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 ScoreAll 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?
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.
Naturally, the Beast is getting an additional Huge factory, bringing the total to 2. OR WILL IT?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 64061 times)