Release the BaronFor the final production, I've played around with the engineering a little more and decided that extending to 60 months, plus increasing the chassis quality up to 0 (since we can't change that later) will give our model a lot more longevity. That's an 895 million dollar loan with 161 million in interest- oof.
Also, hopefully we stay nice and profitable, because I've gone and dumped a LOT of money into R&D. That's 1.5 million per month in total on top- there's a bonus cost to investing in multiple different categories.
We might be pushing it with no Urist sales for the whole factory retooling time, a downside of not building a second car factory. But, the Urists's successor can be built in a new, cheaper to operate factory in Archana. ...hopefully this is all worth it, because the Urist factory will be offline for a full 2 years while it upgrades from Medium 2 to Medium 3 and re-tools. That's around 300 million in lost profits.
As time rolls on, we've repaid our original loans, and our profits have grown. I'm trying desperately to build up extra stock, but our cars are selling fast and the factory still can't keep up. By the way, the partially filled red bar on the timeline represents our back-stock of cars, it's long because I've set a target of 18 months or something. We also got on the hook for taxes. $1.9M per month!
...and make that $4M per month. Ouch! If only we could hide our money somewhere it wouldn't be taxed. Or funnel it into lobbying or something.
First month of factory construction. We're selling cars faster than we were ever producing them. I actually wonder if we might have been okay without the billion-dollar loan we took out. At this stage our net income is 15M, with 26M of monthly payouts from the loan, so we could probably be less than 500M in the red by completion without the loan. That's cheesy, of course (you don't pay interest on negative balance, just lose credit rating), but it works in the current version of Automation. In the expenses pie chart, red is the car factory construction cost (per month), blue in the engine factory, and green is taxes- apparently selling all these cars means we need to pay for roads.
Since we're selling premium cars, I'm taking the liberty of opening dealerships in Dalluha a year before release. I'm also upping our advertising in Fruinia to increase our awareness for premium markets.
Launch day! You can see the competitiveness of the new Baron on the timeline- it's so-so.
Oh no- our first
Production Issue! Despite having the lowest chance (0.4%) of our three facilities for a production issue to occur, the Engine Smelter's Workshop has had a problem with our Urist MC Engines, we've made a bunch of bad gaskets that are springing oil leaks or something, and it's affected our engines made in the last month or two. We can basically choose whether we want to issue a full recall, with mail-out letters and everything. Our alternatives would be to pay for it when it gets fixed, but not advertise the issue (Quiet Recall), or try to ignore it. As you can see, this has various expenses and consequences to our Reputation and Prestige. Our reputation gets dinged a little in a full recall, but a lot more if we ignore it and it gets discovered. Our prestige isn't hurt at all by a full recall, it's what a high-end manufacturer would do for their customers, but it IS hurt if a cover-up is discovered. In this case, I'm going to do the full recall, I don't think 2.2M and 1.0 Reputation cost is all that bad. If we get a big one in the future though, I'll pause for you guys to decide.
June, 1960 Review: The Baron has been out for a few months now and its sales aren't as stellar as the Urist. Right now we're making less profit than we did before, and it's not close to our loan repayments- we're trying to pay back a billion dollars in four years, which may have been aggressive in retrospect. Our credit rating has dropped to B+. You can see on the timeline that the competitiveness of the Wagon is much higher than that of the Sedan, which is sub-par. So overall, keeping the Urist as our main car seems like it may have been the better strategy in retrospect...
...but not all hope is lost. Remember the Urist got similar performance numbers on launch, so we'll facelift the Baron and see if it has more potential.
Here's our market awareness numbers for Fruinia and Internationally, as well as our total sales numbers. As you can see, it's getting a little hard to judge anything from overall awareness, since some countries have lower numbers overall, or in specific markets.
Another important thing: new safety ratings! The Urist would be barely passing the 10 mark at this point. By 1970 safety ratings are climbing fast, but we don't need to worry about the Baron, it's well ahead of its time.
In R&D, there's not a lot of big stuff on the horizon, but we have unlocked a lot of things, and we have more quality numbers to play with, which will take effect for facelifts and new models. Of the major new techs, Transverse FWD will be a boon for cheap cars. We also have Light Truck Monocoque chassis, which is pretty specifically useful for trucks and vans. Disc brakes will benefit our current car lineup considerably. We also have a couple techs that will require a little more decision making as to whether we should implement them: Advanced 60's Safety, and Mechanical Fuel Injection. The safety would be great for the Baron, but re-engineering the safety basically adds one to two years of engineering just on its own, so we might wait for a new model or a later facelift. MFI is a similar story but for engines: it would be a large benefit to both power and fuel economy, but time consuming to engineer.
What Next?The Baron needs a Facelift pronto, with better engineering and new features such as disc brakes. The only controversial part is whether or not we should update to the new safety features which just unlocked.
Do we need a new model? It's probably time we replaced the Urist. However, we're not well positioned to build a new factory because, well, we don't have income from the Urist. If we share our existing engine factory which is currently underused, we can afford a Medium 1, maybe a Medium 2 or 3 car factory if we're feeling ballsy, but we definitely won't be able to afford a Large. At least land is about 40% cheaper in Archana, where we will probably want to build our new factory.
New economy engine? If we're making a new economy model, then having a new economy engine to go with it makes sense. We can install it in the Baron Wagon too. If we want, we could always start a prototype now. I would recommend doing this instead of putting it into the Baron Wagon on the first try, because otherwise we won't be able to finish the Baron Wagon's next facelift until the engine is done, leaving crappy Gen 1 Barons on the market for years.
Bonus: Hot LapThe Baron, an actual performance vehicle, has completed the Test Track in 3:01! It even passed through the Slingshot at a blistering 103MPH! I've recorded a
video of me trying to match this time in BeamNG.
Oh yeah, and the
Dropbox folder has been updated with the new cars. Go try them yourself!
Replies to posts while I was writing this post: Pumpstack, heh. As for B4, I don't think it's likely to be worth it over an I4 at this point, but I'll do it if people vote for it. Either way, it's time to design a new engine model... PROBABLY. If we want our car to UNBELIEVABLY CHEAP then there is still no beating pushrods, which means we can still stay with the Urist MC for a while. But, in my opinion it would be very wise to design a SOHC economy engine.
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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 64073 times)