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Author Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!]  (Read 58199 times)

mightymushroom

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Penultimate Update]
« Reply #270 on: September 11, 2020, 08:08:17 pm »

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.

I'd more or less forgotten about the Noble.
There's an '09 3.1m sedan that would be about the same size (Baron -> Noble -> Duke?), but I can't guess how a new car compares to those positive quality modifiers built up on the Noble.

I think this has been one of the most successful campaigns I've ever even heard of.
It's the only campaign I've heard of. :) But it's been fun. Sensei, you've put this game on my watchlist, there's a fair chance I get it this coming holiday season.
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King Zultan

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Penultimate Update]
« Reply #271 on: September 12, 2020, 07:30:11 am »

I'd never heard of this game until this so I'm just going to assume its the best campaign as its the only one I've seen.

And it sounds like its time to take the Noble out to pasture and replace it with something better that is also a convertible, and Duke sounds like a good name for it.



Also I like the way the Hauler has always stayed this massive ugly rectangle, its like the defining thing for that line of vans.
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Aseaheru

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Penultimate Update]
« Reply #272 on: September 12, 2020, 09:12:09 pm »

Haulers 1 and 2 had an angle, but yeah, Hauler Mk3 was the result of spotting the brickyboi and going "I must have that"
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Sensei

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Penultimate Update]
« Reply #273 on: September 15, 2020, 12:57:37 am »

I'd more or less forgotten about the Noble.
There's an '09 3.1m sedan that would be about the same size (Baron -> Noble -> Duke?), but I can't guess how a new car compares to those positive quality modifiers built up on the Noble.

"Always Bet on Duke"

Well, engineering a new car in 2012 when the game ends in 2020 will be a challenge. Not only does it have to out-compete our existing car, the Noble, but it has to be engineered early as possible. Otherwise, we won't have much time to actually sell it.

First off, a hypothetical refresh of the Noble scores about 152 in Premium, so that's our baseline. If we don't exceed it by a significant margin then the project isn't worth our time, since it's also not going to have to high engineering sliders of a mature project. Still I'm hopeful, the Noble is one of our oldest models still in production (tied with the New Minecart). It has a lot of old tech that could be improved upon.


Here's our new car concept, the Duke. It's got some key features keeping it similar to the Noble: it has the same motor (even though the engine bay is cramped) and it's using hydropneumatic springs, which is still more comfortable than fancy modern computer-adjusted suspension. It's also, like the Noble, transve However, it has a multilink rear suspension design and most of all, +13 chassis quality from R&D. Among other modern features, it gets a Premium HUD in the interior, and electric variable power steering, which we've now gained a good amount of familiarity in. Still, for the scores here, I've added some negative quality sliders which hurt the score a little. In the interest of saving engineering time, I put -3 on the driving electronics, and -1 on the chassis quality.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Not bad, right? Some other design notes: it accomplishes a decent Sportiness with handling in the middle of the chart, and a 7 speed DCT. Much like the Noble again, the body is drug out as large as possible, making it a monster on the road. It's also on 18 inch magnesium wheels, and it uses 4-piston front brakes, the first car we've made in this campaign to use more than 2 pistons. There's a lot of weight to stop- it weighs 5300lbs, making it heavier than the Beast! It's also a lot heavier than the Noble, even with the same features.

Sadly, there's no convertible option, but of course it needs a luxury trim with a hand-made interior. That version scores 142 in Luxury and 115 in Luxury Premium, putting it far above the scores of the Noble DeLuxe's 126 and 101. I wasn't able to give it a Luxury HUD, apparently that's still to advanced and expensive. Apparently the Noble really has been falling behind as a car for the ultra rich.

Designing the car wasn't too bad, but engineering may be the hard part. We start off with a baseline of 86 months. At that rate, the car would come out almost exactly when the game ends.


I fiddled with the sliders and got us a liiitle bit of Automation, within 48 months. This car will... NOT be reliable. But, that's the price you pay for the latest in tech, right?
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I also looked a little into a modernized Minecart replacement- this time going all the way back to a '95 body. It didn't get numbers that were crazy better, and for the markets the Minecart targets, cost efficiency and high engineering sliders are super necessary, so I don't think rushing a new model will work.

Anyway, what do you guys all think of the Duke? Do we give it the green light?
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King Zultan

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Duke Prototype]
« Reply #274 on: September 15, 2020, 07:17:16 am »

I say we go for it, and if people hate we can ignore them as the 2020 apocalypse marks the end of the game and we won't be able to fix it anyway.
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LoSboccacc

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Duke Prototype]
« Reply #275 on: September 15, 2020, 07:27:51 am »

you might want to build the duke in hetvesia, that 90% workforce skill is going to help with recalls I think
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mightymushroom

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Duke Prototype]
« Reply #276 on: September 15, 2020, 01:42:26 pm »

I say we go for it, and if people hate we can ignore them as the 2020 apocalypse marks the end of the game and we won't be able to fix it anyway.
+1
I'm not worried about the reliability. (Because I drive an LMP.)
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Darkening Kaos

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Duke Prototype]
« Reply #277 on: September 15, 2020, 06:14:12 pm »

I say we go for it, and if people hate we can ignore them as the 2020 apocalypse marks the end of the game and we won't be able to fix it anyway.
+1
I'm not worried about the reliability. (Because I drive an LMP.)
+1
 (I drive the Fey Lord, {or does it drive me?})
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King Zultan

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2012: Duke Prototype]
« Reply #278 on: September 16, 2020, 03:33:29 am »

In Soviet Russia Archana Fey Lord drives you?
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Sensei

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2020: Finale]
« Reply #279 on: September 19, 2020, 03:49:18 am »

Okay, this should be the last update. Let's put all those factories to work.

you might want to build the duke in hetvesia, that 90% workforce skill is going to help with recalls I think
Theoretically that might be nice, but I already committed to building all the Huge factories in Archana, so I don't really have a choice (although the Noble's former factories are in Fruinia).

2012: Going for High Score

All of our cars are going to need facelifts. Most of them already have the actual tech features they need, so I'm going to try to keep changes minimal. If I can make the facelift a short turnaround time, we will get our factories operational sooner. First though, our new model:

The Duke is occupying the Noble's existing factories. While its Automation slider isn't as high, these factories have workers who can apparently work at minimal QA threshhold. Once again, the slowdown% number is weird, it gets to 0 halfway down the slider but we keep getting more cars as I reduce it. Hey, though, more cars!


And you know what? We probably need more cars. The Medium factory normally producing the luxury version only makes 4000 cars and there's demand in Luxury for 6000 cars, so clearly we need to make more. I'm assigning it one of the Huge factories, with a leatherworks. Not the most efficient, but it's still a lot of cars.


10 billion dollars(!) and 48 months to get it all set up. Oh well, it's not like we're going to run out of money.


Just looking ahead, we have 13 other active models, including our performance stuff. So, most cars are getting at least one new Huge factory. Once again, facelifts have to be done all at once for cars sharing an engine. Luckily we don't have models with different engine types, or that would tie everything together.

I'm thinking I'll start with The 12. I never expected it, but there are three different models using this engine now.


The Colossus is the car I'll be using to tune the sportier version of the motor. Our tech has advanced to the point where our pistons could comfortable get another 300 RPM on top of the last update's 5000 redline, but for some reason, they don't like it. In fact, they would even like the redline brought down. This is weird because the only stat I can see improving is reliability, which is quite high and supposedly the Muscle demographic has 0% desire for it. I changed up the car's gearing to reduce wheelspin and they no longer wanted the redline reduced, but weren't interested in more either. Since we may as well get the most out of our components (for the price) I switched the internals to Low Friction pistons and reduced their quality a little. The car is now getting an impressive(?) 14.9mpg, and affordability is a little better. Then, the entertainment system gets switched to a Basic HUD and the electronic driver assists get their negative quality removed. Hey, it's affordable to the Pony market!

Now we're at 27 months engineering, which is not bad. Can we afford to make a trim just for Muscle Premium, with a better interior?
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Hahahaha NOPE.

Naturally, I'm adding a Huge factory for the Colossus. I cranked the engineering down to 26 months, and it will just barely get tooled in 25 months, so we're good to go.

For The Beast, the Utility version of The 12 also gets low-friction pistons, improving fuel efficiency. Of course, it's fighting against offroad tires and utility gearing, so  it only manages 16.5mpg. I played around with the interior options, and I've made a rather aggressive decision: to save about 10 months engineering time, both the truck and premium SUV are getting the same Basic HUD interior option. The SUV will, however, get +2 quality. This allows me to increase the engineering sliders some, since they were at baseline before. It's hard to get it done in 26 months, but we can do it.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Naturally, the Beast is getting an additional Huge factory, bringing the total to 2. OR WILL IT?
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Upgrading the factory with the necessary buildings will take way too long. I might be able to jump through some hoops and add it to a later facelift, but for now we are out of luck on adding factories for the Beast. The best I can do is to add expanded offices and better tooling to the existing factory. This does bring us from 40k to 47k output, at least.

