Hello,
First of all, i’d like to apologize for my english because, as a froggy, i’m not a shakesperian kind of guy.
Secondly, to be clear, strategy and developpement games are my favorite kind of game. I play a little to much of EU4, all civs, all sims and city builder, colony developpement builder, etc…, so that is the reason i give you my little impression about your games after a long bunch of testing and playing.
1°) How easy it is simple to break the game.
After many a hours of testing, it became obvious that, producting a car every 2 minuts without taking any loans, is quite easy with the 3 millions challenge.
You just buy science departement and wait until all specialisation are open. Then, when all the specialisation are open you build your factury and there you go you have immediately and immense production line.
The reason why this is possible, it’s because research is far too cheap and too fast.
2°) How easy the game may simply break you even with a perfect compagny
When you produce an incredible amount of cars, you must purchase an immense amount of parts. But the price of those parts depends on a market which you cannot control (ok it is normal, it is the market after all),
but a market in wich every piece sees it’s price going up or down a the same time and with a variation that is the same for each piece.
That is illogical. A market will rarely sees all the price going up or down, but mostly some price are up while other goes down or stay at the same level.
So even with a million $ in bank, you may banquerout in a minute and for many reason
a- you are not inform of variation of the market, which is important
b- you cannot choose the company that sold you somme parts => contrats => well ok you can produce some, but what’s the point if you only want to produce cars ?
c- you have no way of blocking the production without killing the parts arriving parts
d- the spirit of the game is not adapt to the intervention of exterieur event (client desire, price pieces market). It’s like you’re in a game and nothing less exist.
3°) Loans and banks seems cool, but they’ll kill you
Imagine, you need money in the game. You take a nice 100 k$ loans, build your factory, producce, and sell and you have now 200 k$ in bank. The first thing is to repay the loans to get free from bank.
Well you can’t. So your stuck with your loans and it may kill you (well it happens most of the time)
4°) the objectif of the game is great, but it philosophy must change.
The objectif of a factory is to produce in a very effective way. The game is perfect for it, it’s liking doing tertris which production zone. I love it.
But to endure the test of time, you must sell what you client want and you must produce enough, but not too much. This is in contradiction whith the first point i made.
In production line you don’t care about your client and you cannot know what yout client want. You just produce.
In production line, if you produce 1 car every 10 minutes, your can sell it with a profit of 40%, you will sell it in 10 or 20 minutes, but you sell it.
In fact the impact of market piece have no effect on your financial situation. You start little, you stay little. Fine, what if your want to produce more ?
If you produce 1 car every 2 minutes, the production costs are so important, and the variation of the market is so rapid and important, that you need to sell it in 2 minutes with a 5% profit, you cannot wait 20 minutes.
So, imho, theres is multiple way of dealing with that
a- give the possibilty to define the quantity of cars produce by day (with a lowest, and a maximum), with a slider for an entire production line. This way if you build 1 millions car for your population, you can max it up, but you may also produce a less number of luxury cars.
b- if you fit an option at a point, this should take more time to fit a lowest option. For example, fit a leathered seat, should take way time à the same poste, than fiting a normal seat (the option cost more, it takes more time).
c- give the export service a function to collect the need of the client, inform you of the ordered and why potentiel client don’t buy you cars (option missing, or price of the car for instance)
d- have information on what are the other product on the market
e- all client must choose what they want on the car. You sell a model with a series of option included. But if the client want more option, he buys them.
5°) the game should not only be a production line game, but also a compagny management game
The main problem i feel in the game is that it is particulary complicated to have information and you can really see it in the stock of cars you produced and are not sold (i achieve an astonishing 480 cars waiting and gess what… i die)
This ledger is nice but ineffective. Actually you can see all the cars that are waiting to be sold. When you have more than 20 cars you can’t easily deal with it
It’s easiest to see what the modeles i’m producing, and by clicking on it you get a ledger telling me how many are left to sell, how many are in production, right now and the base price
This way, if you got each modele in each category of production, it would be prefectly clear and simple.
and as in other compagny mangement game, it would be interresting to be able to buy other companies.
here are my thoughts on the game
Hope it gives you ideas to get your game even beter it is already.