The Migrant Prototype, Other FaceliftsI accidentally deleted the draft of this post when it was almost done so forgive me if it's missing a few details.
The BaronThe Baron Sedan gets a large boost from new hydropneumatic suspension. The wagon gets its main improvement from the new engine, although that also requires a suspension and tire re-tune. I looked into a muscle variant a bit, and it only scored 120, so I don't think it's worthwhile. Meanwhile, tweaking the regular variant of the Pumpstack for the Baron Sedan has me finding that premium customers like their engine
even more exhaust-choked, even at the cost of some compression, so we're down to 120 horsepower now. There's probably hot rodders buying our car and getting 30% more horsepower out of it with nothing but a bigger exhaust. The Sedan is getting 132 in Luxury, while the Wagon is scoring well in Family Utility and Family Utility Premium. It's down to about 110 in Passenger Fleet- they would like cheaper interiors and more seats, but this would be to the detriment of other markets. I also considered upgrading to Advanced 60's Safety, but I would probably recommend against it unless we really want the familiarity. It would bring our base engineering time from 29 months to 40 months. Most of that 29 months is from the hydro suspension.
Incidentally, the Baron Sedan is starting to get a body age penalty. This really illustrates how it's much stronger in certain demographics, depending on how premium they are. Don't worry about it though, right now this is still basically a placeholder in the game. They say they're going to much it much more serious in a later update though...
Here's the forecast for both Baron trims. Once again, it seems like the Sedan is doing much stronger. We might consider dropping the Wagon. I'd estimate that would take another 6-10 months off of our 29 month engineering time, but I'm not certain since to look I'd have to actually delete the wagon trim and then re-make it or juggle save files if we're keeping it.
The HaulerIt's time for our first facelift, with the new engine! Which, I'm leaning towards calling the Windmill, but the vote is still out. Just adding in the new engine and re-tuning the gears has us up 20 points in Family Utility. Once again they like it geared so it doesn't reach 70 miles per hour because of fuel economy calculations.
The Hauler wagon gets only minor tweaks otherwise, the body is expensive so we can't afford to bump up quality in other places much. Speaking of which, I can get away with decreasing body quality (separate from Chassis, this is on the screen where we choose a body variant) to -2 without much penalty, since we have +1 from R&D.
Regular Fuel is here! Compared to the leaded fuel we're using now, it's just slightly worse. The 1 octane difference means we would have to take out about two ticks of compression, which hurts power and fuel economy. However, leaded fuel is going to be made illegal eventually, probably in 1980 in most countries. Note how the fuel availability is 100%- that means there's no real market penalty for using it. Soon we'll start unlocking unleaded Premium, Super and Ultimate, and they'll start with low availability, then increase. This can vary based on both country and target market, so we'll have to be careful about using fancy fuel. I'm pretty sure Ultimate never reaches 100% availability except for markets like Track, GT and Super.
The Delivery version of the hauler also gets very few changes aside from the new engine, but it's ridiculously competitive.
I'm also testing a Utility version- it doesn't seem to do as well as the van. In fact, I think this body type (and possibly the use of FWD) skews more towards Delivery than Utility.
One snag- our base engineering time is 10 months, but it will take 26 months to go from Medium 2 to Medium 3 car factory. The existing engine factory can cover us, but we might as well upgrade it anyway if we're going to stop making Haulers for that long. Also, here's the market forecast. The Utility is the least profitable of the 3, I think, so it's debatable if we should produce it or not.
The MinecartI've started a prototype with the 1.9m body, front transverse as I usually recommend for an economy car. Here's what it looks like after paint and body morphs! It will be the 70's when we release this car, so
I'm taking suggestions for a new paint color. This is extremely competitive in city/commuter type demographics, and I think it might even have the potential for a sporty trim with a faster engine variant.
So, the main issue is this. There's two ways we can take this car: the first is a more expensive version. This would have double wishbone suspension front and rear, and advanced safety, maybe even power steering. We're looking For this option we would be looking at 68 months base engineering time and 74 PU per car. The markets would look like this: take note of the affordability as well as the competitiveness. This will be a big investment at first, but it might be worthwhile after a facelift and getting our engineering sliders up.
We could, instead, make a more budget oriented car. We'd go for more simplistic Macpherson/Semi-trailing suspension, Standard safety, and couple other tweaks. This would bring us down to 54 months base engineering and 69 PU, and a little material cost and weight savings. The big saving is the 14 months engineering time. With this, we could bring it to 60 months and launch immediately with positive automation sliders and other benefits, which would usually be our first facelift. We could genuinely target budget markets, and/or make huge margins immediately. Our markets would look like this:
Then there is the matter of factories. A Large 1 factory (don't even think about L2 or L3) for cars or engines costs about $2.5B, and takes 51 months to build. Suppose we're building the Minecart out of a Large car factory. If we upgrade our existing engine factory to Medium 3 and drop the Baron Wagon, we can just barely support the Minecart and the Hauler. Of course, that gives us a lot of downtime, haulers won't be produced while that factory upgrades. Alternatively, we could go all in on a large car and engine factory. I think we can afford to do this if Baron and Hauler sales keep up while those factories are under construction. However, I probably need to make sure that we can finish the revision of our new engine into the medium factory and have it start producing before our large factory is finished. This might necessitate some gymnastics with starting the large factory in the background and adding it to the engine production with a non-engineering facelift or some nonsense, I'm not sure.
R&D: It's not related to any car in particular, but here's what I'm going with for now.
Extra car: I decided to make "a sports car with the 3.2m wagon" and I thought it was going absolutely nowhere, but then I realized I needed to remove Archana from the market averages. I thought it would do OK in Family Sport, since they don't have a preferred body type, but it actually didn't. They seem to rely on a "circle test" stat, which is based on the size of the car and is worse with larger cars. However, it DID do well in Muscle. It would look like this:
And this is the horsepower a Pumpstack V8 makes when you let it breath:
Markets for wagon, and convertible. Sedan (not shown) also scores 124 in Family Sport Premium.
Market forecast even says we could sell it competitively at a high margin (assuming a large factory, but then almost anything will sell well out of a large factory).
So, overall maybe not a great showing, but better than I thought. Muscle seems to like the large body. Might be something to think about with Gasmea opening up.
Meeting Time:The Baron: Do we want to drop the Wagon? We could also consider trying to make a two variants of the sedan, one with Premium interior (and no production penalty) and one with Luxury interior, like we are doing now. We could even move our more expensive one with hand-built interiors to really target the high-price Luxury segment. Those have an even worse production penalty than luxury, but a Leatherworks factory upgrade can reduce it to the same as Luxury.
The Hauler: It looks like the Utility trim would be the least profitable, so we might not want to produce it, but we can if we want to.
The Minecart: Which direction should we take this in- the more expensive, or less expensive version? Do we want to go for a large factory?
Factories: We also have to decide what size factory our new engine should be made in. This will be shared between the Minecart, Hauler, and possibly the Baron Wagon and future models as well.
Alternative Projects? We don't necessarily have to go with the Minecart, or exclusively with the Minecart. We could investigate other options as well, such as the enormous 3.2m body. It's relatively fast for me to do a quick eyeball of a car if I don't tune it perfectly, so we can see if crazy ideas have legs.
Bonus Pic:STANCE LIFE
STANCE LIFEmaybe I should drive this in Beam lmao
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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 64112 times)