Announcement: CTC - Car Tycoon Challenge

Community Challenges & Competitions
1

[size=150]Car Tycoon Challenge[/size]

Let me announce a brand new kind of forum challenge: The CTC (Car Tycoon Challenge) is almost ready to go! Build a car according to the needs of the masses and compete with lots of opponents or search for your niché. Keep an eye on the expenses. Guess a good price tag. Sell cars and see if your model can take a big slice of the cake! The awesome thing is: There are no fixed opponents or calculations! All depends on what the other players try to sell and you won’t know it (unless you talk about it).

Features
[ul]]15 groups of buyers with different preferences/:m]
](Hopefully) lots of opponents/:m]
]Management of engineering, tooling and pricing (tools for estimating engineering and tooling costs will be provided); fixed R&D and distribution cost per sold car/:m]
]Insecurity of what the rivals will throw on the market/:m]
]A detailed analysis of your pricing: How close to the optimum price tag for maximum profit have you been?/:m]
]One single rule (manufacture year, probably late 80s) -> build whatever car you want and see how your company would do/:m][/ul]

Winners in different categories:
[ul]
]Biggest overall profit/:m]
]Most cars sold (with profit)/:m]
]Biggest profit per car/:m]
]Most expensive car (with profit)/:m]
]… and maybe some more/:m][/ul]
The challenge will start as soon as the next update is out. Until then I will polish the result tables and graphs and provide more information. Stay tuned…

Below are some teaser images of the result data (not finished yet). :slight_smile: Suggestions and questions are always welcome!

List of participants:
abload.de/img/1participants9js74.png
Nothing spectacular to see here, just an overview over the stats of the other cars. The most important thing is probably the last column where you can see how many cars have to be sold at the given price tag to make a profit.

List of customer groups and their preferences (weight on stats):
abload.de/img/1targetgroupsk7sxb.png
Here you can see how the target groups are focussing on different stats. Also the number of people in the first month (5 years are simulated) in each group are given.

Marketshare of participants:
abload.de/img/1sales1rsm4.png
This is the overall marketshare of each car.

Marketshare per target group:
abload.de/img/1marketshare6tsdm.png
Here you can see how the overall marketshare is divided up to the different target groups.

Profits of participants:
abload.de/img/1financessds55.png
An overview over revenues, expenses and profits of each car.

Price tag analysis for a single player:
abload.de/img/der_bayervns4b.png
Here you can see how well the price tag choice was made. The calculations try different prices for every single car while the prices of the other cars are kept constant at their chosen values. So you can see that too cheap is bad and too expensive, too. Finding the right compromise is the key to financial success.

Now the most important thing:

[size=150]How do you participate?[/size]

[size=130]The Challenge has not started yet! Don’t send me your cars![/size]

Once the challenge has started, simply follow these ten steps:
[ul]]Build a car in Automation (with the right manufacture year 1988) and save it with your nickname as as car name./:m]
]Go to this spreadsheet (Direct Link): [spreadsheet]1C2J3p0silokMj_NK4wv3pI2kbsvHJvpBw5LBNoJpKlw, 1[/spreadsheet]/:m]
]For each major design choice you have to pay engineering or tooling cost. Depending on what you choose, copy the respective 4 white cells next to the chosen part from the “Template” spreadsheet" to the “Calculator” spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will then calculate engineering and tooling costs for you./:m]
]Fill in the other data, your name and choose a price tag for your car into the other white cells in the form on the “Calculator” spreadsheet. Around 2production cost is good for high-volume cars. Small series production cars need to be more expensive if you want to make profit./*:m]
]Once you filled every cell of the form, copy the cells from your name all the way down to Tooling Cost and paste the values into a .txt file. Save the file without any manual changes with your nickname as file name, i.e. “Der Bayer.txt” or similar./:m]
] Delete your data from the spreadsheet so that not too many people can see what you built and that other people have space to make their .txt-file. /:m]
]Send me the .txt-file together with the car .lua-file in a PM (zip-file would be best) and you’re done./:m]
]I’ll at least check if the winners cheated (stats, tooling and engineering cost, manufacture year, lua file cheating, …), so don’t try it./:m]
] One car per player only! Your first PM counts, no extra revisions! The challenge will be open for one week and the overall number of entries is unlimited, so take your time./:m]
]Questions? Ask in this thread! :slight_smile:/:m][/ul]

2

Sweet! Are we allowed to group up?

3

You mean build a car together with someone else? Sure. But there will be only one car per participant and if two people will enter the same/very similar cars, they will steal sales from the other. Every car is treated on its own, so no sharing of R&D or whatever.

4

No no, I meant 2 people working on 1 car! That would be great! I think this is a really good idea Bayer!

5

Yeah, sure, that’s no problem!

6

Damn Bayer, your challenges are epic, I think I drooled a little when reading through. Seems like a real nice preparation for when the actual tycoon part of the game comes out!

Luckily I already was planning a car suitable for this challenge (except for the wrong year), I wonder if the target audience will be big enough though, or somehow have to speak to several groups.
Are the groups pretty definite by the way?

Sounds like great fun for everyone!

7

The groups are not final, no. I still have to do some balancing. The number of people in the groups will scale with the number of participants, so that if you build an average car you will be able to pay your expenses. The algorithm behind the sales numbers is looking at 5 years of selling the car, with nonlinearily less sales each month.

8

Sounds good!

Ps: don’t forget to put on an emission limit if applicable.

9

Hm, yeah, an emission limit would be realistic, but it really only is one choice you have to make and I would have to check it. I’m not a friend of that. Let’s keep it as simple as possible.

10

Update within a week confirmed :stuck_out_tongue:

11

Very nice! :slight_smile:

Just a question: Is this sort of an early experiment to help develop/test the tycoon-part of the game?

Will definately try to participate in this, sound like good fun :wink:

12

No, it has not too much to do with the official tycoon part. I just played around with a selfmade market model and was inspired by Killrob to make this challenge. If the devs find any of my simple approaches useful, they may of course use them. :slight_smile: But I neglected some - probably important - effects and features. I doubt the market model in Automation will be based on a model which took me 3 hours to make. :wink:

13

I imagine it’ll help us decide the details of how we do want to model the markets though.

Thanks for putting in the effort to run another complex challenge :slight_smile:

14

Dang, you stole my idea! xD

I was going to make something quite similar to this using google spreadsheets, and some calculations that would allow sales and such to be calculated, along with an algorithm that shows what target audience a vehicle appeals to. :stuck_out_tongue:

However, my idea has the ‘competitors’ post their car specs into a spreadsheet on google docs and then it’d calculate from there. Or something like that… o.o

15

Which doesn’t sound very fleshed out :wink: also it wouldn’t really work that way because then your competitors have an incentive to post last minute to not give away their strategy. Also, it would be very prone to mistakes. Martin’s version is pretty solid in these regards!

16

Well this has just made my week! New update and new challenge all at one time? Amazing! I’m looking foward to this a lot, already have a few cars setup for this that are pretty close. Will the time we spend tinkering with the engines effect the R&D costs or only the chosen parts and systems?

17

I don’t really think that Der Bayer can limit tinkering time, I’m sure that a bunch of people who want to participate already have started tinkering on an engine at the least, like me to be honest.

I’m wondering if different engine types (i4 vs v8, NA vs turbo) will have different engineering/tooling costs though.

One thing Der Bayer can do though is make us send in the cars in phase 1 and give us the means to calculate the exact price of the car only in phase 2 to determine the pricetag.

18

I already prepared a GoogleDocs spreadsheet where you can see how your major design (->part) choices affect engineering and tooling cost. This is only a simplified version of how it will work later in the game but it’ll do for the challenge. You then calculate your costs in the spreadsheet, add important car stats, copy and paste all the values into a .txt file and send the txt file and the savefile of your car in a PM to me. Once all participants have sent me their files, I can run my evaluation program which reads in the data from those files. So I have nearly no work to do. :smiley: Only the winners (i.e. top 3 per category) will be checked for cheating manually.

19

If its not much work once you’ve figured it all out, can we expect to see more challenges like this, but on other years/ with other target audiences? :smiley:

20

If the system works as intended I don’t have much work. Thus, I can see this kind of challenge happen in a 2 week rhythm. :slight_smile: