I’ve read on discord that there were some known problems with the sales model, but after quick discussion it we were not sure if those were supposed to be fixed in 4.1.7 or not. As I could observe some strange behaviour, I. thought it would be better to just report it.
The problem is that a car seems to be selling to the markets it shouldn’t be selling. I designed a small simple sports car in 1946 (released in 1949). As expected it was completely not competitive outside of the sport markets (difficulty 150%, Fruinia start). Despite that, it was mostly generating the revenue from “delivery” markets, with strong sales in basically ALL segments.
Something is not right here Maybe as someone suggested on the discord, it’s because markets are not saturated, and as long as car has four wheels and it’s moving, is going to be selling? Save game: H2.db.zip (917.8 KB)
More over I’ve noticed a couple of more issues. This is a different save game. The same problem as above is also visible here, this time with the Premium market:
Sales forecast is completely wrong Screenshot was taken with the default settings for the forecast, with expected awareness set to 14%. But I’m making money right now. With my current market awareness of 5.2%-6%. With factory working at the maximum number of shifts, yet forecast is telling me this:
Thanks for point all that out!
A fair bit of the remaining issues you see here in 4.1.9 is very intentional though and it seems like you’re not quite understanding the mechanics right (well, the game doesn’t explain it either).
Competitiveness is basically Desirability times Affordability. So if you have a car with 100 desirability but 10% Affordability, your Competitiveness is just 10, and you would say there should be no sales or almost no sales.
That is NOT correct though, because to the 10% that can afford the car, it is a really good choice! That is the case in the “Premium” example you show above.
Are you sure this is the case? I was thinking about this, especially after seeing the Premium sales. But:
Light delivery sales from the previous example still look suspicious
In the second example i had market awareness 5.2% in Premium market and 6% in Gt. Almost the same. So if you look at the % of market share NOT limited to the market awareness, my car was doing only two times better in the GT compared to Premium with competitiveness 204 and 37 respectively. With such difference in the competitiveness I would expect to be doing more than just twice better in the GT market?
^^^ sales not limited to the awareness. You can see what I was trying to explain in the previous post. I had 0.43% of Premium market, which is surprisingly high compared to 0.75% of the GT market, given the competitiveness. More over, I have 0.62% of Luxury market and 3.62% of Luxury Premium (Lux P. might be a fluke, as there were just two sales), where you can not explain this with too high price. Budgets of Luxury/Luxury Premium are above GT’s budget:
A lot of values are missing explanation/tool tips. Affordability, Desirability, Market Difficulty, Company Bubble are not explained (all of them except of the last one I could guess the meaning).
I can not correlate those values with competitiveness. Premium Desirability * Premium Affordability != Premium Competitiveness (83% * 78% = 64% != 33.7%) . Maybe this is an issue of something being wrong with the calculations, or the calculations are correct, but maybe those presented values are processed in a manner that brakes this Competitiveness is basically Desirability times Affordability. It works just fine for the GT (259% * 79% = 204%)
78% affordability in the Premium, while 79% in GT? Hmm…
78% affordability in the Premium, while 68% in Luxury and 97% in Premium Budget? Hmm^2…
143% affordability in Conv. Sport B. and 107% in Family Premium
37% desirability in the Luxury vs 83% in Premium also seems strange, but could be plausible. I would expect GT car to fit better to Luxury buyers’ taste, but maybe my car is too sporty for them.
That last one may actually be budget-related - buyers in the luxury car market want an interior even more lavish and upmarket than what is expected in the premium category.
Maybe as someone suggested on the discord, it’s because markets are not saturated, and as long as car has four wheels and it’s moving, is going to be selling? 
Save game:
Screenshot was taken with the default settings for the forecast, with expected awareness set to 14%. But I’m making money right now. With my current market awareness of 5.2%-6%. With factory working at the maximum number of shifts, yet forecast is telling me this:
