficiency per-worker as well as employing more workers, but it's not very efficient, it probably would benefit a lot from more advanced tooling (I kept the sliders low to get it tooled in 15 months, if you remember). The Flags column doesn't work, the Baron and LMP factories should have blue flags ("Reduced Production Efficiency)" due to fancy interiors. Next we can see the number of variants made, the total number of products made, the production cost per product, and the production quality, which is blank again. There's no column for Recall Chance, which was implemented recently and is actually one of the main things we need to keep an eye on. Say "pickle" if you read this whole paragraph.
Back on the hub screen, we can see useful stats like our recall chance, but not this month because they broke. I closed the game for the night and re-loaded the save file while writing this section, so that information might just not be part of the save file.
(https://i.imgur.com/OzKjIvS.jpg?1)
Okay, I'll advance the game to February, I was going to do that anyway because we really want low-friction cast pistons.
It's truncated so I had to stitch this out of two images.
(https://i.imgur.com/Pg31p5W.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/iRGKl1R.jpg?1)
Meeting Time
Huge Factories currently under construction: we have two Huge Car and Huge Engine factories coming in 1992. What do we want to put in them? Unfortunately if we start engineering a new model now, I don't think we'll be able to assign them directly to our under-construction factories, instead we have to put them in some other factory for their initial production. It will probably make the most sense to put existing models in them.
Expanding Production: Of our existing models, which ones most need new factories, or factory upgrades? Upgrades will be done faster compared to the date we decide to start them, but they also come with downtime. This isn't optimal, but we can afford downtime at this point.
Facelifts: Any particular changes we should be making? It's still possible some models could benefit from new trims. We can also do color changes as well, I signed off on both the Noble and LMP before I remembered someone just suggested replacing Noble Purple with some shade of white.
New Models? We could probably be served just fine by expanding production of existing models, but we certainly have the money to make models that target markets we're missing too. It also looks like we don't need to be worried about a little overlap in the most common markets (eg Family or Premium) as long as our models hit different secondary demographics. The main areas of the market chart we don't have appreciable sales in are Utility, Track, and regular Convertibles (needs 4 seats), we could target these with new models or trims if we want to go for them. New Family Car? The Alpaca might be getting long in the tooth. It's our best seller, but we could market test a replacement with our new R&D- for example, our base chassis quality has gone from +2 to +6.
The LMP probably needs a better name. For that matter, it might need a new engine.
R&D: I held off upgrading out R&D in this last section, but if we want to start getting unrealistic (and even more profitable?) we can keep pushing further.
Dropbox: It's updated (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) with our new models! There's starting to be a lot of model folders and a few of them have confusing names, so I've now prefixed them with the model year, so they're organized chronologically.
Hot Laps: We have four new models! It's time to try them out. I'll tackle them in order of what I predict will be slowest, up to fastest.
The Migrant is a proper offroad car with chunky tires and a ton of ride height. It's also AWD, which is good, but so are both our sports cars coming later. It's only rated at 0.596 lateral-G, but seems to exceed that in Caswal's Carousel- can the Automation Stig drift? It comes in for a total time of 3:21, actually better than I expected. Short gearing might help get the most out of the Waterwheel's 60 horsepower.
(https://i.imgur.com/ZH3qVJW.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/yCOWkDU.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/pcyBm7E.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/YSwPLQI.jpg?1)
Bonus Pic: AWD drivetrain in the Migrant
I don't know why the rear gets a big driveshaft with a join in the middle but the front gets a small rubber-booted CV axle looking shaft.
(https://i.imgur.com/7M03BEw.jpg?1)
Plans are for two new candidates, a possible Alpaca replacement and a "muscle wagon" of some sort. I have a couple ideas for how we might do that last one. But first, in order to tell whether our Alpaca replacement is better than the Alpaca, we need to get a score for an Alpaca facelift to compare. Even more first, we need to update the Waterwheel.
First, it gets VVT. This makes the cam timing a little different at certain RPMs, and can help with fuel efficiency. At a glance, it doesn't make a big difference. But, I noticed Commuter went up four points, so it must be worth it? This graph compares efficiency with and without VVT, with stats on the left.
(https://i.imgur.com/ooeo1Ra.jpg?1)
However, when comparing actual fuel efficiencies in the Detail Stats screen, we can see a much bigger difference:
With VVT:
(https://i.imgur.com/FiyNJQl.jpg?1)
Without VVT:
(https://i.imgur.com/LH6vwgu.jpg?1)
Next up is Low Friction Cast pistons. Obviously we need these. Just look at the graph! I don't know how we gain that much fuel efficiency by eliminating friction and not get more power out too but hey, I'll take it.
(https://i.imgur.com/hqAJUgx.jpg?1)
Lastly, it gets the fuel system quality all the way from -8 (+8 from R&D, effectively 0) to 0 (effectively +8). This lets us get a little more compression and boost too. It all adds up to a little more power and a lot more efficiency.
(https://i.imgur.com/fS1JJLP.jpg?1)
The Alpaca itself gets few changes. They get upgraded to a Basic Cassette, and get ABS (it's borderline too expensive: it only scores better if you take Archana out of the market survey, but we don't sell much to them anyway). The markets look like this, with Archana taken out:
(https://i.imgur.com/FXJllmz.jpg?1)
This is our score to beat for the potential replacement.
Alpaca Mk2
Nothing shocking in this design. I may be missing something in the tuning, but it's not doing as well as the Alpaca in market tests. This version has a 4-speed transmission and some of the latest features including a Basic Cassette, ABS, and Advanced 90's Safety. It also has +6 chassis quality from R&D. Maybe the problem is just that it's heavier than the Alpaca, especially considering the Waterwheel is a weak engine.
(https://i.imgur.com/A6zmoJ1.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/xxBjUMN.jpg?1)
Muscle Wagon
I decided instead of making a whole new car, why not look at a Noble variant? This was a weird one because they didn't respond nearly as well to more power as I expected. Still, in the name of craftsmanship, I opened up the Noble V8, and turned it into a 500 horsepower machine. It's still running on regular gas and it's still exhaust-choked, by the way. If I give it more power, the car hits 186mph/300kmh, and requires "Y" speed rated tires- which cost thousands of dollars, putting it squarely in supercar territory. I could gear it lower, but the power would be wasted on wheelspin.
(https://i.imgur.com/dnIF0ct.jpg?1)
Tuning the car itself is hard. Muscle can actually be a pretty weird demographic. Increasing the engine's power by 250% brought us from something like 172 to 184 in competitiveness. It's like they care more about the size of the engine than the power it makes. I'm still aiming it for Muscle, but Muscle Premium is somewhat elusive because most things they like, regular Muscle does not. Muscle seems to be very price sensitive. Also, neither one likes things which I'd think of as classic muscle car features, like an LSD. But it's not just that, even things like lowering the car to reduce body roll gain favor with Muscle Premium and lose favor with Muscle. I ended up putting it on air suspension with handling and suspension that compromise between Sportiness and Drivability.
(https://i.imgur.com/25J9SmI.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/36COOgJ.jpg?1)
Alternatively, here's a more dedicated Muscle Premium build. It has far stiffer suspension, a manual transmission, and $6660 tires. It can hit 213mph, supposedly. It still has only premium interior, and still no LSD, strangely. It is absolutely reliant on electronic traction control, which would be a big engineering for us: it has 4% wheelspin even with TC and 18% without. Also, it pretty much exclusively appeals to Muscle Premium, where it gets a 5% penalty just for being a wagon. The engine relies on forged internals, cast metal simply isn't up to the job.
785 horsepower is reasonable for a production car right?
(https://i.imgur.com/M51vQuZ.jpg?1)
In my opinion, this is not a great market score, although we could make a good profit on Muscle Premium sales if it appeals to them well enough to use up their budget. They have a median budget of $60k, and currently we're selling selling about 1500 Raptures per month to the Muscle Premium demographic- but at a price of $27k. So, this could be worthwhile, and the simple appeal of being able to say that we sell a car this ridiculous is worth something too.
Different Muscle Wagon
I thought, why not try a different body? This 1995 3.0m wheelbase wagon actually makes a great muscle car score, although it doesn't really look the part. Despite probably having designed a hundred cars in Automation I'm still not totally sure why this body does better. However, I did make a longitudinal engine and tried RWD and AWD- naturally, they preferred AWD, as do most demographics that don't value fuel economy. This time, they also seemed willing to accept a tune for sporty suspension- maybe this car doesn't need extra drivability to make up for being enormous? So, this unassuming family car with a 500 horsepower V8 under the hood and a tame AWD system seems to be what "muscle" buyers prefer. I guess it's basically like an Audi Avant. IDK if this is what you guys wanted, but it might have broad enough appeal for a large factory, or at least a Medium 3. I could also try and see if I get similar results on a more appropriate looking body... but, it will soon be the 90's whether we like it or not.
(https://i.imgur.com/020QO01.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/29b1Zx6.jpg?1)
1995 Bodies??
It turns out we were literally one month away from getting all the 1995 bodies. When I waited one more month for Low Friction Cast pistons, we unlocked them.
(https://i.imgur.com/5cTbkK6.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/JWbF9Cp.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/SANelQ0.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/H8uyDbN.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/FTf63cd.jpg)
Even More Muscle: Ultimate Steroid Edition
One last try for the muscle car: I think the idea closest to having multiple votes was to go with the old body (making a variant of the Noble), and maybe try a normally aspirated, even bigger engine. This would require a new factory of course, but hey, we can try it. The baseline score for the muscle version of the Noble is 176, at 71% affordability, so we will see if a large, normally aspirated engine meets Muscle desires. For my money, it probably won't beat the not-muscle-looking 90's wagon candidate (which has seen little interest from our board of directors due to the styling) but I'm curious to see if it does better than the turbocharged version.
Sticking this engine in the existing Noble, the biggest we can get is 9 liters. Any larger and it doesn't fit- but that's one of the downsides of transverse front wheel drive. Making it longitudinal would be the traditional muscle way, but that would be an entirely new model.
(https://i.imgur.com/geJggyK.jpg?1)
So, upon starting the engine design, there's two things I notice: first, the components are going to break. An engine of this size needs a low RPM limit, even with forged internals (this screenshot shows the stress with cast, but forged takes some stress at this RPM too). Second... I haven't tuned the engine, and they already like it. So, let's see how far this can go.
(https://i.imgur.com/fFf1Oll.jpg?1)
Pretty early on, I realized they like pushrods- this ruins the performance of our engine at high RPMs, but it's way cheaper. This let me reduce the redline to somewhere cast internals could handle, and then I reduced the cam to make more power on the bottom end. After opening up the exhaust, I have some octane to play with... and I find that they actually like the fuel leaned out a little bit. Once again I'm reminded that Muscle is surprisingly price-conscious. Naturally, this car is going to score very poorly with Muscle Premium. Lastly, I gave it baffled mufflers- louder (good) and cheaper (also good). In real life, I'm pretty sure there's no way you could sell a car like this in the 90's, but hey, it scores. Lastly, with some gearing tweaks and a manual gearbox, this is the score. Also, notice how flat the torque curve is, and how early it starts. Thanks the manual gearbox, it also scores enough in Muscle Premium to beat the dedicated prototype I drew up for that demographic earlier.
(https://i.imgur.com/8ugq8LM.jpg?1)
So that's moving in the right direction actually, but the numbers aren't crazy impressive for a whole new engine. But wait... what ABOUT a new model? If we're making a new engine, it might not be too inconvenient to make a whole new car. Without going into the details too much, a longitudinal front engine, RWD car on the same body type as the Noble scores like this: it's better in some side demographics, but I don't these scores actually justify a new model.
(https://i.imgur.com/ta2mACH.jpg?1)
And then there's one more thing. Since its longitudinal... it COULD fit a bigger engine. Such as a V10.
(https://i.imgur.com/r2xENm4.jpg?1)
12.0L! In traditional muscle car numbers, that's... 754 cubic inches. Absolutely enormous. This is the first time I've exceeded 100% engine bay fill without even coming close to the maximum length in any dimension... don't worry, I think the game will still let us do it. It just might be like the infamous V10 Touareg that was practically impossible to work on and needed a special lift.
The power numbers are good, but not impressive for 12 liters of displacement. On the other hand, just look at that torque.
(https://i.imgur.com/mP0zlGy.jpg?1)
The car itself: a wagon, with a 5-speed manual. Not only does the wagon do well, they actually prefer it, due to the extra weight on the rear wheels reducing wheelspin. That's even true for Muscle Premium, despite a 5% score penalty for the body type. Muscle Premium prefers the 3-door wagon, shown here, over the 5-door, and I'm inclined to choose that because we're already doing very well in regular Muscle.
(https://i.imgur.com/1kNYg9b.jpg?1)
The market scores don't lie, this is a lot better than making a variant of the Noble. It seems that sheer engine capacity wins the muscle category, even if you have to give up transverse mounting to do it. What's more, with this setup, they even prefer RWD over AWD. Well, this is the car that got me: cynical old Sensei thought every single Automation demographic preferred small, high-revving engines with turbochargers, and always in FWD or AWD, and super-always with automatic transmissions. Here, the market scores actually drive me towards a real muscle car: pushrods, big displacement, normally aspirated, front-engine, rear wheel drive, manual. We did end up with a functionally unrealistic engine size (google tells me the Dodge Viper's 8.4L V10 is the largest in a production car- our engine is more like a Can-Am racer) but hey, it gives Bay 12 Motor Company a world record to be proud of. Maybe we can call it the "Bay 12 Liter" or something.
(https://i.imgur.com/hbvCQlQ.jpg?1)
I've left Archana in for these numbers because I already accidentally did that for the other ones in this post and I want a fair comparison. But, if you take Archana out, it gains a little in Muscle, loses a little in Muscle Premium, and jumps way up to 157 in Pony.
I'll stop here. Originally, I was going to run this until 1994 or whenever our next Huge factories finish. But, I think I need to give you guys a chance to vote on this. Actually, I think I know how you'll vote, but we definitely need a name, for the car and motor, and we might pick a color other than Noble Purple too. We also need to pick a factory size (Medium 3 or Large 1 would be likely).
To help with that last bit, here's demographic sizes again: note that since it's almost the 90's, the Muscle market is actually shrinking a lot, but I'm not sure whether this will get worse or level out. It could also just be because the economy is down, which always hurts less practical demographics, but that's temporary.
(https://i.imgur.com/V2gifLU.jpg?1)
Alright, now we're ready to go! The last thing we needed to be ready for the new decade was a muscle car that gets 10 miles to the gallon, apparently. Well, we'll just consider ourselves lucky that emissions and fuel efficiency requirements don't exist in the current version of the game.
The Colossus
I've made a few final tweaks. It's got much stiffer suspension, as well as traction control and Advanced 90's safety, both of which are at -2 quality for now because they're advanced, but we'll be able to bring them up in the first facelift. I also added some brake airflow, because there was brake fade even with massive brakes. Here's the final stats in a new Bronze color.
(https://i.imgur.com/ljHyV8v.jpg?1)
Everyone who says it needs to come from the dealer with flames or skulls or some other tasteless decals... well, I agree with you, but those are fixtures and you'll have to design them yourself. I'll be uploading the car file as usual, and you'll have no problem finding decal fixtures on the Steam workshop if you're interested.
One more important design feature I don't think I mentioned: it's actually using an electronic limiter to keep its top speed below 186mph (300kph I think), otherwise the tires become insanely expensive and the Muscle demographic suddenly can hardly afford it, so the competitiveness drops. If your performance car gets worse competitiveness when you add power, either this or wheelspin is usually the reason. I only recently realized though, there is a tooltip which actually shows to tire cost multiplier. Just look at that!
The tooltip partially hides it but left image has the speed limiter set to 186mph and right image has the speed limiter set to 193mph. The tire cost multiplier more than triples.
(https://i.imgur.com/WQXTqM4.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/E8959CB.jpg?1)
This car (and engine) both use a lot of production units. I'm aiming for a Large 1 factory for each, that will produce around 8000 cars, I think later we can engineer that close to 10,000 in later facelifts and that will be plenty for the market since we have some cars that overlap into Muscle already. A Large 2 would make around 13000 and with the demographic sizes I think that would be pushing it. As usual, I'm targeting the engineering to 5 years for a new model, which means some engineering sliders are reduced.
(https://i.imgur.com/PCz3gbg.jpg?1)
For the engine factory, I've noticed a bug... or at least some strange behavior. The Large 1 Engine Factory in Archana has recall chance go UP when worker wages go up, and DOWN when worker wages go down, when I would expect the opposite. Well, I always knew those damn labor unions just encouraged workers to be lazy! Archanans work the hardest when you keep them starving just a little.
Slowdown is affected as normal and I could probably afford to tweak QA accordingly, but I still thought this was weird.
(https://i.imgur.com/KWzjYCB.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/xSWgzsQ.jpg?1)
Heheh, "Quality Ass"...
The forecast tool estimates that the Colossus will be most profitable at EXACTLY a 20% markup, falling off steeply at 15% or 25%. I think this is because it gets past the $26,0000 median affordability for Muscle if we go higher. However, as our Awareness in muscle improves, I'm sure we will see our margin go up as well.
(https://i.imgur.com/UiqRxtM.jpg?1)
Revisions: Moving in Lock-Step
Now we're officially in the late game: we have a wide variety of models, and many of them share engines. For every time we facelift an engine, every model which uses it must facelift as well and complete at the same time (if we want to avoid a gap in production). Luckily, we don't have any models which use two different engines, which would tangle them together even more. Still, now we must be careful that no one model's facelift has features which make it take much longer than the others. At least, not if we're actually trying to be optimal for sales numbers. But if we're not, then what's the point of Campaign? Well, besides proving that General Motors totally should have sold a 12 liter manual-only muscle wagon for $24,000 in the 90's, and anything less was doing wrong by the consumer.
The Pumpstack Cars
The LMP and Rapture both share the Pumpstack engine. They're also slightly at odds for tuning, so it might be time to make the engine into two variants.
Starting off with the Rapture, I'm noticing that we're staying at 120 competitiveness on the Hub screen. This means our sales are probably being limited by demographic sizes/awareness, not by margins, so it might actually be time to make a trim. First thing's first, the engine though. VVT adds 2 PU and only helps with Budget demographics (it saves fuel close to idle, basically). My first thought was no, but double-checking the market screen, we actually sell more to Sport Budget than to Sport. That's not necessarily beneficial to our margins, but what the hell, I can try it out. Oh yeah, I'm also getting rid of that negative fuel system quality- yay!
(https://i.imgur.com/pvCG8Jh.jpg?1)
Surprisingly, this also lets me up the cam profile. The competitiveness scores were steering me towards a lower cam, but it wasn't that the care was making too much power, fuel efficiency was the issue. Or at least, that's what I assume, because after VVT is installed the regular Sports demographics like a higher cam. Hey, wait a moment... fuel efficiency? I need to turn Archana off in the market screen. Bloody poor people ruining sports cars for everyone. Once I turn that off, I can see that this car is scoring better in Budget than in regular demographics... time to increase the power! With a ball-bearing turbo, more cams, more compression, and more exhaust, we've gained about 70 horsepower at the peak and lost very little power on the bottom end. This will probably be good enough for the LMP too.
(https://i.imgur.com/7aG0IoE.jpg?1)
The Rapture itself gets a gearing tweak, including the AWD being changed to 50/50 (it was biased to the front before). It also gets quality improved, interior to +2, and ABS is no longer negative. I'm skipping traction control and adaptive shocks for this round. It's up about 10 points in the areas that matter.
(https://i.imgur.com/I0J3tYO.jpg?1)
I tried out a hard-top version as well. With only 2 seats, it scores 172 in Light Sport, which is cool, but with 4 seats, it gets us access to the GT, GTP, Fun P. Then I switched from that to the 4-door version, which gets good scores in Family Sport Premium (a much larger demographic!) at very little penalty to the others. So, this is the new Rapture Hard-Top trim. Hopefully, we'll see our margins go up with the wider appeal.
(https://i.imgur.com/6qTyylI.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/MFtu5HD.jpg?1)
I'm initially dialing the Rapture's engineering in to 26 months, because I want to get the new trim out but this still gives me time to increase Automation a lot and go from 4000 to 4800 cars produced, about (with a major factory retooling that causes 10 months downtime but oh well).
Now we have to tune the LMP to handle the increased engine power and see what new features we can get... while keeping the engineering time down. First off, it looks like we've fallen out of competitiveness with the Super demographic, but the new engine brings us right back up. Once again, they like the AWD evened out, which helps with wheelspin. At a glance, I'm not seeing better scores out a more aggressive engine tune, so we're shelving the idea of a separate engine variant for now. Playing around with the options, nothing really seems to make an improvement in the scores much. I did give it a wing which helped a little when properly tuned, but mostly because I felt like it was needed in Beam. It also gets adaptive shocks. Tuning the engineering to 26 months gets us a lot more automation again. It's still not scoring like a "true" super car... we might have to try actually making an all-out super/hyper car in a small factory some time. I signed off before I got a market screenshot and the numbers seem to go wacky after you do that if you look at it in the museum, so here's a picture of it with the wing anyway.
(https://i.imgur.com/A9pEMt8.jpg?1)
Lastly, the Pumpstack factory is being worked close to its limit and there's not a ton of room to improve it (Automation is at 80 and it has add-on buildings already). This is fine for now but might be a problem if we want to keep increasing the Rapture's output. Tooling it close to 100 will make the retool times very long.
The Noble gets like 5 different car and engine variants deleted from when I was trying to turn it into a muscle car with limited success. But, the big change is going to be the new factory, and the Premium and Luxury targeted variants will each be manufactured separately. For the motor, ball bearing turbo scores lower (I think exclusively due to the $100 added material cost? What the hell, cheapasses) but I'm adding it anyway because it makes more power, and earlier. Along with the fuel system improvements come more compression and boost. Not enough change in the graph to really justify a screenshot, I think.
The car itself gets a little wider tires to help with wheelspin, as well as traction control. It also gets a quality notch on the tires, and it could use a quality on the brakes... but it won't get one, because increasing quality actually causes MORE brake fade somehow. It's only 0.1% but still, another weird slider today. Since there's some brake fade still, I end up going to larger wheels so I can fit 350mm brakes. I even added brake airflow to this car too. They still don't want to pay up for vented discs, though... I guess we're already up to $500 material cost for the front brakes alone. Also, I'm pretty sure this window is a typo and should say "Larger Front Brakes."
(https://i.imgur.com/MWfYE6e.jpg?1)
Interior quality is going up! Just going from +1 to +3 costs us 5 PU, but I think we can afford it since we're going to be moving into a bigger factory.
(https://i.imgur.com/p0Aef1t.jpg?1)
Lastly, it's going AWD. It adds Drivability, and luxury/premium like that a lot. This puts the handling on a bit of a weird middle ground, but they seem to like it that way. Trying to tune more towards drivability causes them to lose some of their almost-zero sportiness, which I think they like a lot more than the actual zero sportiness they had before. In retrospect though, this removes the need for traction control, so that goes away.
(https://i.imgur.com/FMJRcd0.jpg?1)
The Luxury version of the car gets EVEN BIGGER wheels, now at 18 inches, and accordingly bigger brakes. It doesn't get any positive interior quality, it's just too expensive on hand made interior. Similarly, there's no interest in a Luxury CD Player.
In the Medium factory, we're only going to make the DeLuxe version. There's something wacky with the recall%... it used to be 0, now it's an astonishing 2.3%, regardless of changing the trims produced in the factory. So, I can safely say that 0% earlier was a bug, either that or this is a bug (or both). Well, the QA slider goes back up and we lose several hundred cars per month, but oh well.
(https://i.imgur.com/zyREdKa.jpg?1)
It's a similar story for the engine factory, which is a bigger problem, because we're going to have a major engine shortage. I'll spare you the screenshots, but I basically decided that I can get a new Medium 3 Engine Factory up and running in 37 months, so that's what I'll do. I was originally looking at 35 months engineering, (a lot of that comes from going from -8 to +0 in fuel system quality, and increasing automation on the car) so that's not too bad. When all is said and done, here's the numbers we're looking at: about 7500 Premium and 3500 Luxury trims per month.
(https://i.imgur.com/PPw7YpE.jpg?1)
The Waterwheel Cars
The Waterwheel is our most prolific engine by far, in the Alpaca, Minecart, Hauler, and Migrant. We get the most benefits from improving it, but it also delays the most cars if we get too elaborate. Playing with the Alpaca as a test bed, we get vastly better fuel efficiency from increasing the fuel system quality and adding VVT. It also gets more boost, at which point it's ready to have the exhaust and intercooler made a little larger too, so it's gaining power as well. Relatively speaking, we've gained about 10% more power and 20% more fuel efficiency, which is crazy.
(https://i.imgur.com/D3tcZuj.jpg?1)
The Alpaca itself gets a 4-speed automatic, and while I hoped to consider ABS, it's not getting that, because it would still take too long to engineer. This new transmission gets it up to 62mph without wheelspin in a blistering, uh... time that still wouldn't be impressive if it were a quarter mile time.
At some point, I lost a chunk of score (left before, right after) and I'm not sure where. Now they'd technically like it more with a 3-speed again, but I'm sticking with the 4-speed because I am stubborn like that. Fake Edit: Now I'm leaving that first bit in, but it turns out I went back to the hub and got Archana turned on in the market screen again. Archana throws off the average enough that the accumulated score prefers 3-speed. Dammit Archana!
(https://i.imgur.com/ISblMiW.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/Yv1X1rJ.jpg?1)
Alpaca's markets now look like this, with Archana turned off. Note the 41.8 miles per gallon! Not bad for a 5-door station wagon.
(https://i.imgur.com/FSR2svr.jpg?1)
On the Huge factory setup screen, major tooling has deteriorated enough since we last refreshed it that it's going to need repairs. This will cause a downtime of 17 months, ouch! Fortunately the Large factory will still be running for part of that time. In this screenshot, it's increased to 18 because I bumped up some sliders.
(https://i.imgur.com/bNceKXz.jpg?1)
The New Minecart's scores are through the roof as soon as the new engine is dropped in, City and related demographics love the gas mileage. It does have some brake issues though: there's brake fade, and if the brakes get any bigger they exceed the wheels grip. ABS improves the competitiveness, but they still don't like brake force to exceed grip (it might just be the cost of larger brakes that is the issue). They also hate brake airflow because it hurts gas mileage, so I guess we're stuck with some brake fade. When we get to engineering we'll see if the ABS is even an option.
(https://i.imgur.com/2Lf1a1L.jpg?1)
There's barely any changes, so we have room for a ton of engineering improvements. Then, revisiting the market screen gets even higher scores.
(https://i.imgur.com/O0iQIzo.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/HciqSYY.jpg?1)
The Hauler Mk2 gets a big new feature! Not ABS, no, apparently that's too expensive to be worthwhile for delivery vehicles that have brakes exceeding their unloaded grip. Nobody's interested in tech that helps stop the giant van and 1500lb of stuff it's hauling. But, they're willing to shell out for a Basic Cassette Player! Delivery drivers rejoice. Oh, it actually does get brake airflow- I seem to have overlooked that with a lot of these cars.
(http://[spoiler][img]https://i.imgur.com/AQVFrWk.jpg?1)
The wagon version, however, has an interest in full traction control (they do suffer from wheelspin a lot).
(https://i.imgur.com/oVSHNH4.jpg?1)
The Migrant, last of the bunch, gets traction control, to help with wheelspin which comes from the very low gearing. Other than that I can't think of much to change. Its scores look like they might be slipping, though.
(https://i.imgur.com/0ynAiy7.jpg?1)
I felt around for new trims, and I think the utility version might actually be worth producing. Despite having only one seat row, it gets okay scores in Offroad Utility and Utility. I thought this wasn't the case earlier, but what the hell, may as well produce it. The soft-top version, on the other hand, seems to score worse in every single demographic, so that's right out.
(https://i.imgur.com/mQldK0E.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/QQtJLJu.jpg?1)
Lastly, in engineering, I brought reliability up to 65 to give it an extra edge. That should count for these demographics. And then finally, we're ready to move forward! This is what people are talking about when they say the late game can be a slog. I'm going to have to go through this whole rigamarole all over again in the next update. I might not screenshot every vehicle. Heck, to stay sane, I probably won't go all-out in optimizing them.
(https://i.imgur.com/XuFBX7R.jpg?1)
Into the 90's
So, finally, everything is signed off. I've dumped $100M or so into dealerships and advertising because we're pushing our awareness limits in some demographics. Since I'm putting it like that, it seems silly to only spend $25M on R&D, so I'll up that too. Here's the new spending:
(https://i.imgur.com/znYe0Bg.jpg?1)
If I close the details on the timeline, you can see everything in engineering. The only project that will finish after the Huge factory is done is the Colossus- I might stop this episode before it releases. Just off the bat, our net profit is down to $300M. Arguably this means we should be spending more money, but I'm content to let it rake in for now.
(https://i.imgur.com/A24OtXn.jpg?1)
Oh boy, my favorite pop-up! I'm probably going to have to close several of these. Basically, it says that our factory has started tooling, but the tooling hit-points were less than expected when I originally signed off on the tooling cost, so the cost will be higher. This happens because the factory is overworked. It gives us the option to take out a loan or have the refreshed factory start with less hit points, but obviously I'm just going to pay it because it's only a few days worth of profit. I really wish there was an option to auto-pay these, or at least auto-pay them if they're under a certain amount.
(https://i.imgur.com/TIAW4oS.jpg?1)
Shortly after this, I paid out $16.8M and 0.2 Reputation over an Alpaca factory quality issue. Two months later, $7M for the Pumpstack factory. Two months after that, $10M for the LMP factory. I get it, the factories are overworked, I know, just let me play the game. Three months later, the Noble factory...
Rapture/LMP release!
I'll have to see how these stabilize, but immediately on release, the margins for our sports car facelifts are far better than for the initial run. Things seem to be looking up for our Pumpstack-based cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/mRHwY05.jpg?1)
This also calls for an immediate refresh! More compression on the Pumpstack, and the LMP gets more camber all around for a higher cornering G (a stat I usually ignore during tuning). The LMP and Rapture both get wider gearing for a better 0-60 time, since they aren't close to having wheelspin issues, and the LMP gets brake airflow (did I really not add that already?) There's probably some quality in there from R&D too. We've unlocked a cool-sounding active wing and cooling flaps, but the demographics just don't like them, not even Super. Same story for Premium CD players. When it's all done, I'll spare you the details but the good numbers (including production amounts) are a little bigger, and the engineering time is 22 months. The bad number (time I've spent on this post) is getting steadily bigger, though. I've got to the point where I'm skipping setting a minimum price margin because it loads every time I click the button for 5% more and I just can't be bothered.
Oh shit, 330,000 Waterwheels are bad. I blame Archana again, lazy sloppy workers! $197M isn't THAT bad, but I'm gonna risk it with a quiet recall and see if that works out for the better.
(https://i.imgur.com/Wb19cWs.jpg?1)
Shortly after this point, our Huge factories begin their long retooling. The remaining Waterwheel factory is badly overworked, at 2.8 shifts. At this point we begin losing money for the first time in a while. Oh yeah, and HIGHER REFRESH COSTS. In the month following this, I get two more Higher Refresh Costs popups, totaling to $200M.
(https://i.imgur.com/cSMRmdb.jpg?1)
In 1991, the Noble facelift releases. The sales numbers are slightly weird. We're not hitting 3 months of stock for the DeLuxe version, but we're also selling less than that factory's maximum output, I think. It shouldn't be an engine shortage either. I hope I didn't mess up the factory/trim configuration. Either way, the margins look good and we're selling a lot of them.
(https://i.imgur.com/5rJ7bNM.jpg?1)
Hey, I maxed out advertising in Fruinia! Most of out sales aren't to here, but it's cool to know that we can.
(https://i.imgur.com/wNDwuqO.jpg?1)
Oof! The issue with the Waterwheel engines has become a public issue. Goodbye, 1.7 Prestige (we still have 22). Oh yeah, shortly after this, I got another Higher Refresh Costs popup. I've not been keeping track but I think we're at risk of exceeding my estimate of "several" and going into "a dozen or more".
(https://i.imgur.com/Mdh13zx.jpg?1)
Waterwheel Releases: In February, 1992 all our Waterwheel-based cars finally update, after another earnings drought. Pretty quickly, we're earning tons of money again.
(https://i.imgur.com/ZNeZTd8.jpg?1)
September, 1992 Review
Our Huge factories have finally finished! We have two Huge car factories and two Huge engine factories, all ready to expand existing models or start new projects! We're also back in the black and raking in money in a hurry. Estimating for factory construction costs in the previous month's earnings, we should make a $1 Billion profit this month. If we want, we can pour it into expanding again. We might also see how high we can get our R&D.
(https://i.imgur.com/MXe0OBK.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/V8IKlMN.jpg?1)
Markets:
Here's our monthly sales numbers. Don't forget the percentage is the portion of the market we've sold to, relative to our awareness. If it's low, there are more customers that could be buying our cars, and we might want to make more cars that appeal to that category. Of course, the competition can account for a lot of that too. At this point it's a little difficult to say which cars are responsible for which demographic. The Alpaca takes up the majority sales in a wide swath surrounding Family and City, even stuff like Utility Sport or Sport Budget (somewhere there's a bunch of lowered Alpacas with loud exhausts and tribal design vinyls). It looks like we really might not be selling any New Minecarts, I guess I'll just have to hope it fixes itself on a facelift or something.
(https://i.imgur.com/wc7dKBA.jpg?1)
Here's our Awareness, and the latest demographic sizes. It seems like everything fun-related is continuing to shrink. Actually, everything but Budget and Utility is shrinking, the economy is just down again. I basically never plan around this because the economy will be different whenever my next facelift or model comes out anyway.
(https://i.imgur.com/5HOAEaa.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/6isWhHx.jpg?2)
Lastly, here's our Untapped Revenue and demographic budgets, just since I haven't posted those in a while. Muscle isn't bad, which bodes well for the Colossus. Family and Delivery are the other big areas. This maybe indicates we should be building more Alpacas or Haulers. Of course, the New Minecart might have good Family overlap appeal if it un-disappears too.
(https://i.imgur.com/1wlbPS3.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/AWt12yA.jpg?1)
R&D:
We've unlocked a whole bunch of chassis materials I talked about last time- those will be worth looking into if we build a new fancy-pants sports car or maybe a very premium lightweight economy car. We've also unlocked VVL and Direct Injection. VVL would require a new engine family, but with these two technologies, we can create the ultimate fuel economy engine. DI is insanely time consuming to engineer and it's an early unlock, so this might be a good choice for a prototype. We've got Standard CDs, Standard 90's safety, and Electronic Stability Control (ESC), the penultimate tech in the ABS/TC line, with ends with Launch Control in like 2011. Semi-Active suspension is here, which will benefit our premium sports and luxury vehicles. Lastly there's exhaust bypass valves. I'm told the way these work is they let the exhaust open up under load, giving you the benefits of loud exhaust for Sportiness but quiet exhaust for Comfort. We also got active aero features, which currently seem to be not beneficial even to Super buyers. Lastly we've unlocked cheapo electric power steering.
(https://i.imgur.com/hscM1xe.jpg?1)
Bodies! Don't forget we also unlocked all the 1995 bodies, and I've included them in this previous post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=176811.msg8172105#msg8172105). This unlock is comparatively sparse. The '00 2.5m hatch has a slightly taller "people mover" variant similar to the New Minecart, and a van variant in the same shape.
(https://i.imgur.com/1Z8tucN.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/B7vwZAe.jpg?1)
Meeting Time
Huge Factories! It's time to decide what should go in them! Remember we can use a new model or an existing one.
New Models? The LMP is only on its second facelift, but we've just got some great new bodies if we want to make a new Super car. We could make it steel, or we could make it aluminum or something in a small factory if we don't want to replace the LMP. We also might take another stab at replacing the Alpaca. There might also be room for a normal-sized utility vehicle, or even a dedicated Track car, two demographics we aren't selling to much.
More Spending: We're raking in a ton of money. We can dump it into more factories, or continue to increase our R&D. We might also still improve our dealerships. They're getting into diminishing returns, but we do need to move a lot of cars.
Facelifts: Every car is up for a facelift except the Colossus, which isn't done yet. You're free to suggest particular changes.
The Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) is updated! You won't find the Colossus, however, until it gets on the market next episode. ;)
Hot Laps: Nothing big enough for a new video, but I thought I'd see some of the new times. The LMP has shaved off a few seconds to 2:18, not as big a difference as I thought 70 horsepower would make but it's something. The Rapture has also sped up a bit, beating the LMP's old time at 2:21. That's the hard top version- the soft top is half a second slower for whatever reason. The Alpaca is also sliiightly faster, at 3:07 compared to 3:09 when we first upgraded to a turbo. Also not as big a difference as I expected, the Automation track seems to value handling over horsepower.
Bonus Pic: The elusive difference between "Multipoint Single" and "Single-point Per Cylinder" etc fuel injectors: it's the number of throttles.
(https://i.imgur.com/cn3oC8n.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/n9AhpMi.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/9t4WX0b.jpg)
Welp, this one really took me ALL DAY, whew. Let me know if I missed anything important.
What size is our Pumpstack? V8?
It's a 3.5L V8, so it's small as V8's go.
I'd forgotten that the I5 exists. That would probably be closer to what I'm thinking of: just a little bit more oomph, while still making all the "correct" fuel economy choices to appease the segment.
Honestly with an I5 we'd probably end up making less power than if we went for an I4 because the I4 would be able to have a higher displacement before getting into issues with length and since it's an economy car we would be using a lower cam setting and a quick spooling turbo so it wouldn't benefit much from high rev capability, I'm still not against it, I just don't think it's really what you're looking for. The V6 has good packaging which will help with getting us a higher displacement engine and plenty of cylinders so the engine isn't stressed by that increase in displacement and a larger.
...Put this post down as Half a vote for I4, 0.375 vote(s) for V6(60 degree), and 0.125 vote(s) for I5
I've never made an I5 in Automation. They tend to be less smooth, I think, but mainly just because you unlock them so late. We've made a V10 so we should have some familiarity, but honestly a larger I4 is probably the better option. I can look at a V6, but in my experience, Automation just does not like them.
The rapture should be able to make a fine track car if you just remove some extra weight and give it a sportier tune, however to go after those utility markets I do think we'd need a new model unless the colossus has a good pickup version of the body.
The utility markets with the exception of utility sport premium will probably prefer a cheaper, smaller and less powerful engine than the our "Bay12 Liter", but most of the changes needed to be made to the rapture should have fairly low engineering times so you'd be able to just shit out an early facelift.
I will have to vote against mighty mushroom's suggestion about looking into an I6, they're just too long for most modern car bodies. we could consider an I5 because they sound cool to make use of the engineering familiarity from the bay12-liter, but in terms of packaging a 60 degree V6 is probably our best bet for fitting more cylinders and capacity without increased service costs from the engine bay being cramped.
You're right about needing a new model to really go after Utility. In my experience, they like extended cabs (4-door, or at least 2 seat rows) best, because they value practicality highly. I don't know if a bigger engine will help. They usually like fuel efficiency so much that actually giving them a bigger engine doesn't help like you might think, but I've been completely wrong about stuff like Muscle so we can try it. Supposedly the tow capacity calculation is bad and needs a rework, which contributes to this.
1992 Prototypes, Round 1
It sounds like the BIG thing we want is a new engine. My instincts tell me a slightly-larger-again I4 is probably the way to go. Of course we need a car to test it in too, is the tricky part. If I test it only in the Alpaca I might skew towards a smaller engine with less horsepower than a new, slightly larger model might like. If I test it in a new model it's subject to all kinds of other stuff. So, I'm going to start out in a new model and also see what happens when I stuff it in the Alpaca.
The Alpaca is a 2.7m, so I'm trying the 1995 2.6m body. The latest Alpaca weighs just under 2500lb and this thing weighs 2927 at a quick first tune, I assume the extra 400lb is just due to width. Also right off the bat, price seems to be an issue, they like the vehicle with smaller-than-optimal brakes. Wait... gotta take Archana out. Also, it has some new high-tech stuff like Multilink rear suspension and a 5-speed automatic. With the Waterwheel engine, we're looking at 145 in Family and Family Utility before any fine-tuning.
(https://i.imgur.com/XptjaTW.jpg?1)
Okay... engine test candidate 1, an I4. Tweaking the size until Family likes it the most, I end up at 1.5L yet again. I guess this is just a consequence of optimizing for Family (rather than say, a mix between Family and Family Premium). This version has VVL and DI, making it very high tech but the DI is expensive and has to be -8 quality. I think this tech might just be too advanced for us right now, because basically no matter how I tune this engine, I can't seem to beat the Waterwheel in terms of fuel efficiency.
(https://i.imgur.com/NohbJyD.jpg?1)
So, next I'm trying the same I4 engine with MFI. The DI was causing some weird stuff due to its expense and low quality, so now I can explore the VVL a little more. That's the only feature that literally requires a new engine anyway, DI just has long engineering. I learned a couple things about VVL tuning: for example, reducing the higher cam can actually prevent knock, because it causes the engine to switch cams at a lower RPM, so the low cam isn't being used at a high RPM where it will knock. Also, without running right up against engine knock, I was able to re-tune the turbo which helped a lot (I was using a too-large turbo in the last engine). I also ran into a weird situation where increasing the exhaust size seems to give a huge increase in fuel efficiency on the graph, but reduces the car's actual gas mileage by 0.1 so they don't like it.
Then I realized I made a stupid mistake: I forgot to use Low Friction Cast pistons instead of regular cast. With that and a few more tweaks, we finally had an engine that was more efficient than the Waterwheel, as well as being more powerful. What's more, for the new car, it scores 151 in Family versus 142 with the Waterwheel. I could maybe make more tweaks to optimize the car from here, but since I'm using it as an engine test bed I'm going to basically keep it where it is.
(https://i.imgur.com/xSzhbT4.jpg?1)
Next: I5 I think V6 is what people are most interested in, but I'll get on with this one first. We're still targeting Family instead of Family Premium or anything, so fuel efficiency is still the big thing. Will they like more displacement? Will they like a similar displacement with smaller cylinder sizes?
At a glance, using the same bore and stroke gets us a 1.8L engine. We could fit an I6 still, but compared that, this I5 has basically no engine bay fill penalty at all, much like the I4. After tuning it, I ended up with a 1.7L and a Family score of almost 149. It only does about 1 point better in Family Premium and Premium Budget (the car itself isn't optimized for these of course). I had hoped to see bigger gains there. Still, an engine of this format might have potential if we want to actually target these markets on purpose, it's actually smoother than an I4, which I thought would be the other way around.
(https://i.imgur.com/Xsn5G5b.jpg?1)
How about the V6? In my experience, Automation hates V6, but I'll be excited if I'm proven wrong. I also won't rule out that I might just be bad at tuning them for some reason. Like with the I5, I'm going with MFI and VVL. However, I definitely can't just use the other engines as a frame of reference for things like turbo size.
Right off the bat, we're at 2.1L and no more power than the I5 for some reason. What's more (and I can't blame wheelspin either, seemingly) the market scores are steering me towards a small exhaust that would make even less power than the I5. I'm ignoring that for now. Sizing the turbo is a little weird since only a twin-turbo can be done for V engines, so we have 3 cylinders per turbo instead of four, making them smaller, and I'm running into the minimum size. I worked out the exhaust and turbo to have similar flow restrictions to the I5. These numbers might be red, but that only means we're not making maximum power- this is normal when an engine is tuned to be fuel efficient and quiet.
(https://i.imgur.com/9b4h2n6.jpg?1)
What I don't understand is why it's less efficient, and it's not making more power despite being larger. (Technically, it makes more at the low end and drops off at the high end, to be fair). With single or dual exhaust, I can't extract more power without it being louder and I still have market scores steering me towards an even more cramped exhaust for who knows why. Compared to the I5, this is just worse. And, yes, I made sure I'm using low friction pistons.
(https://i.imgur.com/iGiwzu4.jpg?1)
All in all, I still think V6 is cursed.
What about putting these engines in the Alpaca?
The baseline Family score for the Alpaca seems to be 144. It started at 158 when I created a new facelift then immediately dropped to 144 when I entered the designer, so that's weird. It does put our new car prototype in a much better light, though. It also got up to 150 with the new VVL-using I4, so we know that's a definite improvement. For reference I'll include the entire market screens, so we can see what effects the engines are having on different markets. Each version has brief gearing, tire and suspension tuning for the new engine, but might not be totally optimized.
(https://i.imgur.com/0U4WVU4.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/LOkGp1d.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/2pLMvaV.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/IpLtKzJ.jpg?1)
Overall, the I4 seems to be the strongest, but the I5 has some advantages as well. It scores better in Family Sport, and it actually gets better gas mileage. Its possible that its cost will be offset by a Huge factory, making it more appealing than we see here. I dunno, it's hard to estimate for.
New Models? Nothing's got votes besides Aseaheru's original proposals, since we all got caught up talking about engines, but I can check a couple out. First off: can the '01 2.5m make a good GT car?
(https://i.imgur.com/GPlxvHl.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/CoJ0ihM.jpg?1)
Yup! This version is longitudinal AWD with a Baron V8, hardtop, Luxury interior. It can also be a Convertible Sport, and it does excellent in Sport when downgraded to a Premium interior, (both to the tune of 190 score) but since we're actually hitting those demographics with the Rapture, this would probably be the version we would focus on. It has 2 seat rows, so it does FAR better in GT/GTP than the Rapture or LMP can. It might be even better with fancy active suspension, but I didn't try that out.
Hauler Mk3? At a glance, that body seems to do fine, but it doesn't seem to be a big leap forward or anything so I didn't finish tuning it. It seemed like it was going to take a while to get right.
Bigger offroad? I actually don't know about this one, our best luck seems to be small stuff. It will need an engine variant too, so that's another one I'll mostly just look into if I get more votes.
Sorry for the long delay, stuff's been busy! It looks like we need to decide whether to go fully ahead with replacing the Alpaca or not, and either way, which new engine to focus on. VVL is a big benefit that could affect most of our cars. If I don't receive votes, I'll probably take the most neutral option, an Alpaca with the new I4. We're also on track to move the Hauler into a huge factory and, IDK, maybe the Minecart too, unless we want to double up on Alpaca production.
1992 and Onward
Looks like that's 3 votes out of 3 for the GT car. I have no choice! We really might have to replace our existing sports cars or make them more specialized into different markets though. We're actually close to market saturation. Look at the markets:
(https://i.imgur.com/r69vncl.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/I5kcWKm.jpg?1)
On top, we have our current sales, and the percentage of the market we sell to (limited to Awareness) on the bottom, we have Awareness. It looks like we're close to awareness cap with our current dealerships (85% in our most lucrative countries I think) and we're selling to ~85% of customers already. That basically means we only have around 300 customers in both of these categories who aren't already buying our cars. The Rapture and LMP do score better than our GT prototype in categories like Sports, so it's not totally worth replacing them, I think.
What I'm going to do for now, is just go ahead and produce our new GT car in a Medium 3 factory or whatever. I might skew it towards higher priced markets with some fancy new tech and good interior. We will probably, I think, suffer from market saturation. But, I'd like to actually see that happen. From there I can decide if we want to make our existing cars occupy different budget categories or what. Part of the reason I want to try this is curiosity, but also remember we're technically playing for the high score. If our cars are, say, forced to reduce in price until we start selling to budget categories because there are so many of them, we're still selling MORE cars, even though we might make less money, it's better for score. Right now, we have more money than god, so we can try something inefficient like this.
For lack of a name, I'm calling our new car the Bay 12 GT. It almost sounds like an actual car name, despite just being our company named followed by a target demographic. I've made some final tweaks: first of all, it gets all the fancy computer-adjusted suspension bits. We're in the 90's now, I have a gameboy in my pocket, and my car has a bunch of different computer systems under the hood. This gets us up to 192 in GT, a big boost, but at the cost of markets like Sport who would prefer a cheaper car. That's okay, GT is a more expensive market and we want to specialize on that.
(https://i.imgur.com/5ro87Ov.jpg?1)
I also thought I'd try ESC while we're at it. It's another fancy computer thing that brakes individual wheels to keep the car under control. I always thought it would be cool if you could control this manually with a joystick or something, but for some reason nobody else thinks it's a good idea. This came with a base engineering time of 100 months so I had to dump the quality to get that under control.
(https://i.imgur.com/n8RF8fz.jpg?1)
I also looked at aero features. They seem to have no interest in fancy cooling flaps or active wings (I never seem to know when a car DOES need these, but it's not often) or any downforce features. I assume this is because they decrease the top speed or add expense. They also don't like undercladding because it increases the top speed above 187MPH/300KPH into an astronomically expensive tire speed rating category. If I combine the two, so we have downforce and the same top speed as before... they still don't like it. Notably, this body has good aero to begin with. Most cars (without aero features) produce a lot more lift than this at high speed.
(https://i.imgur.com/QG1ltfT.jpg?1)
I finished it off with lower profile tires, on sport compound, and some gearing adjustments that got the 0-60 time under 6 seconds. I also tried out a white paint color, since someone suggested that ages ago and I just signed off the LMP and autosaved before I could implement it. Fun fact: GT doesn't mind a manual locking diff, apparently. Well, assuming you leave Archana turned on in the market screen. "Yeah, my Porsche is stuck in a ditch, but I'll just lock the hubs in and get out". I didn't put that in the car though. I did, however, put exhaust bypass valves on the Pumpstack V8. Hopefully the other cars like that because I can't be bothered to make an engine variant.
(https://i.imgur.com/hpT7oll.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/AuKLsdM.jpg?1)
I set it up in a Medium 3 factory and skewed the engineering to low automation, low reliability, extra funding and a little lower pressure to gain familiarity with the new tech. I wish I could see how much familiarity I'm going to gain- there's a "current familiarity" column on the engineering screen that changes when I change the pressure, but I don't know if that's supposed be familiarity when I'm done or what. It will make about 3500 cars, so we'll see what it does on the market where there are fewer total GT customers than that. Also, apparently the exhaust bypass valves will take two years to engineer on the Pumpstack V8. I assume that's because any change causes a big issue when your automation slider is at 93. Come to think of it, I'll probably need a second Pumpstack V8 factory.
Lastly, I the sales projection guided me to a minimum price of $39k, at a 75% margin. Not coincidentally, this is the starting budget of GT demographic. It looks like I need to be affordable to every single GT customer. I wonder what the margin will do in the wild.
(https://i.imgur.com/KgpUnsJ.jpg?1)
The Other Pumpstack Cars! As usual, now I have to update everything else! Oh wait, I accidentally hit spacebar(?) on the hub screen and jumped forward in time a bit. I'm living dangerously with autosaves here, so we're stuck without because I don't want to redesign the GT. For once I'm thankful to be stopped by a recall notice!
(https://i.imgur.com/BAx9MAr.jpg?1)
While it's a drop in the bucket practically speaking, it still stings to pay out $100M.
So, uh, it's 1993 now I guess. Somehow (time passes on the market screen?) I managed to skip a whole year. Oops. Well, uh, I guess that means it's time to...
Unveil the Colossus!
(https://i.imgur.com/UILeXEP.jpg?1)
The Colossus is above 100 Competitiveness and the margin is relatively low, at 41%, and the factory is running at 90% usage. Admittedly, that's fairly realistic, but I like to make stupidly huge margins, not realistic ones! Until the 4.1 update at least. So, it has probably saturated its markets or it can't be any pricier while still hitting its target markets. We're only selling to 50% of possible Muscle customers, so I'm guessing it's having to strike a balance between high margins and being affordable to enough customers.
(https://i.imgur.com/aMKeBxm.jpg?1)
Anyway, I'm just proud that our absurd car is actually selling. Why not celebrate with a facelift?
Our "The 12" engine gets a little more compression and hey, why not exhaust bypass valves? I'm told how these work is, they let the engine operate at whatever loudness it has normally but exactly 40 Loudness, the ideal for a "Sportiness" modifier, at wide open throttle. This gives the best of both words for loudness modifiers to comfort/sportiness. In practice, they seem to make the engine slightly worse in every way, somehow hurting power and gas mileage despite just being an exhaust thing that opens up, but they gain a little competitiveness so in they go I guess. I can see that ESC has the potential to add a few points, but I want to keep this cheap so I'm waiting until it's cheaper to engineer. It also gets semi-active sway bars, however those work, because they like them I guess. Because material costs are significant, I increased the Optimization. Hopefully the facelift will make it cheaper.
Now, it's back to updating everything in lock-step.
The Pumpstack Cars
The Bay 12 GT's updates to the Pumpstack V8 will take 28 months, possible longer if I have to build a factory. But, I'm going to start off just targeting 28 months. I promised myself I'd keep this short instead of explaining every detail so I'm trying my best.
The Rapture: Okay, so apparently The 12 fits in here. And, it somehow scores a little higher than The Colossus in Muscle even without proper tuning.
Note the 14% wheelspin!
(https://i.imgur.com/1n8Xhnh.jpg?1)
Okay okay, back on task, that's not what we're doing today! Putting the slightly updated Pumpstack back in, it gets a 5-speed auto transmission instead of the old 4-speed. It's also getting very low profile tires, which seems to be a trend. I think that as the years go on, we can get lower and lower profile tires without a price penalty, and that's what sporty demographics like. It also gets all the fancy suspension computer thingies, and still no aero undercladding, since nobody likes that apparently. Then, I just repeat those changes for the hard-top trim. Voila, nice looking numbers!
(https://i.imgur.com/SFqKIoE.jpg?1)
Then, engineering time for the suspension is huge, so ixnay on that. We lose a few points, but that's okay, I guess I want to rapture to occupy cheaper markets compared to the GT anyway. I ended up engineering it with Reliability and Optimization. The preview number for the convertible has automatically changed to the Sport Convertible Budget market in this shot, they love that stuff.
(https://i.imgur.com/QwvFwfV.jpg?1)
The LMP: It gets a tick of quality for the interior now that Luxury CDs have come down in price, and a gearing tweak for the new engine (5 speed upgrade again). In the name of more narrowly targeting Super/Hyper, it's getting the fancy suspension as well as ESC. This brings the engineering to 35 months even with very aggressive sliders including lower automation. However, the factory refresh will take 10 months for new Major Tooling, so it at least overlaps with the 28 month deadline and we can avoid having the factory sit idle. This does remind me we could probably do a "proper" super car with a faster engine, though.
This all means the Pumpstack factory is going to be overworked. There's no avoiding a second factory.
(https://i.imgur.com/ASGMbvR.jpg?1)
I want to make a Medium 3, because why bother with half measures... but it will take 37 months. Of course, I can't just have the Pumpstack 1993 version start production in the first factory before the second factory is done, that would make too much sense, especially since the GT car won't be ready to consume those engines until later anyway. So, eh, smaller factory. Medium 2 gets us down to 30 months.
Then, it's back to the Rapture to use up the remaining 2 months of engineering, and sign off.
The I4 cars:
Now we have another big engineering conundrum! I want to use the new I4 engine we've designed. I also want to get our cars into the Huge factories which are sitting idle as soon as possible, while the new engine is going to take around 5 years if I don't make the engineering sliders horrible.
(https://i.imgur.com/CZp1zXw.jpg?1)
The most efficient thing by far would be to do a short-term revision now, engineer the engine in the background and then add the new engine once the factories are already up and running. But, that adds a facelift to four separate models. I'm going to save myself the effort and just make our next facelift the one with the new engine.
Also related to laziness, instead of stopping and asking for a name, I'm going to tentatively name our new I4. We started off with the Windmill and then upgraded to the Waterwheel, two ways to generate mechanical power in Dwarf Fortress, the second more powerful than the first. But, what's more powerful than that? Well, the Dwarven Water Reactor (https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Water_wheel#Perpetual_motion), a long standing bug/feature which generates perpetual energy. So, I'm calling our new engine the Reactor unless people vote to change it. What better name for our engine with an amazing, uh, 80 horsepower?
The Alpaca: we covered this with the Reactor before, but I didn't do the fine tuning. I increased the wheels to 15 inches and fit bigger brakes. I also gave it a 5-speed transmission, which is becoming ubiquitous. A few suspension tweaks, and we've hit a score that matches our new model prototype.
(https://i.imgur.com/id3iCWG.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/jbqFjkA.jpg?1)
Oh yeah, incidentally, I'm aiming for 57 months to engineer the Reactor. That's all sliders at 50, except Funding which is 99, costing us $150M or something petty.
The Migrant: Reactor, 5-speed, no fancy features because Offroad doesn't wanna pay for 'em! Until we unlock Offroad Sway Bars (whatever those are) basically none of the fancy new suspension things benefit these markets. I got some good numbers, and once again I went crazy with the sliders, especially Reliability.
(https://i.imgur.com/dLxyUWt.jpg?1)
The Hauler Mk2: For the Delivery variant, its gets the new 5-speed, and it gets geared for a lot of wheelspin. I guess it's fine if the back is full of stuff. The numbers we're seeing are getting astronomical for the delivery markets.
(https://i.imgur.com/oKOwK0R.jpg?1)
For the passenger variant- well, first off I'm impressed to see a score in Family of 156, greater even than the Alpaca. That's just after changing the engine. The only other particular change is that it had traction control at -2 quality before, that's going up to 0. Tuning the transmission and suspension further gets us these scores:
(https://i.imgur.com/B7Qv7yp.jpg?1)
The New Minecart: This one is still cursed, and not producing any cars cat all. Let's just imagine the workers have been on strike or whatever. I'm pretty sure what actually happened is the price just hit a critical point where it broke. Hopefully, this facelift should fix it. Anyway, it gets the usual: Reactor, 5-speed. This also gets lower profile tires- just a little, to offset the heavier engine making it more prone to understeer. Plus, for once, someone finally wants a fully clad underbody in the aero screen! This helps with fuel efficiency. I mean, it always did, but now they decided they're willing to pay up for the privilege I guess, compared to before when they wouldn't. It also gets reduced cooling airflow, so it can get more gas mileage by diverting less air into not overheating. Lastly, good variable hydraulic power steering is replaced with cheap, nasty electric power steering. When it's all done, we've got a new record of 51 miles per gallon. Huzzah! The New Minecart returns!
