I'm actually surprised everyone's much more interested in the Alpaca-like 2.6m (Goat) than the 3.0m. The 3.0m actually scores more in Family, (I think I said it was a little less, but looking back that's not correct- it's 156 vs 153) and much higher in other demographics, and that's just for the wagon. I'll engineer it so we have it on hand, but I'll just put it in a large factory. The Goat can get the Alpaca's former factories.
1998 New ModelsThe Goat gets the final tweaks to the Reactor. I got a little more fuel efficiency out of it, but the direct injection fuel system is still at -2 quality. Granted, that's -2 with a +10 baseline, but I hope to improve that later. Of course, the engine will be a little tied up while we make our new models. Anyway, the bottom end quality is getting improved to +0 (with +7 from R&D) which lets us rev to 6600 RPM with cheap cast iron internals. Because our VVT gives us a very aggressive cam profile on the high end, even Family seems to appreciate the added room. It manifests itself as increased Drivability and Comfort, in fact, because gears are shifting less often I think. Just going from 6500RPM to 6600RPM redline gives a whole 0.5 Drivability, which is a lot for eking out the last little bit.
In retrospect, there's points to be gained by including ESC. I think I'll eat the engineering time now since it's a new model, but I've given it -4 quality. Similar story with safety, it has 00's safety at -1, which will allow the car to really come into its own for its first facelift. After changing paint, there was a stubborn trim slot which stayed on the red color. In fixing it, I ended up with a plastic strip along the body line reminiscent of the old chrome designs, so I've decided to leave that in.
The Goat will be occupying the Alpaca's old Huge factory. I've added a QA testing building. This puts the build time to an awful 26 months, but I think it will be worth it. We're projecting 36k cars per month against the Alpaca's 33k, and that's without very high engineering sliders. This got me down to 68 months. Notably, the Reactor needed some slider reductions for its own engineering, since it started off at 75 months. This upgrade to direct injection is a big deal. This is of course going to be a pain with regards to facelifting the other Reactor cars.
The Fey Mood looks about right in Noble Purple. (I originally started writing it as the Ghost, but Fey Mood got more votes I think). One tweak for this: I figured, for the production size, why not go to a hand made interior? It gains 4 points in Hyper. Since we're targeting Super and Hyper pretty much exclusively, we pretty much only need to make 1000 cars. A Medium 1 factory with a leatherworks can make 1500. Further adjusting the engineering sliders, we get about 1100 cars and we even have low pressure, which is good so that we can gain familiarity with some of the cool tech. Notably, sequential transmission will help us upgrade all our cars to dual clutch later, I think.
The engine, being direct injected, required unbelievably aggressive sliders to get it out as quickly as the car. Because the automation was so low it needed a Medium 3 factory just to keep up as well.
The price is staggering too! Keep in mind that Automation doesn't really have markets that support million-dollar cars, so this is about as expensive as you can really get. The forecaster says I should set the margin higher, but I'll just let the dealerships do that for me. I don't know if all of our output will actually sell at a high margin.
The Hauler Mk3 was basically already set up, but I did decide to get greedy and go for Expanded Offices. I also improved its engineering sliders, increasing funding to make room for a little more other stuff.
The Carp is selling to these markets, so, I estimate a production of around 10-15 thousand will be plenty. At this point it's okay if our factories end up under worked. I made one tweak to the design, which was re-introducing +2 rear seats. It added a lot of appeal to the Fun and Fun Premium category, at the cost of Track going from 172 to 170 and Track Budget going from around 170 to 165. Additionally, I changed it to pushrod rear suspension, for more sportiness. I did consider going to aluminum body panels, since we have aluminum presses now, but it would go from 95 PU to 125 PU and it's not really worth it from a business standpoint, especially since this car has some good budget appeal. I also realized I should stop caring about Track Premium so much since it's literally 26 cars per month, making it the smallest category in the game, even smaller than Hyper.
The Carp looks good in white, like the GT's little brother.
On second thought, maybe a color lifted from Dwarf Fortress's carp is in order?
