In my own Automation game, Linguini Motors has thus far not survived past about 1960 on three attempts—I don't have a very good sense for when I have enough money to expand.
If you're not sure, just go to the sign-off screen and see if you are able to get 100% loan coverage. If you can- great, you're good for it! Possibly without the loan, but weird stuff happens when your income source gets cut off for a long time. Otherwise the other big number to keep an eye on is your company valuation. As a rule of thumb, if your negative cash-on-hand is less than half your company valuation, you're good to go. Again, estimate this with the total projected cost on the project sign-off screen (and of course your current funds). If you're not hitting these marks, wait and keep selling out of your current factory. Of course, this gets trickier if you're on an insane difficulty run where it can be hard to sell competitive cars out of a small factory, but if you have a medium factory and some design sense this should rarely be a problem.
Well Sensei, I think you'll have to give up on your career as a Gran Turismo driver, but you could probably find work as an announcer. 
Hah, I actually consider myself good at racing games, but trying to drive an Automation car in Beam completely blind is nightmarish. I'll never give up my racing career- not unless I crash and die! Which, with the Baron
TM's new state of the art safety features, is less likely than ever!
Baron '60 and the MigrantJust starting off with the refresh, it seems like the Baron is more competitive for Premium Budget than Premium, and pretty affordable in that market too. I wonder what we're missing to make this a more "premium" car- there's a chance it's just a matter of sheer body size, but unfortunately we can't really make it bigger.
...actually, they like it (just a little) more when I drag the front of the car way out. Oh god, this is hideous. I mean, it's bold and aggressive. Muscle cars are coming soon, right? Well, it will be good, uh, challenge, for our fixture design team to make it look good.
Dragging the Trunk ALL the way out gives us a couple more points but... I just can't do it. I can't sell a car whose trunk is as long as its wheelbase, I have to put it somewhere more reasonable. This is one thing that annoys me in this game, I wish you could do a little more with body morphs, like alter the actual wheelbase. I guess the logic is that since morphs can be different between trims of the same model, it wouldn't make sense for differences like that to exist and still be the "same model".
New disc brakes all around, still less grippy than the tires can handle- the solid "Braking Force" line is below the dotted "grip" line at most speeds. The rear dotted line decreases on the high speed side of the graph because of lift. In high performance cars, this can be corrected with a wing, but this isn't really that kind of car. We're using brake pad material biased towards comfort, so we could get more braking performance if we wanted to, but these feel smooth as butter, or something, and apparently that justifies not stopping very quickly.
Just adding power steering makes a HUGE difference. We go up to 162 in Premium, and the Drivability climbed by 7 points. It looks like this heavy car really needed it.
Engine tweaks- it looks like they don't want more power, basically no matter what I do. I played around and found they DO like Premium Leaded fuel with much higher compression, and even more restricted exhaust and lower cams. Quiet, with power starting from the bottom, but I don't think it will be smashing the '55 Baron's test track record. Incidentally, the engine's fuel efficiency is surprisingly good for a big (well, medium) V8. That all gets lost in gearing, but hey, it's something.
It gets a new, 3-speed automatic transmission to replace the old 2-speed. As you can see, we only get 110 horsepower down to the wheels through this awful slushbox. Now this car has mushy throttle, mushy steering, and mushy suspension.
Market survey says it's a great premium car, with some appeal to muscle car buyers (new category as of this year!) and Family Sport Premium too. Also, Commuter Premium, because apparently our 15MPG gas mileage can be overlooked in favor of the high quality luxury interior, even though Commuters value fuel economy more than anyone else except City Eco.
Here's what the final body shape (with more trunk than the '55 but not MAXIMUM TRUNK) looks like:
The Wagon update isn't producing crazy numbers, but it was selling fine already. I have made some strides with the Urist MC engine: for about a 10% increase in cost, we've got dual carbs, higher compression, more power, more fuel efficiency, and the redline has increased from 4700RPM to 5400RPM. This engine is no longer the
absolute bare minimum in technology, although it's still incredibly cheap. I hope the increased fuel economy will make up for the change in price. The new 34 horsepower Urist should be a great improvement.
