I’ve been using this to convert.
usinflationcalculator.com/
Although of course doesn’t take into account time and wages.
But you don’t have to, the game value doesn’t change, so a $7000 total cost car in 1940 is still that price in 2020 as far as I understand it.
- Or are you talking to get real life prices to compare?*
Yah. So for example a thousand dollar car in 1946 would give us ~$12000 in game
Thanks for the input ya’ll! i understand the game is a set price from 1940-2020, i was trying to convert it to a “realistic” price in real world. for example i made a 1940 “Common Man Base Model” it costs $4978 after all is said and done with 195.8 Production Units. so i want to know what a ~$5k car in game would be how much in the 40s in real world, does that make sense?
Ill try that inflation calc. see if that helps what im looking for.
Now my BIG issue is the Production Units. what are they? i assume they will have a tutorial about it when the Tycoon mode is finished. but until then ill be playing my own “Tycoon” mode. so if anyone knows what is low, normal and high units for a car? and if a Dev reads this maybe shed some light on Priduction Units to try and help me understand how they will be used in Tycoon mode?
Production units are a measure of effort required to produce a certain part or car. Factories, depending on their tech, will produce a certain number of production units if fully staffed. A production unit in 1940 hence is much more than a production unit in 2020 because of automation (not the game 
). Also, your almost 200 production units is a lot by modern standards 
Regarding inflation, you can’t use the official calculator for anything after the 80s because the US government has manipulated the official inflation numbers a lot since then (changed the calculations over and over again, always to the downside). If you have 70s pricing you can compare that to 40s and 50s pricing, but you can’t compare / recalculate 2015 pricing to 50s pricing using those calculators. shadowstats.com does give a more realistic picture of inflation measured by the official government calculations used in the 80s. 
So what you’re saying is, the $1000.00 car from 1946 wouldn’t cost $12k in 2015, as displayed in the calculator at www.usinflationcalculator.com , but probably closer to $40k due to the US government’s tweaking to make itself look better? (using ~7% inflation average from 1980 through current year on top of the calculator’s data)
Yes, correct! There is about a factor of 3-4x missing I would estimate.
Another way to estimate prices is to convert to ounces of gold and then back. Gold is money, currency is not (it’s a non-backed IOU). In 1946 an ounce of gold was $35, which means a car costing $900 was 25.7 ounces of gold. Even with today’s suppressed gold prices (suppressed by big bank short selling, central bank leverage and derivatives not covered by physical metal), that would be around $31000 today. As you can see, a much better measurement of value
In the game we will calculate prices in money units, not currency, but display it in currency units. Sounds weird, but that’s the only good way of tracking actual value throughout the game and converting to currencies.
Historic gold prices: kitco.com/scripts/hist_chart … graphs.plx
I don’t understand what you mean about money units. Does that mean that the prices of cars won’t change from 1940 to 2020 or what? Also does that mean a car will cost the same throughout the world because for instance a bmw is cheaper in america than in england so how will all of this work?
No, that is not what I’m saying.
“Currency” is not “Money” but people call currency money, which is confusing. Internally Automation will work with money units (units of actual value), but those money units will be converted into a currency (like “Dollars”). So prices will change over the years.
Will we set prices in the money units and the game convert it to the currency for each region dependant on the year?
From previous discussions about this my understanding is that prices will be displayed and set using the one currency unit, regardless of the target sales zone. It would be a bit too much for gameplay to have to factor in exchange rates as well as other financials.
[quote=“Killrob”]Yes, correct! There is about a factor of 3-4x missing I would estimate.
Another way to estimate prices is to convert to ounces of gold and then back. Gold is money, currency is not (it’s a non-backed IOU). In 1946 an ounce of gold was $35, which means a car costing $900 was 25.7 ounces of gold. Even with today’s suppressed gold prices (suppressed by big bank short selling, central bank leverage and derivatives not covered by physical metal), that would be around $31000 today. As you can see, a much better measurement of value
In the game we will calculate prices in money units, not currency, but display it in currency units. Sounds weird, but that’s the only good way of tracking actual value throughout the game and converting to currencies.
Historic gold prices: kitco.com/scripts/hist_chart … graphs.plx[/quote]
How well will gold work considering the market completely changed with the end of Bretton Woods in 1972? One thing i tried comparing to was how many months of median wage a car cost as although that assumes that people pay the same % of their income on a car.
The question could equally be how well it worked before Betton Woods ended in 1971 
because at that point the US printed money like crazy but kept the value of the dollar locked to gold… which made more than just the French suspicious. 
But you are of course correct in that the gold price is over-/undervalued at times and then doesn’t make for a good price translation. The same is true for your method, too, which has the problem of median income lagging behind,etc. I don’t think there is any perfect method of determining correct sales prices without taking into account the whole world economy.
To derail the thread back to in-game economy. How should one interpret X production units in a given era: For the 00’s or 10’s how many production units should a competitively cheap eco-box roughly take (Ford fiesta, Peugeot things, etc.)? How about a complicated but affordable-ish performance car (Subaru WRX)?
A modern standard car should be around 100-110 production units, a more premium car around 150, the high-end stuff around 300.
Not to be that guy but why the hell are you reviving a couple months old thread for the purpose of making what is pretty much the definition of a shitpost?
Although the unit of shitposts would be an interesting measure of “value”