A Large 3 factory with QA will be constructed in 73 months, and the car can be engineered in that time with extra funding and just a little negative reliability. It's actually getting a production run of 22k, since we may actually sell a lot to Sport Budget. The Carp has the potential to be our most selling performance car by far. I've set a minimum price of just $10k, because the Sports Budget segment's budget is, uh...
Yeah, apparently, their baseline is negative $6k. Yeah man, I'd love to get paid six thousand to receive a new sports car too.
The last new car is the one I like but nobody else seems to... since we've been calling it a general-purpose car, I'll just call it
The General. There's some interesting stuff to talk about. First of all, despite having trims each with a different body shape, the engineering cost is... not bad. This is the engineering time at baseline sliders, 88 months. Not bad for four different trims. The secret sauce (which I stumbled into) is that there's very few actual different tech options selected. They all have the same suspension types, interior types (except the premium version gets a different entertainment system), transmission, safety, etc. If you have different options selected between different trims, they are vector added. If they're the same, it doesn't matter how many trims you have.
All the settings which just have sliders, like spring rate or tire size, don't seem to count as separate for engineering time purposes. The main ACTUAL difference is the bodies themselves. Despite having four different bodies, the body engineering time is only 1.3 months. Actually, that's bizarrely low, I'd expect more. Still, this car is able to hit a lot of markets.
Just for shits, I added a Convertible variant (another market we're not hitting) and the time went up to 91 months. The only category affected was Chassis. Anyway, with some sliders I got it down to 71 months, the time for the Large 3 factory to construct. Not totally ideal, but hey, it's something. Anyway, time will tell how this strategy works.
With that, I can sign off all the new models. The Reactor based cars are going to wait until our new Huge factories are done, since I think some of them will be occupying these factories. But, I can also do the cars that won't be needing Huge factories, namely the Noble, Colossus, and our Pumpstack cars.
The Pumpstack is being replaced with a new engine. Since we don't have any names for it (I think) I'll call it the
Chain Reactor, in keeping with our theme, but something lava related also might be appropriate. It's a bit of a weird engine. Dual overhead cams mean it could in theory keep making more power up to 8000 RPM, but we've got it limited to 7200 and running on cast iron internals. It makes enough power that the cars which use it have to be artificially limited in speed, if they exceed 186mph they require absurdly expensive tires. 500 horsepower seems to be about the limit for a car like this. I continued to play around with making the engine smaller, and there's very arbitrary points where losing 0.1 horsepower causes like 2 points of Sportiness drop (and about the same Competitiveness drop) all at once, even though the car is still arguably overpowered.
I eventually sized it down to about 3.2L, and dropped the quality on direct injection somewhat as well. The engine I finally came up with makes 450 horsepower, with the peak at its redline of 7700 RPM. With the right gearing, this still gets the Bay 12 GT a 0-62mph (100kmh) time of 5 seconds flat. Markets like it more than the 510 horsepower version I was considering earlier. There's still a lot of potential in the engine if we ever make a version with forged internals.
The Bay 12 GT gets a 6-speed transmission, still advanced automatic rather than sequential because GT likes comfort. It's also getting upgraded from CD player to Satnav (at considerable expense to the customer).
The engineering time for the Chain Reactor is monstrous, at 67 months. Since I'm pretty dead set on getting this engine, and I already set up the GT for it, I'm just going to accept a nearly 6-year facelift time. Needless to say, sliders for the GT are getting cranked up. It's going to be the most reliable GT car on the market, I guess. Look forward to a lot these on the used market in 20 years.
The LMP is in kind of a weird position, since we're going to have a dedicated super car now. I'm keeping it limited to below 186 for the sake of every demographic other than super. Also, the new engine threw the weight distribution off, making it very oversteer prone. It now has stiffer front suspension than rear suspension, and a questionable camber setup of 0 degrees front, -3 degrees rear. That's probably going to have some weird consequences in Beam.
The Rapture immediately struggles with the extra 100 horsepower of the Chain Reactor, so it needs a new gearing setup. Perhaps due to its already high comfort and driveability, markets actually prefer a sequential transmission. Since the speed of all three cars is limited to 184mph, the improved 0-62 time of 4.2 seconds makes this car decisively the fastest of the three Chain Reactor cars. It also gets all the fancy computer suspension bits, and ESC, which necessitates a small reduction in engineering sliders to meet the 67 month target.