Other than that, not much changes. It's staying on drum brakes, because that's all it takes to provide as much braking force as the narrow tires can provide grip. It also looks like standard interiors are considered to be an improvement over premium, but only if we take Archana into account. I'm going to leave the Premium interior where it is and save us a couple months engineering. It does get power steering just like its Sedan cousin. This actually reduces our engineering time compared to having one car use power steering and one not- from 30 months to 25 months! Irritatingly this number does not show in the designer- you only see the engineering cost as if you were making the car from scratch. But, repeatedly going between the designer and the engineering screen reveals this to be the case. Effectively, it's cheaper to give the wagon power steering than not to do so, if we've committed to giving the sedan power steering.
Now's a good time to talk about Archana. Archana is such an outlier than unless I'm specifically targeting them, I prefer to disable them in the market screen in the designer, because they want totally different things from everybody else. The Baron Wagon's a great example of this. If you take the average of all countries, it scores 140 or so in Family. Without Archana, 150. in only Archana, 120- and they can barely afford it (30% affordability). You have to be careful of this or it can lead you to weird design decisions- like downgrading the interior quality when most countries prefer premium interior. Often times Archana won't buy your car at all anyway, instead it will sell in countries where it can get a better margin.
Notice Archana gets the car competitive in weird areas like Premium Budget too. This is for a wagon which has an inherent penalty for not being a sedan!
This is Archana's demographic sizes. They're decently sized. The next picture is Archana's budgets. They're not.
Total design time for the Baron is 29 months. It's not the quick turnaround I was hoping for, but I think it really needs added reliability and tooling. Predicted Sedan competitiveness remains bad, let's hope that's just plain wrong.
Baseline cost is WAY down. Once again this is sort of a trick: we haven't really paid back the tooling from the first time. I've set much higher margins to compensate. Still, both cars have come down in price compared to before, which should really help them sell. I think the Baron is going to take off when this is done.
The MigrantWell, this will be a challenge. I basically never use these van bodies. Furthermore, we're talking low-income with it, which has various meanings now. The actual Budget demographics in Archana can barely afford the minimum price for the old Urist model. The Migrant is going to be more expensive just by virtue of being larger, and we probably will have to push it out of a smaller factory too, which tends to make the car more expensive. Since we want the "absolute cheapest engine" there's truly no replacement for the Urist MC engine. It's tiny, it has pushrods, and its engineering is basically maxed out to make it cheaper, which took us 14 years of revisions to accomplish. I WILL test a version with a newer engine later though. Just for starters on the Migrant, most of the time I'm targeting Archana-only Family demographic. That should put us close to Family Budget range for the other countries, or at least get us crazy margins like the Urist had. It's getting a front transverse engine, and some cheap suspension (but not solid axle, they like it close to ground for ease of access), as well as negative chassis quality to help offset the cost of the large body. I know some vans like this were rear or mid engined, but this body only allows front. There's a real lack of rear-engine non-sporty body options in Automation.
Notice the little +1 on the bottom of the chassis quality slider? That's from our R&D. This means that we have an effective chassis quality of -1 instead of -2 for calculating body flex, weight, etc, but we still get the discounts of a -2 slider: that's a lot of engineering time, and a little Production Units. Saving PU is good because it means more cars out of the same size factory, for cheaper.
Preferred body morphs seem to be rear dragged out as large as possible, but the front made as streamlined as possible for fuel efficiency. That's okay by me, it means we can actually tell which end is the front from a glance. By this point I've spent a lot of time fiddling with wheel sizes and suspension tuning but I'm not done yet.
They seem to like drum brakes, and small ones- apparently large brakes of any kind are just prohibitively expensive, affordability drops like a rock. I assume they are actually "balanced" for regular use, in that the rear grip line would be a lot higher if there were passengers and cargo in the car, so both braking lines would be similarly below the grip.
Naturally, power steering is a must for such a heavy vehicle. Also, with enough other parts of the car made cheaper, even Archana tolerates Advanced 60's Safety despite a 3% affordability cost over Standard 50's, which is a lot. This will help it sell in other countries too. Not pictured: I gave it 100 cooling airflow for extra reliability and utility. Family loses a little competitiveness from this, but Family Utility gains a lot more.
Suspension tuning is a nightmare but this seems to be the best I can do. 80% comfort multiplier- this thing is kind of a bumpy ride! Apparently that's necessary to make it easier to drive.
