I’m writing this from a perspective of 4th campaign play through and a couple hundreds of hours invested into the game, so replayability is not bad even now.
Lack of late/mid game challenges
I’m not sure if that’s only me, but in all of my play throughs, the only challenge was at the very beginning. Once I have a steady income, the question is how quick can I expand into new markets to paint whole markets tab in green. Even with competitiveness set to 120 (next time I will try to go much higher) the mid/late game is just easy.
Maybe add auto adjusting AI difficulty? After all if one manufacture creates a mind blowing car, others usually are catching up sooner or later. In Automation I’m just constantly ahead of the competition.
Maybe add more impactful disruptors?
- When some new country opens, create a difficult struggle for some markets. Like attempt to recreate Japanese cars starts getting imported to USA, or struggling of British car manufactures. Maybe initialise AI car companies from different countries so they are specialised in some markets. Ones a country opens, they flood your market pushing you out of those markets they specialise in.
- Make changes in market sizes more pronounce?
- Maybe change/adjust country preferences over time?
- Make economic downturns more impactful? Oil crisis?
- I don’t know, some global pandemic once a while?
Replayability
Campaign is currently a bit repetitive (after hundreds of hours 
).
- Maybe the starting conditions could be more randomised? Or at least a different preset? Like markets opening dates, what markets are opening and when (a world where everyone loves SUVs from beginning but they are shifting to small cars)
- Different fictional trends, like start with very strict global fuel economy preferences, but as gas is becoming cheaper over time, make it more and more irrelevant and switch to larger engines.
I guess coming up with an AI that can handle such things might be challenging.
Late game is not as fun
There are two factors that make me abandon every play through before reaching 2000s/2010s.
- Creating replacement model for the 5th time is not fun.
- Assigning large number of large factories to models is not fun (or maybe my way of handling this is wrong).
Formulas for cars do not change from game to game and they stay also mostly the same over time, so designing new replacement models becomes more of a chore. Maybe add some tool to speed this process up? Like copy previously selected choices to a new model?
As long as retooling takes ~6months, managing factories is kind of liveable. Once Retooling starts taking 20+ months, it’s really tedious to set everything up. So maybe vastly shorten the retooling period? (I’m not sure what’s the vision for managing factories in the final version of the game)
Also is there a use for huge factories? Their build time is longer than car engineering time, which makes using them a bit problematic. Am I suppose to build them empty 8 years ahead, and then retool them for another 5 years? If building times of huge factories was possible in 5-6 years, I wouldn’t be tempted to use a couple of Large 2 factories instead. And the fewer factories I have, the more enjoyable the game is for me.
Maybe allow for modding some of those things? Things like modding factories’ building/retooling time should be pretty straightforward. Changes to the markets & preferences might be more challenging to mod, as AI could be a problem, but maybe that would be some solution? To let the community help with things like replayability? Setup new fictional worlds (dynamic or static) with different competitors?
