1952 Urist and Factory UpgradeFew changes to the Urist MC Engine. I've crept the quality up in areas where fuel efficiency is improved- fuel system, top end, and exhaust, and I managed to get 0.1 more compression by making the cams a little steeper again. This added power, so to keep the car budget-friendly I had to alter the gearing to once again make it incapable of exceeding 56mph. Actually... maybe I don't have to?
Here's the car re-tuned with slighter wider tires (again) and a top speed which gets us above 56mph! This adds a tiny bit of appeal to the regular family market, but it loses us a few points in most of the others. My hope is that we can make up for that because our cars will be cheaper when we upgrade our factory.
Now back to the engine: do they like it with a dual carburetor? It would get better gas mileage, more power... but no, the added price simply reduces the desirability. Back to the rest of car, we've upgraded to two-shoe front drum brakes, and 11 inch wheels to match the truck version of the Urist. Every demographic likes the added braking. Upping our interior quality from -13 to 0 makes big gains in Family especially, as well as other demographics. We lose some affordability but, again, hopefully we'll make it up on factory size. The very last tick from -1 to 0 makes up a whole 6 desirability points for Family.
The truck version of the Urist can stay slow, but it gets a few tweaks: better brakes and brake re-tune makes them both cheaper and better. It also gets a 0-quality interior, since affordability is already very good. The biggest change is actually a major offroad feature: manual locking differential! Back in 46 the budget demographics didn't want to pay out for this, but now they love it. Note the "offroad" score in this picture, it's gone up to 26. The number on the right, 16, is what we had with an open differential.
I still can't get them to like a suspension setup that carries much weight, but whatever. The more I think about it, the cause of this might be our choice of semi-trailing arm suspension for the rear. A great choice for economy cars, but apparently not so much for utility vehicles. I think it actually carries less than double wishbone.
Our engineering plan includes upgrading the Carsmith's Workshop to level 2! Also, I remember to rename it so it's not Car Factory 1 anymore. Oops. Anyway, behold its glory! If you're curious about addons like the QA testing and staff facilities, well, in my opinion they're just too expensive in the early game, but we can talk about them later.
With about $30M worth of tooling improvements over the baseline $40M retooling cost, we've got our base cost per car down to around $1000! That doesn't include the engine but it's still great.
Also, not shown here, I had to make some improvements to the Urist MC Engine's engineering and tooling sliders to keep up with our Medium 2 factory. But, it won't require an engine factory upgrade (yet).
Finalizing everything (including engineering and tooling costs) we're back to an average price in the short history of the Urist, despite many quality improvements. I'd consider that a success. Of course, projected desirability is so high that dealers will probably set a higher margin than this.
Also, there's this "factory utilization percentage" pertaining to how much of either trim the factory will produce... I don't know if it's dynamic or how to change it or anything else though. Mysteries!
I've got both the car and engine engineering for 24 months- that should let us take advantage of some new tech in 33 months for our next facelift, after we've had some time to see how our improved model is selling. Also, I've got a more aggressive payback plan for our loan this time, and I'm even trying to take a loan that only covers 75%. Here goes!
Looks like our factory upgrade will be taking up a large portion of our engineering time, which means we're going to run out of cars again. I also put some more cash into R&D, we'll check up on our progress later.
For whatever reason, dealers seem to still be selling the Urist 50 Pickup at a crazy markup even though it's no longer competitive at that price and their stock will last 24 months. Maybe because we're not making any more right now? In this image you can also see the mouse-over competitiveness graph for the Urist Pickup. Basically it dives immediately, but only because of the margins set by the dealer. The number "23.1" is the estimated number of months it will take to sell the current amount of cars we have.
Launch day! Margins are high immediately and steadily climb! We have to build our awareness back up after being basically out of the market for a year. I've taken the liberty of upgrading our dealerships and advertising in Fruinia and Hetvesia, we're now spending about $300k per month on those in total. That's actually so small it gets folded into an "other" category along with R&D on the pie chart.