The Fey Mood is our last car based on the Colossus. This car now primarily targets Muscle Premium, with Super as a secondary demographic. They don't see much improvement from the 2012 version of the engine, since they don't care at all about gas mileage. In the interior section, the old Luxury Infotainment System is no longer available, and has been replaced with a Luxury HUD. This means our +3 quality slider that was already there adds way too many production units, so I've brought it down to +1. I've also decided to upgrade its factory from Medium 1 to Medium 3, since Muscle Premium can certainly buy more than the 1500 cars it produces right now. Oversaturating the market (if we can) is part of our strategy.

Then, the engine gets assigned another Huge factory, and we're good to go. All three models cost a total of $12b, which looks cheap compared to the Duke (but the Duke was buying a few new add-on factory buildings).

Next up, time to update its counterpart, the Fey Lord. Since this is supposed to really be the ultimate car, I'm playing around with quality sliders a bit to see if I can get more out of it. The motor gets some top end quality, which reduces the fall-off in power at high RPM, so we can increase the redline to 9400. We're starting to see some component stress, even on forged internals. It's now boosted to about 27 PSI as well.

It also gets upgraded to a 7-speed DCT from the 6-speed which was the best we could make earlier. I considered upgrading the tire quality, but even Hyper doesn't want to pay for them. Going to +3 quality tires adds about $6000 to our material costs, and of course they have to replace those too.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
I did, however, increase the interior and electronics quality to +3 (it even has a Luxury HUD). Fortunately the base cost for a lot of that stuff is coming down. Interestingly, all of this only gets us to 136 in Hyper. In comparison, the Fey Mood scores 130.
Since the Fey Mood Engine is actually only used by the Fey Lord now, I can downgrade the factory for a refund of 300 million dollars. Nice.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Lastly, it's all set up to be engineered in 18 months. Unfortunately, I don't think they got much cheaper, if at all.


Next up, our Chain Reactor-driven cars.

I'm starting with our best seller, the Rapture. To keep it on-budget, I've arbitrarily limited the speed to 180mph, so we can see if they like more power without giving them more top speed and throwing off the tire cost. Overall, they seem to have mixed feelings about more power, Light Sport dislikes it (possibly wanting gas mileage), Convertible Sport likes it, and Sport seems ambivalent. I ended up with a little more redline and a little more power (529 over the old 484), the LMP and GT will definitely appreciate it.

The car itself gets bigger brakes, and a suspension re-tune, as well as -2 quality removed from the transmission. I considered launch control, but engineering was too long. In fact, engineering is too long in general.

I'm pretty sure I see what's happening here (as well as with the Hauler so long ago). This car originally had Advanced 00's safety. Now that we have unlocked Advanced 20's safety, only Advanced 10's and Advanced 20's are on the list. The UI only has space for so many options, so obsolete ones get replaced. Unfortunately this means we HAVE to re-engineer the safety, even though our old safety is probably still up to standards. Although it's a bit of an edge case, this means there's actually a negative consequence for putting a bunch of points into Safety tech, since it pushes old options off the list and forces us to re-engineer. The exact same thing has happened to the interior, we can't have Premium Infotainment any more, only a Premium HUD.

My solution is to downgrade to Standard HUD and Basic 10's Safety. This skews the car more in the budget direction but we're trying to sell more cars to budget markets anyway. This lets me engineer the car in 36 months while improving the Automation just a little. It's sitting at about 160 score in Sport, Convertible Sport, Light Sport and Fun Premium.

Next up, the LMP, our ageing budget super car. I've decided to flip-flop on the design strategy again and give it maximum top speed. This gets it to 220 mph. Once again our entertainment and safety are outmoded, so I'm giving it Basic 10's and a Premium HUD. Ditching older forms of Advanced safety is making these cars a lot lighter. One side effect of the weight alteration is that the car is pretty oversteer-prone. I even gave it positive camber on the front wheels to control it a little bit, but according to the graph, it's going to be pretty snappy.

I'd just like to reflect that, in the world of Automation, you can go out and buy one of these things for (after margins) about $51,000, and it can go 220 mph. And, it sells great, despite its impracticality and visual styling. Not to mention it has a heads-up display. It's like if instead of a corvette, everybody had a Vector W8 in their garage.


Lastly, the Bay 12 GT. Not much to say, it got a Premium HUD, and I compromised on GT scores between competitiveness and engineering by going with Standard 10's safety, since once again Advanced 00's is out.


Lastly I gave the Rapture a Huge factory for the budget markets, and we're ready to sign off our Chain Reactor cars. 36 months, and they're out.

I've saved the bulk of our cars for last, the Reactor cars. This will be a challenge, because I want to keep the engineering time as low as possible. We have, uh, let me check the factory screen... 9 Huge factories left to assign, and all of them are sitting idle until this facelift finishes. So for the most part, I'm going to try to make as few changes as possible.

I'm starting off with tuning the engine to the General Wagon. This is the ultimate version of our economy engine: redline gets increased to 7000 along with our improved technology, it's now again at the maximum before our internal components get stressed. Compression increases to 10:1, boost increases to 6.33PSI, and exhaust quality increases from +2 to +4. We are now at 36.5% thermal efficiency, which is really pretty ridiculous.


As for the General itself, the wagon needs a new safety and entertainment system, and it's a bit of a difficult trade-off. Between Family Utility Premium and Family Utility, about 12 points hang in the balance between Basic safety and interior, advanced/standard. I ultimately went with basic HUD and Standard 10's safety. I only want to engineer one safety variety for all the trims, so hopefully Standard 10's will compromise between the family, sport and premium trims. It also gets an upgrade to 18 inch wheels. They like that last part a lot, actually, so I'm not sure if I just missed that the first time or if wheels/low-profile tires are coming down in cost. Then, there's all the variants. Notably, the Utility variant gets Basic Infotainment instead of a Basic HUD. The difference is about 12 PU. It also gets offroad tires and swaybars, giving it surprisingly large offroad appeal. The Premium version gets a Premium HUD. When we get to engineering, it looks like we have too many different interior options.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Just cutting out the Basic Infotainment in favor of a Basic HUD eliminates 6 months of engineering, but that's not enough. Cutting out the offroad sway bars from utility saves 2 more, and then I make the more difficult decision to only include a Basic HUD in the Premium version of the car. That gets us down to 35 months, which is probably about the best we'll do, so I'm targeting 36 total.

Before I can make the car ready to sign off, I need to make the engine ready to sign off. That means approving every factory configuration. I'm not even setting these up, just moving through (because I'll have to add MORE factories later!) but I need to click though every one of these factories with a check mark, which are already making the Reactor.

Lastly, I'm adding two Huge factories, for a total of three Huge and a Large. This car is split between a lot of trims, so hopefully that's enough.

Next up is the Carp. I've actually already gone in here to tune the Reactor Sport before doing sport trim of the General. The motor gets 71 RPM and a hair more horsepower, the graph isn't exciting to look at. I also don't need to make many changes to the car- Light Sport and Track are already low-budget markets, and luckily, I'm still able to use Basic Infotainment, Standard Infotainment (in the case of the convertible) and Basic 00's safety. Anything more, and it's unduly expensive. I've also limited the top speed to 157 (instead of a theoretical top speed of 160) to keep the tires cheaper. This saved money goes into +1 tire quality, since they like cornering. It also gets a 7-speed DCT. I'm also adding a Huge factory, which should bring total production to 70,000 cars. I think this should cover everything along the lines of "sports budget". Setting engineering to 36 months is no problem, I can get slightly better sliders out of it.

The Goat, interestingly, is scoring highest in city/commuter demographics, rather than Family. It seems that the Family market has skewed towards larger vehicles? The General Wagon is at 141 in Family, whereas the Goat sits at 138. This is a small difference though, and it could still improve.

I spent a while trying to find room to improve before, once again, it came down to Safety. The previous model had Advanced 00's Safety, and this model doesn't need Advanced 10's Safety. In fact, I probably went overboard with Advanced 00's safety. The weight and cost savings of Basic 10's are a godsend.

We save 170 pounds and almost $1700 by downgrading. Now, the Goat takes the lead in Family. It's also got a Basic HUD, and 0-quality ESC. It requires a little downgrades in engineering to get it out in 36 months, but it should be worth it. The market numbers are looking strong.

Note than even though the number for Family Sport has gone away, it's actually 123. It improved as well, but has been hidden since it's projected to sell mainly to the other demographics.

I'm adding two factories, for now. We'll see if there are any left over. I'm not very good at planning ahead.

Next up is everybody's favorite brick, the Hauler. It currently has Standard 00's Safety (we can continue to use this), Electric power steering, and no traction controls at all. I'm hoping we can get it with Electric Variable power steering, however, ESC is right out. I tried to put it in and ended up with 64 months engineering time. Electric Variable only gets 42 months. Electric? 31 months. So, "no major changes of any kind" is the winner for this design. Utility and Delivery benefit a little from the better power steering, and the Wagon's demographics gain significant points from it, but they're just going to have to deal with crappy power steering because we're on a schedule. Now, here's a different way to overview the trims: there's a drop-down button in the project management screen, which I don't use very much. It shows the top 3 demographics and the relevant stats. I don't know what the column that's full of "#0" is supposed mean though.

