Just finished the first mission; my third game. Game 1, turns out I wasn’t playing the mission, I was playing sandbox (somehow), couldn’t figure out where my mission progress was. Game 2, ran out of money. Game 3, through my 15th hour of play, finished the mission in day 12, and cleared out over half of the achievements.
Yeah, for me, the game was addictive enough that I pushed through some mis-steps and a lot of misunderstanding until I finished the mission, but I would have preferred a shorter, more focused experience. If anything, unlocking the first new paint color got me motivated to pursue more achievements.
I think this game would really benefit from more focused missions. For example, if the first mission was “produce 100 cars in 3 days”, you couldn’t specialize anything, and other research options were likewise limited. It’d be a way of learning the game with a focused goal and a short time-frame.
Other suggestions:
- On the Slots/Blueprint view, I’d like to see run time
– plus average occupied time, ie working + broken down + awaiting parts, ie the actual value vs the theoretical value - I’d like to see a Resource Conveyor View, too
– specifically so that I could remove conveyors without destroying slots - I’d prefer to see the Manufacture options in a different place than alongside the Fit options, especially since (other than trying one out) I didn’t use any of them in my first 15 hours
- I’d like to see inputs in the Slots hover-over window
– It seems that production is ultimately limited by the number of importers and their speed. Maybe I’m wrong but I haven’t seen anything to suggest otherwise. One of my biggest needs was wing mirrors, but there’s nothing I could do to speed that up. Hence it feels like trying to optimize further – ie, to continue to play – is pointless. The primary way to optimize becomes buying the most cost-effective source of importers, ie the cheapest expansion slot. I don’t really care for someone to jump in and say “btw tech X turns 1 import into 4 products” because I can’t see any way in the UI to learn that. - I don’t really understand the design behind Expensive and Luxury vehicles. Can I take a $15,000 car and just mark it up to $100,000? That seems horribly simplistic. Given that my mid-range cars had trouble selling even with tons of options, Expensive was a hard target to hit.
– Maybe significantly different components could help here. eg wider, higher-performance tires, larger engines, composite brakes, more expensive paint. The luxury interior components are already there (yet it’s bizarre to see some of them as “common”). Stuff that costs a lot more, something to justify the price.
– I could see bespoke components, eg hand-crafted leather seats, being the sort of item that could justify Expensive and Luxury categories (but, again, nothing in the UI suggested to me that Manufacturing was anything other than a way to squeeze a tiny bit more profit)