"Automation, Inc" Succession: 2020!

B4nditOo · 1 October 2020 20:29

So, just a quick update from my side, as this turn took a bit more time than I hoped for, so let’s start

1981 Planning

My first action was to sort out what were we producing and where. Oh boy, a lot of was happening. We had two sport/super cars in production/development at the same time (Squid and Cuttlefish), and two ~premium cars (Great White and Boulson), each with it’s own custom engine (4 in total). This had to be cleaned up.

Squid was much newer platform, scoring quite good in many markets, so Cuttlefish was marked to go (actually it took me ~7 years to find a use for it’s Medium 3 factories, so it stayed with us for quite a bit longer).
Great White was also doing much better, however it was a bit old platform (1971), with long over due facelift/upgrade. Boulson was marked for cancellation. As we had only 1985 bodies available (+4 tech), and there was a great 1987 Luxury body coming soon, Great White was marked for a quick 2 years facelift and a replacement shortly after facelift finishes.

1983

Facelifted version of the Great White was released. It received a couple of updates, including 4 door sedan trim (previously we had only the convertible). That gave us quite a bit of the revenue boost, which we are going to need as I had big plans…

Great White 2
New Premium/Luxury model. Same formula as before. Lazy V12, AWD, big 4 door sedan. I repeated premium interior from the Great White 1 (usually I’m going for luxury). There was one large change. Medium factory was simply not enough to meet the demand. I went for the largest factory that I dared for: Large 2 (both car and the engine). Company evaluation was $10B, with almost zero balance and this project alone was going to cost us $7B… and we had 5 other factories that had to be put to use…

Blue Whale
As Great White was moving out of it’s M3 factory to brand new L2, I designed a luxury SUV. Same formula as both of the Great Whites, same engine, with only a couple of differences:

offroad tires
shortest gearing
lot’s of engine cooling
offroad undertray
manual locker

Factory retooling was going to take ~12 months, so the Blue Whale project was scheduled to complete ~7 months after the Great White 2 completion, to overlap factory usage (only 5 months of Great White downtime). Retooling costs were brought down thanks to tooling quality decreased from 100 to something smaller.

We still had 1 year for Squid/Boulson to finish engineering, so fast forward too…
1984
Now we had to decide what to do with the remaining 3 factories (Shrimp, Cuttlefish and Boulson).

Squid Mk2
As Squid was doing as expectedly very good, I decided to do a quick facelift. New tires setup, a couple of upgrades here and there, upgraded engine (improved turbo setup with maxed out AR ratio and new bearings) and scores went through the roof (over 220 competitiveness in Sport).

It deserved increased production… but how? I gave it two M1 factories and two M1 engine factories, moved form the Boulson project (remember I had no money for new factories).

That left us with Cuttlefish factories…
Goldfish
I decided to attack also small sedan market. I picked a small ~2.4M body, FWD (ble…) standard interior, Boxer 4 1.8L ECO engine producing 85HP. Scores ~120 in the Familiy segment and around 150 in the Fun. It will do ok.

Both Goldfish and Shrimp projects will be cheap (around $200M-$300M each, basically nothing compared to the Great White 2 ), thanks to decreasing tooling quality in the factories from ~100, and I tried scheduled factory retooling to start after the Great White 2 premier, to avoid risks of going bankrupt.

Final factories setup starts becoming complicated… what’s going where, etc…

1988
Fast forward to the Great White 2 premiere. At the lowest point, we still had credit score A, so I could have been a bit more aggressive. Shortly after the premiere (success), evaluation almost doubled.

savegame: https://filebin.net/wkac42banj2oiavd/Automation_B4nditOo.zip?t=hh6j3ihe

All in all, as you can see I was quite busy. 3 new models, 2 facelifts. This time I think I’ve left plenty of room for more investments (please start moving production to larger factories!). Goldfish and Blue Whales has been released yet.

@pcmoreno one question. I think you have selected to include factories costs in the project of Shrimp, or at least forgot to unselect it? I noticed it, because factories were overworked, with good profit margins, but project was “loosing money”. I’m pretty sure it was making hell lot of profit in the reality? I’m always excluding factory building costs from the project (not retooling costs!), as those are one time costs, and the factories are staying with you. I prefer to think about building new factories as investments financed from the profit of previous models.

Markus248 · 2 October 2020 03:08

Markus, 1988-1993
Upon my return to the corner office of Automation Inc, I was immediately impressed by the growth in volume and diversity of models on sale and in development! We’re 6.3 Billion in the negative, but our cash flow and company valuation are looking great! It looks like our most immediate concern would be to facelift the Squid, but its selling well as is so I’m going wait a few months and start some projects together.

Okay! It’s 1989 and we’ve erased half our debt, and our lineup is selling well! Looks like it’s just going to be a modest round of facelifts this time around. Starting with the squid: Not too much to see here to be honest, minor tweaks to the Shrimp motor eke out a few more ponies and we upgrade the car’s safety. Sets a mean track time though!

On to the Great White 2: The Pigeyeshark is still here! That’s fantastic! So, apparently, are carburators! That’s not fantastic. I think it’s time to give the old pigeye the retirement it’s earned and make a new V12 to power our luxo-barges. For it’s replacement, I went all out. I bring you the Sandshark 6.5L DOHC Biturbo V12:

On the trim side not too much to see, mostly just upgraded brakes and tires to suit the larger engine.

On to the Blue Whale! Rear Double wishbones on an SUV disgusts the purist in me, but it doesn’t disgust the Automation Consumer. Blue Whale Mk2 also gets the new Sandshark Motor, it had the Pigeye before. Other than that, just routine safety updates and minor tweaks.

Last but not least, it’s the Goldfish’s turn. First, I put some turbos and MPFI on the epynomous engine, and then adjusted the gearing accordlingly on the trim and made the obligatory safety upgrades. I had a look at our market screen and thought that maybe a Hatch variant of the Goldfish would do well, as a City premium car and also to give a little more interior volume to be more competitive in the Family segment? Since I’m not really introducing much new this cycle, let’s try that.

Time to sign it all off! I went for 48 month times for the Goldfish and Squid/Shrimp, and needed 60 for the new engine for the Blue Whale and Great White. Due to the opulently expensive nature of the Sandshark, I also had to upgrade engine factory production. This will take the factory offline for longer than I would like, but I would prefer not to buy another factory since I was already getting confused with the existing number! Total cost is 6.4B, I think that’s within our means given our current company valuation. I’m not going to take a loan.

In 1990 the Archanan and Dalluhan markets opened up; I invested in level 3 dealerships.
It’s now late 1993 and the Goldfish and Squid are on sale; they’re both smash hits selling at well over 100% markup. Might be time for a new factory! The Company’s financials are strong as well, and our two Luxo-models are just under a year away from their refresh hitting the market.

It was a pretty quick and relatively uneventful turn from me today, albeit a highly profitable one. It still took a surprising amount of time though!

Save File: https://filebin.net/z5adax4iu7mgymy6/Automation_Inc_Markus.zip?t=19i5sh7c

pcmoreno · 2 October 2020 08:00

Could be indeed that I forgot to unselect the factory cost, I don’t really remember.
But as for the overworked, that’s were the very high Tooling came in. better tooling, more units -> no overworking.

I checked the prediction graphs and there was no overworking predicted. Did it came as overworking during the facelift or actually when the first model came into production?

I love what you did with the Shrimp.

SenseiB12 · 2 October 2020 08:15

It could also be the car factories are working extra shifts. They have a max of 2.7 shifts by default, and I’m pretty sure the engine factory generates a warning for anything more than 2 shifts.

pcmoreno · 2 October 2020 09:03

That could be, but that’s ok

btw, don’t forget to add me to the repeat list, I should be after Luke, I think

B4nditOo · 2 October 2020 09:41

Sorry for not being clear (I was rushing to write the post). Shrimp/Squid factories were not per se overworked, there was no warning from the game. I only meant that they were utilised close to the max number of shifts, with demand vastly exceeding the supply (both before my facelift and after it there was a ~10% engine production surplus)

I would kept the high tooling quality slider, but bringing it down from 100 to 70-80 was saving a lot of money, that I needed for new Great White 2 L2 factories. Especially that I had to also buy Aluminium presses and addons for the forged engines for the M1 factories that I reassigned from the Boulson to the Squid/Shrimp.

