I was playing around with the new difficulty settings which max out at 100x score. If you start with no money and a tiny car plot (no factories) only and set economic variation to extreme, you can add some things like tech and car dealership points (I am not clear how initial dealerships during campaign set up function since the recent dealership changes) while maintaining 100x score.
I've found you can add 9 or more points to say Body tech this way, which unlocks the sweet 1955 models. That 1955 mini-car model is ideal for Achea; it's easier to make it affordable to go further into budget demographics due to expense of production with an initial tiny car factory and contractor engines.
On my test campaign run I made one of that model into a wagon and aimed it at family budget. After a while I had I think like 200 months of preorders (using a tiny factory with automation up to the breaking point for tiny). I did use a smaller, cheaper engine this time though at around 450cc 3 cylinder, since I optimized it for the mini-car instead of my usual 1000cc on everything not sports or luxury. So I guess I'm not sure if that's more pre-orders than it should be, or if I built a more desirable car this time that also had a very advanced body for the year.
The eminently exploitable bug of designing a engine you won't be using and then on the factory sceen within the engine designer, setting it to maximum plot size is still there. As long as you don't sign off, the factory is never built and the plot not paid for, but the game acts as if you own the plot for purposes of company value which means you can take loans against it.
I'm not sure how viable starting without factories is without that exploit. I could only get 3% loan coverage for my first tiny car factory with company valued as an empty tiny plot. It would require a way to obtain a bit of income to back the loan prior to begining the expense of a car factory.
EDIT: V8s are great for initial car, sports is way more profitable to make in tiny factories than demographics with less budget. Eventually you hit a wall if you expand sports production, especially if you are making convertibles and family sports too, but I think a V8 is a great first engine especially with the reduced cost and engineering the first engine receives. I've done well with a 2000cc DAOC (or whatever the acronym is; I used to play a game called Dark Age of Camelot shortened to DAOC so that's how I read it sometimes) V8 in 1946. I designed it for Light Sports but my non-convertible sports model was comfortable enough in the GT area of the demographics that I was selling in those too with the same engine. You can really crank up the selling cost on sports and premiums compared to cheaper demographics and still sell everything your tiny factories make, especially as fancier cars take more production time. I think it irritates the dealerships though, and that's an aspect of the game I haven't really figured out.
One thing I considered was putting 4 in the engine tech that unlocks 50's aluminum bits for engine gubbins. That way I could start with an alum sports V8 on my contractor and use the reduced engineering for first engine on it. I haven't tried that yet though.
EDIT: I found a minor bug and here is a screenshot of a no factory start. It looks like it might be possible to get enough pre-orders with the right designs to pay for the first month of the first factory without going bankrupt.
If I had $82.6k more pre-orders I would have been afloat. I only had it set to I think 10% deposit, though not sure. I think I completely forgot to change that.
EDIT2: No factory starts are way possible:
I made a weird budget car for this. It's engine is the smallest 3 cylinderyou can make, but it's a Dual Overhead 2 with aluminum gubbins. This allowed me to get the weight of the completed car (a wagon actually) under 1000lbs in 1946. I could have had it score a few hundred points of desirability higher in Archana for budget family but it would have weighed 1017lbs or something and that's less cool than being under a half ton. It's a slug on the track with low topspeed, but it accellerates to 20mph much faster than the 1000cc minibus I was making before. It's also very cheap because of the tiny engine, which when using a contractor is usually the most expensive half of the finished budget car. On this it's alnost 50/50 split in production cost between engine (at a contractor price) and everything else.
I already have enough for an engine factory by the time the first model enters actual production at 50% deposit on preorders. That 200 months of production in pre-orders might hurt now though that you have to pay it back. I'll try a facelift and see if that makes me go bankrupt or if the pre-orders roll over to the new facelift. I think though it just starts taking pre-orders on the new model as the factories retool and engineering is done.
When you do a facelift, do pre-orders cease on the previous years' facelifts if you keep them in production past the facelift by keeping a second factory producing it? If they keep pre-ordering a car I'm building just to fulfil pre-orders that would be silly.
EDIT?: I let the save ride and this is what happened with no input other than full recalls when there were recall time stoppages.
Pre-orders just kept going up. I only noticed I wasn't taking anymore in 1990; which I think is caused by the leaded fuel my engines used being illegal by that point; wasn't watching so I don't know when that happened. I'm going to retire on the interest and go on to 2020 to see what that screen looks like.
I stopped production and was going to just never fulfil the pre-orders because at 50% I'm losing money on each fulfilment, but then I thought and said hey enjoy your illegal cars valued customers
I wonder if that's working as intended? I did rip off approximately 480,220 customers (rate of fulfilment a month x months of production pre-ordered) and sold a few of thousands of illegal cars...
Here is the score in the main screen:
Interestingly, it seems fulfilling pre-orders for illegal cars doesn't contribute points to the score on that screen, because around 1990 I stopped gaining points (that's what I was watching)
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Topic: Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game (Read 24675 times)