Our First Car!Well, we've settled on a family budget car, using the 2.6m 1945 station wagon body. As luck would have it, we can make a van variation of this too, so we're going to try to sell delivery vehicles as well. We're starting a new
Model, which takes us to the market screen. Rolling over Family Budget, we can see what they like:
From top to bottom, left column first, these stats are: Drivability, Sportiness, Comfort, Prestige, Safety, Practicality, Size, Offroad, Reliability, and Fuel Economy. So, we can tell right off that more than anything they like the car to be easy to drive and practical, and it has to be reliable too. They also highly value safety, comfort, and fuel economy. Fuel economy might look like the last of our top five, but it also has an effect on affordability, so it's going to be a big deal.
On our body type, we can see some more details as well. For example, the wagon we're looking at has 5 doors and 3 seat rows- great for practicality score.
I've designed the whole car before taking screenshots, so the wheels are on in this picture, but this is the first thing we work with: the Chassis Screen.
I've chosen some pretty decent suspension for a budget car. Solid axles would be faster to engineer, but they're not much cheaper to build. I have also set the Chassis Quality to -2. That's kind of a big decision because we can't go back and change anything on this screen later. I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about Quality, and a few other important numbers that come up when designing a car.
Every part in the car has three kinds of costs:
Material Cost is raw materials we buy.
Production Units are a somewhat abstract representation of labor hours.
Engineering Time is how long it will take to design, which also directly affects how much money it takes to design. Material cost can effected by our
Engineering Sliders (more on those later) a little but it's mostly going to stay the same. We have a Cost Per Production Unit that depends on our factory setup- various things affect efficiency but the main thing is that the bigger our factory is, the cheaper each production unit is, so big factories make it cheap to mass produce cars. Engineering Time has a cost that is spread across every car we make of this type, but also it takes up actual time, and the whole time we're designing our car, the competition is designing better cars too. We can make our engineering faster at considerable expense, or slow it down to save money and have other benefits.
One more thing- Engineering Time is
vector added- values for different parts of the car are squared, added together, and then the square root is taken again. This means that whichever category is biggest has considerably more effect. By taking some quality off the chassis, I saved 6 months overall, and I took some production units off too.
Since this is our first car, I'm going to go through every screen. Normally I'll skip most of them, but you should at least know what all the parts are.
First we have to design the engine:I've chosen a total displacement just under 1 liter, and about as undersquare as possible, which is the normal choice for a small and fuel efficient engine. On this screen I've also chosen our valve type- push rods! It's really our only option since we need to keep this as cheap as possible. This screen is like choosing the Body for our car. We can update this engine family later, but we can't change anything on this screen.
Bottom End: Cast iron is the only option for our internal parts, we haven't unlocked anything better. Since our engine is small, I can safely reduce the quality to -9. We're making 44 ft-lbs of torque on this motor, and if I reduce the quality to -10, our maximum torque drops below 44 and we start to have stress on the components, which reduces the reliability. At -9 we lose some smoothness and reliability regardless of torque, but it's worth it for the cost savings. On this screen we can also make our engine variant smaller than the maximum family size (the outside stays the same but gets smaller cylinders inside). I haven't done this, though.
Top End: The biggest thing we choose on this screen is our Compression. Basically the more we can compress our fuel, the more powerful and efficient our engine is. However, if we compress it too much, the engine begins to knock (blow up). There's a lot of things that can combat this, using better technology in general and also putting more fuel into the engine. Well, we're trying to save fuel and our tech is primitive, especially our choice of pushrod valves. So, all we can manage is 6.8. Our cam profile affects whether the valves open deeply and for a short time (high RPM performance, sporty) or shallow for a longer time (low RPM performance, fuel efficient). It's dialed in pretty low.
Fuel Distribution: A carburetor mixes air and fuel, using only the vacuum force from the engine cylinder pulling air in. There's two types and we're using the Eco (fuel efficient) one. Improving our engine here is the best way to prevent knock so we can have better compression, which basically makes us better at everything. We're trying to stay cheap so we only have one carburetor. Adding a second would make the engine more expensive, but I have started with +1 Quality here. We also choose our top RPM here. Notice the power graph falls off at high RPM? This is because of our valves. The better valves, the higher we can run the engine. We have crap valves, but we don't want the engine to go fast anyway because we're trying to save fuel.
Exhaust: I went with the cheap components here, of course. We have a pretty narrow exhaust, which actually helps us with power on the low end due to some exhaust scavenging effect mumbo jumbo. We might want positive quality here because it helps fuel efficiency... but later.
Test Screen: You get to hear it on this screen. Vrooom! You probably already noticed, but we're making 27.8 horsepower. The fact that I've felt the need to include the decimal should tell you this is not an impressive number. This is about normal for budget car of this era though. On the top right you can see what is restricting the engine- intake air flow is our biggest factor at 7% loss. Adding a second carburetor would rectify this, but it's not worth the cost right now.
Now, we build the car.Technically, everything after this point is part of the "trim". We can change it later, and we can make multiple trims based on this model at once. In fact that's exactly what we're going to do. We can change our paint color and add appearance parts, as well as choose the actual body shape from the list. But, I'll skip forward to
Gearing: I've chosen a two speed manual because it is cheap. Also, it's negative quality, which you're going to see... a lot of on this car. I've set our top gear to, uh... 145 miles per hour. This makes our high gear very, VERY high... so high that the car can't exceed 55 miles per hour with its puny engine.
Why would I do this cruelty to our car, this atrocity against automotives? Well, here's the Fuel Economy Detail Screen. There's way more detail screens that I'm not covering and normally you don't have to look at them to design a car. But, notice the fuel economy at each speed? Cars also get a fuel economy rating at 56 mph, which naturally will be lower. By not going that fast, we get much better fuel economy, ostensibly anyway. Budget markets LOVE this. They do take a score penalty to Drivability because of our low top speed... but only 0.12%.
Wheels: We're using cross-ply tires. Modern cars use radial tires, but we haven't unlocked that technology yet. This limits our tire width severely... which would be a problem if I already wasn't trying to make our tires absolutely as small as possible to keep costs down. We have 110mm rear tires and 105mm front tires (VERY SMALL). This makes the car have more grip in the rear so it can't go into a rear-first spin. The big graph in the center is the steering graph- all you really need to go is that the D should be right on the blue line for easy to drive cars and the S should be right on the red line for sporty cars. In our case, the car is prone to understeer- if you try to steer too hard, you go straight, instead of spinning.
Brakes: In 1946, all brakes suck. Not much choice on that. We have drum brakes on all 4 wheels. Also notice that we have more rear grip than front grip- our car is back-heavy.
Interior: Finally a screen where I don't need the graph. Our wagon allows us maximum seating capacity in the game, 3 rows of seats. I've chosen two full seats in the front, and the back two rows have "+3" bench seats. These aren't "full" seats, they're what you would expect to find in the back of a two door car that has extra seats, and they're less comfortable. However, our budget demographic prefers this because seats are expensive. You might think a 3-person front bench seat is a good idea, since real world cars of the time (especially american) often did this, but Automation demographics almost never like this. Because we have 8 seats, I've set the quality to -13 to get them absolutely as cheap as possible- they probably resemble portable camping benches.
We also have no radio. Our customers just can't afford it. Notice the lowest variety of radio is a "Premium AM Radio"? As the years pass, radios will become more common and cheaper, and we will get Standard AM Radio and Basic AM Radio. New tech always starts in "Luxury" and trickles down. I'll tell you this now: when Basic AM Radios unlock, budget demographics still won't be able to afford them.
Steering and Safety: Power steering doesn't exist yet, but we can add quality to our manual steering rack- or take it away. Safety features add a LOT of weight and engineering time. Like radios, they start off as "Advanced" for the decade and then the simpler, lighter Standard and Basic will unlock. I chose standard. We will have to keep our car's total safety rating in mind, there are minimums to sell in each country. Chassis type is the other big contributor to safety. If we ever sell a premium version of our car this will be the biggest thing to change.
Suspension is the last thing to set up! The steering graph comes back here because it's heavily affected by our settings on this page. But, the main reason I've kept the whole screen is the graph on the right. This includes a lot of different information- we care about maximum load (only 595lbs because the suspension is soft), roll angle (about 7 degrees is best for comfort, lower is more sporty but less comfortable) and tire wear factor (affected by camber). Our wear factor is the lowest possible, 0.85, which means tires last longer. Budget demographics care a lot about upkeep costs!
Here's our car! This post is long as hell and we aren't done yet, so I'm not talking about all the little stats. The only thing I really want to point out is the market scores, the big green squares on the left in most of the previous pictures. First- we're scoring well in a lot of markets. This isn't as good for Family Budget as a 2.1m prototype I put together, but this car has a very wide appeal. For each
Market, the first number is the
Competitiveness. The baseline is 100: that means we are equal to the top 3 competitor cars, not including ones we sell. 173 is very good, but of course we're better than the average "budget" car because that mostly represents used cars. The other number is our
Affordability and this one isn't as good. Only 33.4% of Family Budget buyers (approximately- more on this later) can afford our car. The fact that various markets might buy the car makes up for this.
Oh yeah, I made a van version. This picture is the van. It scores 135 in Light Delivery and awful in standard Delivery and Heavy Delivery. I don't know what's whack with the suspension, but I could only tune it to a max load of 1000 pounds which is pretty poor. Actually this is the first time I made a delivery vehicle that doesn't score well in all three delivery versions, and I've made 3-cylinder versions.
Footnote: I'm not adding any
fixtures- that is headlights, door handles, little chrome doohickeys. They're visual only. Later, I'll provide the .car file so you can import it to your own Automation game if you want to do visual design and post it here.
Victory Lap!Oh yeah, just for fun, I took our car to the test track! We got a time of 4:32. That's just for the wagon version, but when I pull up with the van prototype, they told us we'd used up out allotted time for both cars.
