When I started a campaign (1946) with headquarters in Archana and I tried to design some relatively cheap car for Familiy/Fun/Commuter markets I noticed I think a bug with how the desirability scores are calculated for budget categories (or I don’t understand what’s happening).
Basically I was scoring solid 120%-180% desirability with 50%-80% affordability for the main markets (Familiy/Fun/Commuter), but 300% or more desirability, with 5%-10% affordability for the budget markets. Is it a bug or a feature? In other countries I had an impression that when affordability starts dropping it drags the desirability along, which kind of makes sense and cleans up the UI. In this case, it was messing with a lot of UI things:
top 4 markets were polluted
in the summary “markets” tab, I even couldn’t read some of the markets that I was aiming for, as they were scoring so low (“130”) compared to the budget markets, that it was grayed out.
financial forecast was showing desirability over the years of the highest scoring market (~360%)
That is not a bug, but rather an effect of how the demographics and competitors work.
If there are no cheaper competitors in that market than your car, then you will see that happen. Simple example:
Your car has 1000 desirability and an affordability rating of 30%, while your best competitor has 1200 desirability and 6% affordability.
Total desirability of the two cars:
Competitor: 1200 * 0.06 = 72
You: 1000 * 0.30 = 300
Your competitiveness = 300 / 72 = 417
None of that means that you’ll be making big money in that segment though, because as soon as your margin goes up a little, that means you lose a big section of that market that you previously tapped into.
Thanks for the explanation. I was partially expecting some quirk like that. Also as I more or less understand the game, it didn’t confuse me too much. I knew that I should ignore those numbers and focus on markets where I had some reasonable affordability. For me it was just an UI obstacle, but a new player might get trapped in this, confused, bankrupted and frustrated. So maybe a two suggestions from my side:
Maybe make this math visible somewhere (tool tip when hovering over competitiveness score?), it would help people understand what those numbers actually mean.
Maybe provide another metric “$ competitiveness”/“cashiness”/“potential revenue” of a car? (Integral of demographic’s budget spread, cut off by budget >= estimated_car’s_cost) * estimated_market_share. (can we install some LaTex plugin on the discourse? ). Where estimated_market_share could come from the sales model, or an approximation of it, maybe assuming 100% market awareness? After setting up factories and pricing, estimated car’s cost could be replaced by that giving more accurate score, and the true market awareness (4.1 sales forecast setting) could be hooked in.
My point being that it would be nice to have a single metric that we could aim for and min maxing when designing a car for the campaign. We kind of have this in the sales forecast, but going out of the designer to the sales forecast is a bit tiring and as I mentioned before, current competitiveness score turns out to be a bit confusing.
PS/nit question: can this topic be moved to suggestions?
I guess with the new sales model and selling cars to the dealers first, it won’t be that big of an issue?
LaTeX plugin I’m all for, wrote my thesis in that the most beautiful formulae… unlike those Word-pleb documents by the competition. xD
Having better tooltips for what competitiveness and affordability mean is something we’ve been thinking about. Maybe even plotting those budget curves and shading the area under the graph that can afford your car with the % rating. That would make a lot of things clearer to people aiming for too high affordability.
I’d rather move away from “single metrics we can min-max towards”, rather than towards them… but that shouldn’t be accomplished through UI obfuscation for sure.
). Where estimated_market_share could come from the sales model, or an approximation of it, maybe assuming 100% market awareness? After setting up factories and pricing, estimated car’s cost could be replaced by that giving more accurate score, and the true market awareness (4.1 sales forecast setting) could be hooked in.
the most beautiful formulae… unlike those Word-pleb documents by the competition. xD