New Models for the 80'sWell, 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Additionally, the Noble's massive size seems to score it points in the SUV market, despite the body type penalty.
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.
1982: Passing TimeThe hub screen is now aggressively truncated. I can't show everything without multiple screenshots. However, you can see the four new models timed to release together. Also, I've started manufacturing a Large factory in the background for the Noble Premium.
{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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
1985: Huge ProfitsNow 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.
We can comfortably afford to start our next pair of Huge factories without delay.
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.
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.
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 Review6 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.
For the most part, our income from each model is in line with our production numbers. About half of our income is from the Alpaca alone, in its Huge factory, and for new cars, the Hauler, Rapture, and LMP all have profits about in line with their output. The only exception is the Migrant, which is (relatively) under performing for a Large factory, and the Noble, which gets great profits out of its Medium factory by targeting wealthy markets.
Also, we're scoring a lot more than Killrob in his
current campaign (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.
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.
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.
In just one month we'll unlock
Low Friction Cast Pistons, which make our engines much more fuel efficient. This will be a must-have for the windmill, and I'm definitely waiting for it. It might benefit our performance engines too, since they're not using forged parts, I'll have to test to find out. We've got more CD players coming up. In a couple years we'll unlock Variable Valve Lift, which basically lets us have two different camshaft numbers, to be used at different RPM ranges. This is great since it means we don't have to really choose between our engine working best at low RPM (fuel efficiency, utility) or best at high RPM (performance) but it does necessitate a new engine family. Later there's Electric Power Steering, which is cheap but less nice to use than hydraulic power steering. We're also going to unlock AHS Steel and Light AHS Steel chassis materials in 2 and 7 years respectively, both of which make cars lighter.
Bodies:Not so many bodies this time. 1990 wasn't a big unlock year and we didn't quite hit the 1995 mark.
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.
There's a lot of information on this screen and most if it's
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.
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.
We can see that the Large Windmill factory and the Rapture factory both have a really high recall chance, probably because I forgot to turn up the QA slider (oops). Nearly all our car factories, including the Huge one, are overworked. That might be slightly exacerbated because I ordered them to build 12 months of stock in everything (hey devs- I wish I could do that for all my models with one click) since that's closer to how long retooling usually takes now. In other words, all our factories are occupied except those which are in construction or the Noble L1 factory which just finished, and basically all our models could be made more profitable by simply throwing more factories at them.
Meeting TimeHuge 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 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.
The Hauler Mk2 has replaced our old delivery vehicle after its unfortunate demise. The "minivan" body has been stretched to the point of being more like a full size van, but it is front wheel drive and on wishbone suspension. I'll be testing our most popular trim, the passenger version. It overcomes its awful acceleration (21 second 1/4 mile time) to get
3:15 and beat the Migrant, as well as the old Hauler of course.
The Rapture is our first true sports car, with AWD and a front V8. Let loose, the Baron V8 now makes 281 horsepower, putting it ahead of the Noble variant currently in production even with almost 50% less displacement. It hits 135mph on the Slingshot, and stays above 70 through Bavarian Bend, making use of its 1g cornering grip. It gets
2:25, a new record for Bay12, but it might not stand...
The LMP is a proper, mid-engine supercar which shares an engine with the Rapture. Despite partial aluminum construction, it actually comes in heavier (probably thanks to the totally killer hi-fi speaker system). It has longer gears, stiffer suspension and wider tires (rated to an impressive 1.17g cornering grip). It comes in at
2:22 and also hits 137mph, promptly replacing the Rapture's records. However, maybe it needs more power to be a true supercar.
Funny thing... we managed to release this with the same body type, in the same year (almost) as the
Linguini Motors LM88. Do great minds think alike? Or are there not enough cool racing bodies in Automation? One thing is for sure: we here (me here) at Bay12 Motor Company don't have the test driving skills to match their 2:24 time.
You can see us (me) trying, though, in the latest video.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.
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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 60858 times)