February, 1955 Review: We've now unlocked the various tech I was talking about last time. Notice we're bringing $10M in profit every month! We can definitely afford to start spending some money now.
Here's our total market awareness. Our largest demographics are actually around 25% if we just look at Fruinia. All the Utility is in Hetvesia because Fruinia only has Utility Budget as a category.
Here's our sales numbers. According to the Competitiveness screen (not shown- it relies heavily on mouse-over tooltips) the pickup is accounting for some weird categories, including Light Sport Budget, City Budget, and City Eco. Anyway, notice our main money is now coming from Family. In short, if our car is competitive at a high price, that's what dealers are going to go for. We are still making insane margins, so it's not an invalid strategy, but we aren't actually selling to budget because are cars are desirable enough that people who are willing to pay more have bought nearly all of them.
Bonus market graph: here's where our money is coming from.
Here's our research spending and progress. No big tech we're aiming for except Transverse FWD, I think. We're also due to unlock hydraulic power steering in about a year, but it might be too expensive to use at first. Some of the stuff that's coming up includes: Solid Disc Brakes in 1959 (a must-have for most cars). Light Truck Monocoque Chassis in 1960 (safety of monocoque with load capacity of a ladder, priced in between the two). Aluminum engine headers in 1960 (we can make aluminum blocks but only cast iron heads right now, which sucks). Torsion Beam suspension in 1962 (chassis tech actually) which, I believe, is a very inexpensive suspension for economy cars. And, way out there, Mechanical Fuel Injection in 1964. This is kind of expensive to engineer, but good for gas mileage and gains familiarity with electronic fuel injection later, which will be a must-have but crazy expensive in terms of engineering time when it unlocks. Oh and of the course, the one I'm always banging on about, Transverse FWD in 1962 (more accurately 1960 because of our R&D spending).
Body unlocks:
What Next?New models? With our income, we can probably afford to start work on a second model now. It will take 4-6 years to engineer and factory construction won't start until the last 2-3 years of that, and we have income from the Urist to prop us up. We could also wait until Transverse FWD unlocks. That would be a good time to replace the Urist, whether or not we have a second model, as long as we're not financially reeling from startup costs. Keep in mind that if we want to share an engine between the Urist and a second model, it will definitely need an engine factory upgrade or a second engine factory working in parallel.
New engine? We can start working on a replacement to the Urist MC Engine or something different if we want. Now would be the time if we want a mature new engine in a ~1960 model.
R&D? If we want, we can afford to start spending a couple million per month on R&D and be a really high tech company. We don't have to, though.
Urist facelift? We're going to want to incorporate some of the new tech we've unlocked- or, at least, I'll try it out in the designer and see if the markets like it. The big question is whether we want to go from Standard 40's Safety to Standard 50's Safety. This will probably take more time than it's worth if we're replacing the Urist soon, but we gain familiarity. We also need to decide if we want to include a Basic AM Radio. This will help us a lot in Family (probably) but would probably price us out of the budget segments, at least until that feature decreases in price with later facelifts.
What about Familiarity? I'll do another mini-update on this feature later.
Bonus bullshit: Our Automation Test Track Time hasn't really improved much, at 4:29. But did you know you can add other tracks to automation? Here's the Nurburgring, AKA the Green Hell, one of the most famous race tracks in world, known for being the ultimate test of car and driver. Manufacturers are constantly competing to set the world record. In the modern day, the Lamborghini Aventador holds the world record of just under 6:45, and in 1955, I couldn't find the world record for that year on Wikipedia but it's at least under 10 minutes. We got... 18:30. This is almost exactly the same time that Toyota set with a Prius in a PR event where they went out of their way to record the slowest lap ever and demonstrate their gas mileage. It also puts us behind the Trabant P50. To be fair that won't actually come out for a couple years, but it only has 20 horsepower, and it's built by communists. (Wait, are dwarves communists?) Other fun numbers on this screen include our quarter mile drag race time, of 29.5 seconds.
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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 64098 times)