Here's the overall competitiveness scores. It hits Family Utility Premium in Archana despite having a basic interior and no radio at all. It also scores 96 in Utility in Hetvesia despite not being a utility vehicle, which bodes well for a truck variant. In demographics such as Family, it actually scores very close to 160 if you take Hetvesia out of the equation. None of these numbers are mind blowing but it's cheap and hits a wide spread, so this could be viable. For the record, we're looking at 5 years engineering time on the dot.
Also, 112 in Pony Budget lol. I feel awfully bad for the guy who's like, "I wanted a muscle car but I can only afford this, I guess it's kind of fast." It's geared to a practical top speed of 64MPH. Of course, it's already a bit of an Automation meme that every car you could possibly make will score in this category.
Variants:You're getting your money's worth this episode (if you amortize the cost of your ISP bill across the time you've spent using the internet, this thread probably cost a dollar or two) because I'm going to work up a few alternatives too. First, the
Delivery Van variant has scores that are off the charts with very little tuning.
Like our other semi-trailing-arm car, a
Utility variant has miserable carrying capacity at around 1000lb, but this doesn't stop it from being a hit (according to market projections anyway). Just keep in mind that Delivery and Utility are both smaller demographics than Family, so it's normal to see higher scores if you directly target them.
Now motors. What would it look like with a
SOHC I4? On my first crack at it, I came up with a 1.3L 3-valve that makes 53 horsepower, and better fuel efficiency too. It's not fuel injected or anything crazy, so the base engineering time is 62 months- we can have a prototype out in time to revise into the first facelift. It's about 25% more expensive than the Urist MC Engine. It scores about 10 points higher in Family and Family Utility for most countries, and 5 higher in Passenger Fleet. I didn't do pickup/delivery mockups.
We could also try a
SOHC H4 (that's a boxer, the pistons make an H shape). At the initial piston size of 86mm it's too large for front wheel drive, but once I size it down similar to the I4, it works out fine. In fact, in tuning it for Family competitiveness, I got very nearly the exact same stats with a 1.3L setup of the same bore and stroke as the I4 prototype. This graph is a comparison of the two power curves (they overlap) and stats. Notably, the boxer engine is a
hair better in a few ways. It makes the tiniest bit more horsepower AND fuel efficiency, which might be down to some setting I didn't get exactly the same but I'm not sure. It's also smoother and quieter, and has 0.5 more reliability, which I'm not sure how much that actually matters but it's something. It also takes 10% more Production Units to make, meaning the same factory makes that much less engines for that much more price each. Unfortunately there is one bigger difference: it will take about 13 more months to engineer. We're comparing a 36 month base time with no familiarity to a 24 month base time with 22% familiarity.
In my opinion, the logical choice is still the boring I4.
Back to the main Migrant: Putting aside crazy variants and estimating for a Medium 2 factory, we're looking at a launch price of $6500, approximately, which puts us on the upper end of budget cars in most countries and well affordable by Archana standard markets. We have a good forecast too.
The projected cost of building a Medium 2 factory is $1.5 billion. The bank will loan us, at most, 500 million. That means we have to be sure we're good for 1 billion in cash during factory construction without going bankrupt. I think we can, but with our other loan going on as well, this will be really pushing it. Medium 3 is probably out because it would ALSO need our engine factory to upgrade to at least Medium 2. We may be looking at an engine factory upgrade either way when we introduce a new engine; we will be producing fewer engines per factory shift because they cost more production units than the Urist MC.
Boardroom Meeting:The Migrant: Should we go ahead? Should we make any changes? Is Medium 2 a good factory size? Should we start with just the family version, or utility/delivery too?
New Engine: We should definitely engineer one of these. What should we call it? Do we need to assess the viabilty of introducing a new engine with the first generation Migrant (and an upcoming Baron Wagon) instead of a facelift? This would probably require reducing the Migrant to a Medium 1 factory to start off.
Marketing: Once the Migrant comes out, it's probably time to introduce our dealerships to Archana. Should we wait until later, or open up now and see if our current cars can sell?
Keep in mind, even though I've designed these cars, we can still cancel them or make major changes before I've signed off. So far I've mostly led you guys on to the next car, but I'm open to trying different things, and we can also make changes contingent on them actually getting better market scores if we want.
Bonus Pic: Migrant FWD drivetrain.
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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 64095 times)