I'm assigning it to two additional Huge factories, since I know the Hauler is a big seller. It's projecting about 250,000 cars produced per month from (now) four Huge factories plus one L3 factory. These Archana factories do suffer a lot from me trying to keep the recall chance low. There's about 17% slowdown, and that's after being halved by a QA facility in each one. They get a little better as staff gain experience, though. I wish I had made some of the Huge factories in other countries so I could compare how much the labor cost actually changed. I know we have a cost per production unit for the factory, but I don't know if that's 100% labor cost or if it has some material/utility cost from the factory itself.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
ACKSHUALLY, no, I think all the numbers I need to understand that are here. The Cost per PU is exactly the Staff Costs divided by the production units. Therefore I can conclude that the production cost of the car, in top left, (which is just the cost of running the factory per car, not including materials) is a direct product of labor costs only. So if Archana has 20% of whatever the baseline labor cost is, then producing the car in Hetvesia, with 90% labor costs, would be about 4.5 times as expensive. Of course, some of this cost would be diffused by less QA slowdown. Now, here's our baseline prices:

If we had produced this car in Hetvesia, it would be about $1500 more expensive, assuming we didn't underpay our employees or something. That's pretty significant. Keep in mind however that I've also kept our base price low by un-ticking the button that includes tooling costs, since I want to sell these cars cheap and I'm not worried about breaking even on my tooling costs on a schedule. That's worth about the same amount per car. Anyway I guess the moral of the story is, build budget cars in Archana, but we knew that already.

Now time for our little offroad car, the Migrant. Not many big changes to make. In trying to keep to a strict 36 month schedule, I'm able to get them on Electric Variable power steering. Weirdly, one had electric and one had hydraulic before. I don't remember if I did that deliberately or not. Switching from Standard 00's to Basic 10's safety would be a good improvement, but it looks like it's going to be outside our engineering schedule. Because markets like Offroad are cheapasses, they're staying on Standard Infotainment, which right now costs us $230 and 2 PU to put it in the car. I do apparently have some scary handling characteristics to work out of the Utility version, if I can figure out how:

I'm still not 100% sure what this graph means about actual handing, but I'm pretty sure this means it tends to be sluggish to turn, until it spins out all at once. At least, I was able to fix it by changing the sway bars (now it's just an understeer monster). I think going from no entertainment system to the basic infotainment might have thrown it off. This is one thing that bothers me about Automation cars though: apparently adding just 20 pounds threw the car into terminal oversteer. To me that seems to imply that the best handling setup is as close to terminal oversteer as possible (adjusting the swaybars more than just enough yields a worse score) but once the car is on the road, simply placing a toolbox the wrong place could cause it to be at risk of spinning out, to say nothing of worn tires or a wet road, or variances in the weight of the driver or passengers.

Anyway, I'll add a Huge factory. Now there's just one left.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
As you can see, we're going to need more engine factories assigned. I need to not forget like I did last time- that's probably the single mistake that cost us the most sales in the campaign so far.

We're also down to the very last Reactor car, the New Minecart, our dinosaur we could never replace. Once again it's turned to terminal oversteer. I think our baseline tech is causing some parts of the car to get lighter (or heavier) and that's the issue. I know that adding quality to the Safety slider actually increases the weight of safety systems, I suspect that R&D quality does the same. Of course, they absolutely hate negative quality on safety. I wonder if having a baseline +1 with a -1 slider is worse than simply a 0.

It's no matter though, the roll angle was high, so there's room to add stiffer sway bars. Now on to the difficult part: the previous version used the now-defunct Advanced 00's safety, so we need a new safety system, and probably the lighter, the better. However, we need at least 38, and Basic 10's doesn't cut it. It's off by a few points, not just a tiny bit, so I ended up going with Standard 10's safety rather than using a bunch of quality sliders. That's one downside compared to having replaced this with a new vehicle, if it had higher Chassis quality I could probably have saved a lot of weight with basic safety. Like other low-budget cars, this one is keeping Basic Infotainment to save a lot of PU.

However, I am adding some quality slider to the interior. And on second thought, that makes it viable to go to Basic 10's with +4 quality. I went back and forth a couple times, and the result is slightly cheaper and more desirable. Additionally, it brings the car up to 66 miles per gallon. That's probably a benefit of emissions requirements not being in the game yet, we don't have to use catalytic converters.

Time for factory setup! A new factory with a little under 0.3% recall chance, 75 tooling, 80 tool quality has 17% slowdown. An old factory with the exact same setup has only 6% slowdown. Worker experience makes a real difference! Now in Engineering, we have an issue...
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Yeah, looks like putting +4 quality on the Basic 10's safety makes the engineering time absolutely monstrous. This isn't viable at all, I need to get it under 36 months somehow. What I ended up doing was decreasing the Safety quality to +1, and increasing the Interior quality to +4, which also helps safety. The interior quality costs very little engineering time because it's basic tech. This got the engineering time down to 39.8 months, and I brought it from there to 36 entirely with the Pressure slider. We lost some reliability, but the other downside of the Pressure slider, gaining less familiarity, isn't an issue for us at this point. Now we're projecting 240,000 vehicles per month, at only $5k per vehicle (again with engineering and tooling costs ignored).

One last thing! Despite having written about it earlier in this post, I very nearly forgot to add engine factories. Now time to click through ALLLLL of them. I'm just ticking the box for the QA addon building, dragging the automation slider, dragging the tooling quality slider, dragging the QA slider. I really wish I could do these in batches. Most of the factories have slightly different sliders because I don't care enough to make them exactly optimal. You can see this screen is truncated, about two pages are just Reactor factories at this point.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now, it's time to approve our 124 billion dollar project. Fully 1/4 of our company valuation is involved in tooling factories for Reactor cars and engines alone.


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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!
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Sensei

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2020: Finale pt2]
« Reply #280 on: September 19, 2020, 03:50:07 am »

2013: The World Didn't End in 2012

In the first month of 2013, we brought in almost 3 billion dollars in profit. That's good, because we don't want to go bankrupt tooling up all our new factories. Most of those are going to start only 10 months from now, they have a burdensome 26 month tooling time. We're probably going to sell out of our entire stock of cars and lose market familiarity again. What we apparently AREN'T going to sell out of, is 1998 model Fey Moods. We've still got "5 months worth of stock", whatever that actually means, and the 2005 facelift came out a year and a half ago.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Because our engine factories were overworked for a while, most them them get this "high refresh costs" popup when they start tooling.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Seven months later, we're sold out of EVERY kind of Fey Mood because the factory is undergoing a big upgrade. The majority of our factories are just about to start retooling, so let's see how our markets are doing before the numbers go crazy:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
We're above 50% in most categories, including the biggest market, Family, which has gone up to 56% from 46% since we last looked. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with the rest of our factories on line, but because of the massive tooling time, things will get worse before they get better.

After a few more factory refresh popups and a Migrant recall worth $450M (stupid worthless elves in Archana building our cars), construction is well underway. I forgot to get a screenshot, because I'm clicking though them almost without reading them, but I'm pretty sure I got a factory refresh popup with NEGATIVE 7 million extra refresh costs. After another $750M recall for Reactor engines, we're halfway though 2014, and the new Fey Lord releases. At this point, we're losing a shit ton of money every month again. The complete list of factories is truncated to like 5 screens worth, but as you can see, many of them are under construction or about to enter construction.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

By 2015, our cars based on The 12 release. I also have a ton of overworked engine factory notifications, as a few of them start construction slightly earlier than others. We've also lost enough money to avoid paying taxes. The Fey Lord is selling pretty well, it's at 90% factory utilization. 237 sales isn't bad for a car designed primarily to market to Hyper, a demographic which buys 44 cars per month. Also, we're losing an impressive 7 billion per month.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Like most months, you can see I have a "higher factory refresh costs" popup waiting for me.

Later in the year, the Beast is our best-selling 12.0L vehicle by a good margin. It's making almost $600M per month, and it's been climbing a little each month.

I'm also surprised to see it's split almost exactly 50/50 between the two trims. The Colossus is also making 450M, although it seems to have reached market saturation. You can see it's sitting at 61% factory utilization.

This is actually kind of bothersome to me though. It's selling at 127% margin still. Presumably, it's most profitable to sell them at this margin, and reducing the price to gain Pony/Budget sales would cause a loss in total income, since so much profit would be left on the table from Muscle and Muscle Premium. However, the object of the game is to sell cars, not exactly to make money- your score is based only on cars sold. So, it's kind of working against me here.

The Fey Mood is also selling enough that the big factory update was apparently justified.


2016: New Cars Release!

All of our Reactor and Chain Reactor cars finished in December 2015. By January we're making our first sales, and the company is profitable again. During the re-tool we've managed to get about 200 billion dollars in debt. Fortunately, our company valuation is now $520B (we've gained $100B) and our credit rating is still A+. In retrospect, I could have probably have afforded 18 factories instead of 12, so we haven't leveraged all of our valuation.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
What's not announced, is that the Noble has ended production. The last of its factories has begun retooling to build the Duke. The hub screen says we have more than a year of stock for the two Noble trims, but no more will be produced.

