Updated to 1.13. Changelist and highlights

Production Line Game discussion
1

Ok, this is quite a major change, so please be gentle regarding the inevitable bug reports :smiley: Here is the changelist:

Thats an understatement. Performance on really massive factories should be an order of magnitude better now. Hopefully this introduced no glitches. Note that some slots may take up to two seconds to register that a route has changed, but thats part of the optimizing.

I’m hoping this will boost participation in the votes. You can only vote once per version!

This was much requested and I agree it helps enormously.

This may break some existing games, because upgrades have now been moved around. Everything will work ok, but you might want to check that upgrades are enabled.

This should balance things much better. You shouldn’t get that stop-start issue with bulk sales now, and prices will be driven down by your competitors.

This is the big big change. Old save games have their designs translated automatically to the new version, but 99% of your designs will be redundant. This was just so people did not lose their layouts. In future you will only have one car design until we add new body types (next month hopefully).

This patch was a bit of a beast, and touched a lot of core gameplay stuff. Its been mechanics driven rather than content driven, but some big content improvements will be coming in due course. Obviously my priority is to make the games core fun, balanced and interesting. Adding extra ‘stuff’ is relatively easy to do later :D.

2

Wooo! Fit Dashboard! :smiley: \o/

3

Noticed with this update that I am spending a lot of time micromanaging the car and addons prices. Even spending more time with that, than actually building/improving my factory.
Personally not a big fan of this, but can’t think of a way on how to improve it yet.

4

If you just want a general markup, without fine-tuning each price, you can set a blanket price from the top.
What is the force that is encouraging you to micromanage? are prices in the market for features falling too rapidly?

5

I think the general problem with the market price dropping and the micromanagement of the pricing of individual car features is that the game isn’t all that generous with offering information and finding out WHICH ones of the car features is responsible for the lower sales or lower income.

… but that is generally a problem of the entire market model the game is currently using. The player doesn’t really know why something is selling and why it isn’t. Or what the demand threshold actually is and how much the simulated competition is interfering with all that.

I’m sure you also played a lot of Industry Giant or Transport Giant, Cliff? Or at least I assume you are familiar with those type of games…

… there you have something like Cities or Consumers where you sell your goods and which project a certain demand for each product each month (or whatever timeframe) after which the demand gets reset.

There the projected demand (in terms of quantities per month) is directly influenced by your pricing for each individual product and also on how much your competitors want for their products (if they are selling the same).

But whatever you are doing you get a fast, visual response of how much goods you have to produce/deliver to meet a demand, if you are overproducing something or if there is still room for expansion.

… and that is what Production line is currently missing and that makes it quite hard to adjust pricings for individual features and which typical configurations you actually want to produce for a model.

Currently the market is so abstract that you really can’t tell if you are doing fine or not.

So what the game probably should have is some form of simulated market that projects a certain demand for a certain feature (and resulting configurations of multiple features) on a certain model.

That demand would then increase/decrease depending on various events (like scripted ones) or by devaluation (due to newer technology superseding older technology) as well as competition driving prices down/up.

I think a bunch of graphs (like stacked clustered columns or whatever elese seems good) for each model could do that nicely…

Where each bar would basically represent a car feature on that model and displays how much potential there is on the market (how much you sell, how much the competition is selling, how much is still unsatisfied, how much could be unlocked through more aggressive advertising/marketing)

6

Yup we definitely need that sort of thing. Right now you can see the market price of each feature on the finance screen, and then cross-reference it to your feature price in each car design, but that’s fiddly.
To be honest, I do want it to be a little bit awkward to do until you start building and researching marketing & market research, but obviously it should never be frustrating :smiley:

Because there are already thousands of players and the game is not being designed in a vacuum I’ve been concentrated on getting the game more balanced and usable, rather than trying to fix the whole long term financial model in one hit. Hopefully the model in 1.13 is a lot better than earlier versions. Certainly not perfect, but if we are moving in the right direction, thats always good.

I suspect the real solution is just to expand on that design screen for each feature with more data, make the market value of the feature visible to the player (rather than unknown) and maybe add some colored indicators showing the extent to which you are over or under-pricing that feature.
or like you say, I could switch to a supply & demand based model, although that does involve a lot more complexity, as the AI then has to respond to the price and so on…

I think it best to wait a few days and see what people have to say on the developer priorities vote in terms of working on this, versus other features.

7

I also think the price of cars and addons drop too fast, even for stuff I haven’t researched yet.
A better window of your cars vs competitors or something would make it easier. Right now I was selling cars just fine in my new factory and started building an advanced factory, but halfway through the cars I was producing at mark-up 50% stopped selling and had to go down to 20% markup and now I barely make enough to buy components and finishing my new production line is very very slow while I keep needing to drop the markup in order to sell cars to not go bankrupt.

Perhaps an idea to have a difficulty setting for new games. Very Easy and competitors will not go below 50% markup, so if you go are under 50% markup you will always sell your cars. Easy 40%, Medium 30%, Hard 20%, Very Hard 10%, Are You Nuts 0%. Or something in those lines.

8

Difficulty levels is definitely something I will be working on soon, along with scenario objects. Right now it seems people generally want more cars (thats booked in) and also financial changes & routing fixes.

9

There is no rush. There is so much to do and you are only one guy with 2 hands :slight_smile: