Engine balanace and car design screen

Production Line Suggestions
1

Hey, second post here, second round of suggestions.

First, great improvements since last time i visited, back then the market wasn’t really in and the game was hard to play back then. A lot happened since then.

Second, the engine manufacturing and progression seems really weird. There are a lot of options to chose from for my cars, but the order in which they can be achieved is strange and does not reward the player very well.

This is the most apparent whith start-stop engines and hyprid powertrains. Startstop-engines can only be combined with the standard combustion engine, where it increseases the production needs of the powertrain by a sensor. That is fine, however, for some reason, it is not compatible with fast or superfast engines. Maybe it is meant to be built into them already, but this is not made clear by the research tree. As a result, people might research fast engines first and then go for start/stop to realize they just wasted that technology. It could be solved as an independent update to powertrains in the feature menu.
Hybrid powertrains have the similar problems, they exist next to the other engine types, not as an option to combustion engines. Even weirder, they don’t need any changes to imported parts or production, they build with a standard powertrain and the manufacturing time of fit powertrain does not even go up. they also add way more value to the car then fast or super fast engines compared to their research cost. Maybe this is work in progress, but it makes little sense regarding the rules of the game. fast and superfast engines also suffer from the fact, that they need an imported engine unit which makes them way more expensive then the electric engines, which can be manufactured extremely cheep. They might balance out a bit by needing less imported units /car but this usually isn’t the biggest issue.

Third, i feel the weakest part of the game is still the competition and market. I do understand that this is not the focus of the game, but the last 20 hours in the game were always a drag when trying to figure out how to more effectively make money. I think there are several reasons to that, i will try to list what made it hard for me to enjoy that part.

  1. Judging the value of the car is extremely annoying, as there is no one indicator for it in the game. To add to that, it is completely mysterious what the value of the game should be. Problem one could be easily solved, by just summing up the market value of the car somewhere in the car designs screen. Then, the second part would come in, actually telling the player what percentage above that value customers are willing to pay, so that you have an indicator for where the prize should be. Right now, i have to raise the price when i see my cars are being sold and lower it when this does not happen and i have no clue if i am way off or not.

  2. The market as a whole is too gamey. I can see that it was intended to have the player interact with it frequently to adjust sales and stuff, but this feature does not work for me at all. The changes to market competetiveness and the number of customers interested in certain cartypes/prices switches for the most part too often to be useful for the player. Competetiveness doesn’t matter that much, as it stays at 100% after some time anyway, but the number of interested customers does switch simply too often to be reliable. If i intended to use that in any way, the time the production line needs to adapt to those changes is too long already. I’ve learned that the best strategy is to quickly research as many bodytypes as possible and build a bit of everything. This is emphasized by a lack of an ability to steer the interest of my customers. If i could make them all want to buy only budget cars, it might be an option to sell them. If i was known for sports cars, i could dedicate a bigger production to them. With the current system, the cheaper tiers seem easily avoided, in my current game the component cost of a compact car with all universal and common features is 9000, the gross profit i could do with it is probably not very high vs the investment i needed to make this worth my time. At the same time i can sell an expensive compact car for 52k or more, i just can’t build that many of it. But this does not seem to matter at all because the game seems to allow much higher profit ranges in the higher tiers that cannot be overcome by number sold of budget cars.

Maybe this isn’t even the case, i couldn’t tell because the game does not give me a real estimate of the profit i am getting for my cars. It would help to see what my real production costs are versus the component costs we currently have, this is all guesswork or self made excel sheets.

  1. The competition is not really simulated. The customers are, which is why we have the system with budget sports cars and Jeeps that cannot build sunroofs and therefore should not be sold as an expensive car. Ultimately, the game would benefit from customers having an idea what they want to buy and making realistic decisions between your cars and your competitors cars. But that’s not the focus and therefore the system was made more general.

Anyway, i enjoyed my time, cheers!

2

So, after thinking about it all for a little bit, here is my proposal for a customer market that is easy to implement while still being a bit more responsive and realistic. I haven’t read any wikis or online tutorials and i am basing my assumption on the status quo on my limited experience with the game.

I assume that currently a customer is set on buing one combination of model and price range. If the customer sees a car that fits that description, he will check if there are enough components for the pricetier in the car, he will check if the car is good value for money and if he already has that car or can buy the same car from you for cheaper. And if all those boxes are ticked, he will buy the car with a high propability. If some are missing, the chance of him buying the car are drastically reduced but it’s still possible. This means, the best car to sell is one with exactly enough features for the tier,the features should together be expensive enough to warrant the top prize for the tier customers will reliably buy. Which is why the leather seats and the 5 point wheels are really good, together with aircon or something similar a sedan is already maxed out in price while the production line is not overburdened with imports. It makes little sense though, nobody would buy that car.

I would make the models attract different customers. all upgrades are already in a category, use that to make somewhat believable cars. For example, sportscars value performance upgrades very high while heavy and uneccessary convenience upgrades might be less relevant. A compact car would value safety and convenience, a sedan luxury. So customer 1 might want a cheap sportscar and might enjoy your budget line with barely any convenience, driver assistance and entertainment features, while the guy willing to pay 100k rightfully would want the whole package.

3

Hi, thanks for your feedback, it is much appreciated. I am planning to look at the whole issue of hybrid engines (and whether or not they should have some time as a fitting penalty etc) tomorrow, just so you know I’m not unaware of it :smiley: