In my latest round of playing production line I foud myself doing alot of waiting for research and money. There wasnt a whole lot to do to keep my mind occupied while waiting for that stuff and even when a new research would come in it would basically be me quickly buying the upgrade and applying it to the model followed by more waiting.
Something I thought might add a little more complexity and activity between this waiting game was something somewhat inspired by Big Pharma. Eventually we start unlocking the ability to make our own parts. What would be really neat is if these parts had a rating we could change on the parts. Waht I’m envisioning is something like a pyramid with a floating point between teh 3 extremes. The three extremes would be innovation/safety/reliability. Parts we order in would just always be pegged out as reliable but parts we make ourselves we could change through research and experimentation in special testing rooms.
Some of these rooms would be a crash test course. Some would be a more specialized electronics room. In the Factory I work in in real life they have an Air Bag room where they do routine tests on airbag systems. The idea behind changing these ratings is to 1) develop your own brand. Anyone can get the stock doors but your company has doors that look a certain way. This would be reflected in 2) Each type of car would have certain sweet spots you would try and get the part to that would really increase its value. These sweet spot values could be something that is statically coded in, randomly generated, or static with the option to make them random.
So for example Maybe an SUV would want reliability and safety in their doors while a Sedan would want a little more innovation. These values should change based on the luxury value of the car as well. a Basic Sedan would have different sweet spots than Luxury Sedans.
At the end of the day you could really set up a detailed process of custom making every part on the car and finding that magic sweet spot to make the perfect car at teh expense of only having a few lines due to limited floor space or you could just focus on one or two parts and focus more on a factory that uses its space to just build more cars.
Either way it would be something to keep the player busy while he is waiting for research or money.