I know a lot of people feel that the game is too easy and I think this comes down to prices.
A Solution?
Conveyors, upgrades, stockpiles, and power plants could all be 10 times more expensive than they are currently. Just add a zero.
Then, you could tweak the item prices to a specific multiplier like x4.7 to adjust things more precisely.
Conveyors is at a good price IMO 1200$ / Part
Upgrades are way to cheap and most of them are “free” as there are no added assemblys to the line
Powerplants make no sense at all, this should be removed IMO
Stockpiles, why should it cost more? its just an open floor that you place items in
so if you were to go on the offensive on something it would be the Upgrades, it should cost ALOT more.
Also the research team should be more expensive to simulate the process better.
We have increased the prices of uipgrades progressively over the late few patches. As I recall we even quadrupled power-plant costs (and they will probably go higher still).
In addition… a lot of the upgrades are currently ‘unfinished’. For example, you upgrade to a car alarm, but there is no car alarm component to buy (yet). These will be coming…
For example you notice that climate control already has a component, there will be more things like this.
We absolutely plan difficulty levels, and achievements to also encourage different styles of gameplay. Plus I am well aware that the current car sales price system is really bad 
I’m definitely open to balance suggestions, but also wary of breaking the game. Good to know that people agreed with my idea to increase upgrade and power costs. Also interesting idea that conveyors are too cheap.
Thinking about it in terms of 3 difficulty levels- Easy, Normal and Hard…
Take any given map and just figure out the exact cost to build the very first basic production line at the most optimal position and the worst one. Then you can set the starting funds to be in the average of those two. This would be the way to balance for a normal game. Then you would adjust that starting fund value to be either the max or min of the funds required to start out for the other difficulty levels, and how expensive loans and item prices are from there.
Obviously a demolition tool should be in place before trying to balance difficulty levels because a single mistake would be rather annoying. Also as I have said in a previous suggestion thread for balance reasons do not generate import export locations in the map editor. Rather let the map editor limit which walls can have importers and exporters placed on them. I think something like I discussed there is eventually going to be necessary so that things make sense. This will make balancing a lot easier because it just becomes a simple room size calculation from wall to wall rather than a random import location that is harder to balance around and less forgiving to a new player.
i fully agree to the import / export thing.
however with the newly added “decling” prices the game has actually taken a major turn for the harder gameplay
yeah but its not really the final solution, if I understand correctly, Cliff just threw together a quick fix to appease the mob ^.^
yeah. bad thing is that i keep loosing now becouse after a while the price is so low its not worth to sell the cars any more 
There should be a threshold at least of some sort, to make sure you don’t end up losing money on parts you install.
right now I think the ideal spot is about 65%-80% somewhere in there, depending on your car output
I actually really dislike the current system so I’ll be glad when its updated.
I think there should be a limit to how cheap a car design can be sold.
That limit should probably be based on all the factors included in creating it.
So item costs, total spent on R & D to produce the design, production line layout, and hourly costs such as employee wages and power consumption.
Looking at these factors, how would you balance it?
I would take the amount spent on R & D and use it as a sign of how “innovative” or “practical” the car is. If I spent $1M in items and employee wages to create a new part for a car, this item is sold at a higher price until I have covered the amount of money I spent on the R & D. Basically, all newer designs will get price boosts because of this R & D factor. However, competitors can out-price you if they completed the research sooner and are no longer looking to cover their R & D costs. The cars are equally desirable to the customer, but one is at a lower price so customers would always buy that car. Except the cars availability has to be taken into account. That is how many cars are being produced? If you produce the car at higher price, but also at a higher volume you can normalize the profit for the number of sales you are getting in comparison to your competitor and can compete against a company that has done the research previously. Then once you pay off the R & D you will have effectively dominated the market for this particular design.
Of course other than R & D if you make a cheaper production line layout, or manufacture parts in-house it can be more profitable.
In this way we can simulate a kind of difficulty level where you have to reach a consumer range where you are either selling a few cars at a high price, or selling many cars at a reasonable price to increase your market share.
At the moment the game has no real obvious implementation of competitors. I would like to have a system where AI competitors are actually making progress and you could keep track of them.
For example right now aircon declines in value as a feature over time after a certain pre-determined date. I think a better system would be for the value to be fairly constant, until a competitor starts producing cars with aircon (and you would maybe get a pop-up news item telling you about this). at that point, the value starts to decline. (and the value of a basic car would decline too)
With a system like that, you would want to research features before the competition, and you wouldnt want to be ‘too far behind’.
A system like that is easy to hook into difficulty levels as well.
Thats my current thoughts anyway 
Awesome!
Once we have competitors you could add a campaign game-mode where you can also buy out a competitor’s stocks and you get their portion of the map unlocked. I think this would be a great alternative to the empty lots we have currently.