Understanding the LC - Difficult?

[LTrotsky]

It’s 1951. I designed in 1946 a convertible that had over 200 desirability in several market demos (of the exactly and only and ever 4 I could ever see). The car had an engine, too. Went through (for the 11th time, as this is my 11th attempt to run an LC) the factory config and sign off screens.

Here is the result: Each factory indicates units are being produced. However, I can’t go into the factory and look at or adjust anything (everything is greyed out).

Monthly sales have been zero. In all months.

I do not understand what I am doing wrong. I don’t think it’s lack of desirability or affordability of the cars. If I may suggest, the user interface for the campaign is extremely difficult to understand - I may not be alone in this.

I’ve taken the effort to sign up and log into this forum to share these concerns. So I’d appreciate not getting trashed. Thanks.

I have more images, which show production and the inability to alter anything, but as a new user, I’m limited to one

[LTrotsky]

“It won’t let me do anything with anything.”

I’m not alone.

[Kyuu77]

What happens when you click on the black box? It should show the desirability of the car in its market.

[Killrob]

Have you followed the tutorial? It is slightly dated, the campaign was in a much rougher state back then (yeah, imagine that), but the same concepts still apply and make you able to sell cars no problem.

It is hard to tell what you are doing wrong from just the outcome.

Edit: Also, in that video you linked it is so blatantly obvious why this doesn’t work and the game tells him (reduce power, the only thing he doesn’t do). He built a muscle van that no one wants that is a RIDICULOUS amount of power for a little people mover in 1950. 30-40hp would be plenty, and an I4 would have done the job way better at half the size.

This is rather frustrating to watch for me, as I imagine it is frustrating to play for the player too. How can we make it any clearer that this design just doesn’t work and will suck ass? The flashing red warning should give people pause, and it did, and yet it was ignored. This car behaved in the market exactly as it should. The factory setup was atrocious as well: small 1 engine factory trying to supply a medium 1 car factory. Yes, the game doesn’t warn you about that yet and will do in future, but still, that should be something that one thinks about?

[accent]

Watch other people play it (who know what they’re doing, so like Killrob here, who made the tutorial and has more let’s play type of stuff on it). That’s how I figured out how to play.

[david488]

I think it is worth considering that for the Casual difficulty level, some of the decisions are made for the player, so as to avoid errors like mismatched engine factory : car factory.

Also useful for new players would be a selection of pre-generated engines that, while not optimal, would be “good enough” for the player to get started.

The learning curve is pretty steep. It was a surprise that I could “ignore” the blue advisories and yellow warnings, that really “appeal” and “affordability” are the only metrics that matter when it comes to sales, and every thing feeds into those two numbers.

[Carnagexz]

Hi rob, love the game and been playing it a lot since campaign lite have come out.

If I may make a suggestion, I think a lot of the issues could be fixed by having segment marketing be a tad more informative. (No need to create a whole new game mode like some suggest.)

One thing I’ve found out the hard way, is that unless your an automotive history aficionado one would tend to sometimes conflate the historical requirements of the vehicles and over-engineer themselves out of the market.

I love the way current market panel tells you the absolute critical things like Body type requirements and seating requirements. But I believe it would be great if the market panel would give you more information about the “desires” of the segment. Now there is no need to hand hold, by providing us with motors or straight up telling us what to build.

I think it’d be great if it worked kind of like this. EX: One thinks that they want to make a sports sedan of late 00’s (GT) so when you’d select the segment, you’d get information like:

(Note: Time period specific, maybe by decades. In this cased it’s for late 00’s)
Hp range 245-355,
MPG range 16-30,
seats 4-5,
bodystyle: sedan
Emissions: (some limits, I have no idea what)
Cargo/Payload: 14-20ft^3
(And maybe optional, if possible secondary stats like 0-60/top speed/G’s grip. With some sort of indicators as to what is market elasticity toward these statistics. Maybe like top 3 important stats, like for utility/cargo cars it’d be something like MPG/Cargo/Drivability, while sport cars would be HP or torque/sportiness/speed statistics.)
And of-course the usual price range and desirability we have today.

I think this would be best since it gives people the idea of what they should do to do, while still remaining flexible as to what features/engines/setups one can do in order to reach their goal.

Because at the moment when you build a vehicle, its all just a ton of stats, there isn’t any real context as to whats good enough or bad. Like is my V16 with responsiveness of 157 good? or is my V16 with responsiveness of 258 good? It is really impossible to answer without context since some market segments would care quite a lot, while others wont really bother too much. (Yet that information is unknown to the player.)

(slight detour)
That small engine factory + medium car factory seems like a carry over strategy (Now defunct) from pre-UT engine days, when engine factories would commonly outpace car factories, so you could have a smaller engine factory that’d supply a larger car factory. (Or even multiple trims.) I’ve noticed in the recent versions the productions got equalized so now its almost 1:1.

Just my .02

[Killrob]

I think those are solid suggestions, and similar to what we have planned in vague terms for what we’d ultimately want the feedback to look like. There is so much that can be done with the market demographics in order to show where you’d want to place yourself as well.

For instance we think that this panel coming with the next patch will help quite a bit to gauge the market feasibility (how much money there is in each demographic):

Gasmea

Fruinia

Showing what the competitor cars are like is something that is pretty high up on our list of feedback we’d like to give to the player. What I think would work is to average the stats of the top 3 competitors in each demographic and display those on demand. Those can already be compared to in the side stats panel by clicking one of the four demographics you have on there but I think too few people are using that feature.

Cheers!