(https://i.imgur.com/BT7d1HC.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/eyblfCH.jpg?1)
This car can also get a Huge factory. It should be cheap enough to really sell to Passenger Fleet.
This is almost enough to use up the three Huge factories making Reactor engines. In fact, I was going to just leave a Large 1 engine factory idle and do all the production at Huge scale for optimum prices, but it looks like I'll need that factory too.
The Noble
The only car using the Noble V8 is still the, uh, Noble. First the engine: as usual, our fuel tech is a little better, so it gets a hair more compression and boost. I also looked at exhaust bypass valves- they really hate them. If bypass valves avoid a loudness penalty for comfort, then uh... nah, I have no idea how this works. They DO like a little steeper cam (I feel like I'm just going back and forth on this with this engine) and VVT makes it slightly more affordable because of fuel efficiency, so why not put it in. The car itself gets, you guess it, a 5-speed transmission. Now, I don't know what changed, but when I get to the handling graph, it's gone a little screwy. Something must have got lighter or heavier to shift the weight distribution.
(https://i.imgur.com/jwxrCgY.jpg?1)
Engineering for the Noble, I came up with 31 months for the upgrade. I also found that the Noble V8 had been set to 93 Automation from when I was trying to make enough with only one factory. This was so high that I actually gained production by reducing it (efficiency losses from lower-automation factories).
Moving Onward!
Once again there's a ton of crap engineering at different times. The main block is our Reactor-based economy vehicles, in 57 months. The Bay 12 GT finishes just one month later.
(https://i.imgur.com/DAs2Uqj.jpg?1)
Since we're making so much money, I basically may as well spend it. I'm starting two sets of Huge factories. What are they for? I dunno. They're basically a tax write-off for us though. The total cost of these is, I dunno, 20 billion dollars? We have 12 billion in the bank and we're bringing in 1 billion per month, we should be fine.
(https://i.imgur.com/fyR3PdR.jpg?1)
Also, why not spend some money on R&D? I've about tripled our spending.
(https://i.imgur.com/akHjRhc.jpg?1)
Two months later, we're still well in the green. I don't really want to build more Huge factories because then I have to figure out what to do with them. So, I chucked another $150M/month into the R&D machine (not shown, but it was basically just +1 to body, chassis and fuel) and figured why not see what it costs to max out our dealerships? Well, a lot. Here's Gasmea:
(https://i.imgur.com/8o4oK6A.jpg?1)
See that? $576 million per month for level 10. That would give us 95% Awareness, the absolute maximum. Level 9 costs $176M. We're not QUITE at that level of throwing away money yet, so I set every country to level 9 except Dalluha. Dalluha is very expensive to set up dealers in relative to their market size, so I kept them at level 8. This sucked up another half a billion dollars (per month!) leaving us with "only" $300M per month income.
This is our expenses as of April, 1994. Ignore the bit on the right of the graph, it's a future projection that's missing the important parts.
(https://i.imgur.com/UVvwAqf.jpg)
Colossus facelift! It's selling well, and at crazy margins. I'm not sure if this is just because our costs are "lower" because they don't include the huge first tooling price though. What is for sure is the factory is working full time.
(https://i.imgur.com/u8qWLVQ.jpg?1)
In 1996, we finally start losing money for a few months while the Noble and Pumpstack vehicles all go into retooling. We're still 16 billion in the black though. When those cars all finished, I took a minute trying to figure out what is selling where, but I decided to just save that for the end of the post because it's getting a little confusing. Anyway, later on in 1996 all our Waterwheel/Reactor cars start retooling, so we lose some more money. We post a loss for the year... which means no taxes, yeah!
(https://i.imgur.com/pP9xbmb.jpg?1)
During 1998, we start losing more than a billion per month as we retool several Huge factories at once. We actually hit negative money (just barely) before all our new vehicles come out. However, we made it! We make a billion in profits for a few months, though our revenue tapers off a little bit.
December, 1998 Review
We're getting close to the end game! Only about 21 years left. We're only going to have a few more chances to introduce new models for Bay 12 Motors, anything that releases too close to 2020 will be more for seeing what we can make than for actual sales numbers. Speaking of seeing what we can make, we managed to actually sell a car with a 12 liter engine, so that's pretty cool.
(https://i.imgur.com/ZdhbK60.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/sD6NKdX.jpg?1)
Markets: First, our awareness. Our cap is 90% awareness in most countries, and we're very close to it in our main markets. From the growth percentage numbers, you can see we've entered some new markets as well. Delivery has grown fast since we moved the Hauler into a Huge factory, and now that we're selling more cars in general, we've started gaining Awareness (presumably, as a consequence of sales) quickly in a few Budget markets. Passenger Fleet has also grown fast, a consequence of New Minecarts being available for a reasonable price.
(https://i.imgur.com/1NtHoYy.jpg?1)
Here's our sales numbers, limited to awareness. If the percentage is low in a category, we could probably stand to be making more cars for it. Thanks to more and cheaper cars, we're selling a lot to Family, which has now surpassed Family Premium. You can also see that we're nearly capped out on markets like Super, Muscle Premium and Luxury/GT. Surprisingly, we're still only selling to half of Muscle. The Colossus might be too expensive to sell to the whole market.
(https://i.imgur.com/Y2x934P.jpg?1)
Lastly, here's demographic sizes. The economy is good, most are growing. Delivery, Heavy/Offroad Utility, and oddly Track are all growing a lot.
(https://i.imgur.com/4uuSp2K.jpg?1)
What are all our factories?
I don't intend to make this a regular feature, but it's definitely time to summarize. Honestly, I've stopped thinking in terms of total number of factories for the company, and mostly just think of factories for each project. So, I'm not even sure how many we have offhand. The factory screen is getting too big to screenshot, so I'll just list things off. Production numbers are for January 1999. Since I closed the game, I have to tick forward again before the factory screen actually shows numbers (rather annoying).
Unoccupied Factories:
2 Huge car factories, 2 Huge engine factories. These are under construction, will finish in mid 2000.
Reactor Factories:
There are 3 Huge factories making Reactor engines, totaling about 180,000 units.
The New Minecart has a Huge factory, and a Large 1 factory. Due to bugs(?) the Large factory is not producing any cars. The Huge is producing 47k.
The Hauler Mk2 has a Huge and Large 2 factory, totaling about 74k cars.
The Migrant is in a Large 1 factory, producing about 17k cars.
The Alpaca is in a Huge and a Large 1 factory, producing about 60k cars.
Pumpstack Factories:
The Pumpstack is (somewhat inefficiently no doubt) being made in two factories, a Medium 2 and Medium 3, instead of a Large or something. Total about 14k units.
The Rapture is being made in a Medium 3 factory, putting out 6000 units.
The LMP is also being made in a Medium 3 factory, putting out 4400 units. It's actually running 2.1 shifts to the Rapture's 2, but the output for that work is less due to Luxury interior and maybe less automation.
The Bay 12 GT is in a Medium 3 and making 4600 units. Like the LMP, it has a Luxury interior.
Noble:
The Noble V8 is being made in two separate Medium 3 factories. These are tooled quite differently, one makes 9600 engines and the other only 5000.
The Noble Premium is being made in a Large 1 factory with 10k output, and the Noble DeLuxe is being made in a Medium 3 with a Leatherworks with about 3800 output.
Colossus:
The 12 engine is being made in a Large 1 factory making 8500 engines per month (it's relatively high PU with its 10 cylinders). At least I'm 90% sure it's a Large 1, you can't see engine factory sizes on the factory screen for god knows what reason, although you can see car factory sizes. The car factory is also a large 1. Somehow it made 8300 cars last month, I'm not sure what's with the extra 200 engines.
Hopefully I didn't miss anything. Our total number of factories is: I have no idea still.
R&D: We've got the last VVT unlock, which I believe is VVT for dual-cam engines. This will be useful if we ever want to make the ULTIMATE engine. We unlocked Offroad Sway Bars, which I apparently managed not to put in the Migrant. We've also unlocked new entertainment: Basic CD, as well as Luxury and Premium Satnav. We also unlocked Sequential transmissions, which will be a benefit to some of our performance cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/uKNw7RC.jpg?1)
Bodies: Thanks to highly aggressive tech investing, we've unlocked bodies up to 2009. Very soon we'll get the 2010 bodies as well, but here's what we have for now: It's already an absolute crapton of body types.
The top two bodies have hatchback and wagon variants off to the right.
(https://i.imgur.com/3CbQYqQ.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/S0vTrfN.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/YVkN5JB.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/L4EaGgM.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/RaP8skJ.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/wdl1yFs.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/cRQr4mN.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/74RpwnC.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/stiSsbJ.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/Imx3IEx.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/Dj6Kmdm.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/ZKDcUC8.jpg)
Meeting Time!
We're getting into the home stretch now. We have almost all the tech and, very nearly, all the bodies. I checked in the car designer and there are only three bodies we have yet to unlock, they're all 2011 and (in my opinion) very boring looking. Keeping in mind that cars take a few years to design, it might be time to design the cars that we are going to use through to end of the game. Remember, when we hit 2020, the game ends and we get our final score.
Performance Cars: We're getting to the point of market saturation in many categories- except muscle, oddly. Track is also pretty much untouched. It might be time to replace the Pumpstack V8 with a more modern engine which is better suited to performance applications. Remember, it was originally designed for luxury cars, it just happened to be big enough to make a good performance engine. With regards to our model lineup, we have a few options. Our new Bay 12 GT has two seat rows, and with a big enough factory it might have the versatility to have a variant for every demographic currently served by the Rapture and LMP. However, it still scores less in certain areas than the smaller cars with one seat row only. We could also introduce new trims for our existing models instead. I do like the idea of building a real, dedicated super/hyper car for ultimate performance as well. This would let us play with some of the fancy tech and materials that just don't get used otherwise.
Utility type stuff: The Hauler and Migrant both skirt adjacent to Utility, but don't quite hit it. We could probably use a dedicated utility car. The 2.5m 2005 van is an interesting prospect, since it has a pickup variant. However, that also has only one seat row, so a dedicated Utility model with two seat rows and a bed could be a better option. The Migrant and Hauler both seem like they could stand larger production numbers as well. The Hauler in particular, despite having a Huge factory already, is spread across wide markets with its variants, so it could use more production.
Economy Cars: We've just rolled out our new I4 engine, which we might use until the end of the game. We could experiment with something more expensive but more fuel efficient, like a dual-cam engine, and see how they like it. We could also consider making the massive upgrade to Direct Injection, although that is still ahead of its time. Otherwise, merely improving our engineering will probably be a big gain. With regard to our models, the Alpaca is probably good until 2020 but my pride is insisting we replace it with a more modern looking car soon. The New Minecart could also conceivably be replaced, though it's doing great. We also might consider splitting some of our cars into Budget and Premium trims, especially as we continue to expand into more factories.
More Factories? We have two Huge factory pairs coming up soon, it is time we decide which model(s) will be the first to get two Huge factories all to itself. At this stage in the game, making multiple trims makes a lot more sense. We also need to decide how many more factories we want to build- the earlier the better. I'd say we can comfortable afford four pairs of Huge engine and car factories, and if we want to go all out we could try making more. I am curious to see if we can reach total market saturation by 2020.
R&D and Marketing: We're getting to the "look how much money I have" stage of R&D and dealerships. Going to the very highest level in anything generally costs more than the actual return, but as we open up more Huge factories we might be able to afford it. Let me know if we should have any particular goals.
The Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) is updated as usual with the newest cars! Try the Colossus and Bay 12 GT!
Hot Laps!
I did a video (https://youtu.be/ccPYuc5qEBQ) too!
I know you're all excited to see the Colossus, but first, how does our new Reactor engine perform? I'm choosing the New Minecart as our benchmark. It's definitely our fastest economy car yet, alllllmost breaking the 3 minute mark with a 3:00:81 time. It hits 105mph in the slingshot as well, truly making it a car that has enough acceleration to be safe on modern highways. I feel the need to emphasize again though, this thing averages 51 miles per gallon. I don't actually know whether that's US or UK gallons though.
(https://i.imgur.com/YScUuNI.jpg?1)
The new Bay 12 GT is extremely similar to our other performance cars in design, with the same engine and AWD. Its main advantage, really, is having a second seat row. On the test track, it clocks an impressive 2:19. Impressively, this is two seconds faster than the latest LMP revision! I'm not sure exactly what makes it so great, but I think the fact that the body itself has low drag and not too much lift is a contributor. It hits 139 on the Slingshot, which is pretty damn fast.
(https://i.imgur.com/t36DhLp.jpg?1)
Now the one I really want to see: the Colossus! It's tuned for straight line speed more than handling, but what will its absurdly large 12.0L do around the track? Since we never actually put a performance version of the Noble V8 into production, this 576 horsepower monster is the most powerful engine we've ever produced. During this episode we released the first version of the Colossus as well as a facelift. The facelifted version is about a second faster, setting a time of 2:21. This puts it pretty close to in line with our other performance cars. However, it sets our track speed record of 152mph, before braking heavily to corner the slingshot at 125.
(https://i.imgur.com/0prpLGG.jpg?1)
I'm up for trying most of this, but the one thing I dont think is a great idea is trying to fill the role of the Alpaca with a 3.0m body. If we're trying to sell to the Family market, that's simply too large. They like medium sized cars because they're easier to drive, cheaper and more fuel efficient.
Dangit, why'd the Alpaca have to be so perfect. Every suggestion I make to update and improve on it falls flat one way or another! :P
Fine, how about from this screenshot
(https://i.imgur.com/stiSsbJ.jpg)
That and maybe the one to its left are the only other models from the current update that I would consider stylistically; although I guess it wouldn't hurt to go back a bit.
(Hmm, that's slightly smaller than Alpaca, rather a shorter list of names from which to choose. The Bay 12 Goat?? ::))
1998 Prototype
Without staying up too late, I don't think I'm going to get to all the stuff we want to try in this post, so hold on for one later. I'm going to start with the big one: the Alpaca replacement. Tentatively, the "Goat".
Okay just first off... I can't find the body? I'm not kidding. I searched. I lined everything up. I'm pretty sure this is the same spot on the screen. But... it's not there?
(https://i.imgur.com/4J05ro0.jpg)
Since we're always selling our Alpacas (or any other economy car) at insane margins, I'm going to spare no expense in the engineering, and rely on sheer volume to make it cheap. That means it's getting multilink rear suspension, the most comfortable option in the game. I gave it +1 Chassis and Body quality above our already +11 base tech. I also sprung for fully clad undertray, an aero feature which helps gas mileage, making a benefit for commuters even though Family likes it slightly less. Oddly enough, of all the things to cheap out on, they seem to like small brakes which are prone to brake fade. Lastly, I planned out an upgrade of the Reactor to Direct Injection. This would take about as long as the car model to engineer, but hey, it would benefit the new car model. Ultimately this is what I came up with. It's fully 3200 pounds with modern safety features, but the scores aren't bad.
(https://i.imgur.com/WxSZFgq.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/CAGeGUO.jpg?1)
I also couldn't resist seeing if a wagon would be better. Except for Family Sport (of all the markets?) it's not.
(https://i.imgur.com/LoGylcI.jpg?1)
Almost time to go to sleep... but what about that new performance engine? I'm going to use the Bay 12 GT as a test platform. Well, I didn't finish up tuning it, but I tried an aluminum dual-cam V8 around 3.7 liters. I keep getting around 400 horsepower... which is cool, but it also makes it a 200 mile per hour car (that's really impressive on only 400 horsepower but alright) and requires the $8000 tires. I keep getting stuck around 180 score in GT and Sport, I can't go higher just by getting more performance out of the engine because it ultimately makes the car too fast. It's an interesting question, but what kind of engine makes the most sense is going to have to wait until next time.
Prototype: Super/Hot Rod?
Well, we might have an idea here... or a quick example of just how bad the body age penalty can get. The '46 body has almost as little drag as the best bodies in the game, but it has pretty terrible lift characteristics. For reference, the LMP has 0.024/0.016 lift and the Bay 12 GT body has an absurdly good 0.002.
(https://i.imgur.com/Xw8LEli.jpg?1)
Well I tried to tune it and... well first off, it just doesn't support proper super car tires.
(https://i.imgur.com/q1TqPyx.jpg?1)
It also has terrible engine space unless you put the engine in the rear, and then I can't get maximum sportiness without terminal oversteer. That said, the score isn't bad (for not being tuned right). With Advanced 90's safety, it's perfectly safe. In fact, I don't think there is a body safety penalty. The poor safety of old cars probably comes mostly from the lack of ladder frame, and lack of chassic quality bonus. But, the body age penalty? It's only 3%. I think that's where it caps out in this version of the game.
(https://i.imgur.com/KLX9ig3.jpg?1)
So, let's try this 1940's styled super car thing again. I'm going for the body I always use for 40's sports type stuff:
(https://i.imgur.com/wA9OD9h.jpg?1)
A 6L turbocharged V12 can be stuffed (barely) into the engine bay, making 1100 horsepower. This gets us a top speed of 276mph. That puts us squarely on the Hyper/Super demographic line for this car. It also uses new sequential transmission. With these scores, it beats the LMP in Super and especially Hyper. Earlier prototypes also scored in Track Premium but this example is far too expensive.
(https://i.imgur.com/ralNE4E.jpg?1)
It takes WIIIIIDE tires to handle the power. Oh yeah, it was also an opportunity to use AHS steel- but even Hyper still doesn't want Carbon Fiber body panels. Apparently it's just too expensive for everybody.
(https://i.imgur.com/AMJZjKT.jpg?1)
Hauler Mk3?
Okay, if you thought this body looked ugly in the bodies screen, you should see it with morphs.
(https://i.imgur.com/WLvtiwi.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/kNIiQEO.jpg?1)
For the delivery version, the scores are great, I think it does better in Delivery and Heavy Delivery than the Mk2. The market scores steered me towards tiny, narrow tires that supposedly have a 1200lb load limit. You'd think that would be bad, since the suspension has a 2000lb load limit, but whatever. The brake setup is also completely insane, but I guess that comes with the size of the vehicle (and the desire for cheaper brakes).
(https://i.imgur.com/cjUUS3k.jpg?1)
Switching to a Utility version, I expect to see a low practicality penalty because it's only 1 seat row. In fact, Utility Budget has a 15% low practicality, but Utility has a penalty for offroad. Also, we start off with high scores in Delivery despite a body type penalty.
(https://i.imgur.com/zjjuyUz.jpg?2)
With AWD, manual lockers, and much softer springs, we get a decent Utility score! It also has a Premium interior. Surprisingly, Utility Budget hates it, its practicality is below their minimum to avoid a big penalty. But, for regular Utility, we were able to get away with only one seat row.
(https://i.imgur.com/fpwvdub.jpg?3)(https://i.imgur.com/lJFZWlf.jpg?1)
Lastly, can it still make a decent family van? I've set it up so far with only Standard safety, so hopefully that's still fine with six or so seats. Well, I tuned it and this is what I came up with:
(https://i.imgur.com/DYKSQR7.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/MW4U5f4.jpg?1)
It has MUCH smaller brakes, FWD, and a Standard interior. They also really like ESC, so the Family version has it and I may as well add it to the others because I think the engineering time will be less if they all have the same thing. In fact, I checked and sure enough, base engineering time is 82 months if they all have ESC and 90 if only one does. Alternatively, it's only 68 months if they all don't have ESC. Just the Family Van version loses about 5 points.
