1992 and OnwardLooks like that's 3 votes out of 3 for the GT car. I have no choice! We really might have to replace our existing sports cars or make them more specialized into different markets though. We're actually close to market saturation. Look at the markets:
On top, we have our current sales, and the percentage of the market we sell to (limited to Awareness) on the bottom, we have Awareness. It looks like we're close to awareness cap with our current dealerships (85% in our most lucrative countries I think) and we're selling to ~85% of customers already. That basically means we only have around 300 customers in both of these categories who aren't already buying our cars. The Rapture and LMP do score better than our GT prototype in categories like Sports, so it's not totally worth replacing them, I think.
What I'm going to do for now, is just go ahead and produce our new GT car in a Medium 3 factory or whatever. I might skew it towards higher priced markets with some fancy new tech and good interior. We will probably, I think, suffer from market saturation. But, I'd like to actually see that happen. From there I can decide if we want to make our existing cars occupy different budget categories or what. Part of the reason I want to try this is curiosity, but also remember we're technically playing for the high score. If our cars are, say, forced to reduce in price until we start selling to budget categories because there are so many of them, we're still selling MORE cars, even though we might make less money, it's better for score. Right now, we have more money than god, so we can try something inefficient like this.
For lack of a name, I'm calling our new car the Bay 12 GT. It almost sounds like an actual car name, despite just being our company named followed by a target demographic. I've made some final tweaks: first of all, it gets all the fancy computer-adjusted suspension bits. We're in the 90's now, I have a gameboy in my pocket, and my car has a bunch of different computer systems under the hood. This gets us up to 192 in GT, a big boost, but at the cost of markets like Sport who would prefer a cheaper car. That's okay, GT is a more expensive market and we want to specialize on that.
I also thought I'd try ESC while we're at it. It's another fancy computer thing that brakes individual wheels to keep the car under control. I always thought it would be cool if you could control this manually with a joystick or something, but for some reason nobody else thinks it's a good idea. This came with a base engineering time of
100 months so I had to dump the quality to get that under control.
I also looked at aero features. They seem to have no interest in fancy cooling flaps or active wings (I never seem to know when a car DOES need these, but it's not often) or any downforce features. I assume this is because they decrease the top speed or add expense. They also don't like undercladding because it increases the top speed above 187MPH/300KPH into an astronomically expensive tire speed rating category. If I combine the two, so we have downforce and the same top speed as before... they still don't like it. Notably, this body has good aero to begin with. Most cars (without aero features) produce a lot more lift than this at high speed.
I finished it off with lower profile tires, on sport compound, and some gearing adjustments that got the 0-60 time under 6 seconds. I also tried out a white paint color, since someone suggested that ages ago and I just signed off the LMP and autosaved before I could implement it. Fun fact: GT doesn't
mind a manual locking diff, apparently. Well, assuming you leave Archana turned on in the market screen. "Yeah, my Porsche is stuck in a ditch, but I'll just lock the hubs in and get out". I didn't put that in the car though. I did, however, put exhaust bypass valves on the Pumpstack V8. Hopefully the other cars like that because I can't be bothered to make an engine variant.
I set it up in a Medium 3 factory and skewed the engineering to low automation, low reliability, extra funding and a little lower pressure to gain familiarity with the new tech. I wish I could see how much familiarity I'm going to gain- there's a "current familiarity" column on the engineering screen that changes when I change the pressure, but I don't know if that's supposed be familiarity when I'm done or what. It will make about 3500 cars, so we'll see what it does on the market where there are fewer total GT customers than that. Also, apparently the exhaust bypass valves will take two years to engineer on the Pumpstack V8. I assume that's because any change causes a big issue when your automation slider is at 93. Come to think of it, I'll probably need a second Pumpstack V8 factory.
Lastly, I the sales projection guided me to a minimum price of $39k, at a 75% margin. Not coincidentally, this is the starting budget of GT demographic. It looks like I need to be affordable to every single GT customer. I wonder what the margin will do in the wild.
The Other Pumpstack Cars! As usual, now I have to update everything else! Oh wait, I accidentally hit spacebar(?) on the hub screen and jumped forward in time a bit. I'm living dangerously with autosaves here, so we're stuck without because I don't want to redesign the GT. For once I'm thankful to be stopped by a recall notice!
While it's a drop in the bucket practically speaking, it still stings to pay out $100M.
So, uh, it's 1993 now I guess. Somehow (time passes on the market screen?) I managed to skip a whole year. Oops. Well, uh, I guess that means it's time to...
Unveil the Colossus!
The Colossus is above 100 Competitiveness and the margin is relatively low, at 41%, and the factory is running at 90% usage. Admittedly, that's fairly realistic, but I like to make stupidly huge margins, not realistic ones! Until the 4.1 update at least. So, it has probably saturated its markets or it can't be any pricier while still hitting its target markets. We're only selling to 50% of possible Muscle customers, so I'm guessing it's having to strike a balance between high margins and being affordable to enough customers.
Anyway, I'm just proud that our absurd car is actually selling. Why not celebrate with a facelift?
Our "The 12" engine gets a little more compression and hey, why not exhaust bypass valves? I'm told how these work is, they let the engine operate at whatever loudness it has normally but exactly 40 Loudness, the ideal for a "Sportiness" modifier, at wide open throttle. This gives the best of both words for loudness modifiers to comfort/sportiness. In practice, they seem to make the engine slightly worse in every way, somehow hurting power and gas mileage despite just being an exhaust thing that opens up, but they gain a little competitiveness so in they go I guess. I can see that ESC has the potential to add a few points, but I want to keep this cheap so I'm waiting until it's cheaper to engineer. It also gets semi-active sway bars, however those work, because they like them I guess. Because material costs are significant, I increased the Optimization. Hopefully the facelift will make it cheaper.
Now, it's back to updating everything in lock-step.
The Pumpstack CarsThe Bay 12 GT's updates to the Pumpstack V8 will take 28 months, possible longer if I have to build a factory. But, I'm going to start off just targeting 28 months. I promised myself I'd keep this short instead of explaining every detail so I'm trying my best.
The Rapture: Okay, so apparently The 12 fits in here. And, it somehow scores a little higher than The Colossus in Muscle even without proper tuning.
Note the 14% wheelspin!
Okay okay, back on task, that's not what we're doing today! Putting the slightly updated Pumpstack back in, it gets a 5-speed auto transmission instead of the old 4-speed. It's also getting very low profile tires, which seems to be a trend. I think that as the years go on, we can get lower and lower profile tires without a price penalty, and that's what sporty demographics like. It also gets all the fancy suspension computer thingies, and still no aero undercladding, since nobody likes that apparently. Then, I just repeat those changes for the hard-top trim. Voila, nice looking numbers!
Then, engineering time for the suspension is huge, so ixnay on that. We lose a few points, but that's okay, I guess I want to rapture to occupy cheaper markets compared to the GT anyway. I ended up engineering it with Reliability and Optimization. The preview number for the convertible has automatically changed to the Sport Convertible Budget market in this shot, they love that stuff.
The LMP: It gets a tick of quality for the interior now that Luxury CDs have come down in price, and a gearing tweak for the new engine (5 speed upgrade again). In the name of more narrowly targeting Super/Hyper, it's getting the fancy suspension as well as ESC. This brings the engineering to 35 months even with very aggressive sliders including lower automation. However, the factory refresh will take 10 months for new Major Tooling, so it at least overlaps with the 28 month deadline and we can avoid having the factory sit idle. This does remind me we could probably do a "proper" super car with a faster engine, though.
This all means the Pumpstack factory is going to be overworked. There's no avoiding a second factory.
I want to make a Medium 3, because why bother with half measures... but it will take 37 months. Of course, I can't just have the Pumpstack 1993 version start production in the first factory before the second factory is done, that would make too much sense, especially since the GT car won't be ready to consume those engines until later anyway. So, eh, smaller factory. Medium 2 gets us down to 30 months.
Then, it's
back to the Rapture to use up the remaining 2 months of engineering, and sign off.
The I4 cars:Now we have another big engineering conundrum! I want to use the new I4 engine we've designed. I also want to get our cars into the Huge factories which are sitting idle as soon as possible, while the new engine is going to take around 5 years if I don't make the engineering sliders horrible.
The most efficient thing by far would be to do a short-term revision now, engineer the engine in the background and then add the new engine once the factories are already up and running. But, that adds a facelift to four separate models. I'm going to save myself the effort and just make our next facelift the one with the new engine.
Also related to laziness, instead of stopping and asking for a name, I'm going to tentatively name our new I4. We started off with the Windmill and then upgraded to the Waterwheel, two ways to generate mechanical power in Dwarf Fortress, the second more powerful than the first. But, what's more powerful than that? Well,
the Dwarven Water Reactor, a long standing bug/feature which generates perpetual energy. So, I'm calling our new engine the Reactor unless people vote to change it. What better name for our engine with an amazing, uh, 80 horsepower?
The Alpaca: we covered this with the Reactor before, but I didn't do the fine tuning. I increased the wheels to 15 inches and fit bigger brakes. I also gave it a 5-speed transmission, which is becoming ubiquitous. A few suspension tweaks, and we've hit a score that matches our new model prototype.
Man, the Alpaca really has legs. Also, we seem to not be having absurd safety engineering. Making this facelift take as long as the engine design means I can really go nuts with the sliders.
Oh yeah, incidentally, I'm aiming for 57 months to engineer the Reactor. That's all sliders at 50, except Funding which is 99, costing us $150M or something petty.
The Migrant: Reactor, 5-speed, no fancy features because Offroad doesn't wanna pay for 'em! Until we unlock Offroad Sway Bars (whatever those are) basically none of the fancy new suspension things benefit these markets. I got some good numbers, and once again I went crazy with the sliders, especially Reliability.
The Hauler Mk2: For the Delivery variant, its gets the new 5-speed, and it gets geared for a lot of wheelspin. I guess it's fine if the back is full of stuff. The numbers we're seeing are getting astronomical for the delivery markets.
For the passenger variant- well, first off I'm impressed to see a score in Family of 156, greater even than the Alpaca. That's just after changing the engine. The only other particular change is that it had traction control at -2 quality before, that's going up to 0. Tuning the transmission and suspension further gets us these scores:
It looks like the added horsepower was a big benefit for the large Hauler. This definitely can get a Huge factory. For now it also keeps its Large 2 factory because, I don't know what else to put in there. That could be a good candidate for Utility vehicles later though.
The New Minecart: This one is still cursed, and not producing any cars cat all. Let's just imagine the workers have been on strike or whatever. I'm pretty sure what actually happened is the price just hit a critical point where it broke. Hopefully, this facelift should fix it. Anyway, it gets the usual: Reactor, 5-speed. This also gets lower profile tires- just a little, to offset the heavier engine making it more prone to understeer. Plus, for once, someone finally wants a fully clad underbody in the aero screen! This helps with fuel efficiency. I mean, it always did, but now they decided they're willing to pay up for the privilege I guess, compared to before when they wouldn't. It also gets reduced cooling airflow, so it can get more gas mileage by diverting less air into not overheating. Lastly, good variable hydraulic power steering is replaced with cheap, nasty electric power steering. When it's all done, we've got a new record of 51 miles per gallon. Huzzah! The New Minecart returns!
This car can also get a Huge factory. It should be cheap enough to really sell to Passenger Fleet.
This is almost enough to use up the three Huge factories making Reactor engines. In fact, I was going to just leave a Large 1 engine factory idle and do all the production at Huge scale for optimum prices, but it looks like I'll need that factory too.
The NobleThe only car using the Noble V8 is still the, uh, Noble. First the engine: as usual, our fuel tech is a little better, so it gets a hair more compression and boost. I also looked at exhaust bypass valves- they really hate them. If bypass valves avoid a loudness penalty for comfort, then uh... nah, I have no idea how this works. They DO like a little steeper cam (I feel like I'm just going back and forth on this with this engine) and VVT makes it slightly more affordable because of fuel efficiency, so why not put it in. The car itself gets, you guess it, a 5-speed transmission. Now, I don't know what changed, but when I get to the handling graph, it's gone a little screwy. Something must have got lighter or heavier to shift the weight distribution.
Adding a little front swaybar fixed it. I also upgraded to 18 inch wheels and bigger brakes, as well as a CD player. That brings the Premium trim to 186 in its target. The DeLuxe was already running 18 inch wheels, but it gets a similar transmission upgrade. It seems that I had it geared very long to reduce wheelspin, but our tires have improved or something, so this version is geared much shorter for better acceleration and still has no wheelspin. Both the Premium and DeLuxe are running Hydropneumatic suspension, which prevents the installation of any fancy active bits except for the semi-active swaybars.
