Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: 1 ... 16 17 [18] 19 20 ... 23

Author Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!]  (Read 58209 times)

Sensei

  • Bay Watcher
  • Haven't tried coffee crisps.
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #255 on: September 06, 2020, 03:31:52 pm »

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.


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.


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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The engine, being direct injected, required unbelievably aggressive sliders to get it out as quickly as the car. Because the automation was so low it needed a Medium 3 factory just to keep up as well.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The price is staggering too! Keep in mind that Automation doesn't really have markets that support million-dollar cars, so this is about as expensive as you can really get. The forecaster says I should set the margin higher, but I'll just let the dealerships do that for me. I don't know if all of our output will actually sell at a high margin.


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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.


The Carp looks good in white, like the GT's little brother.


On second thought, maybe a color lifted from Dwarf Fortress's carp is in order?


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...

Yeah, apparently, their baseline is negative $6k. Yeah man, I'd love to get paid six thousand to receive a new sports car too.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
All the settings which just have sliders, like spring rate or tire size, don't seem to count as separate for engineering time purposes. The main ACTUAL difference is the bodies themselves. Despite having four different bodies, the body engineering time is only 1.3 months. Actually, that's bizarrely low, I'd expect more. Still, this car is able to hit a lot of markets.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.


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).


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.


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!

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.


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.

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.


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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.


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.

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.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Oops. Looks like the Alpaca is still on the list because there's still a Large 1 factory assigned to it (no engines though, so no actual production).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


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:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
We have now entered every single market. Some various budget markets have grown very quickly because we've only just now started making enough cars that the dealerships will price down into that range. We also had low awareness in the three Delivery variants before. Offroad/offroad budget categories are gaining, partly because we stopped producing the Migrant for a while and lost our awareness. Track is the market with the lowest gain relative to its awareness. We might just need to build more Carps.

Here's our monthly sales data:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Our goal, ultimately, is to get close to 100% in every category (realistically due to competition and dealership max awareness, 90% is probably the best we can do). If we're not there, then basically for each demographic, we want to decide: do we expand production of existing trims, create a new trim of an existing model, or create a new model? Surprisingly, despite our variety of performance cars and my concerns we would saturate the market, we're only selling to about 1/3 of Sport customers. The logical choice in this situation might be to move the Rapture (or something) into a larger factory. In fact, apparently the Carp is our best competitor in Sport, due to its price. We still haven't saturated Muscle because although the Colossus is fine for it, it's also selling to Family Sport and Family Sport P. City Premium is being filled by the Goat, which probably just indicates we need an actual premium trim of the Minecart. Convertible is in theory covered by the General, but production numbers are so small it sells entirely into Convertible Premium. We don't have a proper Luxury Convertible. Heavy Utility and Offroad Premium might justify new models or trims. Basically you get the idea, if you have any questions about which cars are competing primarily in which demographics I can answer those specifically later.

Lastly, here's the demographic sizes:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
This tells us how many cars we need to make to really cover every market. We can start seriously pumping out Huge factories now, and I guess we're going to need to. For example: each Light Delivery, Delivery, and Heavy Delivery is large enough to support a Huge factory. That means that just one trim of the Hauler Mk3 could justify three huge factories. I've also been surprised by how much cars can be diffrayed among different demographics. For example the Rapture sells 6000 cars, and it's intended to target Sport (and Convertible Sport), but between all our models which have Sport appeal we're only making 2000 Sport sales- some are going to GT, Family Sport, Fun etc. We also have barely cracked some of the Budget markets which are enormous. For example Pony Budget accounts for 20,000 cars, but I don't know if we are best off trying to target that by continuing to make more of our existing cars (so they get cheaper) or building a dedicated mini-muscle car.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Coming up, we'll unlock the last safeties, the less advanced 10's safety types and, with enough tech, we can even get 20's safety, not that this will probably ever see its way into our cars. We also have the entire HUD line of entertainment systems to unlock. Other than that, literally the only thing we don't have yet is carbon fiber wheels.

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...

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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 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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Of course, our Pumpstack has been replaced by the Chain Reactor. Between the LMP and the Rapture, the Rapture Soft-Top is slightly faster (and the hard top is slower, don't ask me why) with our new 450 horsepower engine. It has a solid 10 seconds on the Carp, coming in at 2:13. I guess that's good, or our marketing department would have a hard time justifying the price compared to the Carp. It hits 143mph on the track, twice- before braking to take the Slingshot at 132, and then reaches the same speed before Bavarian Bend.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The Goat, or Hauler Delivery Mk3, both get about 3:02 around the track. Nothing surprising for our economy/utility vehicles. Actually, maybe it's a little surprising that the Hauler is no slower than the Goat. It's ostensibly slower, so does it... handle better? Unladen, it apparently weighs almost 200lb less, which... honestly that just doesn't check out to me. Maybe safety features add a lot of weight per-seat.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The General Wagon (not pictured) gets about 3:10, while the General Sport gets 2:38. It actually makes me wonder if we'd be better off with a Goat Sport or something.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Last of all, the Fey Mood! I have high hopes for this 1100 horsepower blast from the past. The first thing I notice is that the engine sounds like a bicycle keeping pace with a train. The second thing is that it really is quite fast, it hits 190 before braking to take the Slingshot at 145. It crosses the line in 2:03:62. I wonder if we can get a version under 2 minutes. Relatively pedestrian chassis material choices certainly aren't helping the weight.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Logged
Let's Play: Automation! Bay 12 Motor Company Buy the 1950 Urist Wagon for just $4500! Safety features optional.
The Bay 12 & Mates Discord Join now! Voice/text chat and play games with other Bay12'ers!
Add me on Steam: [DFC] Sensei

Aseaheru

  • Bay Watcher
  • Cursed by the Elves with a title.
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #256 on: September 06, 2020, 04:11:22 pm »

 Is it bad that I want to watch someone drive the Hauler?

 Anyways, looks like its time to work on facelifting all the things again for new tech. Perhaps a Future Minecart, perhaps based on the '07 2.2m.

 And it looks like Huge factory priority should be Hauler, General, Goat, Carp, Hauler, Future Minecart...
Logged
Highly Opinionated Fool
Warning, nearly incapable of expressing tone in text

lukerules117

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #257 on: September 06, 2020, 05:47:39 pm »

>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.

Is there a reason that you can't just put an extra quality point into it?
Logged

mightymushroom

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #258 on: September 07, 2020, 09:03:04 am »

It looks like in most cases we just need to be making more vehicles and we'll get the markets through sheer volume. Huge factories and more huge factories!

Aside from the budget categories, it looks to me that we're having trouble in the area around Convertible and around Heavy Util/Offroad Util. For convertibles, I dunno. We have plenty of awareness, do we just need to make more cars? I originally meant for the Rapture to hit that, but I guess it was so small it only gets Convertible Sport? We have the General convertible now so that should cover it, eventually? (?)

There's an '08 3.4m pickup that looks tough enough to handle the rough utility jobs (probably the version with extended cab, as it seems customers value passenger space over cargo space). Do you suppose they would appreciate a more powerful engine rather than an economy focus?

In lieu of making new models, this could be a good time to go through the list and give everything a Premium/Luxury variant if they don't have it yet; as the increase in supply brings the price down we can sell better features. Other than that, keep up the facelifts and improve quality all around I think.

Can we please make a super materials version of Fey Mood? I want to know what we can really do when we go all out.
Logged

LoSboccacc

  • Bay Watcher
  • Σὺν Ἀθηνᾷ καὶ χεῖρα κίνει
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #259 on: September 07, 2020, 10:47:19 am »

if it's .2 points, remove the active sport suspension in favor of the standard to remove the -1% safety modifier

failing that, +1 quality to the interiors will not give the massive pu/eng penalty as a +1 quality to safety.

I've tried in the sandbox to see if either fix is enough, but importing campaigns saved car into sandbox breaks a million little things.
« Last Edit: September 07, 2020, 10:52:46 am by LoSboccacc »
Logged

Sensei

  • Bay Watcher
  • Haven't tried coffee crisps.
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #260 on: September 07, 2020, 09:27:05 pm »

>safety
Is there a reason that you can't just put an extra quality point into it?
Actually uh yeah that is probably the simple solution. I checked and adding +1 safety quality brings us to 38.0 exactly. Another option could have been to remove the +2 rear seats, but I'm pretty sure they're valuable to some markets. Then I continued to play around around and found that, for whatever reason (weight distribution?) a dual clutch transmission and larger wheels, combined, increased the safety score by another 0.2 so I didn't even need the safety quality. To summarize the update, they really like electric variable power steering and dual clutch transmission, as well as the upgrade from Basic CD (which is no longer even an option) to Basic Infotainment. I'm assuming Basic Infotainment means the CD player comes with an aux cable now. Also, have some incredibly low profile tires that they like. The wheels have gone from 16 to 18 inches with no change in tire size.