I think there's still at least one or two prototypes I still want to try, but that's what I've got for the moment.
More!
How about our other idea for a hypercar? The modern 2.7m body really does look good. But, you should see it with the default tire size...
(https://i.imgur.com/KlvjMs3.jpg?1)
It also has much worse lift characteristics than our GT car body... so much so that I'm convinced that the GT car body has bugged/typo lift numbers.
(https://i.imgur.com/7TFO727.jpg?1)
Anyway, I made it mid-engined and gave it the absolute meme machine 1100 HP V12 I designed for the classic body hyper car. It's AWD with a 70% rear bias, that solved the the issues balancing it out and had much less wheelspin than the default 50/50 since the weight is in the back. Following the desires of the demographics, I have no aero, and pretty standard construction.
(https://i.imgur.com/hwhmzl8.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/1WrG4l6.jpg?1)
I honestly can't help feel slightly disappointed... we're making a car for the most expensive market in the game, and even though it's affordable, they still don't want to pay out for most of the exotic materials. They're basically useless in campaign right now. I tried a bunch of combinations, and this is what Hyper wants.
(https://i.imgur.com/6ssIyJy.jpg?1)
The market scores are stronger than the vintage body version, but the choice is up to you. Or, we could make both, but it will really hit market saturation. Like the other example, it has the potential for a Track Premium version. What's more, there's a convertible variant.
(https://i.imgur.com/wh1NMY5.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/UsLL3LK.jpg?1)
I have no idea why there's a 5% penalty- it is both a convertible, and a coupe. But, whatever.
Light Sport/Track: This is something I don't usually build for. Let's see... for the 2009 2.3m body, I think I'll try something a little less powerful, and more budget friendly. I give you: the Reactor Sport.
(https://i.imgur.com/0K0sud9.jpg?1)
Nearly double the horsepower of the base Reactor gives us some good shit. Compared to average Light Sport competitors, it's much less sporty, but also much more driveable and comfortable. This version has 2 seats only. 2+2 scores much worse in Light Sport but goes to 200 in Fun Premium.
(https://i.imgur.com/iffFphz.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/RnvyfqY.jpg?1)
Now can I make this into a Track variant? Well, immediately I found some changes that also benefit regular Sport. Going to Basic safety saves a lot of weight (Track has a 10% low-weight desire!) and we can actually afford Active Sport suspension in these markets. This gets us to 200 in Light Sport right off the bat, invalidating that market screen up above which I'm too lazy to change. There's also some changes I didn't expect- like a geared LSD. Even Super doesn't always like those. The biggest change of all? VERY stiff suspension. It also got aggressive brakes and camber, because Track has specific desires for cornering and braking.
(https://i.imgur.com/Ea9m31W.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/adnqS7L.jpg?1)
I also had a short look at the Minecart replacement with the '07 2.2m. It's actually an SUV, and gets penalties in Commuter accordingly. It can make a decent car according to Archana budgets, but not matter what I do it doesn't get a lot cheaper than our existing minecart/alpaca. We're probably just best cranking up Optimization and Automation in the engineering for those cars, and making sure they have multiple Huge factories, if we want to hit budget demos.
I think the only suggestion I really have yet to prototype is the '07 3.0m with a lot of variants, and maybe trying to hit track/light sport (or their premium versions) with a GT variant. Or cheaper GT variants in general. I also need to figure out what I want to do with the Pumpstack replacement engine.
Back from a trip, so let's do some stuff!
I don't have much in the way of specific votes, so I'm just going to do my best to pick stuff that people seem favorable towards. We're getting into the home stretch now. I don't know how far we are away from the campaign 4.1 version release, but I definitely want to conclude this before that happens. In the interest of thoroughness though, I'm going to investigate the last couple prototypes we want to look at:
Last round of Prototypes!
Before I get to the really fun stuff, let me show the last thing I did first: an alternative trim of the Bay 12 GT. This has the new, unnamed engine intended to replace the Pumpstack, making about 500hp and with the speed limited by gearing. It's targeting Track Premium mainly. It has much stiffer suspension, simpler interior, and only 2 seats even though the car has 2 seat rows. Oddly, Sport seems to like eliminating the rear +2 seats- I got them to a 205 score, much higher than the normal GT, during tuning despite aiming for Track. It could also gain several points in Track and Light Sport by reducing from Advanced to Basic safety, but two safety types between variants adds crazy engineering time so that is not the version that's shown here.
(https://i.imgur.com/hAd5AMF.jpeg)
It looks like, aside from Track premium, Light Sport and Track customers prefer the smaller, cheaper Reactor Sport-based car. The true optimum is probably a middle ground between an engine straining to get 150hp out of its tiny 1.5L block and a 3.7L V8 that's making so much power the car can barely handle it. But, I like the Reactor Sport for not adding a new engine to our production line.
The '46 3.1m Super isn't a great option. It's absolutely huge and has terrible drag. The rear is so far from the front that even enormous rear tires don't give much grip, it needs to be AWD to handle a lot of power. What's more, there's no actual coupe body option, so it's stuck with a 20% penalty.
(https://i.imgur.com/IKHYOe7.jpg?1)(https://i.imgur.com/JF37sFU.jpg?1)
Lastly, there's the '07 3.0m 'general purpose' build. This car is a lot more compelling! It's a good bit more expensive than the Alpaca, no matter what, but it has three seat rows. It does okay (not as good as our other prototype) in Family, but excellent in Family Utility (regular and premium). That is, of course, as long as Archana is excluded from the averages. Due to its size and comfort, it also has a lot of capacity to be a solid Family Premium/Family Sport, judging from the numbers I saw during tuning.
(https://i.imgur.com/pt69Zm5.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/6NL42gy.jpg?1)
If we want a single model that hits a lot of different markets with variants, this would be it. The only thing it doesn't replace is the more budget-oriented markets served by a smaller car. Just for reference, here's a Family Sport version. It has a the Reactor Sport motor variant, wider tires, stiffer suspension, and only 4 seats compared to the wagon's 6.
(https://i.imgur.com/oVAYPm3.jpeg)(https://i.imgur.com/NWMSxi5.jpg?1)
Heck, let's get greedy- suppose I want to try to ute? That doesn't usually work out, but...
(https://i.imgur.com/pirJB61.jpeg)(https://i.imgur.com/4Xx28Al.jpeg)
Hey, today they're fine with only one seat row! This does make me wonder about my conventional wisdom of Utility having a huge issue with low Practicality from only one seat row. I'm beginning to suspect it depends on the particular game session. Sometimes, the competition's average Practicality is high enough that you hit the threshold for a penalty, and sometimes, it's not... interesting.
There's more viable variants in that, such as a premium and a convertible, but I think you get the idea. This is a very compelling car, but it does leave some questions as to our current plans- what variants should we produce? What existing cars, if any, should be replaced? Would we still replace the Alpaca with that other car?
Well, it was originally my plan to just go ahead with the timeline, but I think this is actually worth calling a vote. What should call our new car, and what variants should we make? What about names for the other cars, such as the track/light sport car and the Alpaca replacement?
I'm actually surprised everyone's much more interested in the Alpaca-like 2.6m (Goat) than the 3.0m. The 3.0m actually scores more in Family, (I think I said it was a little less, but looking back that's not correct- it's 156 vs 153) and much higher in other demographics, and that's just for the wagon. I'll engineer it so we have it on hand, but I'll just put it in a large factory. The Goat can get the Alpaca's former factories.
1998 New Models
The Goat gets the final tweaks to the Reactor. I got a little more fuel efficiency out of it, but the direct injection fuel system is still at -2 quality. Granted, that's -2 with a +10 baseline, but I hope to improve that later. Of course, the engine will be a little tied up while we make our new models. Anyway, the bottom end quality is getting improved to +0 (with +7 from R&D) which lets us rev to 6600 RPM with cheap cast iron internals. Because our VVT gives us a very aggressive cam profile on the high end, even Family seems to appreciate the added room. It manifests itself as increased Drivability and Comfort, in fact, because gears are shifting less often I think. Just going from 6500RPM to 6600RPM redline gives a whole 0.5 Drivability, which is a lot for eking out the last little bit.
(https://i.imgur.com/zXJYoUw.jpg)
In retrospect, there's points to be gained by including ESC. I think I'll eat the engineering time now since it's a new model, but I've given it -4 quality. Similar story with safety, it has 00's safety at -1, which will allow the car to really come into its own for its first facelift. After changing paint, there was a stubborn trim slot which stayed on the red color. In fixing it, I ended up with a plastic strip along the body line reminiscent of the old chrome designs, so I've decided to leave that in.
(https://i.imgur.com/t8qfkdv.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/rkR2mXm.jpg)
The Goat will be occupying the Alpaca's old Huge factory. I've added a QA testing building. This puts the build time to an awful 26 months, but I think it will be worth it. We're projecting 36k cars per month against the Alpaca's 33k, and that's without very high engineering sliders. This got me down to 68 months. Notably, the Reactor needed some slider reductions for its own engineering, since it started off at 75 months. This upgrade to direct injection is a big deal. This is of course going to be a pain with regards to facelifting the other Reactor cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/NORLmQI.jpg)
The Fey Mood looks about right in Noble Purple. (I originally started writing it as the Ghost, but Fey Mood got more votes I think). One tweak for this: I figured, for the production size, why not go to a hand made interior? It gains 4 points in Hyper. Since we're targeting Super and Hyper pretty much exclusively, we pretty much only need to make 1000 cars. A Medium 1 factory with a leatherworks can make 1500. Further adjusting the engineering sliders, we get about 1100 cars and we even have low pressure, which is good so that we can gain familiarity with some of the cool tech. Notably, sequential transmission will help us upgrade all our cars to dual clutch later, I think.
(https://i.imgur.com/6SaThYW.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/HnGQwKq.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/lv9tRjP.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/ZladRek.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/KDya8dJ.jpg)
The Hauler Mk3 was basically already set up, but I did decide to get greedy and go for Expanded Offices. I also improved its engineering sliders, increasing funding to make room for a little more other stuff.(https://i.imgur.com/6Cl5zOn.jpg)
The Carp is selling to these markets, so, I estimate a production of around 10-15 thousand will be plenty. At this point it's okay if our factories end up under worked. I made one tweak to the design, which was re-introducing +2 rear seats. It added a lot of appeal to the Fun and Fun Premium category, at the cost of Track going from 172 to 170 and Track Budget going from around 170 to 165. Additionally, I changed it to pushrod rear suspension, for more sportiness. I did consider going to aluminum body panels, since we have aluminum presses now, but it would go from 95 PU to 125 PU and it's not really worth it from a business standpoint, especially since this car has some good budget appeal. I also realized I should stop caring about Track Premium so much since it's literally 26 cars per month, making it the smallest category in the game, even smaller than Hyper.
(https://i.imgur.com/l8rwaZ2.jpg)
The Carp looks good in white, like the GT's little brother.
(https://i.imgur.com/JTPoE6j.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/cGGJad2.jpg)
On second thought, maybe a color lifted from Dwarf Fortress's carp is in order?
(https://i.imgur.com/7NhkEZT.jpg)
A Large 3 factory with QA will be constructed in 73 months, and the car can be engineered in that time with extra funding and just a little negative reliability. It's actually getting a production run of 22k, since we may actually sell a lot to Sport Budget. The Carp has the potential to be our most selling performance car by far. I've set a minimum price of just $10k, because the Sports Budget segment's budget is, uh...
(https://i.imgur.com/bJ6XNYn.jpg)
Yeah, apparently, their baseline is negative $6k. Yeah man, I'd love to get paid six thousand to receive a new sports car too.
(https://i.imgur.com/Z8lZWq6.jpg)
The last new car is the one I like but nobody else seems to... since we've been calling it a general-purpose car, I'll just call it The General. There's some interesting stuff to talk about. First of all, despite having trims each with a different body shape, the engineering cost is... not bad. This is the engineering time at baseline sliders, 88 months. Not bad for four different trims. The secret sauce (which I stumbled into) is that there's very few actual different tech options selected. They all have the same suspension types, interior types (except the premium version gets a different entertainment system), transmission, safety, etc. If you have different options selected between different trims, they are vector added. If they're the same, it doesn't matter how many trims you have.
(https://i.imgur.com/K4KBChw.jpg)
Just for shits, I added a Convertible variant (another market we're not hitting) and the time went up to 91 months. The only category affected was Chassis. Anyway, with some sliders I got it down to 71 months, the time for the Large 3 factory to construct. Not totally ideal, but hey, it's something. Anyway, time will tell how this strategy works.
(https://i.imgur.com/75Qu3Xn.jpg)
With that, I can sign off all the new models. The Reactor based cars are going to wait until our new Huge factories are done, since I think some of them will be occupying these factories. But, I can also do the cars that won't be needing Huge factories, namely the Noble, Colossus, and our Pumpstack cars.
The Pumpstack is being replaced with a new engine. Since we don't have any names for it (I think) I'll call it the Chain Reactor, in keeping with our theme, but something lava related also might be appropriate. It's a bit of a weird engine. Dual overhead cams mean it could in theory keep making more power up to 8000 RPM, but we've got it limited to 7200 and running on cast iron internals. It makes enough power that the cars which use it have to be artificially limited in speed, if they exceed 186mph they require absurdly expensive tires. 500 horsepower seems to be about the limit for a car like this. I continued to play around with making the engine smaller, and there's very arbitrary points where losing 0.1 horsepower causes like 2 points of Sportiness drop (and about the same Competitiveness drop) all at once, even though the car is still arguably overpowered.
I eventually sized it down to about 3.2L, and dropped the quality on direct injection somewhat as well. The engine I finally came up with makes 450 horsepower, with the peak at its redline of 7700 RPM. With the right gearing, this still gets the Bay 12 GT a 0-62mph (100kmh) time of 5 seconds flat. Markets like it more than the 510 horsepower version I was considering earlier. There's still a lot of potential in the engine if we ever make a version with forged internals.
(https://i.imgur.com/WOuyiid.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/vp15tKL.jpg)
The Bay 12 GT gets a 6-speed transmission, still advanced automatic rather than sequential because GT likes comfort. It's also getting upgraded from CD player to Satnav (at considerable expense to the customer).
(https://i.imgur.com/6VsgmN5.jpg?1)
The engineering time for the Chain Reactor is monstrous, at 67 months. Since I'm pretty dead set on getting this engine, and I already set up the GT for it, I'm just going to accept a nearly 6-year facelift time. Needless to say, sliders for the GT are getting cranked up. It's going to be the most reliable GT car on the market, I guess. Look forward to a lot these on the used market in 20 years.
The LMP is in kind of a weird position, since we're going to have a dedicated super car now. I'm keeping it limited to below 186 for the sake of every demographic other than super. Also, the new engine threw the weight distribution off, making it very oversteer prone. It now has stiffer front suspension than rear suspension, and a questionable camber setup of 0 degrees front, -3 degrees rear. That's probably going to have some weird consequences in Beam.
The Rapture immediately struggles with the extra 100 horsepower of the Chain Reactor, so it needs a new gearing setup. Perhaps due to its already high comfort and driveability, markets actually prefer a sequential transmission. Since the speed of all three cars is limited to 184mph, the improved 0-62 time of 4.2 seconds makes this car decisively the fastest of the three Chain Reactor cars. It also gets all the fancy computer suspension bits, and ESC, which necessitates a small reduction in engineering sliders to meet the 67 month target.
Last of all, the Chain Reactor gets a new Large factory to support its production. It won't be nearly as engineering-optimized as the pumpstack starting out.
New Factories! Lastly, I have decided that, for tax purposes, it's time we started losing money. I've commissioned the construction of four each of Huge Car Factories and Huge Engine Factories. Hey, it's going to take a lot of factories to completely saturate the Automation market.
Onward!
January of 1999, we're finally losing money, just a little bit. It seems that six Huge factory pairs under construction at once is what it takes to accomplish that. We should be bringing in money once the two factory pairs that are almost done finish. Remember, Reactor car engineering is waiting until then so we can put them to use immediately.
(https://i.imgur.com/E1f3hC5.jpg)
In all this I forgot to facelift The Colossus. It's been sitting four years without engineering too, poor thing. The 12 engine gains compression and VVT, which helps the fuel efficiency some. That's not a big thing Muscle cares about, but it is a thirsty engine after all. It also gets a lower cam profile, losing 25 horsepower on the top end but gaining 50 ft-lbs of torque on the bottom end, for a smoother engine. A downgrade from Premium to Standard CD players helps with affordability. Lastly, it gets ESC, and negative quality on the 90's safety removed (that feels like something I must have missed in the 1993 or whatever facelift). When that's all done, it's sitting comfortably at over 200 competitiveness in Muscle again. The King is back, baby! Altogether, it should be ready in 36 months, and hopefully cheaper than before.
My strategy worked!
(https://i.imgur.com/dS0Qm9i.jpg)
Also, our revenue is up after the 1998 slouch and we're back to bringing in $230M per month, despite having a bunch of factories under construction.
That trend steadily continues into 2000, until our factories finish and we're bringing in almost a billion per month again. I've upped our R&D some to compensate- in fact I doubled our spending, but it's basically just +1 in most categories.
Reactor Facelifts
There's actually only a couple cars to worry about directly. The Alpaca and Hauler Mk2 are being replaced (a little scary since they're our biggest earners) so only the Migrant and New Minecart get upgrades. The main thing for them is that they need to be upgraded to the Reactor's facelift.
For the New Minecart, I accidentally clicked on the Chain Reactor and had a bit of a panic.
(https://i.imgur.com/zmcyxAe.jpg)
We've now unlocked up to 7 gear ratios for automatic transmissions. Tuning for this is tricky because the car doesn't have a lot of grip to work with, so I've settled for 6 speeds. There's a lot of overlap already.
(https://i.imgur.com/oeo1r90.jpg)
Also, it gets ESC. Our ongoing projects have gained us a lot of familiarity, and I think the base engineering time for it has gone down as well.
(https://i.imgur.com/UhfTHgG.jpg)
We currently have 48 months before the Reactor facelift finishes. For the New Minecart, it takes some funding and pressure, and -2 ESC quality, to get it there on time. At this point I also realize that engine supply is going to be an issue, since the Reactor facelift doesn't include the new Huge factories. Lastly, the sign off screen here suggests that the engine won't be done engineering for 52 months rather than 48. I got 48 (actually 49) based on the Goat's projected finish time of 08/2004, while this indicates the Reactor facelift will finish on 11/2004. Well, if I screwed up, we might have 3 months of no engines. Anyway, look at the production numbers. With an additional Huge factory, the Minecart will be making 100000 units a month.
(https://i.imgur.com/QbCetjH.jpg)
The Migrant, our small offroad SUV, gets a 6-speed transmission, electric power steering and offroad sway bars. I have literally no idea what an offroad sway bar is compared to a regular sway bar, but it has offroad in the name and they like it. I'm... still not sure this rather niche vehicle justifies a Huge factory (although we're due to have scads of them soon) so I might save the Huge factory we have for the Goat or something. I can, however, upgrade its factory to Large 3 in 51 months. This does mean taking the car off the market for four years though. Upgrading factories is really a drag. However, I'm just going to do that rather than add another middling-sized factory to the list.