Engineering for the Noble, I came up with 31 months for the upgrade. I also found that the Noble V8 had been set to 93 Automation from when I was trying to make enough with only one factory. This was so high that I actually gained production by reducing it (efficiency losses from lower-automation factories).
Moving Onward!Once again there's a ton of crap engineering at different times. The main block is our Reactor-based economy vehicles, in 57 months. The Bay 12 GT finishes just one month later.
Since we're making so much money, I basically may as well spend it. I'm starting two sets of Huge factories. What are they for? I dunno. They're basically a tax write-off for us though. The total cost of these is, I dunno, 20 billion dollars? We have 12 billion in the bank and we're bringing in 1 billion per month, we should be fine.
This is basically the stage in world generation where mountainhomes pop up everywhere.
Also, why not spend some money on R&D? I've about tripled our spending.
Two months later, we're still well in the green. I don't really want to build more Huge factories because then I have to figure out what to do with them. So, I chucked another $150M/month into the R&D machine (not shown, but it was basically just +1 to body, chassis and fuel) and figured why not see what it costs to max out our dealerships? Well, a lot. Here's Gasmea:
See that? $576 million
per month for level 10. That would give us 95% Awareness, the absolute maximum. Level 9 costs $176M. We're not QUITE at that level of throwing away money yet, so I set every country to level 9 except Dalluha. Dalluha is very expensive to set up dealers in relative to their market size, so I kept them at level 8. This sucked up another half a billion dollars (per month!) leaving us with "only" $300M per month income.
This is our expenses as of April, 1994. Ignore the bit on the right of the graph, it's a future projection that's missing the important parts.
You can see we're now spending more on dealerships than research. Tax payments are also considerable.
Colossus facelift! It's selling well, and at crazy margins. I'm not sure if this is just because our costs are "lower" because they don't include the huge first tooling price though. What is for sure is the factory is working full time.
In 1996, we finally start losing money for a few months while the Noble and Pumpstack vehicles all go into retooling. We're still 16 billion in the black though. When those cars all finished, I took a minute trying to figure out what is selling where, but I decided to just save that for the end of the post because it's getting a little confusing. Anyway, later on in 1996 all our Waterwheel/Reactor cars start retooling, so we lose some more money. We post a loss for the year... which means no taxes, yeah!
During 1998, we start losing more than a billion per month as we retool several Huge factories at once. We actually hit negative money (just barely) before all our new vehicles come out. However, we made it! We make a billion in profits for a few months, though our revenue tapers off a little bit.
December, 1998 ReviewWe're getting close to the end game! Only about 21 years left. We're only going to have a few more chances to introduce new models for Bay 12 Motors, anything that releases too close to 2020 will be more for seeing what we can make than for actual sales numbers. Speaking of seeing what we can make, we managed to actually sell a car with a 12 liter engine, so that's pretty cool.
We're continuing to bring in tons of money. I'll get into the details of each model in a bit, but this second picture gives us a quick idea of the relative income of each of our car models. You can see it's sliding off pretty fast compared to when everything released a few months ago. I think this just usually happens, of course a facelift will probably help, especially for the Reactor engine which has all engineering sliders at 50. Now that we've got more Huge factories running, the Hauler Mk2 is now our biggest earner, having surpassed the Alpaca! Our smallest earner is (and has been for a while) the LMP, which is probably up for replacement with a dedicated super car.
Markets: First, our awareness. Our cap is 90% awareness in most countries, and we're very close to it in our main markets. From the growth percentage numbers, you can see we've entered some new markets as well. Delivery has grown fast since we moved the Hauler into a Huge factory, and now that we're selling more cars in general, we've started gaining Awareness (presumably, as a consequence of sales) quickly in a few Budget markets. Passenger Fleet has also grown fast, a consequence of New Minecarts being available for a reasonable price.
Here's our sales numbers, limited to awareness. If the percentage is low in a category, we could probably stand to be making more cars for it. Thanks to more and cheaper cars, we're selling a lot to Family, which has now surpassed Family Premium. You can also see that we're nearly capped out on markets like Super, Muscle Premium and Luxury/GT. Surprisingly, we're still only selling to half of Muscle. The Colossus might be too expensive to sell to the whole market.
Lastly, here's demographic sizes. The economy is good, most are growing. Delivery, Heavy/Offroad Utility, and oddly Track are all growing a lot.
What are all our factories?I don't intend to make this a regular feature, but it's definitely time to summarize. Honestly, I've stopped thinking in terms of total number of factories for the company, and mostly just think of factories for each project. So, I'm not even sure how many we have offhand. The factory screen is getting too big to screenshot, so I'll just list things off. Production numbers are for January 1999. Since I closed the game, I have to tick forward again before the factory screen actually shows numbers (rather annoying).
Unoccupied Factories:2 Huge car factories, 2 Huge engine factories. These are under construction, will finish in mid 2000.
Reactor Factories:There are 3 Huge factories making Reactor engines, totaling about 180,000 units.
The New Minecart has a Huge factory, and a Large 1 factory. Due to bugs(?) the Large factory is not producing any cars. The Huge is producing 47k.
The Hauler Mk2 has a Huge and Large 2 factory, totaling about 74k cars.
The Migrant is in a Large 1 factory, producing about 17k cars.
The Alpaca is in a Huge and a Large 1 factory, producing about 60k cars.
Pumpstack Factories:The Pumpstack is (somewhat inefficiently no doubt) being made in two factories, a Medium 2 and Medium 3, instead of a Large or something. Total about 14k units.
The Rapture is being made in a Medium 3 factory, putting out 6000 units.
The LMP is also being made in a Medium 3 factory, putting out 4400 units. It's actually running 2.1 shifts to the Rapture's 2, but the output for that work is less due to Luxury interior and maybe less automation.
The Bay 12 GT is in a Medium 3 and making 4600 units. Like the LMP, it has a Luxury interior.
Noble:The Noble V8 is being made in two separate Medium 3 factories. These are tooled quite differently, one makes 9600 engines and the other only 5000.
The Noble Premium is being made in a Large 1 factory with 10k output, and the Noble DeLuxe is being made in a Medium 3 with a Leatherworks with about 3800 output.
Colossus:The 12 engine is being made in a Large 1 factory making 8500 engines per month (it's relatively high PU with its 10 cylinders). At least I'm 90% sure it's a Large 1, you can't see engine factory sizes on the factory screen for god knows what reason, although you can see car factory sizes. The car factory is also a large 1. Somehow it made 8300 cars last month, I'm not sure what's with the extra 200 engines.
Hopefully I didn't miss anything. Our total number of factories is: I have no idea still.
R&D: We've got the last VVT unlock, which I believe is VVT for dual-cam engines. This will be useful if we ever want to make the ULTIMATE engine. We unlocked Offroad Sway Bars, which I apparently managed not to put in the Migrant. We've also unlocked new entertainment: Basic CD, as well as Luxury and Premium Satnav. We also unlocked Sequential transmissions, which will be a benefit to some of our performance cars.
There's a lot less new tech coming up as we're later into the game now. We're in a long period where CDs are the latest tech for Standard and below, until they all get replaced by Infotainment in a rush starting in 2010 (probably 2002 for us- I guess you'll be able to plug your PDA into your car???) We're also going to unlock Dual Clutch transmissions in a couple years. These are basically the ultimate transmissions for both economy and performance, though they might be pricey at first because we're unlocking them a few years early. Other than that, there's new safety and Launch Control coming up eventually. In many tech categories, we've already unlocked everything in the game.
Bodies: Thanks to highly aggressive tech investing, we've unlocked bodies up to 2009. Very soon we'll get the 2010 bodies as well, but here's what we have for now: It's already an absolute crapton of body types.
The top two bodies have hatchback and wagon variants off to the right.
In the second screenshot, the bottom body type is a 2.7m wheelbase. The scroll bar is getting less granular the more cars there are, sorry.
The big block of 2005 vehicles have more variants than I can even understand, such as three different "SUV" variants with tiny differences.
Meeting Time!We're getting into the home stretch now. We have almost all the tech and, very nearly, all the bodies. I checked in the car designer and there are only three bodies we have yet to unlock, they're all 2011 and (in my opinion) very boring looking. Keeping in mind that cars take a few years to design, it might be time to design the cars that we are going to use through to end of the game. Remember, when we hit 2020, the game ends and we get our final score.