I had to tame it with lean fuel mixture (at least it improved affordability a bit). It could easily made 350-400HP, but without traction control/AWD there would be no way to put the power down

Ops I completely forgot about that! I would have upgraded it to fuel injection, as I didn’t know what to do with the engineering sliders

On the other hand, that made me wonder. So far, whenever I was going for luxurious V12, I was either starting with some DOHC 48V, or upgrading to it quite quickly. However, the luxurious demographics do not care neither about high revving, nor about fuel efficiency, nor about the power. But V12 with DOHC and 48V always was causing me problems with production and requiring larger factories. Maybe for such applications, sticking with pushrod or DaOHC is the way to go?

Also 6.5L V12, might be a tad too big for the 1990s/2000s bodies I had once a problem, where for the 40 years my company was using the same square 6.0L DOHC 48v V12 (designed in 1946), and I was forced to abandon it and throw away company’s heritage, just because it wouldn’t fit into a new body

pcmoreno · 2 October 2020 09:53

haha, yes, I felt exactly that when I tried to drive it on BeamNg. The cuttlefish has the same issue, they’re fast but going on medium fast curves with them (100 -150 km/h) is quite tricky to say the least. I did manage a decent time(for my standards) with one of the Cuttlefishes on the Lakeside Park Raceway

Also I’m still learning how to engineer turbos, so I’m happy to learn from your approach there.

B4nditOo · 3 October 2020 05:13

@LoSboccacc I think you are next according to the list

LoSboccacc · 3 October 2020 09:17

on it sorry got some RL issues

LoSboccacc · 3 October 2020 13:02

PART ONE OF TWO

I’m splitting this in two because it’s taking a while to process all the things going on

----------------- the Goldfish ----------------

car is doing great and in need of minor adjustment.

if anything what is apparent is that we’re underproducing them, like, by a lot

I don’t want to eat margins from upgrading an existing factory, so I’ll get a large plot construction project on the side. Having a large factory however allow the car to reach more markets without losing efficiency massively.

The lineup gains a slightly more premium variant, and because the demographics were basically begging for a more fun version of the car I’ve also designed a sport coupe that is a love letter to 90s current Group N cars:

----------------- the Squid ----------------

The squid is, simply put, aging. It’s a great nifty machine, but it will soon lose margin from more modern sport cars. This puts me in a difficult position, as there aren’t nice, compact bodies to build a replacement and most of the 90s innovations needed we haven’t much familiarity with.

As I couldn’t make a replacement in any short time I’ll went nuclear with engineering, putting in everything in the Octopus replacement, from active suspensions to traction control, and I’ll set it on slow burning for 96 months. Here’s the design, completely comparable with it’s counterpart, which got a retrofit as well:

The weight distribution is so much better and the scores comparable, even if it gets propelled in the future.

The engine showed some limitation in valve once we started hitting the 6000RPM range, so I’m also preparing a prototype to be matched with the car at the next retrofit:

It’s currently limited by conrod strength, which will not be a issue anymore when it finishes engineering.

Now we just need to wait the Sharks launch and see how the market react to them!

LoSboccacc · 3 October 2020 19:51

PART TWO OF TWO

expenses time!

Blue and White are a smash hit, and with the new techs pioneereed on the Octopus we can finally put the massive v12 power under control.

That makes the Blue the king of all UTEs

Same with the Great White, the market just loves them. I’m going to upgrade them both into large 3 factories, and we still cannot saturate production. Not gonna go huge tho, because these car are very vulnerable to market shifts.

This does put quite a strain over the v12 production lines. Limited by 51 years engineering, I opted to split the production over 5 large factories instead of waiting for a huge one to build up:

even if it’s a !!20 BILLIONS!! project, we can absorb the construction costs just fine, especially thanks to the Sharks earnings:

Speaking of finances, that tiny sliver there is our dealership and marketing budget.

I’m going to increase that by a lot over the play, as it has so little impact on the overall cash flow to be negligible. Also, research is going to get some money dumped into.

Since we’re not getting hammered too bad by the factory construction cost, it’s a good time to build another line, for dedicated city cars, especially since we just unlocked tiny 90s bodies:

The Clownfish will be powered by a tiny 3 cylinder engine. Nothing to call home about, costs about half of the Goldfish engine and produces about half the power.

(I actually tweaked it a little more later and reached 23% something efficiency)

The project financials, overall are just passable, especially considered the other cars we building:

but we are completely repaying a huge factory here, and next iterations will be all profit:

As the last Squid iteration reaches completion, it’s time for a company status recap.

We have a lot of great projects coming up, both short and mid term:

we got a decent amount of factories to move around for future projects, and we can have the mediums free to produce more exotic dresses for that v12:

The great white is carrying the weight of the company on its shoulders, and it’s going to be even better when it starts rolling out the larger factories. The blue is breaking a new segment and so need some awareness before it can take off, but it’s showing promise. The squid is doing ok, and the goldfish is a mixed back, it can probably be so much more when mass produced:

I’ll follow the clownfish career with great interest, but it is time for me to retire once again.

https://we.tl/t-bOe3DQziju

lukerules117 · 5 October 2020 07:35

First three years were spent mostly waiting for the current projects to finish to start some of my own, and all that was really done was that I made a quick trim for the squid.

December 1999

The Great White 2 and Blue whale just finished their facelift and at 17 years since starting design I believe it is time to start on their replacements

The first significant project under my rule will be a successor to both the great white and the blue whale Combining them into a single model dubbed the Whaleshark, it’s not great in the luxury SUV markets, but is adequate and performs well in the luxury markets. It uses some overly new entertainment system so the material costs should be cut by almost 4000 by the time it a facelift is made.

2001

At some point I decided against a full recall and opted for a quiet recall and it bit me in the ass costing 0.8 reputation and 0.4 prestige. I would like to be constructing a huge factory or two in Archana right about now, however the cost of land is fairly high at the moment.

The octopus is finally done being engineered so I can finally assign that one squid factory I had lying around as well as upgrade one of the factories from small 3 to medium 3. Few changes were made to the actual car except some slightly increased quality, and significantly reduced cooling(It’s a sports car, it’s not like it needs to be capable of being driven hard). There may be a slight issue with one of the factories being overworked as well but I’m not sure how to fix it as it seems more like a bug than an issue with the factory setup.

2002

The Clownfish just released and as such it’s time for facelift and possibly a factory given that we have 60B company valuation and 4.2B on hand. The facelift of the engine was a fairly indepth overhaul consisting of MPFI being upgraded to direct, the AFR was leaned down to 15:1, added a turbo, swapped the first muffler to none and second muffler to reverse flow, and increased the exhaust diameter. All of that bring the thermal efficiency from somewhere around 25% to nearly 32%. The car itself gets a new suspension tune, an undertray, alloy wheels(this car already spits in the face of our prestigious heritage enough) reduced cooling and modified gearing which allow it to reach an estimated 51.6mpg, and with the factories newly assigned from the golfish it has an estimated price to produce of just 6.1k.

I have once again failed my duties when it comes to balancing the budget and for the past 5 years under my helm I have done nothing to lower our net income, instead having to pay outrageous amounts in taxes. I have rectified this with the construction of seven new huge factories in Archana, four for cars, three for engines. It will be up to my successor on what to do with them.

Save file: https://mega.nz/file/LP5DXaaZ#lb0im_tbJvgUIn9Af0eHZAcyoVFxs-LnNG44Y1mkKrs

LoSboccacc · 5 October 2020 08:31

I’ll snoop in the saves because this is getting super interesting, with having all these different cars from different people and different production philosophy in a single save game.

except for the sport car, each and every design is having comparable earning performances:

expenses doesn’t show car production costs breakdown, but we can work it backward from car margins. And the Goldfish is the clear winner of this and by a large amount with 160% markup on average:

There’s also some interesting consideration to be made around markets: one premium car in two sold worldwide, whether off-road, car or ute, comes from our factories:

There’s no point in pushing it further, given we’re not having great margins as it stands.

The huge Goldfish desirability creates a weird feedback with markup prices: the car would be great for the normal family and commuter markets, but since the demand is super high the markup balloons prices, so that only the premium market can afford it. But since they like it the price stay artificially high, so that the intended markets can’t afford it, and all the cars get sold in the premium segment.

This also happens across regions: even with great competitiveness and affordability, we’re selling jack shit in Arhana:

as everything gets slurped up from Gasmea.

B4nditOo · 5 October 2020 10:35

Indeed, we have saturated the premium/luxury markets.

I think I have made a suggestion once some time ago, that we could use of a view to identify overlapping cars/trims. Since 1995 it looks like Great White is slowly undercut/eaten away by Blue Whale, then both are undercut by Goldfish around 1999. Around 2002 maybe also clownfish starts pushing all of them as well (or they are just loosing competitiveness/economy is in decline).

Hmmm, nice…

@LoSboccacc, one question. What has happened with the Blue Whale and Great White 2 between 1991 and 1995? It looks like we’ve missed $28B in revenue during that time?

@SenseiB12 I think it’s your turn again

SenseiB12 · 6 October 2020 07:46

Well, it’s good to be back! My court order prohibiting me from participating in any company related to automotive production has expired, so I’m here to make cars! LoS already broke down the important bits of how we’re doing financially, but how about the company’s other assets?

2003 State of Automation Inc

Right now the majority of our profit is going towards constructing new factories, about half a billion dollars each month. That’s a good use of our money for sure. We’re also paying exorbitant taxes.

What’s weird is, when I look at the timeline, they’re all finishing at considerably different times. I’m guessing the ones that are taking longer have steel presses and maybe other extras, but I don’t really have a good way of knowing! The other tricky thing is until they’re finished, I can’t assign them to any new models or facelifts, and I can’t assign them to any models or facelifts that are in progress when they finish either. To really use them, I’ll have to have some models ready for a facelift with fast engineering when they finish.

Now, the state of our R&D is not that impressive. For a company with almost $300M to spare AFTER factory construction expenses, I can’t believe we’re only spending 1% of that on R&D.

With some more quality modifiers, maybe more of our cars could be selling at crazy margins like the Goldfish does.

Our dealership network is similarly unimpressive. Actually, most places are around 70% maximum awareness, which isn’t exactly bad, but why not have the actual business of selling our cars be more than a tiny sliver on our company’s expense sheet?

I’ve increased our dealerships to level 7 in most places. If we’re at risk of saturating the premium market, obviously we’re best off expanding. I also increased our research by about +4 in most areas. In all the new spending accounts for about $100M and I assure you, every penny is worth it, and going to completely legitimate destinations. Now Marketing, Dealerships, and Research all get their own space on the pie chart, albeit small ones.

The Cars

The Whaleshark is due to replace the Blue Whale and Great White, if I read my predecessor’s notes correctly, and the Clownfish and Octopus are engineering right now. That leaves me only the Goldfish and the Squid to tamper with, at the moment.

Taking a look at The Goldfish, I’m not too impressed with what I see. I took a new facelift to the drawing board and at a glance, the number I’m seeing aren’t too impressive. With a CD player and electric power steering, I’m getting a little over 120 Competitiveness. Of course, maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way, since this car is such a big earner for us.

I might want to replace it, but we’ll come back to this.

How is the Squid doing? Well I think its factory bugged out some time in 2002 and it stopped being produced or sold. You can see that is LoSboccacc’s graph.

Market survey says it’s performing best in Light Sport, which is kind of funky for a car with 350 horsepower.

Maybe these numbers aren’t so bad, I’m a bit used to seeing stupid crazy numbers by this point but I also usually have broken the game with research. It certainly looks like it’s set up right and the affordability is reasonable. Again that’s impressive for a car with 350 horsepower, imagine getting 4.1s 0-60 time for the price of a miata.

Since hopefully the Clownfish has markets like Commuter covered, I’m replacing the Goldfish, and with something a little bigger. I’ve chosen a 2009 2.6m wheelbase chassis, for a much more modern family car, with multilink rear suspension. Actually, only after I had got it going did I realize that the Clownfish was now due to use up all the Goldfish factories, but I think it’s compelling as a new model anyway.

Behold, the Starfish! Using a fully modernized version of the Goldfish B4 with direct injection, this car offers a comfortable and spacious but inexpensive vehicle for families. Inside is a basic interior with a CD player, five seats, and standard safety features.

There’s also a premium version, since our upcoming premium/luxury car, the Whaleshark, doesn’t have enough seats to target Family Premium.