Also, it's not a reactor car, but I totally forgot to upgrade the Noble. Nothing crazy happening here though. The motor gets a couple ticks of compression, it gets ESC and active sway bars (the Noble's trademark Hydropneumatic suspension precludes other active bits). The DeLuxe version gets a Premium (not Luxury- that's too expensive for literally anyone right now) SatNav. Admittedly, that's pretty advanced for 2000. I also upped the Body quality a little on the Luxury version. Weirdly, this doesn't seem to benefit from R&D after the car is made. Unlike Chassis quality, I can improve it in a facelift, the but the R&D bonus is stuck at +4. Both versions also get a 7-speed automatic transmission. Apparently they're willing to pay for it unlike the other markets, or it's more benefit to the heavy Noble than something like the Minecart.
(https://i.imgur.com/KltZ60N.jpg)
Altogether, these changes add up to 47 months to implement. With that, every single car in our lineup has either a facelift or replacement in engineering. Huzzah, progress! With that, time ticks on. I considered spending more money on dealerships, but it's getting to be VERY diminishing returns. The worst example, Dalluha, would cost $190M to go from 85% max awareness to 90% max awareness... that's more than we make from Dalluha currently, I'm pretty sure. Gasmea would cost us $400M to go from 90 to 95%, the absolute max. This wouldn't be worth it in financial terms, 5% of Gasmea is not worth $400M I am pretty sure, but it might be something we do to maximize our score when we're done making factories.
2002
Four recall notices later, the Colossus facelift releases! It's selling well, but competitiveness is still sitting at 115 and I suspect cost might be an issue. As usual, we're only selling to 50% of the Muscle demographic. In retrospect, looking at our sales data, we're making 10,000 Colossi per month, and our combine Muscle and Muscle Premium sales are about that much. So, at (unfortunately) the cost of going offline for 28 months, I'm upgrading the car and engine factory for the Colossus to Large 2. Originally I wanted to use the Alpaca's old Large 1 factory, but there wasn't a corresponding engine factory.
Going into 2003, we begin losing money as some of our factories enter the long retooling process. Then, there's another pronlem. The Fey Mood has "launched", but I never built an engine factory for it. In fact, I didn't rename the engine either.
(https://i.imgur.com/WEa0aw0.jpg)
Oops. Actually, the engine for it hasn't completed engineering- I can't start a new facelift for it. Hopefully all I did was screw up the amount of time the engineering for the motor will take. I could have sworn I synchronized them. I hope I didn't somehow synchronize the Fey Mood motor with another car.
(https://i.imgur.com/BW6gBXL.jpg)
Unfortunately, there's no way to check at all when this will resolve. Engine projects currently don't get displayed on the timeline at all. This is due to change in the next game version, but for now all I can do is twiddle my thumbs.
2004: Models Release!
All of our models come out this year. The first wave is in August. This is good, since having all of our factories offline at once has caused us to start losing more money than I wanted to for tax purposes- almost 3 BILLION per month.
(https://i.imgur.com/xrTa3ON.jpg)
Some months later, the Fey Mood FINALLY enters actual production. Sales numbers are consistently in the hundreds due to price, so the Medium factory is working minimum shifts. It's still profitable however.
October, 2005 Review
Hey! At this point in the timeline, I'd wager all of you reading this thread are alive. The internet is a thing now too. Just keep in mind that this is what Youtube looks like while we're selling cars with built in satnav.
(https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/timeline/youtube/youtube-2005.png)
Our biggest earner right now is the New Minecart, no doubt thanks to its sheer production numbers. Impressively, it's selling 85k units and STILL at a 148% margin. Of all the cars, it's not really the one I intended to give two Huge factories first, but it was in the right place at the right time. The Hauler Mk3 is close behind with 60k sales but an even bigger margin of around 162% depending on the trim. We still haven't totally conquered the market, but that's what our new factories are for. We have fully 5 huge factory pairs ready to expand our sales numbers.
(https://i.imgur.com/xrTa3ON.jpg)
New Models: The Hauler Mk3, with an H1 and L2 factory, is our biggest new earner, although of course it's continuing in the same market segment as the Mk2. No single trim is completely dominating this time. The Delivery version is selling the most, but at the lowest margin. Maybe it has a higher absolute profit for some reason. None of the markets the Hauler trims target are saturated, in fact we could probably double production. Everybody loves driving gigantic toaster ovens.
(https://i.imgur.com/sKoi8jP.jpg)
Our next highest earner is the General. Despite having only a Large 3 factory, it's outperforming the earnings of some models with Huge factories. As we'll discuss in the Market section, its low production numbers have led most of its trims to be priced exclusively into premium markets. This is another good candidate for getting a lot more factory space.
(https://i.imgur.com/1MiqrkH.jpg)
Just behind is the Goat, it's selling at 156% margin and the competitiveness is still 108, meaning, once again, we could use a lot more of these.
(https://i.imgur.com/bcUpwCO.jpg)
The Carp is doing pretty well, although it's earning less than the Colossus or Rapture. Its high competitiveness and low margin indicates that it may be saturating its markets, which makes sense since it has enough production to dip into budget categories. That will cause the price to stop rising as it has to find a balance between earning profit and being affordable to more buyers. Remember, that's okay. If we're ultimately aiming for a high score, saturating markets is what we want.
(https://i.imgur.com/kvV9qZT.jpg)
The Fey Mood is selling relatively poorly, and it hasn't dominated its markets either. In the Markets screen, the LMP is actually out-competing it Super and Hyper, apparently. I suspect this is because these markets are seeing the LMP as "good enough" and it's vastly cheaper. The Fey Mood has stayed at its minimum 25% margin, which indicates that maybe the price is too high. A facelift where the base price isn't trying to pay back tooling will help, and I can set a 10% margin or something.
(https://i.imgur.com/KNVtSD7.jpg)
As for the rest of our cars, you can mostly see how they're doing in the main hub screenshot. The Colossus and Migrant have both taken well to their factory upgrades. The LMP is our lowest earner besides the the Fey Mood, which seems to be the way it goes for cars targeting Super (it doesn't help that they're overlapping some too).
Markets: Now that we're in the last stretch, it's our goal to utterly dominate the market. It's our goal to saturate every single one, or at least, get as close as we can. First, here's our awareness:
(https://i.imgur.com/MWWudK6.jpg)
Here's our monthly sales data:
(https://i.imgur.com/ytHLYiV.jpg)
Lastly, here's the demographic sizes:
(https://i.imgur.com/903hoaE.jpg)
R&D: As usual, I've upped our R&D spending some more. We've now hit +15 in Fuel System research- it won't actually take effect for another year or two, but this is the absolute maximum investment level. As for recent unlocks, we've unlocked every level of Infotainment all at once. Depending on how bad the early unlock cost effect is, it would probably be prudent to begin replacing all of our entertainment systems with this tech. We've also unlocked Dual Clutch transmissions while our new cars were engineering, we will probably be using these in all cars, both economy and performance. We also unlocked Electric Variable power steering, a less cheap feeling version of Electric Power Steering. Compared to hydraulic power steering, it has a negligible effect on gas mileage, so this will probably be used in most of our economy vehicles. I suspect luxury cars will still want hydraulic. We also unlocked ESC+LC (Launch Control), the last ESC-line upgrade, which will benefit performance cars. Lastly, we've unlocked Advanced 10's safety, which will benefit any new model we decide to make, and Carbon Ceramic Brakes, which are mostly for supercars such as the Fey Mood.
(https://i.imgur.com/73e4uFR.jpg)
One More Thing: A problem with the Carp: When I designed the car, I chose Basic 90's safety. Light Sport and Track have a strong preference for low weight. However, this has led to a total safety score of 35.8. And, well...
(https://i.imgur.com/oIu8uDG.jpg)
Yeah, it's going to be banned from sale in Fruinia by 2010 if we don't do something. I normally don't like to re-engineer safety, but there's another thing. Even Basic 00's safety will only bring it up to 37.8. Otherwise, we have to go to Standard and gain some weight. So, someone let me know if there's a trick we can pull to squeeze 0.2 more safety out of it and meet Fruinian safety standards.
Bodies: These are the last 3 bodies in the game, with all variants.
(https://i.imgur.com/TKLwy6j.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/gCDMzHZ.jpg)
World Domination Meeting
This might be our last chance for new cars! Depending how we're doing, I might not do any new cars at the next update, and the one after that will probably be going to 2020 and getting our final score. So, if we need a new car to hit a demographic, let me know.
Fill all the markets! With trims or bodies, we probably need something new for Offroad Premium, Luxury Convertible, and maybe offroad/heavy utility. For everything else, we need to decide if we want to replace any existing cars or expand them with new trims. We have 5 Huge factories ready to go, so we need to decide where best to assign them.
More Factories: How many more do we need? We can probably afford as many as we want to make, and in fact, it's probably okay to lose money at this point in the game. Maybe... ten or so huge factories?
Dropbox: as usual, it's updated (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0) with every single new car. Incidentally, our company produces too many damn cars.
Hot Laps:
We have a shitload of new cars, and updates to old cars. I might keep track times limited to just the interesting ones.
The Carp does some impressive handling on its rock hard suspension. It hits a top speed on the track of 134mph, right before Bavarian Bend, having not slowed down at all for the Slingshot. It gets 2:24 final time, making it almost as fast as our Pumpstack based cars with fully twice as much horsepower.
(https://i.imgur.com/kJqldF8.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/K8Yn3r0.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/KI4ElDt.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/LH9D47E.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/2l0jEis.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/6sQyBGO.jpg)
I'll probably do a video sometime later. I can't handle the Carp or the Fey Mood in beam, hehe.
Bonus Pic: Rear pushrod suspension on the Carp
(https://i.imgur.com/hV3FhUG.jpg)
2005 Facelifts and New Models
First, the alternative Fey Mood gets an ultra-lite trim with Sport interior and Basic Infotainment, saving about 300 pounds over the full fat luxury version. This won't sell as well, but it will be the one whose performance numbers we advertise. ;) I've also chosen a suitable name for it.
(https://i.imgur.com/LeJjUry.jpg)
I brought the engineering back up to 60 months from 55 or so by lowering the pressure. This will help our familiarity in all the cool tech bits.
I'm going to call our new truck the Beast. Not the most creative, but eh, whatever. The main version has one major change that can help: rear-biasing the RWD will help with our massive understeer. I almost gave up and accepted 94.5% drivability (lousy) but I found a balance between AWD with too much understeer, and RWD which, well, would still understeer, but also had too much wheelspin.
(https://i.imgur.com/CehUSdm.jpg?1)
Fun fact: the truck weighs 5171lbs, and the engine is fully 986 pounds of that. Also, tuning the engine is an interesting case where increasing the cams ostensibly increases the thermal efficiency of the engine, but decreases the actual gas mileage of the vehicle. I'm sure there's some interesting gearing stuff behind that.
It also gets an SUV with Premium interior (Premium Satnav rather than Infotainment for expense and engineering reasons). Even with the ESC quality down to -5, which made a big difference, it's going to take 69 months to get done at basically 50 engineering sliders. I've put it in a Huge factory because why bother with anything less? You can see we're going to need to make more The 12 engines as well.
(https://i.imgur.com/VLmkyTA.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/O3KQu3o.jpg)
I considered making a crew cab to sell to Utility Premium, which would score about 190 in that market, but I've decided that for now, the regular Utility variety's score of 170 in Utility Premium will do.
Next up, the Colossus needs to be updated at the same time, since it now shares an engine with the Beast. I never imagined The 12 would be anything other than a gimmick engine for the Colossus, but here we are. It gets a massive boost from a Dual Clutch transmission, and I also downgraded the Safety to standard (oddly, this seems to take less engineering time than leaving the Advanced right where it is). This saved a lot of material costs, which understandably are high with this car.
(https://i.imgur.com/Mx9pJsi.jpg)
For whatever reason, downgrading the ESC to -5 quality helps a lot with engineering time, which has ballooned, even though I'm pretty sure we squeezed 0 quality ESC into the last facelift. Whatever.
Lastly, The 12 engine gets a Huge factory, and a LOT of engineering sliders since there's no major feature changes (adding the new variant doesn't hurt much since it's mostly the same parts with different tuning). It might be our most reliable engine now.
I considered going for the General next, but instead I'm doing the Carp first because I want to use it to primarily tune the Reactor Sport. Our fuel tech has improved and the motor has an octane of 82, so there's a lot of room to work with (remember we use 86 octane fuel. Apparently that's what Automation thinks Americans use, just go with it). Most of this goes into a larger intercooler, and more compression (10.5:1) so the engine gains about 20 horsepower, all on the top end. With a small gearing tweak, I was able to get the market to agree with an increase in the redline to 6700RPM. I think that's the same as my Honda Civic.
(https://i.imgur.com/TeEB2wk.jpg)
For the car itself, there aren't many changes, although once again it appears to need a quality reduction in ESC below what we were making before. Now, it was suggested that we put this one in a Huge factory too. I think to justify that, I'll need...
(https://i.imgur.com/EIs5S1P.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/0tumIKv.jpg)
There's about 6000 Convertible Sports Budget customers, and this car serves them very well, in addition to having some competitiveness with Convertible Sports (which is a relatively premium demographic). This version has a premium interior and much softer suspension.
Also, in retrospect, I might stick to the Large 3 this car is already made in. I don't think I have another good use for that factory, and the Huge and Large together might be too much. I will, however, improve its tooling and engineering. This should push out 28k cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/9fB88MG.jpg)
Now, the General. This is my opportunity to tune the normal Reactor engine. We're up to 0-quality direct fuel injection, and our baseline is now +13, which is great. When all is done, we're very slightly more powerful at 88.0 horsepower, and a little more fuel efficient. I'll spare you the comparison graph, it's two lines very close together. To my surprise, family markets for the wagon trim aren't interested in the dual clutch transmission. DCT is apparently a little less comfortable, and a little less drivable, enough to offset its fuel efficiency gains. The only real change it gets is an upgrade to variable electric power steering. The other thing to notice, is scores are down a lot. Possibly, competition is catching up, I wonder if the Goat has been similarly effected.
(https://i.imgur.com/5d4e8HB.jpg)
The other cars are mostly similar, although at this point I've noticed electric variable steering has a very long engineering time. It shares its quality slider with ESC, so that's probably where my long engineering times that demand low quality have been coming from.
(https://i.imgur.com/ZbczDVf.jpg)
It too gets a new Huge factory, and an engineering time of about 5 years, with a lot of slider gains. The Carp is about the same, so it looks like I'm aiming for a rather long 5 year facelift for all the Reactor cars.
The New Minecart, to my surprise, doesn't want DCT either. I thought its improved fuel efficiency would be desired by the likes of City Eco, but they're more concerned with the comfort loss. I'll try again after the facelift to see if the tech becomes attractive when it's more mature, but it looks like we won't be seeing every car go to DCT like I thought. I also felt around for a sport or premium trim, but sport was going nowhere and Premium didn't outperform the General Premium trim in the Commuter Premium market, so I didn't bother. It just gets electric variable power steering. With that new tech, I wasn't able to squeeze out any slider improvements either (they're already pretty high). It does however have the potential for a light delivery trim if we want later. Anyway, since it's supposed to be our most budget car, it's getting another Huge factory; its third.
The Hauler isn't seeing much changes, but notably the Hauler Delivery apparently has the same affordability as a potential Minecart Delivery. I'm not entirely sure how that makes sense, but it's vastly more competitive at a 288 score so whatever. Once again, even though a dual clutch helps with gas mileage and affordability they aren't interested. I realize that since I have 288 competitiveness, I can take the drop to 283 for removing the entertainment system entirely. This reduces the cost of the car which is always good, and more importantly reduces our PU by about 10% meaning we can make more cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/MM0Uizr.jpg)
In the same vein of austerity, none of the Hauler trims get electric power steering, ESC, or really any new features. They're just perfect (and cheap) the way they are. This also means that we can REALLY crank the engineering sliders.
(https://i.imgur.com/ZkrAzTu.jpg)
As observed with the General, the wagon is facing stiffer competition in Family Utility, and it's down to about 130 score.
Once again, this model gets an additional huge factory. With its low PU and high automation, the output numbers are fantastic. We have one factory putting out 52k cars per month.
(https://i.imgur.com/SMyeCex.jpg)
The Goat confirms again, Family competition is way up, and numbers well above 150 in this market are likely a thing of the past. I guess I'm surprised that the competition is picking up just now, but Family is lucrative market so it makes sense that there would be strong competitors. For updates, it's getting the safety brought up from -2 to 0 (Advanced 00's was probably expensive for us in '98) and ESC is staying at -5, because it's getting costly electric variable steering added. The brake pads get softened quite a bit, adding brake fade but apparently it's more comfortable so they like it. After doing that, they also want brake airflow, so this is definitely going in the direction of looking like a 2010's car.
(https://www.civicx.com/forum/attachments/reversefogs-jpg.42367/)
Like the Hauler, it gets a lot of extra engineering Automation slider, which means a lot of extra factory tooling Automation slider, which means... 22 months retooling, yuck. I think there's not a lot to do about it though, that's just a weakness of Huge factories.
(https://i.imgur.com/zkhrp7O.jpg)
The Migrant is the last reactor-engined vehicle for this facelift, and man, wouldn't it be so easy to just... not update it? But no! We must press on! Of the two trims, the SUV sees little change except an upgrade to ESC from ABS+TC, while the pickup looks like it will benefit a ton from downgrading interiors to Basic with no entertainment system. Its primary markets (except for Utility, which we now have other vehicles for) remain the same and score much better, and of course it becomes much cheaper. Sadly there's no Huge factories left to go around, but the Large 3 gets a QA facility, and it gets engineering worth a few thousand more cars. It now has a projected output of 37k.
(https://i.imgur.com/RNCu9wY.jpg)
The original Fey Mood seems like it scores considerably worse with the 1300 horsepower engine, especially in the Super demographic where budget is a slight concern. However, I already signed off on the upgrades, so instead I'm downgrading it to The 12. This gets a good score in Super, as well as Muscle Premium of course. Hyper goes down a bit, but we have the Fey Lord to cover that market now. However, this has led to an odd circumstance.
(https://i.imgur.com/7pYpxSa.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/QZ3H9gA.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/lUNPHgv.jpg)
As a bonus, I made a 4-seater GTP variant. It scores 158 in GT Premium and awful everywhere else. It also gets all the top notch electric bits and DCT.
Next up, the Noble, probably one of cars we could have stood to replace. Its base chassis quality is +4 and I think we're up to +9 or something. Well, we're sticking with the classic for Premium/Luxury. You can't go wrong with having an unbelievably huge body only the 70's can provide for those markets. First, the engine gets some updates. We can add fully 600 RPM to the redline thanks to tech advancements, which gives the engine a very wide power band. They also prefer a higher cam shaft again. I feel like I move it up or down every time I facelift the engine, but I'm pretty sure the increased RPM is the cause for wanting steeper cams this time.
(https://i.imgur.com/61MfWlR.jpg)
For the car itself, I assumed they would want an advanced automatic over a DCT for comfort reasons, but... they prefer the DCT. I dunno why, if it weren't for the market numbers I'd never have picked it after seeing that our cheaper cars don't like it. The reason appears to be that Sportiness goes from 5.1 to 10. The Luxury version still can't afford actual Luxury entertainment systems (maybe a symptom of ahead-of-time costs), so it gets a Premium Infotainment system. Lastly, I added the Alpaca's Large 1 car factory to the Noble's production, as well as a newly constructed large engine factory. It will take exactly 60 months, finishing along with the Reactor cars.
Lastly, we have the Chain reactor cars. I'll start with the Bay 12 GT. The Chain Reactor gets only a little more power, as I explained before the cars can't really go faster than 184mph. However, the Bay 12 GT customers are happy to get a 7-speed DCT. Actually, I'm going to eat my words: maybe tires are getting cheaper, but it might be reasonable to get the GT going faster. After a score dip immediately above 184mph, the scores steadily increase to the actual top speed of 208mph, at which point GT is very slightly less and GTP is a few points higher. Turns our that a 7-speed DCT takes a long time to engineer, so it gets a little negative quality, and the engineering sliders get extra funding and pressure to get it done in 5 years.
The Rapture is almost the exact same story. DCT, Electric Variable power steering, negative quality. This time it stays at 184mph for the Sport market. It does, however, need more production. I planned a new Large 2 factory which happens to be the exact biggest I can manage in 60 months, and increased the engineering of the engine and its factories considerably to keep up.
The LMP is the same as the rapture again, but I had to go back to the Chain Reactor and add an engine factory.
Okay. Oh man. I think we have enough cars now. No more cars. I don't wanna click any more.
But I Gotta Click
So, we want more factories. We need more factories. I think we need... a dozen of these.
(https://i.imgur.com/o6Y77Ug.jpg)
...I have also become acutely aware that there are two loading screens for each factory I build, a total of 48 loading screens. I'm on an SSD and they're only like a second, but still. Now, there are more factories under construction on the hub screen timeline than I can view at once. The question remains:
Did I just bankrupt us?
Nope. In the next month, we made a $45M profit. That means I used up our $1.6B income almost exactly. At this point I realize I didn't make a backup save and I DID manage to fuck something up: I didn't assign the Reactor engine to most of the extra factories we have, so we're going to have a big problem with engine supply. Now that I signed off the facelift, there's no way to add the factories. (Apparently however, a later update will add the ability to add factories independently of facelift).
After a little bit, we start losing money. Our income has dipped along with the economy. We're losing a billion every two or three months. That sounds bad, but I'm basically not worried as long as our debt is a lot smaller than our company valuation, which is 220 billion. You can see on our finances graph where the red line jumps up (factory construction costs) and the green line, our income, dips just under it, correlating to the drop in the economic graph. It's 2008 now, but fortunately, I don't think it's going to be as bad as the real 2008 crash.
(https://i.imgur.com/j5h8eQs.jpg)
Ooohkay maybe it is as bad as the real 2008 crash. The economy graph has been sitting at -5% for months, which I assume means a 5% shrinkage every month, or the monthly portion of what would be a 5% annual shrinkage. Either way, the real cause of our losses of 4 billion per MONTH is that all of our factories are retooling, so we're not selling any cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/6SRQ3Yd.jpg)
In October 2010, everything except the Beast, Fey Mood and Colossus finished at once. Our debt has grown to $100B, but our company valuation has grown to $350B with the value of our half-finished factories. Now of course we're in for a real engine shortage, so without delay, I need to facelift the Reactor motor. Instead of actually updating it (and all of our cars) I'm going to facelift it WITHOUT modifying it, and just add the factories.
(https://i.imgur.com/RudhwBR.jpg)
No pictures, but I did a real rush job rather than fully tooling the factories to high slider levels. Still it will take 23 months, since two factories lacked an iron foundry (oops).
I'm not considering this too important while we have our engine shortage, but here's our income at the start of this facelift.
(https://i.imgur.com/dOWsCi2.jpg)
Because the engine factories have been overworked, I'm getting a "higher factory refresh costs" notification every three seconds, but we're on our way to being stable again. We hit a high income of 3.7B per month for one month before we have a short gap in our production again.
November, 2012 Review
Finally, our factories are finished, and my last minute facelift of the Reactor engine is done. Now we can do our last set of actual facelifts, but I'm going to take a little break before the finale.
(https://i.imgur.com/CIeGF33.jpg)
Interestingly, the Fey Lord's sales don't really reflect the competitiveness in the designer. What was indicated was that the ultra-lite version, with a much less luxurious interior, was much less competitive (about 113 vs 145 or something). In fact, it's selling about equal numbers to the luxury interior version.
(https://i.imgur.com/THLF86S.jpg)
The lite version is cheaper as well as selling at a lower margin, so cost is definitely a factor despite the considerable budget of customers who would buy this car.
Markets: Here's our current sales numbers. Our market awareness has dropped a little because of the period where we weren't producing cars, but we're still doing pretty decent. Incidentally, I maxed out all of our dealerships and advertising except Dalluha, where the last step costs $700M per month.
(https://i.imgur.com/FhBkThE.jpg)
While it looks like we haven't grown in market share all that much, considering that we about doubled our factories, market sizes have grown considerably.
(https://i.imgur.com/1MfWikz.jpg)
On our finances screen, we have enough car varieties currently on sale that we get an "other" category on the pie chart for stuff like the LMP/Fey Mood/Fey Lord.
(https://i.imgur.com/CDaoWmI.jpg)
R&D review: We have all the tech except 20's safety. Don't know if I'll invest further in tech, we only have one or two facelifts left in the game for most cars.
Bodies: We're done with those lol
Final meeting!
Okay, after this will be the last episode- we're going for the score screen! We have 12 Huge factories. We have enough time to make a new model if we really want, but it will only be on sale for 2-3 years before the end of the game. I guess this is the opportunity to build a total meme car in campaign mode if we'd like. We could use a proper luxury convertible, and maybe something suitable to Pony Budget.
I experimented with a convertible version of the Noble, but I didn't get a very impressive score in Luxury Convertible (around 120), it seems like they prefer something considerably sportier, and possibly smaller. I suspect the Colossus might be a little large and difficult to make cheap for Pony Budget customers, but they still want a large engine, just on a budget, so a trim of some car with, say, a Noble engine and minimal interior might be interesting. Notably, Pony Budget, City Budget, and many of the other Budgets have budget spreads that bottom out at $2k, so we'll never be 100% affordable. I think the main driver of our prices is still that we're not building enough cars for demand, so I'm curious to see what happens when we go absolutely ham on the factories.
So, let me know what trims/cars we should try. Other than that, we're almost done! I'm planning to post a video with the cars we haven't driven yet along with the finale.
I'm going to make a move towards laziness and just put the save file in the dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2iy2np0pz59onvu/AABuvcsVQgj6FMZBzENDG5S0a?dl=0). If you want the latest cars, you can open the save file and export them. I might still put individual cars in for the finale, if people want.
Hot Laps!
Alright, it's time to see how the Fey Lord performs! This car smashes records the entire way around the track. It reaches 204 before the slingshot, and exits Bavarian Bend going 80. The final time is 1:51:75, destroying the 2-minute market that our previous cars struggled to meet. That's for the lightweight version, but surprisingly, the heavier luxury version is almost exactly as fast, posting 1:51:83 despite a weight difference of 300 pounds.
(https://i.imgur.com/yYAr3i4.jpg)
Our other new car is the Beast. The two versions are considerably different, the standard utility version has a trimmed back variant of The 12 which is leaned out, on shallow cams, and has a single exhaust. It also has extremely tall and soft suspension. The premium SUV on the other hand, is heavier, but sits considerably lower and has the full 570 horsepower engine.
The pickup version is what I'll try first. It shifts through narrow gears quickly, all the way to 5th gear before the Evardsen Esses, where it has to promptly slow down to handle the corners. It reaches absolute redline of 117mph before the slingshot, then has to slow considerably. Despite being fast off the line, it comes around in 2:57.
(https://i.imgur.com/DZoO73y.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/hloSvHe.jpg)
Bonus pic: Hauler models through the years
(https://i.imgur.com/SnqJn1o.png)
I'd more or less forgotten about the Noble.
There's an '09 3.1m sedan that would be about the same size (Baron -> Noble -> Duke?), but I can't guess how a new car compares to those positive quality modifiers built up on the Noble.
"Always Bet on Duke"
Well, engineering a new car in 2012 when the game ends in 2020 will be a challenge. Not only does it have to out-compete our existing car, the Noble, but it has to be engineered early as possible. Otherwise, we won't have much time to actually sell it.
First off, a hypothetical refresh of the Noble scores about 152 in Premium, so that's our baseline. If we don't exceed it by a significant margin then the project isn't worth our time, since it's also not going to have to high engineering sliders of a mature project. Still I'm hopeful, the Noble is one of our oldest models still in production (tied with the New Minecart). It has a lot of old tech that could be improved upon.
(https://i.imgur.com/zAJ8RpJ.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/rJhgZRH.jpg)
Here's our new car concept, the Duke. It's got some key features keeping it similar to the Noble: it has the same motor (even though the engine bay is cramped) and it's using hydropneumatic springs, which is still more comfortable than fancy modern computer-adjusted suspension. It's also, like the Noble, transve However, it has a multilink rear suspension design and most of all, +13 chassis quality from R&D. Among other modern features, it gets a Premium HUD in the interior, and electric variable power steering, which we've now gained a good amount of familiarity in. Still, for the scores here, I've added some negative quality sliders which hurt the score a little. In the interest of saving engineering time, I put -3 on the driving electronics, and -1 on the chassis quality.
(https://i.imgur.com/SlSkSfL.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/X9P2VqQ.jpg)
Sadly, there's no convertible option, but of course it needs a luxury trim with a hand-made interior. That version scores 142 in Luxury and 115 in Luxury Premium, putting it far above the scores of the Noble DeLuxe's 126 and 101. I wasn't able to give it a Luxury HUD, apparently that's still to advanced and expensive. Apparently the Noble really has been falling behind as a car for the ultra rich.
Designing the car wasn't too bad, but engineering may be the hard part. We start off with a baseline of 86 months. At that rate, the car would come out almost exactly when the game ends.
(https://i.imgur.com/wcbQzEK.jpg)
I fiddled with the sliders and got us a liiitle bit of Automation, within 48 months. This car will... NOT be reliable. But, that's the price you pay for the latest in tech, right?
(https://i.imgur.com/6OFXPEy.jpg)
I also looked a little into a modernized Minecart replacement- this time going all the way back to a '95 body. It didn't get numbers that were crazy better, and for the markets the Minecart targets, cost efficiency and high engineering sliders are super necessary, so I don't think rushing a new model will work.
Anyway, what do you guys all think of the Duke? Do we give it the green light?
Okay, this should be the last update. Let's put all those factories to work.
you might want to build the duke in hetvesia, that 90% workforce skill is going to help with recalls I think
Theoretically that might be nice, but I already committed to building all the Huge factories in Archana, so I don't really have a choice (although the Noble's former factories are in Fruinia).
2012: Going for High Score
All of our cars are going to need facelifts. Most of them already have the actual tech features they need, so I'm going to try to keep changes minimal. If I can make the facelift a short turnaround time, we will get our factories operational sooner. First though, our new model:
The Duke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZf64NfQATM) is occupying the Noble's existing factories. While its Automation slider isn't as high, these factories have workers who can apparently work at minimal QA threshhold. Once again, the slowdown% number is weird, it gets to 0 halfway down the slider but we keep getting more cars as I reduce it. Hey, though, more cars!
(https://i.imgur.com/FsM4Fcc.jpg)
And you know what? We probably need more cars. The Medium factory normally producing the luxury version only makes 4000 cars and there's demand in Luxury for 6000 cars, so clearly we need to make more. I'm assigning it one of the Huge factories, with a leatherworks. Not the most efficient, but it's still a lot of cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/sX1JQDk.jpg)
10 billion dollars(!) and 48 months to get it all set up. Oh well, it's not like we're going to run out of money.
(https://i.imgur.com/tdJyof0.jpg?1)
Just looking ahead, we have 13 other active models, including our performance stuff. So, most cars are getting at least one new Huge factory. Once again, facelifts have to be done all at once for cars sharing an engine. Luckily we don't have models with different engine types, or that would tie everything together.
I'm thinking I'll start with The 12. I never expected it, but there are three different models using this engine now.
(https://i.imgur.com/X2lOP8G.jpg)
The Colossus is the car I'll be using to tune the sportier version of the motor. Our tech has advanced to the point where our pistons could comfortable get another 300 RPM on top of the last update's 5000 redline, but for some reason, they don't like it. In fact, they would even like the redline brought down. This is weird because the only stat I can see improving is reliability, which is quite high and supposedly the Muscle demographic has 0% desire for it. I changed up the car's gearing to reduce wheelspin and they no longer wanted the redline reduced, but weren't interested in more either. Since we may as well get the most out of our components (for the price) I switched the internals to Low Friction pistons and reduced their quality a little. The car is now getting an impressive(?) 14.9mpg, and affordability is a little better. Then, the entertainment system gets switched to a Basic HUD and the electronic driver assists get their negative quality removed. Hey, it's affordable to the Pony market!
(https://i.imgur.com/XVBud7I.jpg)
Now we're at 27 months engineering, which is not bad. Can we afford to make a trim just for Muscle Premium, with a better interior?
(https://i.imgur.com/pkqv3fn.jpg)
Naturally, I'm adding a Huge factory for the Colossus. I cranked the engineering down to 26 months, and it will just barely get tooled in 25 months, so we're good to go.
For The Beast, the Utility version of The 12 also gets low-friction pistons, improving fuel efficiency. Of course, it's fighting against offroad tires and utility gearing, so it only manages 16.5mpg. I played around with the interior options, and I've made a rather aggressive decision: to save about 10 months engineering time, both the truck and premium SUV are getting the same Basic HUD interior option. The SUV will, however, get +2 quality. This allows me to increase the engineering sliders some, since they were at baseline before. It's hard to get it done in 26 months, but we can do it.
(https://i.imgur.com/NvUjKDz.jpg)
Naturally, the Beast is getting an additional Huge factory, bringing the total to 2. OR WILL IT?
(https://i.imgur.com/l1h3y2R.jpg)
The Fey Mood is our last car based on the Colossus. This car now primarily targets Muscle Premium, with Super as a secondary demographic. They don't see much improvement from the 2012 version of the engine, since they don't care at all about gas mileage. In the interior section, the old Luxury Infotainment System is no longer available, and has been replaced with a Luxury HUD. This means our +3 quality slider that was already there adds way too many production units, so I've brought it down to +1. I've also decided to upgrade its factory from Medium 1 to Medium 3, since Muscle Premium can certainly buy more than the 1500 cars it produces right now. Oversaturating the market (if we can) is part of our strategy.
Then, the engine gets assigned another Huge factory, and we're good to go. All three models cost a total of $12b, which looks cheap compared to the Duke (but the Duke was buying a few new add-on factory buildings).
Next up, time to update its counterpart, the Fey Lord. Since this is supposed to really be the ultimate car, I'm playing around with quality sliders a bit to see if I can get more out of it. The motor gets some top end quality, which reduces the fall-off in power at high RPM, so we can increase the redline to 9400. We're starting to see some component stress, even on forged internals. It's now boosted to about 27 PSI as well.
(https://i.imgur.com/ciP8Awi.jpg)
It also gets upgraded to a 7-speed DCT from the 6-speed which was the best we could make earlier. I considered upgrading the tire quality, but even Hyper doesn't want to pay for them. Going to +3 quality tires adds about $6000 to our material costs, and of course they have to replace those too.
(https://i.imgur.com/AeeUyWl.jpg)
Since the Fey Mood Engine is actually only used by the Fey Lord now, I can downgrade the factory for a refund of 300 million dollars. Nice.
(https://i.imgur.com/VATHqX5.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/st7pC9t.jpg)
Next up, our Chain Reactor-driven cars.
(https://i.imgur.com/YXQx8Bd.jpg)
I'm starting with our best seller, the Rapture. To keep it on-budget, I've arbitrarily limited the speed to 180mph, so we can see if they like more power without giving them more top speed and throwing off the tire cost. Overall, they seem to have mixed feelings about more power, Light Sport dislikes it (possibly wanting gas mileage), Convertible Sport likes it, and Sport seems ambivalent. I ended up with a little more redline and a little more power (529 over the old 484), the LMP and GT will definitely appreciate it.
The car itself gets bigger brakes, and a suspension re-tune, as well as -2 quality removed from the transmission. I considered launch control, but engineering was too long. In fact, engineering is too long in general.
(https://i.imgur.com/enNDb8R.jpg)
I'm pretty sure I see what's happening here (as well as with the Hauler so long ago). This car originally had Advanced 00's safety. Now that we have unlocked Advanced 20's safety, only Advanced 10's and Advanced 20's are on the list. The UI only has space for so many options, so obsolete ones get replaced. Unfortunately this means we HAVE to re-engineer the safety, even though our old safety is probably still up to standards. Although it's a bit of an edge case, this means there's actually a negative consequence for putting a bunch of points into Safety tech, since it pushes old options off the list and forces us to re-engineer. The exact same thing has happened to the interior, we can't have Premium Infotainment any more, only a Premium HUD.
(https://i.imgur.com/z4yYRK6.jpg)
My solution is to downgrade to Standard HUD and Basic 10's Safety. This skews the car more in the budget direction but we're trying to sell more cars to budget markets anyway. This lets me engineer the car in 36 months while improving the Automation just a little. It's sitting at about 160 score in Sport, Convertible Sport, Light Sport and Fun Premium.
Next up, the LMP, our ageing budget super car. I've decided to flip-flop on the design strategy again and give it maximum top speed. This gets it to 220 mph. Once again our entertainment and safety are outmoded, so I'm giving it Basic 10's and a Premium HUD. Ditching older forms of Advanced safety is making these cars a lot lighter. One side effect of the weight alteration is that the car is pretty oversteer-prone. I even gave it positive camber on the front wheels to control it a little bit, but according to the graph, it's going to be pretty snappy.
(https://i.imgur.com/7Y9o2ZO.jpg)
I'd just like to reflect that, in the world of Automation, you can go out and buy one of these things for (after margins) about $51,000, and it can go 220 mph. And, it sells great, despite its impracticality and visual styling. Not to mention it has a heads-up display. It's like if instead of a corvette, everybody had a Vector W8 in their garage.
(https://i.imgur.com/BgqicxF.jpg)
Lastly, the Bay 12 GT. Not much to say, it got a Premium HUD, and I compromised on GT scores between competitiveness and engineering by going with Standard 10's safety, since once again Advanced 00's is out.
(https://i.imgur.com/q3vzeYD.jpg)
Lastly I gave the Rapture a Huge factory for the budget markets, and we're ready to sign off our Chain Reactor cars. 36 months, and they're out.
I've saved the bulk of our cars for last, the Reactor cars. This will be a challenge, because I want to keep the engineering time as low as possible. We have, uh, let me check the factory screen... 9 Huge factories left to assign, and all of them are sitting idle until this facelift finishes. So for the most part, I'm going to try to make as few changes as possible.
(https://i.imgur.com/NTfKZ0G.jpg)
I'm starting off with tuning the engine to the General Wagon. This is the ultimate version of our economy engine: redline gets increased to 7000 along with our improved technology, it's now again at the maximum before our internal components get stressed. Compression increases to 10:1, boost increases to 6.33PSI, and exhaust quality increases from +2 to +4. We are now at 36.5% thermal efficiency, which is really pretty ridiculous.
(https://i.imgur.com/tUbNo5O.jpg)
As for the General itself, the wagon needs a new safety and entertainment system, and it's a bit of a difficult trade-off. Between Family Utility Premium and Family Utility, about 12 points hang in the balance between Basic safety and interior, advanced/standard. I ultimately went with basic HUD and Standard 10's safety. I only want to engineer one safety variety for all the trims, so hopefully Standard 10's will compromise between the family, sport and premium trims. It also gets an upgrade to 18 inch wheels. They like that last part a lot, actually, so I'm not sure if I just missed that the first time or if wheels/low-profile tires are coming down in cost. Then, there's all the variants. Notably, the Utility variant gets Basic Infotainment instead of a Basic HUD. The difference is about 12 PU. It also gets offroad tires and swaybars, giving it surprisingly large offroad appeal. The Premium version gets a Premium HUD. When we get to engineering, it looks like we have too many different interior options.
(https://i.imgur.com/1mSp2up.jpg)
Before I can make the car ready to sign off, I need to make the engine ready to sign off. That means approving every factory configuration. I'm not even setting these up, just moving through (because I'll have to add MORE factories later!) but I need to click though every one of these factories with a check mark, which are already making the Reactor.
(https://i.imgur.com/FU5oaPF.jpg)
Lastly, I'm adding two Huge factories, for a total of three Huge and a Large. This car is split between a lot of trims, so hopefully that's enough.
Next up is the Carp. I've actually already gone in here to tune the Reactor Sport before doing sport trim of the General. The motor gets 71 RPM and a hair more horsepower, the graph isn't exciting to look at. I also don't need to make many changes to the car- Light Sport and Track are already low-budget markets, and luckily, I'm still able to use Basic Infotainment, Standard Infotainment (in the case of the convertible) and Basic 00's safety. Anything more, and it's unduly expensive. I've also limited the top speed to 157 (instead of a theoretical top speed of 160) to keep the tires cheaper. This saved money goes into +1 tire quality, since they like cornering. It also gets a 7-speed DCT. I'm also adding a Huge factory, which should bring total production to 70,000 cars. I think this should cover everything along the lines of "sports budget". Setting engineering to 36 months is no problem, I can get slightly better sliders out of it.
The Goat, interestingly, is scoring highest in city/commuter demographics, rather than Family. It seems that the Family market has skewed towards larger vehicles? The General Wagon is at 141 in Family, whereas the Goat sits at 138. This is a small difference though, and it could still improve.
(https://i.imgur.com/LnpdLYa.jpg)
I spent a while trying to find room to improve before, once again, it came down to Safety. The previous model had Advanced 00's Safety, and this model doesn't need Advanced 10's Safety. In fact, I probably went overboard with Advanced 00's safety. The weight and cost savings of Basic 10's are a godsend.
(https://i.imgur.com/f0CyyCS.jpg)
We save 170 pounds and almost $1700 by downgrading. Now, the Goat takes the lead in Family. It's also got a Basic HUD, and 0-quality ESC. It requires a little downgrades in engineering to get it out in 36 months, but it should be worth it. The market numbers are looking strong.
(https://i.imgur.com/lWVoNsE.jpg)
Note than even though the number for Family Sport has gone away, it's actually 123. It improved as well, but has been hidden since it's projected to sell mainly to the other demographics.
I'm adding two factories, for now. We'll see if there are any left over. I'm not very good at planning ahead.
Next up is everybody's favorite brick, the Hauler. It currently has Standard 00's Safety (we can continue to use this), Electric power steering, and no traction controls at all. I'm hoping we can get it with Electric Variable power steering, however, ESC is right out. I tried to put it in and ended up with 64 months engineering time. Electric Variable only gets 42 months. Electric? 31 months. So, "no major changes of any kind" is the winner for this design. Utility and Delivery benefit a little from the better power steering, and the Wagon's demographics gain significant points from it, but they're just going to have to deal with crappy power steering because we're on a schedule. Now, here's a different way to overview the trims: there's a drop-down button in the project management screen, which I don't use very much. It shows the top 3 demographics and the relevant stats. I don't know what the column that's full of "#0" is supposed mean though.
(https://i.imgur.com/u73bHYP.jpg)
I'm assigning it to two additional Huge factories, since I know the Hauler is a big seller. It's projecting about 250,000 cars produced per month from (now) four Huge factories plus one L3 factory. These Archana factories do suffer a lot from me trying to keep the recall chance low. There's about 17% slowdown, and that's after being halved by a QA facility in each one. They get a little better as staff gain experience, though. I wish I had made some of the Huge factories in other countries so I could compare how much the labor cost actually changed. I know we have a cost per production unit for the factory, but I don't know if that's 100% labor cost or if it has some material/utility cost from the factory itself.
(https://i.imgur.com/iQ7vKez.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/2TtyKkh.jpg)
If we had produced this car in Hetvesia, it would be about $1500 more expensive, assuming we didn't underpay our employees or something. That's pretty significant. Keep in mind however that I've also kept our base price low by un-ticking the button that includes tooling costs, since I want to sell these cars cheap and I'm not worried about breaking even on my tooling costs on a schedule. That's worth about the same amount per car. Anyway I guess the moral of the story is, build budget cars in Archana, but we knew that already.
Now time for our little offroad car, the Migrant. Not many big changes to make. In trying to keep to a strict 36 month schedule, I'm able to get them on Electric Variable power steering. Weirdly, one had electric and one had hydraulic before. I don't remember if I did that deliberately or not. Switching from Standard 00's to Basic 10's safety would be a good improvement, but it looks like it's going to be outside our engineering schedule. Because markets like Offroad are cheapasses, they're staying on Standard Infotainment, which right now costs us $230 and 2 PU to put it in the car. I do apparently have some scary handling characteristics to work out of the Utility version, if I can figure out how:
(https://i.imgur.com/K4P3zDv.jpg)
I'm still not 100% sure what this graph means about actual handing, but I'm pretty sure this means it tends to be sluggish to turn, until it spins out all at once. At least, I was able to fix it by changing the sway bars (now it's just an understeer monster). I think going from no entertainment system to the basic infotainment might have thrown it off. This is one thing that bothers me about Automation cars though: apparently adding just 20 pounds threw the car into terminal oversteer. To me that seems to imply that the best handling setup is as close to terminal oversteer as possible (adjusting the swaybars more than just enough yields a worse score) but once the car is on the road, simply placing a toolbox the wrong place could cause it to be at risk of spinning out, to say nothing of worn tires or a wet road, or variances in the weight of the driver or passengers.
Anyway, I'll add a Huge factory. Now there's just one left.
(https://i.imgur.com/kSUodUr.jpg)
We're also down to the very last Reactor car, the New Minecart, our dinosaur we could never replace. Once again it's turned to terminal oversteer. I think our baseline tech is causing some parts of the car to get lighter (or heavier) and that's the issue. I know that adding quality to the Safety slider actually increases the weight of safety systems, I suspect that R&D quality does the same. Of course, they absolutely hate negative quality on safety. I wonder if having a baseline +1 with a -1 slider is worse than simply a 0.
It's no matter though, the roll angle was high, so there's room to add stiffer sway bars. Now on to the difficult part: the previous version used the now-defunct Advanced 00's safety, so we need a new safety system, and probably the lighter, the better. However, we need at least 38, and Basic 10's doesn't cut it. It's off by a few points, not just a tiny bit, so I ended up going with Standard 10's safety rather than using a bunch of quality sliders. That's one downside compared to having replaced this with a new vehicle, if it had higher Chassis quality I could probably have saved a lot of weight with basic safety. Like other low-budget cars, this one is keeping Basic Infotainment to save a lot of PU.
(https://i.imgur.com/w3iweg9.jpg)
However, I am adding some quality slider to the interior. And on second thought, that makes it viable to go to Basic 10's with +4 quality. I went back and forth a couple times, and the result is slightly cheaper and more desirable. Additionally, it brings the car up to 66 miles per gallon. That's probably a benefit of emissions requirements not being in the game yet, we don't have to use catalytic converters.
Time for factory setup! A new factory with a little under 0.3% recall chance, 75 tooling, 80 tool quality has 17% slowdown. An old factory with the exact same setup has only 6% slowdown. Worker experience makes a real difference! Now in Engineering, we have an issue...
(https://i.imgur.com/eEMhFI2.jpg)
One last thing! Despite having written about it earlier in this post, I very nearly forgot to add engine factories. Now time to click through ALLLLL of them. I'm just ticking the box for the QA addon building, dragging the automation slider, dragging the tooling quality slider, dragging the QA slider. I really wish I could do these in batches. Most of the factories have slightly different sliders because I don't care enough to make them exactly optimal. You can see this screen is truncated, about two pages are just Reactor factories at this point.
(https://i.imgur.com/g9UejTa.jpg)
Now, it's time to approve our 124 billion dollar project. Fully 1/4 of our company valuation is involved in tooling factories for Reactor cars and engines alone.
(https://i.imgur.com/hbFcHiZ.jpg)
2013: The World Didn't End in 2012
In the first month of 2013, we brought in almost 3 billion dollars in profit. That's good, because we don't want to go bankrupt tooling up all our new factories. Most of those are going to start only 10 months from now, they have a burdensome 26 month tooling time. We're probably going to sell out of our entire stock of cars and lose market familiarity again. What we apparently AREN'T going to sell out of, is 1998 model Fey Moods. We've still got "5 months worth of stock", whatever that actually means, and the 2005 facelift came out a year and a half ago.
(https://i.imgur.com/xmQGB0s.jpg)
Because our engine factories were overworked for a while, most them them get this "high refresh costs" popup when they start tooling.
(https://i.imgur.com/YgH6Ko6.jpg)
Seven months later, we're sold out of EVERY kind of Fey Mood because the factory is undergoing a big upgrade. The majority of our factories are just about to start retooling, so let's see how our markets are doing before the numbers go crazy:
(https://i.imgur.com/UiWEDBe.jpg)
After a few more factory refresh popups and a Migrant recall worth $450M (stupid worthless elves in Archana building our cars), construction is well underway. I forgot to get a screenshot, because I'm clicking though them almost without reading them, but I'm pretty sure I got a factory refresh popup with NEGATIVE 7 million extra refresh costs. After another $750M recall for Reactor engines, we're halfway though 2014, and the new Fey Lord releases. At this point, we're losing a shit ton of money every month again. The complete list of factories is truncated to like 5 screens worth, but as you can see, many of them are under construction or about to enter construction.
(https://i.imgur.com/0MstQmI.jpg)
By 2015, our cars based on The 12 release. I also have a ton of overworked engine factory notifications, as a few of them start construction slightly earlier than others. We've also lost enough money to avoid paying taxes. The Fey Lord is selling pretty well, it's at 90% factory utilization. 237 sales isn't bad for a car designed primarily to market to Hyper, a demographic which buys 44 cars per month. Also, we're losing an impressive 7 billion per month.
(https://i.imgur.com/YYb27YU.jpg)
Later in the year, the Beast is our best-selling 12.0L vehicle by a good margin. It's making almost $600M per month, and it's been climbing a little each month.
(https://i.imgur.com/UohzT7F.jpg)
I'm also surprised to see it's split almost exactly 50/50 between the two trims. The Colossus is also making 450M, although it seems to have reached market saturation. You can see it's sitting at 61% factory utilization.
(https://i.imgur.com/Hf67Q05.jpg)
This is actually kind of bothersome to me though. It's selling at 127% margin still. Presumably, it's most profitable to sell them at this margin, and reducing the price to gain Pony/Budget sales would cause a loss in total income, since so much profit would be left on the table from Muscle and Muscle Premium. However, the object of the game is to sell cars, not exactly to make money- your score is based only on cars sold. So, it's kind of working against me here.
The Fey Mood is also selling enough that the big factory update was apparently justified.
(https://i.imgur.com/SjUtoZf.jpg)
2016: New Cars Release!
All of our Reactor and Chain Reactor cars finished in December 2015. By January we're making our first sales, and the company is profitable again. During the re-tool we've managed to get about 200 billion dollars in debt. Fortunately, our company valuation is now $520B (we've gained $100B) and our credit rating is still A+. In retrospect, I could have probably have afforded 18 factories instead of 12, so we haven't leveraged all of our valuation.
(https://i.imgur.com/ALzVC6G.jpg)
Our Market awareness hasn't been hurt too bad. We're gaining quickly in some markets, such as Heavy Utility. You can also see we've started seriously selling into Pony Budget.
(https://i.imgur.com/TosCtrc.jpg)
On the sales numbers screen, we can see we've totally dominated some smaller markets such as Offroad Premium and Utility Premium (thank the Beast SUV for that). We've also got to around 70% in big markets like Family. The only market we're really ignoring is Convertible Luxury, and it's too late to do anything about that. We can also see we haven't dominated Delivery, since the Hauler is at 132% margin but only 70% factory utilization, I just have to hope the price comes down on its own.
(https://i.imgur.com/cal9muB.jpg)
Halfway through 2016, we've hit 720,000 game score. Most of our score is coming in right at the end here with a ton of factories, I'm hopeful we can hit a million. Incidentally, you can see that extreme mass production has caused both our prestige and reputation to suffer- this is with maximum advertising too!
(https://i.imgur.com/M0MN4li.jpg)
Since we're basically done with the part of the game where we care about making money, I'm upgrading Dalluha's dealerships to level 10. With that, we're at absolute maximum spending on dealerships and advertising. We're purely losing money by doing this, but if it helps us sell 1% more cars then it's cool I guess. Incidentally, the absolute maximum you can spend on dealerships and advertising is 2.4 billion per month. I'd spend more if I could!
(https://i.imgur.com/tQhlxxw.jpg)(https://i.imgur.com/M7LW7bl.jpg)
Incidentally, Fruinia has a new safety standard of 40 coming in 2020. This would result in the Carp and the New Minecart being banned.
(https://i.imgur.com/lyCpgwU.jpg)
I'm not really sure why they even bothered putting that into the game if it ends in 2020.
(https://i.imgur.com/n2VM5S0.png)
2017: Duke Releases
The Duke actually came out a couple months ago, and the sales numbers are great. Long live the Duke! On the other hand I don't know how, but it's apparently losing money (and lots of it).
(https://i.imgur.com/8oH4UGH.jpg)
This clears up a couple months later, maybe our stocks had to build up.
At this point, the General is leading profits with $1.6B per month, while the Hauler is leading sales numbers with 204,000 units. Many of our cars are making a lot less money because we've finally saturated the market, so they're reducing prices and selling to budget markets. The Colossus has dropped to 4% margins. The Carp has even dropped to 0%! The Rapture 2005 Hardtop is somehow claiming 130% margins while new Raptures are selling for 15% margins.
(https://i.imgur.com/5nqe0SN.jpg)
A few months later we're losing money- despite all of our factories being operational! Apparently we're now seeing some of a negative consequences of market saturation. Some cars are also losing money, they're working the factory extra shifts and paying workers overtime, but still not making enough stock. If we weren't cruising for the end of the game, this would be a problem.
(https://i.imgur.com/hdlm8cj.jpg)
The Duke is a good example of this: 104% factory utilization, still hasn't built up the target of 6 months stock, and losing money at 10% margins.
(https://i.imgur.com/0CcrZCA.jpg)
Apparently setting a minimum 0% margin means they'll sell the car at ANY margin including at a loss? Or margins on the hub screen are calculated differently than the forecast screen? Or it's a bug, who knows. Anyway, apparently the Colossus is selling at -7% margins. Come to think of it, I may have given it a -10% minimum margin or something when I was goofing around. Remember, score is driven by car sales, not money.
After two more recalls in the last 3 months of 2017, we enter 2018. Well, our prices are stabilizing, so have we dominated the world yet?
(https://i.imgur.com/KvP2McO.jpg)
In fact, we can see that in almost every market, we're cheaper than the competition, often many times cheaper. Just for example, Muscle Premium:
(https://i.imgur.com/GorVlAC.jpg)
By 2019 our sales have steadily risen, and we're also losing less money (a little) since we've built up stock on all our cars. Now each car is individually profitable, but we're still losing about a billion per month due to R&D and that sort of thing. It doesn't look like we're going to hit a million points.
(https://i.imgur.com/dy8yDLO.jpg)
You've been reading for a long time, so have a picture of a car.
(https://i.imgur.com/XLnoidl.jpg)
2020!
It's January, 2020, and things are looking up for Bay 12 Motors! But, we've been running this company since 1946, and after 74 years, it's time for us to retire (at presumably the age of like 100 years old or something). Also, I don't know that things are actually looking up for Bay 12 motors, because we over expanded and are losing money hand over fist. Well, at least I can't think of anything that could go wrong in the next twelve months.
Finishing the game gives us this screen:
(https://i.imgur.com/psiz4uc.jpg)
We sold over a hundred million cars! As you can see, the Goat and New Minecart were our best sellers, so from start to finish we've been best known for our simple and efficient family cars.
In our last month, the Hauler Mk3 sold 267,000 units, while the General continued to be our most profitable making 2 billion dollars. More cars have hit 0% margin, including the Goat and New Minecart.
(https://i.imgur.com/NT8GvhQ.jpg)
Actually, I have to wonder if this could have sold more cars. It's at 220 competitiveness, but only 62% factory utilization. Oh well, we can't make cars so good they completely eliminate competition as a factor. Speaking of which, apparently a ton of them magically release in 2020.
(https://i.imgur.com/56F7q3a.jpg)
It looks like we've got about 80% market share. There's only a couple markets where we have less than 50%. Our best country (in percentage of market share) is Gasmea, and our worst is Archana, where the budget markets are the poorest.
(https://i.imgur.com/VQ0zotS.jpg)
Other than that, I won't get way into the markets- we're done! We had a great game, I'll have to ask around on the Automation Discord and forums if we got the highest score for Lite Campaign V4.0, I think it's entirely possible that we did (even though I made some mistakes). Thanks to all of you who stuck with reading all these graphs. Oh wait, we do have one more thing to look at:
Hot Laps!
Two new cars I want to look at- the Duke, and the last version of the Fey Lord.
The new Fey Lord hits 205mph, and it's down to 1:50:59. I'd like to see someone come close to that in Beam. Then again, it's turbo and AWD biased to one side, both of which are kind of bugged in BeamNG.
(https://i.imgur.com/Uf60YbD.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/FULHCcE.jpg)
I've put the save in the Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ref9s2oxcthhksd/Bay_12_Motor_Company_Autosave.db?dl=0). It's managed to get up to 78 megabytes in size. Just download that and you'll have access to all the cars.
Bonus pic: ALL the cars!
(https://i.imgur.com/uJmLLjE.png)
I recorded a video, but I tried a different recording program after some computer trouble and essentially ended up with 15 minutes of black screen. I don't really feel like trying to recreate my first impressions (or messing with the video software) so I think I'll go ahead and post this episode without a video, sadly. If anyone else does, make sure you try the Hauler Mk3, it has some rather amusing braking behavior. The Beast is also a hoot, it's fast but needs the hand brake to get around turns. Also, I'll be impressed if I can see a clean lap in the Fey Lord.
I think I've probably played enough Automation in one go for now. Hopefully, version 4.1 will be out soon to shake things up. If some of you guys are interested in trying though, we might be able to do a succession game some time.
just fyi there's something wonky in the sale model, I doubt 150% desirability affects anything in the sales beyond the user interface numbers. I've tested out with a budget shit commuter, that was scoring 34 the highest, has desirability 21% after som year, and sales still outstripped factory production, at a solid 33% markup:
(https://i.imgur.com/wAQERt2.png)
can't test further as the game crashes under my ass at the first retrofit.