Last StepsOkay, so we have a car... on paper. Two, arguably: the wagon and the van. Here's a preview of our
Factory configuration: there's a lot of inputs here but only three outputs we care about- well, four if you include cost. The total number of cars, cost per car, and
recall chance all depend on our automation level (how many manufacturing steps are done by machines as opposed to hand built), tooling quality, and the other ones, you can read them. In short, the base cost was $100M dollars to set up our factory, and cars were going to cost $1.7k to manufacture, but I want to put $150M in to make a greater quantity of cars at lower price each. With this setup, we can make about 1500 of each of the two car types. I predict we'll have no trouble selling that many.
Engineering is the process of actually creating the final design. By adding funding, we can finish it faster. Pressure can get it done faster too, but we lose reliability and we don't gain as much familiarity with the tech we use- familiarity is good because it makes engineering faster next time, for
free. I like things that are free. We can also directly improve (or reduce) reliability, we can reduce the amount of materials wasted per car (decreasing cost but taking more production units per car) with Optimization, or we can increase Automation, which means cars cost less production units and we can make more for cheaper. All of this adds time and money.
We had a base time of around 43 months, so I increased to 48 months for a few benefits. With this configuration we'd launch on January 1950.
I also have to do the same process for our engine- it gets a factory configuration and engineering. Our factory is capable of making more engines than we can make cars, so it won't be working full time.
The PriceOnce all is said and done we get to the market projection screen. This is where we can set the price of our car. I've set it to a 15% margin of profit (with factory tooling and engineering costs included for an estimated 5 years production run), so our car will cost $5,500. I didn't screencap the market screen with market budgets, but Family Budget averages around $4900 +/-2900 I think. This means, less than half of them can afford our car, but that's normal. There's 19000 of them or something, and we're only making 1500 wagons.
Also on this screen, you can see new competitiveness numbers. They're estimated, but they account for a couple things: new competitors coming out in the next four years, and the actual price of our car after tooling, engineering etc. They're a lot lower, of course- but these scores are still pretty good.
The Sign-Off Screen is the last step before our car actually enters production. The thing I want to draw attention to is the loan slider- we can choose how much of the predicted $250M project cost we want our loan to cover. I suggest we get it covered-
technically we can just go into negative money and pay no interest in the current game version, but I'm not 100% sure we won't go bankrupt. If our credit rating is F and we have negative money for 12 months, the game ends. I also suggest a 72 month loan term. That's two years after we start actually producing cars to pay it back.
One last thing. We need to invest in dealerships, and we might want to invest in R&D and marketing. First, let's talk about
Awareness. This is a percentage score that represents how many people even consider our brand when they go to buy a car. Awareness is on a per-market basis, and we mostly gain it by selling cars in that market. However, we have a
maximum and minimum awareness based on our
dealerships level. Our dealership level in each country incurs a monthly cost to upkeep, and it rises quickly depending on the level. Not only that, it takes a full year to level up our dealerships in a country, and we pay for it the whole time. I suggest we get our dealerships to level 2 in both Fruinia and Hetvesia, before our car comes out. We can also invest some in marketing, which I'm pretty sure increases the perceived competitiveness of our cars. This picture shows the cost and benefits of a level 2 dealership network in Fruinia.
We can also start now on R&D if we wish. Like dealerships, R&D costs us monthly upkeep, and it costs $25k per month at level 1 and doubles every level after. There is an R&D in each quality slider category. For each level we have, we get two effects: we unlock relevant technologies one year earlier, and we get +1 quality automatically, at no extra cost. This will be the key to world domination, if we can afford it. If we feel confident enough, we can get our Fuel System tech to +1 or +2 before our first car comes out, then immediately update it to benefit from the new tech. This will give better fuel efficiency and performance (we'll trade in the performance for even more efficiency), as well as better reliability, which budget customers love. We could also invest in drivetrain tech to unlock front wheel drive as early as possible.
But, this is up to you. If we're not careful, the costs can be quite a lot.That covers everything! Here's what I need from you...Sorry, this got out of hand. It kind of turned into a comprehensive tutorial. I guess I don't know what to trim out- it took 40 minutes to design the car and all night to write this.
Is our plan good? There's still time to make changes to the car, in terms of both design and engineering.
-If we're feeling really ballsy, we could try to upgrade to a Medium 2 factory immediately.
-Alternatively, we could try to save money or get the car out faster.
-Are level 2 Dealerships (40% max awareness) good enough? Should we focus on just Fruinia, or Hetvesia too?
Research Plan? Should we start R&D now? What tech should we focus on?
We have to name our car!-We need a name for the Model, and both Trims. Trim names can just be "1946 Wagon" type stuff if you want, though.
-We should also name our engine
-We should ALSO name our factory! Who wants to work at "Car Factory 1"?
What color should we paint it?-I went for a low-flake mild blue as a generic 1946 paint. But we can paint it whatever we want. I suggest we pick a color to symbolize our company!
Also, how do you feel about live streaming? If we do live streams, you can have a lot more direct input. I should probably figure out how to get Discord to show a chat window in-game, or otherwise try Twitch or something.
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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 64076 times)