Anyways, looks like its time to work on facelifting all the things again for new tech. Perhaps a Future Minecart, perhaps based on the '07 2.2m.
It's not quite worth it. It has a lot of drag and, really, the main problem is just that it's classed as an SUV.

That's what it scores with ALL the cool tech we can throw at it. I even gave it Standard instead of Advanced safety, which City/City Eco like a lot. In comparison, here's the New Minecart, still saddled with the weight from advanced safety (worth about 5 points).

So, I guess to be fair it does a little better in Commuter, but overall I'm not seeing it as good enough to replace the NMC.

Aside from the budget categories, it looks to me that we're having trouble in the area around Convertible and around Heavy Util/Offroad Util. For convertibles, I dunno. We have plenty of awareness, do we just need to make more cars? I originally meant for the Rapture to hit that, but I guess it was so small it only gets Convertible Sport? We have the General convertible now so that should cover it, eventually? (?)
The General Convertible scores almost 200 for the Convertible demographic, and even sells okay in Convertible Premium despite 120 score (although we might want an actual convertible premium car, either from the General or Noble if the Noble has a convertible option). So, it should do just fine. The Rapture only has one seat row, which rather strictly limits it to Convertible Sport.

Quote
There's an '08 3.4m pickup that looks tough enough to handle the rough utility jobs (probably the version with extended cab, as it seems customers value passenger space over cargo space). Do you suppose they would appreciate a more powerful engine rather than an economy focus?
This is actually a bit of an odd case, because in my experience USUALLY Utility prefers extended cabs. Of course, that's been pretty inconsistent this campaign, sometimes they really demand those extra seats and sometimes they're fine. However, Heavy Utility specifically disdains extra seats, they want maximum cargo bed space.


In short, Heavy Utility at least demands its own trim with limited seats. Notably, it also has the engine displacement desire (at least that's what I'm assuming that symbol is) we've seen in Muscle before. So, these are the scores with the Reactor. Heavy Utility is only 120 despite the fact that I'm doing far better in Drivability and Utility than the top 3 average.

Maybe we do need a bigger engine. Well, first I got it to 140 by fixing the suspension and nerfing the safety. But hey, why not put The 12 in? Just adding ESC has me up from 140 to 144 in Heavy Utility, despite monstrous tuning issues.

As you can see, it NUKED standard utility though, from 180 to 120. With some more tuning, well, it's a viable competitiveness, but the affordability leaves a lot to be desired. I could almost see producing something like this just for Utility Premium though, they love it too. Look at some of these stats...

8% wheelspin WITH ESC AND AWD, 0-62 in 6.3 seconds, it can carry 2500lbs (presumably without slowing down at all) and it's up on monster truck tires with 18 inches ride height.


Okay okay, how about something more reasonable, like the Noble V8? Well, I'll skip the screenshot but nothing impressive. Affordability is only up to 60% and they don't like it nearly as much. Instead I tried making a new variant of the Colossus with the fuel mixture completely leaned out for efficiency. That wasn't enough though, I went through all the changes to make it a utility engine: low cams (absolute 0 in fact), small exhaust, lowered RPM and negative quality pistons to make it cheaper. When it's done, we're down to... well, a very unimpressive power number for the displacement, but a ton of torque and some more affordability and score- it's getting a whole 14.2 miles per gallon, against 9.7 with the full performance version of the engine.

With enough engineering sliders and a good sized factory, we might actually be able to make this reasonably affordable.

Thoughts? I also might do a lightweight, full-tech version of the Fey later.
Logged
Let's Play: Automation! Bay 12 Motor Company Buy the 1950 Urist Wagon for just $4500! Safety features optional.
The Bay 12 & Mates Discord Join now! Voice/text chat and play games with other Bay12'ers!
Add me on Steam: [DFC] Sensei

Sensei

  • Bay Watcher
  • Haven't tried coffee crisps.
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #261 on: September 08, 2020, 12:17:07 am »

I also sat down and worked on a superior Fey Mood version for a bit. This might look similar but it's a different car from the ground up, carbon fiber panels and chassis. It's got carbon ceramic brakes, Standard safety, dual clutch, ESC+LC and so on. The only place it's carrying extra weight is the interior- hand made furnishings and the best in Infotainment systems, a couple hundred pounds but a requirement to actually sell the car. It's pretty much directly targeted at Hyper. The score you see here is a little low, it was 155 before I switched the engine to Super fuel. That fuel type has an availability penalty, but I hope that will go away during the car's engineering. The engine got a rework to more than 1300 horsepower. A lot of little components had to get more expensive, but I kept tweaking it with the specific goal of exceeding 200mph on the test track, and this car can do it (I won't spoil the time though). It also manages an impressive 1.3 cornering G's, and 0-62 in 2.5 seconds.


