I think the idea that you quick design a bunch of vehicles then delete the entire Design Studio(s) is not good. It is just a temporary placement that takes away the need for puzzle fitting as much as possible into the floor space available.
I have 2 ideas to rectify this.
#1 - If you delete the Design Studio, you no longer get to produce the vehicles it made. You’re back to just the Sedan. You can add a warning when you go to delete saying “if you delete your last design studio you cannot produce advanced body types”
#2 - To make the game more challenging, we need to place an additional Design Studios to produce more advanced body types like the open top sports car and off-road vehicle or some other combination. Right now there is no fight for space in the office factory floor. We need to make this a place where challenging decisions need to be made. And the same rules apply as above. If you delete the second design studio you lose the ability to make the open top and off-road body types.
#3 - As was mentioned in the suggestions thread viewtopic.php?f=54&t=19313 , there could be a degradation of design so you need to keep the design studio to keep things refreshed. But I kind of like the idea #1 plus #2 a bit more as it’s more black and white.
Here’s a pic to show how I’d suggest the additional design studio be presented (note I just randomly chose two. It might be better to have “pickup and off-road” or “off-road and the entire sports car set” for the 2nd design studio)
I love the idea of keeping the ‘Design Studio’ active.
Yes, more vehicles styles are sure to come our way, and that will be awesome! Of course, there is more to design than just a body.
How about a whole design tech tree, looking at things such as:
Improved Aerodynamics
Fuel Efficiency
Vehicle Lifespan
Customer Satisfacation
New materials for design and build
Better Safety cells
In car software such as a GPS App
These items should however take longer to research, make the game alot more challenging.
And again, love that we should be having new vehicles. Personally i am looking forward to producing a wider range of vehicles. And who knows, maybe even have some custom vintage vehicles like the "Morgan 4/4’…drool
I agree that in the late game, the design studio is pretty redundant right now. I am considering how we could have a bunch more ‘design-only techs’ like have already been mentioned, and maybe some stuff like metallic paint, or more stylish seats, running lights and other purely visual things. I can see how it makes gameplay sense to force the studio to remain for the other designs, but I’m not sure how I could really justify that in common sense terms.
I like the Metallic paint idea, very popular in South Africa with our abundant sunshine.
The design studio could also have a tie in to the consumer brand awareness and consumer satisfaction. The research points gained can be on a endless research item for something like a ‘Vehicle Safety Rating’?. Which if not being researched will decay over time?
Or unlocking actual items signs as ‘Showroom Improvements’, etc? All of which can affect your consumer showroom visits.
The design studio could also have an endless loop research item that actively reduces import pricing?
I think once you have done all the designs of cars etc you can delete it to save hourly money on scientists costs and get money back to put into other
areas.Thats what i do to cut my hourly production costs.
You can always put it back when you have more money to spend.Its all about costings which is important.
Borrowing money is very expensive and could backrupt you.I have already been down that road.
Copied this from You Tube when I put it up there a little while ago. I think there are ways to increase the usage, of course I love tying research up alot. Making complex trees that you need to research 1, 2, and 3 before you can unlock A.
Regarding the Design studio and the Market Splits, like someone else already stated, Packages are awesome for that. I could see it being another tree on the design studio, You would need them to design the Package, to unlock the ability to research the items. So for the Basic package, would take 500 design points to open, which would allow the basic technologies to be researched like power windows, in car music, and Air conditioning. Then the Mid Range (1000 pts) tier would need to be designed, before opening research to climate control, then then expensive (1500) would unlock pollen filters, With Luxury (2000) to unlock things like Napa Leather, Wood Dash, Gull Wing Doors, Etc. (Points are examples depending on balancing.)
Some of the Technologies that need to be researched to go into the car are actually more design features, or what I’d class as a design feature anyway. Would it make more sense to have the design studio researching things such as leather seats, the sun roof or bull bars for the front of the vehicle and then keep the research purely for the Technologies like xenon headlights or manufacturing upgrades.
This then adds the challenge in the earlier game to decided on whether to look into different car styles or different design features for a specific vehicle and then adds in the length of time that the design studio needs to be utilised for.
I know this is potentially a bit late in the game to be changing up how the design studio works though and I appreciated that at the minute it basically unlocks things for the make chassis block and would then need to start unlocking the features too.
Edit: I’ve just realised post-typing this that this is somewhat similar to what the previous poster suggested. Basically the car technologies branch off from the design of car that you have researched.
The problem here is there is no thought required for the Tetris puzzle aspect of fitting in pieces of the Office Space areas. We need to be forced to leave research and design in and balance the game’s budgets back around this if people are going bankrupt too much leaving them in.
Otherwise the game will get hammered on “what’s the point?” type criticisms.
A clean solution to this is to reincorporate design studio features into research labs. I get that you want to split it out, but beyond a point it feels arbitrary to do it. You’re splitting one thing into two things because you get to put something cool looking on the map.
It’s just vastly flexible to have this stuff in the normal R&D tree.
An option here is to have research dependent upon how many labs you have on the map somehow. So it’s not just points per second, it’s a points per second threshold to unlock techs. I’ve never played a game that does this, and it might be idiotic, but it seems like you’re going in that direction a little bit. You could have new R&D labs change visual appearance in order to imply new capabilities.
The R&D tree is also finite and it seems a little odd to think about deleting the labs at some point. But finite research is a problem that other games have also (Kerbal Space Program). Maybe you want to do infinite research, like Factorio, somehow, but I have no idea how that could pertain to this game.
