The BaronWell, it's time to design a new car, and it looks like the Baron is our main pick.
I understand the appeal of waiting for unlocks, but I'm sensing that there will almost always be something more just around the corner. Tell those lazy design dwarves to finish quaffing the break room ale and get back to work.
Proposal: the Bay 12 Baron
Target demo: Premium?*
Body type: '55 2.5m 4-door; possibility for a wagon trim aimed at Family P to hit the Family market from both sides
Engine: 90° V8 SOHC (assuming it fits)
Other Stuff: Yes
Color: how about Plump Helmet Noble Purple
*I'm not totally sure what the difference between, say, Premium and Luxury segments entails.
For research, I rather fancy the "go wild" plan, let's show the world what a real masterwork automobile can be!
With priority toward safety, driver assists, and more engine techs.
It also looks like demand is for a wagon version too. Nobody's said it explicitly, but I take it to mean we're aiming for Steel construction and the Medium factory that's necessary for that. I also didn't get to that Familiarity mini update, so it looks like we'll be talking about that while we go through the design for the Baron.
Oh, but FIRST first, here's what we're targeting: Premium, and Family Premium. Notice that they both have a specific desired body type, the Sedan. By the way, the money values for these screens are new category, Untapped Revenue- the total amount of spending in each market, minus what we're currently earning. It's not limited to awareness, so the numbers are 2-4 times what's realistic. But of course, if it was it would assume we're stuck at 5% awareness in Premium, which will change as soon as we actually start selling.
Also, since it came up, here's City- they prefer hatchbacks. Family itself has no desired body type, but they are limited to certain body types by their seating requirements.
Now, of course, here's the big tradeoff in Automation: you can directly target a demographic, or try to hit multiple. For example, family probably prefers a wagon due to the cargo space, and possibly a third row of seats. Premium tends to prefer four seats instead of five, because it's more comfortable, and it has to be a sedan. But, a five-seat sedan will hit both, just not as competitive in either. What will sell more? Hard to judge.
On to the Baron! One more market screen before we start. Market budgets! It looks like Premium runs a bit more expensive than Family Premium. A car in the $20-25k range could hit both, and convertible too- although the '55 2.5m body does not have a convertible variant. In fact, if we want a car with a convertible AND a wagon (or, at least, four doors) to hit family, we basically have to go all the way back to '46. So, it looks like a convertible is out for this model.
The chassis will be steel, monocoque, and double wishbones all around. For these screenshots I'm keeping familiarity highlight on- this makes the options more yellow the more familiarity you have. We have 12.2% familiarity in steel body panels, which directly reduces the engineering time by that much. Also, Monocoque Chassis has 0 familiarity and an engineering time of 30 months, which is enormous (Ladder Frame takes 6). We really should just bite the cost though. This is supposed to be a high-tech car, and monocoque is the choice of chassis type for basically all modern cars, so building familiarity now is good. The suspension is also potentially expensive, but hey, premium. You can also see that we have familiarity in front double wishbone, but not rear.
We've decided on a V8 for this car, but for reference, we've built up 16.6% Familiarity in Inline 4 motors, and a 9.4% familiarity with I6, and I3. Now, every time we engineer (or facelift) something, we gain a certain amount of familiarity. We also gain familiarity in other things which are similar, according to some hidden ratio. Furthermore, we lose familiarity after not engineering things for a while. If I had to guess, we gain 0.6 times the I4 familiarity in I6 and I3, and then we lose 4% of the familiarity we had, or so, but I don't really know for sure how it works. In any case, the familiarity conversion factor between I4 to I6 and I3 is the same, and it's a little more than half.
It also turns out, we have exactly 9.6% familiarity with V8's, saving us a little over 4 months. We have no familiarity at all in V12, or boxers. Presumably if we had been making I6 motors this whole time, we would have 9.6% familiarity with V12 instead of V8. Since none of this is actually labeled we just have to make intuitive guesses.
Pushrod valves have given us familiarity in SOHC, but very little (3.3%) and even less if I want to spring for high-tech 4-valve (1.1%) which I'll decide if it's worth the engineering time cost later. Presumably we only gained familiarity when we first made the Urist MC engine family, because we don't re-engineer this part during facelifts.
Also not pictured: we have around 15% familiarity with the engine block material (cast iron) itself, and the bottom end parts. We haven't unlocked new options in these areas. One thing to think about with Familiarity is it doesn't just give bonuses to stuff we have, it also gives bonuses to future tech! For example at some point we'll unlocked Forged engine internals, as well as Low Friction Cast. We'll start with familiarity in the newer cast stuff as soon as it unlocks. This also affects some other areas we can easily predict. For example, if we usually go with Standard safety systems- say, Standard 40's, we gain familiarity with the next two generations, Standard 50's and a little in Standard 60's (in addition to other 40's era types). This also affects entertainment systems in a similar way- I think. I'm pretty sure that covers what I have to say about Familiarity, except for specific techs. Oh, and one more thing- the Pressure slider in the Engineering tab has a big effect on familiarity gains. So, if we want to focus on research, we can allow a project to take longer.