Of course, there's a catch. This cool pearlescent paint won't carry over to Beam at all. Well, the other catch is it has all kinds of limited production flags, and the base engineering time is 141 months, so it's going to take some REALLY aggressive engineering sliders to get it out in a reasonable time. I played around with the sliders to get it down to 5 years, and we're looking at a base production price of 125k per car, maybe, and about 160 cars produced per month if the factory is working full time. That's in a Small 1 factory. Even then we might need a variant with +2 seats in the rear to sell some to GTP in order to make it more profitable.
Logged
Let's Play: Automation! Bay 12 Motor Company Buy the 1950 Urist Wagon for just $4500! Safety features optional.
The Bay 12 & Mates Discord Join now! Voice/text chat and play games with other Bay12'ers!
Add me on Steam: [DFC] Sensei

Aseaheru

  • Bay Watcher
  • Cursed by the Elves with a title.
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #262 on: September 08, 2020, 12:41:13 am »

 That tiny thing is a SUV? Small SUV.
Logged
Highly Opinionated Fool
Warning, nearly incapable of expressing tone in text

Darkening Kaos

  • Bay Watcher
  • Legendary Gibbering Idiot +5
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #263 on: September 08, 2020, 05:41:54 am »

     That Fey Mood is awesome, Sensei, it could be in a Bond movie … any chance we could outfit it with mudguard machine guns?
Logged
So! Failed to make peace, war looms, kill the infidels... what are our plans for the weekend?
The Giant Moles in the caverns of my current fort breed like crazy, even while regularly being decimated by other beasts entering them...

King Zultan

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #264 on: September 08, 2020, 06:30:02 am »

I say we go for the big truck with the monster truck tires, and according to the screen shots muscle will also buy it so we could have a drag trim or something.
Logged
The Lawyer opens a briefcase. It's full of lemons, the justice fruit only lawyers may touch.
Make sure not to step on any errant blood stains before we find our LIFE EXTINGUSHER.
but anyway, if you'll excuse me, I need to commit sebbaku.
Quote from: Leodanny
Can I have the sword when you’re done?

mightymushroom

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #265 on: September 08, 2020, 07:29:36 am »

well, a very unimpressive power number for the displacement, but a ton of torque and some more affordability and score- it's getting a whole 14.2 miles per gallon, against 9.7 with the full performance version of the engine.

Torque – *lightbulb* yeah, why didn't I think of that earlier. Truck buyers love torque.
This is our truck, then.

Even then we might need a variant with +2 seats in the rear to sell some to GTP in order to make it more profitable.

That... might be missing the point. We don't make a vehicle like this because it's profitable. We make it because we are carsmiths, and we can.
Logged

Sensei

  • Bay Watcher
  • Haven't tried coffee crisps.
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #266 on: September 08, 2020, 03:49:10 pm »

That tiny thing is a SUV? Small SUV.
I guess it would classify as part of the more modern CUV/compact SUV trend- think Nissan Juke. Of course, Automation doesn't really model the huge popularity of SUVs as family vehicles in the place of station wagons/minivans, and the weird trend of smaller and smaller cars getting replaced by SUVs which are... kind of small.

     That Fey Mood is awesome, Sensei, it could be in a Bond movie … any chance we could outfit it with mudguard machine guns?
Hey, you can always download the .car file later and do fixtures, if you have the game. There are gun mods lol.

I say we go for the big truck with the monster truck tires, and according to the screen shots muscle will also buy it so we could have a drag trim or something.
I don't think it really has the capacity for a dedicated muscle trim, it gets a pretty large body type penalty I think, but I might give it a Premium trim and give that the full powered version of The 12, since they have 0% fuel efficiency desire. Also, partly just because I want to see it on the Beam test track.

well, a very unimpressive power number for the displacement, but a ton of torque and some more affordability and score- it's getting a whole 14.2 miles per gallon, against 9.7 with the full performance version of the engine.
Torque – *lightbulb* yeah, why didn't I think of that earlier. Truck buyers love torque.
This is our truck, then.
Well, it's actually a little weird right now. They DO care about torque some, but not as much as you'd think. Keep in mind the standard Utility market loves this with the improbably small 1.5L motor. It's just that Heavy Utility has a direct desire for engine displacement, which is a good proxy for torque but doesn't actually mean they want the most towing capacity or whatever. It's like I'm putting a huge engine in not because it's powerful, but because we can put that 12.0L badge on the car, and then after that we're doing everything possible to make it less powerful and more fuel efficient.

Quote
Even then we might need a variant with +2 seats in the rear to sell some to GTP in order to make it more profitable.
Quote
That... might be missing the point. We don't make a vehicle like this because it's profitable. We make it because we are carsmiths, and we can.
Fair... although in that case, I might also make an ultimate track time trim, with a light weight interior.

With that, aside from a couple Premium variants of our existing cars, I'm probably good to go ahead soon. Last call if we want to investigate any new models.
« Last Edit: September 08, 2020, 08:30:38 pm by Sensei »
Logged
Let's Play: Automation! Bay 12 Motor Company Buy the 1950 Urist Wagon for just $4500! Safety features optional.
The Bay 12 & Mates Discord Join now! Voice/text chat and play games with other Bay12'ers!
Add me on Steam: [DFC] Sensei

Fishbreath

  • Bay Watcher
  • [AVATAR HERE]
    • View Profile
    • Many Words
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2005: Road to World Domination]
« Reply #267 on: September 09, 2020, 08:26:57 am »

we can put that 12.0L badge on the car, and then after that we're doing everything possible to make it less powerful and more fuel efficient.

Yeesh. The 70s called; they appreciate your commitment to the ideals of huge yet wimpy engines. :P

I might try and stream some hot laps tonight—finally, there's not much more on my plate.

Sensei

  • Bay Watcher
  • Haven't tried coffee crisps.
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Penultimate Update]
« Reply #268 on: September 11, 2020, 12:53:39 pm »

Alright, it's time to start really farming that final score! And, making one last fun car on the way.

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.

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.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Its factory gets a considerable amount of add-on facilities. The Body and Chassis are both different varieties of weather resistance steel, which is a pain in the ass. You see, there's Galvanised Steel, Treated Steel, and Corrosion Resistant Steel. Everybody hates Corrosion resistant steel because it's too expensive. Meanwhile, Galvanised Steel is only for body panels, and Treated Steel is only for chassis, but they both require investment in a factory add-on. At our scale, I'm sure it's better to spend more on the factory and less on materials for the cars themselves.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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...

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Only, our brake vents won't be fake. Anyway, all the changes bring our score from about 133 to 138 in the Family market, the Goat's main target.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.


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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
We've hit the absolute top speed through gearing. Apparently 2.17 is the lowest final drive ratio we can get, so with the engine's relatively low 5000 RPM redline, we can't go any faster than 234mph, even though we seemingly have the power to do so. Whatever, I'll just instruct our salespeople to slap anyone who says 234 miles per hour is too slow. I assume Super customers won't mind buying 24 quarts of oil for an oil change in our massive motor either.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
11.8 loudness is really quiet.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Oh, and a dozen matching engine factories. So... with a little practice, I've optimized the process down to 8 clicks. That's 172 clicks altogether. I really wish I could do this in batches. Or we could build like, Huge 3 factories or something.

...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.


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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The General is at the lead, followed by the New Minecart, while the Hauler has fallen out of favor somewhat.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Here's our hub screen, with the profit from each model. The General continues to perform as well as models with more factories assigned, while the New Minecart has taken the lead at $1.2B income. It's presumably selling into budget markets now, so we're going to see diminishing profit returns, although we still want the score, which comes from car sales. The Hauler has recovered as well.

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.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The only thing we're particularly missing is Convertible Luxury. Other than that, I think we just need to make a lot more cars, and we have a lot more factories.

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.
Spoiler: BIG (click to show/hide)

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. 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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The SUV version is about 5 seconds faster. It hits a top speed of 129, doesn't shift quite as madly because of its longer gearing. It exits Bavarian Bend at a rather excruciating 51mph, tires squealing the whole way. Notably, that's the exact same speed as the Utility version, despite its lower suspension.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Bonus pic: Hauler models through the years
Logged
Let's Play: Automation! Bay 12 Motor Company Buy the 1950 Urist Wagon for just $4500! Safety features optional.
The Bay 12 & Mates Discord Join now! Voice/text chat and play games with other Bay12'ers!
Add me on Steam: [DFC] Sensei

lukerules117

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Penultimate Update]
« Reply #269 on: September 11, 2020, 07:23:25 pm »

I think this has been one of the most successful campaigns I've ever even heard of.
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 16 17 [18] 19 20 ... 23