Ladder is in a bit of a weird place in my opinion, and I was hoping to start here with some suggested changes before V4.2 came out. This should branch off into other chassis bits too.
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The safety penalty of using a Ladder frame appears to be very severe, to the point that using it on vehicles what would sensibly use a Ladder won’t because the markets prefer a Monocoque frame due to safety alone. This is particularly pronounced in Hetvesia and Gasmea, as they have strong tastes for “safe” cars, even though a Monocoque Van or Fleet car is uncommon. Ladders appear to have a flat -25% safety value throughout the entire game which is a huge penalty, even if you’re building a massive truck, since that penalty is added over the weight and footprint of the vehicle. I’m not exactly sure how to fix that short of just reducing the penalty. Almost nothing else you can do can sufficiently offset the penalty. I understand that ladders are less safe than a Monocoque, for a variety of reasons, but the penalty is insane.
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Early Monocoque bodies, as far as I am aware weren’t too rigid compared to most Ladder frame bodies. The game appears to properly emulate chassis stiffness based on footprint of the car, but it appears to affect both frame types equally with Ladder being consistently worse in terms of rigidity trough the whole game. I’d like to suggest that larger bodies with Ladder frame in the early 50s-70s be stiffer than they currently are.
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It’s implied based on the tooltip for Ladder frame that service costs are cheaper on cars using this type of frame. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Reducing service costs for ladder frames should make the car appeal to cheaper markets.
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Space Frame and Ladder seem to be extremely close together on familiarity gain. Working on a ladder almost gives you full familiarity to space frame. That probably needs to be dialed back a bit.
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Ladder frames don’t appear to do much when you’re working on a large body in context of utility. Seemingly because of weight/size. On a fullsize van, the difference is basically negligible for use of ladder versus Mono. Utility needs to be fixed/overhauled in general though.
Just dropping these here on the forums so they don’t get buried on Discord. Please weigh in on what you think of Ladder V. Everything else.