I also want to create a truly affordable sports car. After I confirmed the Octupus is, in fact, replacing the squid entirely (I don’t know why it says it’s still “in production”) I set about designing a car for Sport/Light Sport. My goal was to keep it cheap, and use the Goldfish motor so I don’t have to design a new one from scratch. I ended up going with a VERY small body, and springing for slightly expensive aluminum body construction. The whole thing is under 2000lbs!

The Idiosepius (smallest known squid species) is a real pocket rocket. Mid engine setup means it can have pushrod suspension on all axles, it corners to more than 1.2g and it even does it with some comfort rating. A new sequential gearbox makes it extra sporty. It’s good we had a DOHC boxer lying around, that was pretty much a perfect fit, although its redline is limited a lot by sticking to cast components.

It’s kind of narrowly targeted, since the body doesn’t even give me the option of a second seat row, but the market score is really off the charts. There’s another 20 points in it if I add ESC, but for now I’m keeping the engineering time down.

I’ve set the engineering of both cars and their engine to 67 months, and each model is getting a Large 2 factory in Archana with the QA addon (essential in Archana). There’s also a Large 1 and Large 2 factory to build engines.

I had rolled the timer just a few months to see if I could squeeze a little out of the new R&D before starting my new models, but this is the first time I’m going to really get moving. Next stop, Huge factories!

…to be continued!

B4nditOo · 6 October 2020 13:10

I request formal expense reports with attached all invoices.

SenseiB12 · 7 October 2020 03:08

2004 and Onward!

In early 2004, all our projects are underway and we still have a lot of income. The new factories for the Starfish and Ideosepius are consuming around another $50M, so there’s still 150 coming in to our accounts.

I’ve also noticed we’re moving the company in a bit of an interesting direction. We’ve been primarily dedicated to premium and luxury markets, until we started suddenly making budget cars as well. But, we still have a lot more Prestige than Reputation.

As we sell less prestigious cars, our prestige tends to go down (and reputation goes up). But, we’ve got a pretty good thing going with prestige, and I might like to boost it. It’s about now I’ve noticed we’re not selling any cars in the Hyper market! I’m lazy and don’t want to make a whole new engine though, so maybe I’ll start something when the Sandshark is done engineering.

Going forward, I have a LOT of recalls. No point listing them all, but it’s apparent that a ton of our factories were (I presume) set up with the default QA slider, which is not what you want to do when you move your manufacturing to Archana!

In all, I count TEN factories with a recall chance greater than 1%! That’s rolled every month, so it’s no wonder I’m getting recalls every couple of months!

In 2005, the Octopus facelift hits the market! It pretty much immediately glitches out and stops selling. I checked and the engine completed engineering and has factories assigned. I wish I knew why this happens.

Going to make a facelift, the predicted competitiveness is around 105, although it does hit some different markets. I think there’s room for improvement! The car itself goes from advanced automatic to a 6-speed dual clutch transmission, bigger wheels and brakes, and ESC with electric variable power steering, as well as stiffer and lower suspension. This helps a lot, but the biggest gains are in the engine. LoS left me a prototype engine which was intended for the Octopus, but never used: the Seahorse.

It was initially set up a little funny, so I smoothed it out. I went from only one muffler to two, and switched from a performance to standard intake, making it much quieter (all the markets prefer this). I also drastically lowered its boost and increased its compression, which was very low. It’s now more high-strung, but making a lot more power. The wheelspin of the car would be a bit high without ESC, but the extra power is worth it, it’s getting 3.8 seconds 0-60 and a top speed of 223 miles per hour, all while being affordable to Sports customers.

Here’s the new Octopus, in Ink Blue!

I actually had to drop the electric variable power steering for engineering time, but I managed to get it out in 48 months (the transmission was the main source of time, but I think it was necessary). One of the factories was missing aluminum presses, so I added those.

Towards the end of 2006, the Whaleshark and Clownfish factories are in construction, so I get about a dozen “extra factory refresh costs” popups since all the factories have been overworked. We also start losing more than a full billion a month (really shows how much the Clownfish is propping the company up) and go well into negative cash reserves. This is fine, we’re still valued at over 100B, but wow that happens fast. Even once they come out, we’re losing money at a decent pace, despite good sales. Hopefully that levels out when we build up our stock.

Since the Whaleshark had a long engineering cycle, it’s due for an immediate facelift. I want to use its engine in a hyper car so I’ll need to make a facelift anyway. But, the first thing I’m doing is giving the luxury version of the engine much LESS power. Drastically shrinking the exhaust and shrinking the turbo a little causes us to from from almost 400 horsepower down to 340, but all that the Luxury markets care about is that it’s smooth and quiet.

It also gets an 8-speed automatic, so the engine never has to be out of its (very wide) powerband.

The SUV version also gets manual locking wheel hubs, which adds about 15 competitiveness in Offroad Premium outright, as well as getting downgraded from Luxury to Premium Satnav. Between this and the reduced horsepower (and top speed), we’re reducing the material cost by thousands.

I also found (what I thought was) a very egregious error: all the trims, even the convertible, are on Chunky Offroad tires! Switching from Offroad to Medium tires made… a surprisingly small difference.

I also managed to reduce the quality of the top end from +2 to +0 with basically no consequences, making the engine a lot cheaper. I put that up to R&D advancement.

I was also surprised to find that no factories were actually manufacturing the Sedan trim, only the convertible and SUV. I decided to change up the Sedan trim to be an extreme luxury car- hand made interior, but still only premium entertainment (apparently even Luxury likes to pinch pennies, according to competitiveness numbers). I decided to have the Medium factory producing Whalesharks get a leatherworks, and produce only the sedan trim while the other factories made the SUV and convertible. It works best at a lower automation slider anyway.

It’s also time for the other vehicle to use the Sandshark V12 motor. I looked up large squid species and mostly came up with stuff like “Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni” or “giant cranch squid” which are even worse for a car than Idiosepius, so I’m just going with a cliche and calling this thing the Kraken.

As you can see, the performance version of the Sandshark makes exactly 666 horsepower. It’s all carbon fiber with a monocoque frame, so it has to be made in a Medium 1 factory. I wanted to use a body that could have a 2 seat row option for GT customers, but I couldn’t find one I liked that fit the Sandshark.

Anyway, the Kraken should be a boost to our prestige. It clears the test track in just under two minutes, and sells for $101k base price. It’s also got a ridiculous prestige score.

It’s also time to update the Clownfish. The motor is a bit loud, with only one muffler, so I added a second one and made the exhaust wider to stop knocking. I was also able to bring up the ignition timing since our tech had improved and the octane requirement was lower. Since this isn’t a premium car, it also gains a lot from getting a 3rd rear seat and downgrading to a basic infotainment system.

It also gets electric variable steering and ESC, but with a lot of negative quality, and a little wider tires to reduce understeer and wheelspin. Vented brake discs as well. The one thing I was surprised they didn’t want was more transmission speeds. I can’t find a way to get better market score out of more than the 4-speed auto that’s in there.

This should be more desirable with wider market appeal, and cheaper too. I bet it will really take off. (I did end up taking out the electric variable power steering in favor of regular electric, which saved a whopping 30 months engineering time!)

I’m looking at 48 months engineering for it, which unfortunately means it won’t be ready to have the new factories added, but I just want this out of the way. The factory set up for this car is pretty wack.

The recall chance is wayyyyy too high, and the automation for the factory is very far away from the automation set on the car’s engineering. I was able to get about 10,000 more cars per month increasing the automation and tooling to 80, and I paid up for a QA building so we can have reasonable recall without too much slowdown.

With the factories for the Clownfish all cleaned up and a new facelift on the way, we can finally move into 2009. The Ideosepius and Starfish both release close to the end of the year, and in december they’re selling. The Ideosepius isn’t bringing in a lot of money (we need to build awareness in its markets) but the Starfish is making a ton of money, half as much as the Clownfish but with only a Large 2 factory.

Good thing too! As soon as these cars released (and we also stopped paying to construct their factories) our finances turned green again. We got almost $23B into debt, which is not great.

You can see that our income increases and spending decreases at the exact same time, when the factories finish and begin operating.

By April, 2010, the new version of the Octopus is out and selling. It’s doing decently, although there was a sales drop for all models in the last two months.

Looking back on the last seven years, I feel like I’ve done a lot for this company. When I reprised my role, we had not enough dealerships, not enough research, and only 22 Prestige and 4 Reputation. We weren’t really known as an exceptional company. Now, thanks to my efforts, look what people think of us!