Performance Cars: We're getting to the point of market saturation in many categories- except muscle, oddly. Track is also pretty much untouched. It might be time to replace the Pumpstack V8 with a more modern engine which is better suited to performance applications. Remember, it was originally designed for luxury cars, it just happened to be big enough to make a good performance engine. With regards to our model lineup, we have a few options. Our new Bay 12 GT has two seat rows, and with a big enough factory it might have the versatility to have a variant for every demographic currently served by the Rapture and LMP. However, it still scores less in certain areas than the smaller cars with one seat row only. We could also introduce new trims for our existing models instead. I do like the idea of building a real, dedicated super/hyper car for ultimate performance as well. This would let us play with some of the fancy tech and materials that just don't get used otherwise.
Utility type stuff: The Hauler and Migrant both skirt adjacent to Utility, but don't quite hit it. We could probably use a dedicated utility car. The 2.5m 2005 van is an interesting prospect, since it has a pickup variant. However, that also has only one seat row, so a dedicated Utility model with two seat rows and a bed could be a better option. The Migrant and Hauler both seem like they could stand larger production numbers as well. The Hauler in particular, despite having a Huge factory already, is spread across wide markets with its variants, so it could use more production.
Economy Cars: We've just rolled out our new I4 engine, which we might use until the end of the game. We could experiment with something more expensive but more fuel efficient, like a dual-cam engine, and see how they like it. We could also consider making the massive upgrade to Direct Injection, although that is still ahead of its time. Otherwise, merely improving our engineering will probably be a big gain. With regard to our models, the Alpaca is probably good until 2020 but my pride is insisting we replace it with a more modern looking car soon. The New Minecart could also conceivably be replaced, though it's doing great. We also might consider splitting some of our cars into Budget and Premium trims, especially as we continue to expand into more factories.
More Factories? We have two Huge factory pairs coming up soon, it is time we decide which model(s) will be the first to get two Huge factories all to itself. At this stage in the game, making multiple trims makes a lot more sense. We also need to decide how many more factories we want to build- the earlier the better. I'd say we can comfortable afford four pairs of Huge engine and car factories, and if we want to go all out we could try making more. I am curious to see if we can reach total market saturation by 2020.
R&D and Marketing: We're getting to the "look how much money I have" stage of R&D and dealerships. Going to the very highest level in anything generally costs more than the actual return, but as we open up more Huge factories we might be able to afford it. Let me know if we should have any particular goals.
The Dropbox is updated as usual with the newest cars! Try the Colossus and Bay 12 GT!
Hot Laps!I did a
video too!
I know you're all excited to see the Colossus, but first, how does our new Reactor engine perform? I'm choosing the New Minecart as our benchmark. It's definitely our fastest economy car yet, alllllmost breaking the 3 minute mark with a 3:00:81 time. It hits 105mph in the slingshot as well, truly making it a car that has enough acceleration to be safe on modern highways. I feel the need to emphasize again though, this thing averages 51 miles per gallon. I don't actually know whether that's US or UK gallons though.
The new Bay 12 GT is extremely similar to our other performance cars in design, with the same engine and AWD. Its main advantage, really, is having a second seat row. On the test track, it clocks an impressive 2:19. Impressively, this is two seconds faster than the latest LMP revision! I'm not sure exactly what makes it so great, but I think the fact that the body itself has low drag and not too much lift is a contributor. It hits 139 on the Slingshot, which is pretty damn fast.
Now the one I really want to see: the Colossus! It's tuned for straight line speed more than handling, but what will its absurdly large 12.0L do around the track? Since we never actually put a performance version of the Noble V8 into production, this 576 horsepower monster is the most powerful engine we've ever produced. During this episode we released the first version of the Colossus as well as a facelift. The facelifted version is about a second faster, setting a time of 2:21. This puts it pretty close to in line with our other performance cars. However, it sets our track speed record of 152mph, before braking heavily to corner the slingshot at 125.
It also sets our 1/4 mile time record of 13.74, although honestly, that's slower than I would expect for a car making well over 500 horsepower.
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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 64093 times)