Our Market awareness hasn't been hurt too bad. We're gaining quickly in some markets, such as Heavy Utility. You can also see we've started seriously selling into Pony Budget.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Apparently the Colossus is responsible for our Pony Budget sales- its margins have dropped to 71%, maybe as a result of competition. As usual, it seems like the solution to selling in budget markets isn't to design an extremely cheap car, but to design a good car and make it cheap though engineering sliders and extremely large scale production.

On the sales numbers screen, we can see we've totally dominated some smaller markets such as Offroad Premium and Utility Premium (thank the Beast SUV for that). We've also got to around 70% in big markets like Family. The only market we're really ignoring is Convertible Luxury, and it's too late to do anything about that. We can also see we haven't dominated Delivery, since the Hauler is at 132% margin but only 70% factory utilization, I just have to hope the price comes down on its own.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Halfway through 2016, we've hit 720,000 game score. Most of our score is coming in right at the end here with a ton of factories, I'm hopeful we can hit a million. Incidentally, you can see that extreme mass production has caused both our prestige and reputation to suffer- this is with maximum advertising too!


Since we're basically done with the part of the game where we care about making money, I'm upgrading Dalluha's dealerships to level 10. With that, we're at absolute maximum spending on dealerships and advertising. We're purely losing money by doing this, but if it helps us sell 1% more cars then it's cool I guess. Incidentally, the absolute maximum you can spend on dealerships and advertising is 2.4 billion per month. I'd spend more if I could!


Incidentally, Fruinia has a new safety standard of 40 coming in 2020. This would result in the Carp and the New Minecart being banned.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Since I'm looking at the world map, I thought I'd mention that Gasmea has 107% Total Economic Power, whatever that means.

2017: Duke Releases

The Duke actually came out a couple months ago, and the sales numbers are great. Long live the Duke! On the other hand I don't know how, but it's apparently losing money (and lots of it).

This clears up a couple months later, maybe our stocks had to build up.

At this point, the General is leading profits with $1.6B per month, while the Hauler is leading sales numbers with 204,000 units. Many of our cars are making a lot less money because we've finally saturated the market, so they're reducing prices and selling to budget markets. The Colossus has dropped to 4% margins. The Carp has even dropped to 0%! The Rapture 2005 Hardtop is somehow claiming 130% margins while new Raptures are selling for 15% margins.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Arguably, at this point, any car that still is making high margins and a lot of profit, we're not making enough of. That means the General, with its many trims, could have used a couple extra Huge factories. Apparently that also applies to the Bay 12 GT and the Migrant, which I had been reluctant to give a Huge factory for a while. I must have been wrong about that.

A few months later we're losing money- despite all of our factories being operational! Apparently we're now seeing some of a negative consequences of market saturation. Some cars are also losing money, they're working the factory extra shifts and paying workers overtime, but still not making enough stock. If we weren't cruising for the end of the game, this would be a problem.

The Duke is a good example of this: 104% factory utilization, still hasn't built up the target of 6 months stock, and losing money at 10% margins.

Apparently setting a minimum 0% margin means they'll sell the car at ANY margin including at a loss? Or margins on the hub screen are calculated differently than the forecast screen? Or it's a bug, who knows. Anyway, apparently the Colossus is selling at -7% margins. Come to think of it, I may have given it a -10% minimum margin or something when I was goofing around. Remember, score is driven by car sales, not money.

After two more recalls in the last 3 months of 2017, we enter 2018. Well, our prices are stabilizing, so have we dominated the world yet?
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The percentages are limited to awareness, which is about 93% in both markets. Even taking that into consideration, it looks like we sell well over 70% of the total cars bought in the world. This is probably going to be more or less stable as we move towards 2020. Browsing by competitiveness, some of the "best" cars for certain markets are surprising. Our most competitive Sport Utility car is the Goat. It's a low budget demographic, apparently so low budget that most of them just give up and get a cheap car. Maybe there are a bunch of Goats driving around on lift kits. Despite the General Convertible being a strong seller, the most competitive car in the Convertible market is the Duke, because apparently they care more about having a very comfortable interior. The most competitive Hyper car is the Fey Mood, not the Fey Lord- and it apparently scores 364?? Once again, this shows price is a huge factor even if affordability isn't. It's also pushed the LMP out of the sport for Super.

In fact, we can see that in almost every market, we're cheaper than the competition, often many times cheaper. Just for example, Muscle Premium:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

By 2019 our sales have steadily risen, and we're also losing less money (a little) since we've built up stock on all our cars. Now each car is individually profitable, but we're still losing about a billion per month due to R&D and that sort of thing. It doesn't look like we're going to hit a million points.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Our best entry in Offroad Utility, the Migrant, is apparently not enough to get us all of the market share. Presumably this is because it's still selling at 100% margins and we're not making enough. We also lack a proper Convertible Luxury and Convertible Super. Other than that, the only areas we're not totally penetrating are budget markets. Track premium and Hyper are also markets where, presumably, other companies are able to actually compete with us, because we're making more than enough cars to saturate them and still hovering around 60%.

You've been reading for a long time, so have a picture of a car.


2020!
It's January, 2020, and things are looking up for Bay 12 Motors! But, we've been running this company since 1946, and after 74 years, it's time for us to retire (at presumably the age of like 100 years old or something). Also, I don't know that things are actually looking up for Bay 12 motors, because we over expanded and are losing money hand over fist. Well, at least I can't think of anything that could go wrong in the next twelve months.

Finishing the game gives us this screen:


We sold over a hundred million cars! As you can see, the Goat and New Minecart were our best sellers, so from start to finish we've been best known for our simple and efficient family cars.

In our last month, the Hauler Mk3 sold 267,000 units, while the General continued to be our most profitable making 2 billion dollars. More cars have hit 0% margin, including the Goat and New Minecart.

Actually, I have to wonder if this could have sold more cars. It's at 220 competitiveness, but only 62% factory utilization. Oh well, we can't make cars so good they completely eliminate competition as a factor. Speaking of which, apparently a ton of them magically release in 2020.


It looks like we've got about 80% market share. There's only a couple markets where we have less than 50%. Our best country (in percentage of market share) is Gasmea, and our worst is Archana, where the budget markets are the poorest.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Also, Archana apparently has 1 Track Premium, 1 Hyper, and 3 Luxury Premium buyers, and we didn't get any of them last month.

Other than that, I won't get way into the markets- we're done! We had a great game, I'll have to ask around on the Automation Discord and forums if we got the highest score for Lite Campaign V4.0, I think it's entirely possible that we did (even though I made some mistakes). Thanks to all of you who stuck with reading all these graphs. Oh wait, we do have one more thing to look at:

Hot Laps!

Two new cars I want to look at- the Duke, and the last version of the Fey Lord.

The new Fey Lord hits 205mph, and it's down to 1:50:59. I'd like to see someone come close to that in Beam. Then again, it's turbo and AWD biased to one side, both of which are kind of bugged in BeamNG.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The Duke gets 2:35. I went back to look at the latest model of the Noble to see if it was much of an improvement, and it's only 0.2 seconds faster. That's surprising since it's got a better cornering grip, and better top speed. But, on closer inspection, it weighs 1000 pounds more and has an extra second of 0-60 time.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've put the save in the Dropbox. It's managed to get up to 78 megabytes in size. Just download that and you'll have access to all the cars.

Bonus pic: ALL the cars!
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I recorded a video, but I tried a different recording program after some computer trouble and essentially ended up with 15 minutes of black screen. I don't really feel like trying to recreate my first impressions (or messing with the video software) so I think I'll go ahead and post this episode without a video, sadly. If anyone else does, make sure you try the Hauler Mk3, it has some rather amusing braking behavior. The Beast is also a hoot, it's fast but needs the hand brake to get around turns. Also, I'll be impressed if I can see a clean lap in the Fey Lord.

I think I've probably played enough Automation in one go for now. Hopefully, version 4.1 will be out soon to shake things up. If some of you guys are interested in trying though, we might be able to do a succession game some time.
« Last Edit: September 19, 2020, 04:01:32 am by Sensei »
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Darkening Kaos

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2020: Finale]
« Reply #281 on: September 19, 2020, 05:54:39 am »

    Awesome job, @Sensei, and that Fey Mood … did a lot better than I expected it too.
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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2020: Finale]
« Reply #282 on: September 19, 2020, 08:14:43 am »

That was quite the trip, there were parts where I thought our terrible amazing ideas might bankrupt the company but it powered on until completion with a collection of the most random cars, also I hope we go the highest score for this version.
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mightymushroom

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2020: Finale]
« Reply #283 on: September 19, 2020, 08:24:31 am »

Congratulations!

Not only is the score impressive, but the fact that you stuck to it with a bunch of "designers" who basically pointed at a body and said, I like that one, put an engine in it and make it go. I think you've earned a break.
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Fishbreath

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Re: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [2020: Finale]
« Reply #284 on: September 19, 2020, 12:24:10 pm »

What a delightful playthrough this was! Also, extremely instructive to me, in that by following your example I'm now actually able to play Automation without going entirely bankrupt.

In an hour or two, once a certain 22gb upload finishes, I'll have some thoughts on cars.
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