Uh, okay, we’ve had a LOT of recalls. And I pulled the reliability slider down on some of our cars to get them engineered quickly. To some extent, this is also just the result of selling both cheap and expensive cars. What I’m trying to say is, it isn’t my fault, I swear! Also, the red trend shows that both prestige and reputation are getting worse simply as we sell cars… but then again, most of my factory refresh changes with better QA haven’t been implemented yet! It could still turn around! And once again, the money I’m spending on marketing in these areas is very legitimate!

On the other hand, sales are looking good. We have to gain awareness in some areas (such as Light Sport) but we’re doing well considering.

Revenue is also up a lot, thanks to our new models, and as I said before we have some positive cash flow to work with. (although we have a lot of debt too)

We’ve also just completed one of the Huge car and engine factories which have been under construction for a while. The rest all finish at different times, some very soon and some more than a year out still. As these complete, we’ll see massive increases to our profit since we won’t be spending almost a billion per month on construction. I think that the Starfish would be a great fit for the factory pair that’s just opened up, however, I’m going to leave that decision to my successor.

Okay, I heard from my buddy in marketing, it sounds like, uh, maybe not all that marketing money was being spent wisely.

More Discord Tidbits

https://i.imgur.com/Cv4SHLR.png

I’m going to retire again, and pass the role of company president to @B4nditOo. I’m thinking about where to travel for my vacation. Here, draw one of these countries I’ve listed on slips of paper from this hat, that’s where I’m going!

Here’s the save file: https://gofile.io/d/SKaXnM
It looks like the next turn might be the last for this game! Good luck!

LoSboccacc · 7 October 2020 14:24

yeah the Octopus platform was planned from the start to handle way more power than the Squid it replaced, but we lacked a proper mid-range power engine to make it shine, so it got bogged down from the extra 100kg without being able to the benefit from better weight distribution and suspensions.

The reason the seahorse was set up funky was that at the time conrods couldn’t handle the torque stress from a fat turbo.

B4nditOo · 8 October 2020 08:27

I’ve started the final turn, but it might take a while, as this week I don’t have that much time. Probably I will be done only during the weekend.

I’ve took a brief look at the our situation.

Kraken (high tier sports/super car) is still a couple of year in the engineering. Once it’s out, it will be competing internally with the Octopus (mid tier ~15-20 years old sports car) and Ideosepius (low tier light sport).

Ideosepius (light sport) is ready for the facelift. It is selling okeish.

Starfish (medium Premium Budget, Familly Premium and Passenger Fleet (???) Wagon) is also ready for the facelift (it’s sharing B4 engine with Ideosepius) is a staggering hit.

Whaleshark (large Luxurious/SUVish platform) is also doing very well, and is also a couple of years into the engineering

Clownfish (medium sub premium sedan) is also doing great, also undergoing a facelift right now.

We have a decent profit (a couple of hundreds $M per month), we are a couple $B in debt, and valuation around $120B.

What all of that means, is we have a lot money to invest. My grand strategy is to end up my turn in ~8 years, with Credit Score around F (), with as many new factories as possible and with as many cars being sold as possible from as many segments as possible Going a bit into the details, in the first couple of years (until Kraken/Whaleshark/Clownfish finish engineering):

Octopus deserves the retirement.
Facelift Ideosepius, trying to bump its scores hopefully adding more factories.
Facelfit Starfish, probably just minor updates, and add a lot of factories.

After that, I could either spend all the money into ramping up production of the existing models, or I could go crazy. What I’m thinking about is going full in, trying to cover the missing demographics:

As cheap as possible shitbox
Delivery van

About the 3. and 4. I’m not yet sure, I have to think about it. I think we have the money to both add factories to all of the current project and to start at least one new model. I’m not sure if we have enough money to start two new models (with decent production capabilities). What do you guys think?

About the 1. point

I’ve managed to bump the competitiveness of Ideosepius from 120 to 190 in the Light Sport market with a couple of small updates. But more about this in the next post, once I will have access to my screenshots

LoSboccacc · 8 October 2020 15:51

about the cheap shitbox: I think it’s going to really need more than one huge factory to avoid the normal demographic to slurp them up, see for example the goldfish. or they need to be truly terrible but cheap car, but even for these there’s no guarantee that the sales ai will just up the margin pricing the budget demand into the ground