I ended up going with Advanced 50's- premium demands good safety. I also got our V8 up to 200 horsepower with a 3.7 liter displacement. And it's cool but... look at the top right corner of the second pic- 7.8% wheelspin! And with fancy new Radial tire tech and very wide tires, it's still not enough to counteract, plus our material cost for tires is now up to an insane $2300 at 150mm width. Even though our affordability percentage is good, our competitiveness is actually getting dinged from the cost compared to narrower tires. It looks like I'm going to need to de-tune the engine a bit so I can cancel out wheelspin with narrower tires.
...so here's what we ended up with. A little under 3.5L, 142 horsepower. Besides being smaller, I choked it with a small exhaust and brought the cams WAY down. At least we know there's a lot more power potential in this engine.
After fine tuning I can get it to 158 in Premium with 5 seats (also 141 in Family Premium) or 173 in Premium with 4 seats, but Family Premium goes down to 130. This is also assuming we're willing to take advantage of Luxury interior, which gives us a "Reduced Production Efficiency" penalty- like the Limited Production from Aluminum, but less severe, this hurts our car output and scales with factory size. (In the case of a medium 1 factory we go from about 1000 cars made with Premium Interior to about 850 with Luxury Interior). For now let's assume our Sedan is a 4-seater and see what the wagon can do.
The wagon initially does worse than the sedan in family premium, but I haven't tuned it yet. It does offer a third seat row, but nobody seems to like actually have seats there- including Family, who isn't interested in this car at all because we have a V8 that isn't tuned for fuel efficiency. Incidentally we CAN make multiple engine variants, such as a variation of the V8 for utility purposes.
...try as I might, I can't actually make this wagon perform better than the sedan in basically any category. Looks like premium buyers really don't like sedans. But what if we put the humble Urist MC engine in?
Well, it looks like it could be a real rival to the standard Urist- although it sits comparatively up-market of course. However, will it get ruined in engineering?
Our base engineering time is a ridiculous 94 months. Maybe I went a little ham with the new tech- but some of the huge stuff, like monocoque chassis, we basically have to do sooner or later. Also, basically every interior feature is new. In fact many of the mechanical features, such as an automatic transmission, are new too, and having different stuff on the sedan and the wagon does not help. First I can save a few months (although at some competitiveness cost) by ticking chassis quality to -1, but we get to the real issue...
...usually for a premium car, you save on engineering time by tanking the reliability, because they don't care much. Of course, if we want the sedan AND the wagon, that really hurts the wagon. Here's an example with engineering time down to 55 months. But, we might consider dropping the wagon, or at least dropping it for our initial run and re-introducing it later. Notice the wagon's predicted competitiveness has suffered a lot more than the sedan.
Our predicted launch competitiveness is just OK, so cutting down the engineering time even further might be beneficial. Still, this is probably viable if it's the strategy we want to take.
The whole project is predicted to cost 1.4 Billion. This should be possible to pull off, but we will be going all in on it for a while. Also that cost is for a Small engine factory building our V8. If we want a medium factory so we can more easily expand our premium car production it will be more like 1.8 Billion, which will be really touch and go. Either way the bank won't even give us a loan for the full value- but we do have good income from the Urist.
Well, here's what our pre-production prototype looks like, in Noble Purple:
I didn't have an HSV reference for the paint so I just eyeballed. Also, it gets sparkly flakes, because what better way to say premium in 1960 when this hits market?
Wagon too: it gets dimple dye blue, of course.
Sorry for potato quality, this was a laptop episode. I'll upload .car files if we agree on the design.
Meeting Time!What should we do with the Baron design? Should we keep or drop the wagon? Does it need engineering changes? We could go longer with better reliability and production numbers at release, or even faster.
Names: The model is called the Baron, but we have two trims to name. We could also use a cool name for our V8 engine. Maybe rename our I4 to something like the Urist MC Hauler and call the V8 Urist MC something else?
The Urist can get a standard update regardless. If we make the Baron Wagon, the Urist can probably remain out ultra-budget car and the Baron Wagon can be our mid-market family car.
A couple questions: Regarding bodies whose pages go off the screen, I don't want to screenshot them all, but basically if it goes off the screen you can usually assume it has a van and a truck variant, and you'll be right 90% of the time. You can always specify that you're only interested if it it has a certain option. Also, the Urist transmission has a ridiculous overdrive- if it had the horsepower, it would redline at 140 miles per hour in top gear. Of course, it doesn't have the horsepower, so its top speed is at 50 miles per hour, with the engine running at a very low RPM.
Author
Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 59921 times)