Gameplay Suggestions

Hey,

the game is fun, however i feel like there are a few things keeping it down. Probably because they are not properly implemented yet, i was very lazy and did not read all the threads, so, i am probably very late to the party :slight_smile:

  1. Research: It’s too abstract. Basically, you can simply build the shittiest factory ever with only the most basic production and cars and wait. Invest all your money into Research Facilities and wait. This leads to stagnating gameplay, you will build a factory that is good enough for your current money. Then you will research. Then you erase your factory and build a new one. That is extremely frustrating because half the time you realize after 1 hour of building, that you haven’t had enough money and you start all over again. You never organically evolve your factory. I would tie research to production, make it much slower and give it bonuses for each of the prerequisite building active. For example, if you want to get axle production, if you still run on axles assemblies and not rear and front axles assemblies, you get no bonus and your bonus scales by the number of rear and front axles assemblies.

  2. Demand: Your demand is not visible. Your market is not visible. There is no explanation for sales. The price seems to determine how fast people are buying your cars, not if they buy your cars. When i deleted my first production line with around 10sec/car, i was making sooo much money, had a markup of only 15% and no backlog of cars. Then i built a new line for 10 million moneys and the cars did not sell anymore. I reduced the price by 10% they sold out. Then they wouldn’t sell for this price anymore. Reduce by 10% again. until, at the end, they do not sell at all. I am pretty sure the system for the market is not implemented, but if that’s what you are going for, you need to explain it to the user.

  3. Efficiency and profit: Probably a UI thing. When i tried to change my factory tu build everything myself, i expected an astronomical raise of profitabilty. I made a spreadsheet to see the production cost of a basic car + QA + Airconditioning which was at the time 10814. At the same time producing all of it myself did cost me 4338 + additional wages + the investment in the power plants. Power plants are dirty cheep, so forget about that. One employee seems to cost 96 dollars/hour, i calculated based on my 10 second prouction line. If i understand time correctly 1 hour in game is 60 seconds, so 190 employes * 96 /6 cars, every car would be 3040 more expensive, meaning i save 3436 per car or 32%. The profit however never showed a tendency upwards. I can’t see the basic economic points that i need to make decisions in the game. What is the production cost of my car? There is no way of seeing if changing production in a certain way will benefit me or not, the financial overview is not enough.

  4. Bigger production lines: Once you try to get to faster production, you very quickly get to limitations of the game. One seems to be the AI between conveyor belts. If you try to get to 1 car / sec, you need 11 dry finish booths. So, to be efficient, you take your 2 Fit Wing Mirror station and you branch out in 11 conveyor belts to be able to dry the finish of 11 cars in 21 seconds. Then you merge your 11 parallel lines back into 3 Fit Flywheel stations. The AI does not seem to know how to efficiently use the existent parallel stations though. Even if i had brought 1 car every 2 seconds to the paint stations, it would not have used all 11 stations equally. If this does not work, the whole game falls apart. The second problem are the resource conveyors. Those are a pain in the ass. You have to put them in, start the simulation and check if they are able to provice stock fast enough. Redrawing them is the biggest problem, because you can’t just delete them, you have to delete the structure below first. There is no way to forcefully separate networks, you have to build everything 1 space off or they autoconnect. And they are even more stupid then conveyors. There are no priorities for them, they do not realize that they keep filling up stuff that is almost full while other empty stockpiles stop the whole production. And fiddling with them is absolutely no fun.

  5. Selling buildings: Why can’t i simply rebuil my stuff somewhere else. If i realize that i need more of one station and i have to change my setup, i have to sell my buildings for half the price and buy them new. It would be much more logical that everything you delete costs you money for the deconstruction, then goes back to you stock and if you put it back down, you pay a construction fee. Should you decide to sell it, you can still set up so the player loses half the initial investment. But if he does not, the financial impact should be much lower. This game has no planning mode, so you delete over and over to get what you want in the end and it is so expensive.

  6. Stock: Right now the price fluctuation for prices is completely irrelevant you can’t manipulate it anyway. You could also put in a resourcecost modifier that varies over time to have some fluctuation. If you could buy huge amounts of resources or stock when the prices are very low and then stop importing, there would be an incentive to care about the prices. Theoretically it is possible to do this already, but the resource conveyor system does not support it, you would have to delete conveyors to stop importing and you would have to do that for each resource in several different spots because the game does not work with centralized spots as far as i understand it.

  7. Variants: The only way to make different variants of the same car with consistent results is seperate production lines. You cannot say every car gets airbags and steering help but only 20% get a panorama roof. You can build parallel stations, one with an update, one without, but this will result in a billion different cars if you do it with every kind of station. Currently, there is no special incentive to building variants, but if you have a market and different people that want different cars, you would also need to be able to tell your station to build Extra x into this car, because it belongs to a variant that has it. Basically put the features on the car, not the station and have an ui up that lets you set up a variant and how many of your cars should be of that variant. In your mind, the game is probably not about the sales aspect, but about the manufacturing, but without it, i would lack the motivation to play after i created the first big production line ant turned on everything.

Cheers