Last of all, the Chain Reactor gets a new Large factory to support its production. It won't be nearly as engineering-optimized as the pumpstack starting out.
New Factories! Lastly, I have decided that, for tax purposes, it's time we started losing money. I've commissioned the construction of four each of Huge Car Factories and Huge Engine Factories. Hey, it's going to take a lot of factories to completely saturate the Automation market.
Onward!January of 1999, we're finally losing money, just a little bit. It seems that six Huge factory pairs under construction at once is what it takes to accomplish that. We should be bringing in money once the two factory pairs that are almost done finish. Remember, Reactor car engineering is waiting until then so we can put them to use immediately.
In all this I forgot to facelift
The Colossus. It's been sitting four years without engineering too, poor thing. The 12 engine gains compression and VVT, which helps the fuel efficiency some. That's not a big thing Muscle cares about, but it is a thirsty engine after all. It also gets a lower cam profile, losing 25 horsepower on the top end but gaining 50 ft-lbs of torque on the bottom end, for a smoother engine. A downgrade from Premium to Standard CD players helps with affordability. Lastly, it gets ESC, and negative quality on the 90's safety removed (that feels like something I must have missed in the 1993 or whatever facelift). When that's all done, it's sitting comfortably at over 200 competitiveness in Muscle again. The King is back, baby! Altogether, it should be ready in 36 months, and hopefully cheaper than before.
My strategy worked!
Also, our revenue is up after the 1998 slouch and we're back to bringing in $230M per month, despite having a bunch of factories under construction.
That trend steadily continues into 2000, until our factories finish and we're bringing in almost a billion per month again. I've upped our R&D some to compensate- in fact I doubled our spending, but it's basically just +1 in most categories.
Reactor FaceliftsThere's actually only a couple cars to worry about directly. The Alpaca and Hauler Mk2 are being replaced (a little scary since they're our biggest earners) so only the Migrant and New Minecart get upgrades. The main thing for them is that they need to be upgraded to the Reactor's facelift.
For the
New Minecart, I accidentally clicked on the Chain Reactor and had a bit of a panic.
We've now unlocked up to 7 gear ratios for automatic transmissions. Tuning for this is tricky because the car doesn't have a lot of grip to work with, so I've settled for 6 speeds. There's a lot of overlap already.
Also, it gets ESC. Our ongoing projects have gained us a lot of familiarity, and I think the base engineering time for it has gone down as well.
We currently have 48 months before the Reactor facelift finishes. For the New Minecart, it takes some funding and pressure, and -2 ESC quality, to get it there on time. At this point I also realize that engine supply is going to be an issue, since the Reactor facelift doesn't include the new Huge factories. Lastly, the sign off screen here suggests that the engine won't be done engineering for 52 months rather than 48. I got 48 (actually 49) based on the Goat's projected finish time of 08/2004, while this indicates the Reactor facelift will finish on 11/2004. Well, if I screwed up, we might have 3 months of no engines. Anyway, look at the production numbers. With an additional Huge factory, the Minecart will be making 100000 units a month.
The Migrant, our small offroad SUV, gets a 6-speed transmission, electric power steering and offroad sway bars. I have literally no idea what an offroad sway bar is compared to a regular sway bar, but it has offroad in the name and they like it. I'm... still not sure this rather niche vehicle justifies a Huge factory (although we're due to have scads of them soon) so I might save the Huge factory we have for the Goat or something. I can, however, upgrade its factory to Large 3 in 51 months. This does mean taking the car off the market for four years though. Upgrading factories is really a drag. However, I'm just going to do that rather than add another middling-sized factory to the list.
Also, it's not a reactor car, but I totally forgot to upgrade the
Noble. Nothing crazy happening here though. The motor gets a couple ticks of compression, it gets ESC and active sway bars (the Noble's trademark Hydropneumatic suspension precludes other active bits). The DeLuxe version gets a Premium (not Luxury- that's too expensive for literally anyone right now) SatNav. Admittedly, that's pretty advanced for 2000. I also upped the Body quality a little on the Luxury version. Weirdly, this doesn't seem to benefit from R&D after the car is made. Unlike Chassis quality, I can improve it in a facelift, the but the R&D bonus is stuck at +4. Both versions also get a 7-speed automatic transmission. Apparently they're willing to pay for it unlike the other markets, or it's more benefit to the heavy Noble than something like the Minecart.
Altogether, these changes add up to 47 months to implement. With that, every single car in our lineup has either a facelift or replacement in engineering. Huzzah, progress! With that, time ticks on. I considered spending more money on dealerships, but it's getting to be VERY diminishing returns. The worst example, Dalluha, would cost $190M to go from 85% max awareness to 90% max awareness... that's more than we make from Dalluha currently, I'm pretty sure. Gasmea would cost us $400M to go from 90 to 95%, the absolute max. This wouldn't be worth it in financial terms, 5% of Gasmea is not worth $400M I am pretty sure, but it might be something we do to maximize our score when we're done making factories.
2002Four recall notices later, the Colossus facelift releases! It's selling well, but competitiveness is still sitting at 115 and I suspect cost might be an issue. As usual, we're only selling to 50% of the Muscle demographic. In retrospect, looking at our sales data, we're making 10,000 Colossi per month, and our combine Muscle and Muscle Premium sales are about that much. So, at (unfortunately) the cost of going offline for 28 months, I'm upgrading the car and engine factory for the Colossus to Large 2. Originally I wanted to use the Alpaca's old Large 1 factory, but there wasn't a corresponding engine factory.
Going into 2003, we begin losing money as some of our factories enter the long retooling process. Then, there's another pronlem. The Fey Mood has "launched", but I never built an engine factory for it. In fact, I didn't rename the engine either.
Oops. Actually, the engine for it hasn't completed engineering- I can't start a new facelift for it. Hopefully all I did was screw up the amount of time the engineering for the motor will take. I could have sworn I synchronized them. I hope I didn't somehow synchronize the Fey Mood motor with another car.
Unfortunately, there's no way to check at all when this will resolve. Engine projects currently don't get displayed on the timeline at all. This is due to change in the next game version, but for now all I can do is twiddle my thumbs.
2004: Models Release!All of our models come out this year. The first wave is in August. This is good, since having all of our factories offline at once has caused us to start losing more money than I wanted to for tax purposes- almost 3 BILLION per month.
Some months later, the Fey Mood FINALLY enters actual production. Sales numbers are consistently in the hundreds due to price, so the Medium factory is working minimum shifts. It's still profitable however.
October, 2005 ReviewHey! At this point in the timeline, I'd wager all of you reading this thread are alive. The internet is a thing now too. Just keep in mind that this is what Youtube looks like while we're selling cars with built in satnav.
Our biggest earner right now is the New Minecart, no doubt thanks to its sheer production numbers. Impressively, it's selling 85k units and STILL at a 148% margin. Of all the cars, it's not really the one I intended to give two Huge factories first, but it was in the right place at the right time. The Hauler Mk3 is close behind with 60k sales but an even bigger margin of around 162% depending on the trim. We still haven't totally conquered the market, but that's what our new factories are for. We have fully 5 huge factory pairs ready to expand our sales numbers.
Oops. Looks like the Alpaca is still on the list because there's still a Large 1 factory assigned to it (no engines though, so no actual production).
New Models: The Hauler Mk3, with an H1 and L2 factory, is our biggest new earner, although of course it's continuing in the same market segment as the Mk2. No single trim is completely dominating this time. The Delivery version is selling the most, but at the lowest margin. Maybe it has a higher absolute profit for some reason. None of the markets the Hauler trims target are saturated, in fact we could probably double production. Everybody loves driving gigantic toaster ovens.
Our next highest earner is the General. Despite having only a Large 3 factory, it's outperforming the earnings of some models with Huge factories. As we'll discuss in the Market section, its low production numbers have led most of its trims to be priced exclusively into premium markets. This is another good candidate for getting a lot more factory space.
Just behind is the Goat, it's selling at 156% margin and the competitiveness is still 108, meaning, once again, we could use a lot more of these.
The Carp is doing pretty well, although it's earning less than the Colossus or Rapture. Its high competitiveness and low margin indicates that it may be saturating its markets, which makes sense since it has enough production to dip into budget categories. That will cause the price to stop rising as it has to find a balance between earning profit and being affordable to more buyers. Remember, that's okay. If we're ultimately aiming for a high score, saturating markets is what we want.
The Fey Mood is selling relatively poorly, and it hasn't dominated its markets either. In the Markets screen, the LMP is actually out-competing it Super and Hyper, apparently. I suspect this is because these markets are seeing the LMP as "good enough" and it's vastly cheaper. The Fey Mood has stayed at its minimum 25% margin, which indicates that maybe the price is too high. A facelift where the base price isn't trying to pay back tooling will help, and I can set a 10% margin or something.
As for the rest of our cars, you can mostly see how they're doing in the main hub screenshot. The Colossus and Migrant have both taken well to their factory upgrades. The LMP is our lowest earner besides the the Fey Mood, which seems to be the way it goes for cars targeting Super (it doesn't help that they're overlapping some too).
Markets: Now that we're in the last stretch, it's our goal to
utterly dominate the market. It's our goal to saturate every single one, or at least, get as close as we can. First, here's our awareness:
We have now entered every single market. Some various budget markets have grown very quickly because we've only just now started making enough cars that the dealerships will price down into that range. We also had low awareness in the three Delivery variants before. Offroad/offroad budget categories are gaining, partly because we stopped producing the Migrant for a while and lost our awareness. Track is the market with the lowest gain relative to its awareness. We might just need to build more Carps.
Here's our monthly sales data:
Our goal, ultimately, is to get close to 100% in every category (realistically due to competition and dealership max awareness, 90% is probably the best we can do). If we're not there, then basically for each demographic, we want to decide: do we expand production of existing trims, create a new trim of an existing model, or create a new model? Surprisingly, despite our variety of performance cars and my concerns we would saturate the market, we're only selling to about 1/3 of Sport customers. The logical choice in this situation might be to move the Rapture (or something) into a larger factory. In fact, apparently the Carp is our best competitor in Sport, due to its price. We still haven't saturated Muscle because although the Colossus is fine for it, it's also selling to Family Sport and Family Sport P. City Premium is being filled by the Goat, which probably just indicates we need an actual premium trim of the Minecart. Convertible is in theory covered by the General, but production numbers are so small it sells entirely into Convertible Premium. We don't have a proper Luxury Convertible. Heavy Utility and Offroad Premium might justify new models or trims. Basically you get the idea, if you have any questions about which cars are competing primarily in which demographics I can answer those specifically later.
Lastly, here's the demographic sizes:
This tells us how many cars we need to make to really cover every market. We can start seriously pumping out Huge factories now, and I guess we're going to need to. For example: each Light Delivery, Delivery, and Heavy Delivery is large enough to support a Huge factory. That means that
just one trim of the Hauler Mk3 could justify three huge factories. I've also been surprised by how much cars can be diffrayed among different demographics. For example the Rapture sells 6000 cars, and it's intended to target Sport (and Convertible Sport), but between all our models which have Sport appeal we're only making 2000 Sport sales- some are going to GT, Family Sport, Fun etc. We also have barely cracked some of the Budget markets which are enormous. For example Pony Budget accounts for 20,000 cars, but I don't know if we are best off trying to target that by continuing to make more of our existing cars (so they get cheaper) or building a dedicated mini-muscle car.
R&D: As usual, I've upped our R&D spending some more. We've now hit +15 in Fuel System research- it won't actually take effect for another year or two, but this is the absolute maximum investment level. As for recent unlocks, we've unlocked every level of Infotainment all at once. Depending on how bad the early unlock cost effect is, it would probably be prudent to begin replacing all of our entertainment systems with this tech. We've also unlocked Dual Clutch transmissions while our new cars were engineering, we will probably be using these in all cars, both economy and performance. We also unlocked Electric Variable power steering, a less cheap feeling version of Electric Power Steering. Compared to hydraulic power steering, it has a negligible effect on gas mileage, so this will probably be used in most of our economy vehicles. I suspect luxury cars will still want hydraulic. We also unlocked ESC+LC (Launch Control), the last ESC-line upgrade, which will benefit performance cars. Lastly, we've unlocked Advanced 10's safety, which will benefit any new model we decide to make, and Carbon Ceramic Brakes, which are mostly for supercars such as the Fey Mood.
Coming up, we'll unlock the last safeties, the less advanced 10's safety types and, with enough tech, we can even get 20's safety, not that this will probably ever see its way into our cars. We also have the entire HUD line of entertainment systems to unlock. Other than that, literally the only thing we don't have yet is carbon fiber wheels.
One More Thing: A problem with the Carp: When I designed the car, I chose Basic 90's safety. Light Sport and Track have a strong preference for low weight. However, this has led to a total safety score of 35.8. And, well...
Yeah, it's going to be banned from sale in Fruinia by 2010 if we don't do something. I normally don't like to re-engineer safety, but there's another thing. Even Basic 00's safety will only bring it up to 37.8. Otherwise, we have to go to Standard and gain some weight. So, someone let me know if there's a trick we can pull to squeeze 0.2 more safety out of it and meet Fruinian safety standards.
Bodies: These are the last 3 bodies in the game, with all variants.
World Domination MeetingThis might be our last chance for new cars! Depending how we're doing, I might not do any new cars at the next update, and the one after that will probably be going to 2020 and getting our final score. So, if we need a new car to hit a demographic, let me know.
Fill all the markets! With trims or bodies, we probably need something new for Offroad Premium, Luxury Convertible, and maybe offroad/heavy utility. For everything else, we need to decide if we want to replace any existing cars or expand them with new trims. We have 5 Huge factories ready to go, so we need to decide where best to assign them.
More Factories: How many more do we need? We can probably afford as many as we want to make, and in fact, it's probably okay to lose money at this point in the game. Maybe... ten or so huge factories?
Dropbox: as usual, it's
updated with every single new car. Incidentally, our company produces too many damn cars.
Hot Laps: We have a shitload of new cars, and updates to old cars. I might keep track times limited to just the interesting ones.
The Carp does some impressive handling on its rock hard suspension. It hits a top speed on the track of 134mph, right before Bavarian Bend, having not slowed down at all for the Slingshot. It gets 2:24 final time, making it almost as fast as our Pumpstack based cars with fully twice as much horsepower.
Of course, our Pumpstack has been replaced by the Chain Reactor. Between the LMP and the Rapture, the Rapture Soft-Top is slightly faster (and the hard top is slower, don't ask me why) with our new 450 horsepower engine. It has a solid 10 seconds on the Carp, coming in at 2:13. I guess that's good, or our marketing department would have a hard time justifying the price compared to the Carp. It hits 143mph on the track, twice- before braking to take the Slingshot at 132, and then reaches the same speed before Bavarian Bend.
The Goat, or Hauler Delivery Mk3, both get about 3:02 around the track. Nothing surprising for our economy/utility vehicles. Actually, maybe it's a little surprising that the Hauler is no slower than the Goat. It's ostensibly slower, so does it... handle better? Unladen, it apparently weighs almost 200lb less, which... honestly that just doesn't check out to me. Maybe safety features add a lot of weight per-seat.
The General Wagon (not pictured) gets about 3:10, while the General Sport gets 2:38. It actually makes me wonder if we'd be better off with a Goat Sport or something.
Last of all, the Fey Mood! I have high hopes for this 1100 horsepower blast from the past. The first thing I notice is that the engine sounds like a bicycle keeping pace with a train. The second thing is that it really is quite fast, it hits 190 before braking to take the Slingshot at 145. It crosses the line in 2:03:62. I wonder if we can get a version under 2 minutes. Relatively pedestrian chassis material choices certainly aren't helping the weight.
I'll probably do a video sometime later. I can't handle the Carp or the Fey Mood in beam, hehe.
Bonus Pic: Rear pushrod suspension on the Carp
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Topic: Bay12 Motor Company: Let's Play Automation [Castle Motors: COMPLETE!] (Read 64069 times)