Yes I know. I’m pretty sure we can afford 3 huge factories for the shitbox or van alone, maybe more. That’s taking into account adding more production capacity to all of the other remaining models.
Ooh, good luck on any additional huge factories. Maybe I should have started some myself. You’ll have a hard time getting them built and tooled before 2020. If you do build any new ones, it might help to make them part of the model/facelift instead of making them on their own, I think it takes less total time even though it ties up your facelift forever. Tooling for an empty huge factory can take almost 2 years.
I also might think twice about retiring the octopus. The Kraken won’t really replace it, since it’s like four times more expensive before markups.
Ok, @SenseiB12 was right about Huge factories. There is no time for them. Decently equipped L3 factories (staff + quality control, with sliders ~80) are finishing construction 3 years before end of the game. In the end I decided to go full in. We have spare $100B until we would reach credit score F, but also it looked to me like we would have around $1B or maybe even $2B profit every month without any constructions (this profit over 7 years should cover us another $100B in investments).
So this is my plan…
I tested a couple of bodies combinations and decided to settle for ugly van + utility truck called Beluga AND the shitbox Bristlemouth on separate bodies (if I’m already paying $150B in factories, we can suck up the additional engineering costs. Using same platform both for the shitbox and van, would give us ~10-20% worse scores, with longer engineering times).
For both of them I designed a cheap 1L R3 slightly turbocharged engine (DOHC 4v per cylinder), with thermal efficiency around 38.5%. Cheap, able to mass produced, with passable 71HP. Unfortunately that’s our second R3 engine currently used, but the other:
- Is slightly too big for my taste for use in the cheapest applications (1.5L)
- But most importantly, it’s currently being engineered, so no way for me to increase it’s production
Shame that we can not add factories independently of facelifts
It’s suboptimal, but heck. One dedicated engine to use in two very large projects is good enough 
Beluga
Solid axles, RWD cargo, and AWD utility. Utility on Offroad tires.
I took me quite a bit of time to make up my mind on the chassis design. This setup scores well in the delivery categories and utility. Alternatively I could go with for example McPerson front, Torsion Beam back. Difference would be:
- Delivery scores would be almost the same (despite miserable cargo capacity
) - Passenger Fleet version would score around 120 instead of 105
- But no AWD for Utility
In the end our shitbox was also scoring around 105 in the Passenger Fleet demographic, so I decided to go with the solid axles approach. I’ve assigned four L3 factories, with around 160_000 cars per month. Why that many?
Those are the demographic sizes. Currently we are selling next to nothing in the budget, delivery and utility categories and I want it all! I’m hopping the Beluga, with such high scores and production costs well below average buyer’s budget, will be able to saturate all the market awareness that we will be able to accumulate. It will have 3 years before the end of the game, so I’m hoping we will reach ~70% market awareness.
Utility (B) + (L./H.) Delivery * 0.7 (awareness) * 0.7 (guestimate on the sales number) =
322_000 * 0.7 * 0.7 ~= 160_000 cars per month
Let’s see how will it play out. (Our current market awareness is between 15%-30% in those demographics)
Bristlemouth
Mc Person front, torsion beam rear (or trailing arms?), basic interior… nothing special. Productions costs ~$3.5K, so we should easily satisfy the budget categories. There are lot’s of them though… I’m going for five L3 factories, chewing out together 250_000 cars per month.
Ideosepius
I don’t know if you have noticed, but this design had one major flaw. Upon release, we were not able to sell it in Fruinia because of the minimal safety ratings! On other markets it was getting penalty as well! One change to advanced safety bumped the scores from 140 to 190.
Other bigger change was the engine. Much leaner (to bump affordability), forged interior (as I think @SenseiB12 suggested), adjusted gearing, differential, etc. In the end we had slightly less affordable but much more desirable facelifted version
I’ve also added a convertible trim
I’ve of course added a bit of production capacities. Merely tripling/quadrupling the output.
Starfish
I haven’t changed much, definitely nothing major. Of course apart from assigning a spare Huger factory that was lying around, and building two more L1 (or L2? I don’t remember now…) factories, as I wanted to roll both Starfish and Ideosepius ASAP. I don’t know, maybe I should have added more factories to Starfish, but total costs of all of those projects is already $206B…
One more thing, I’ve expanded our marketing and dealerships investments. Especially aiming to boost Beluga’s and Britlemouth’s premiere (drivability, reliability, Archana dealerships etc).
Fastforward 1.5 years. Whaleshark updated finished. We are loosing money a bit faster then I expected, but as long as Clownfish will be a success, we should hopefully be fine.
One surprise. Someone started building empty huge factories that have just finished constructing. The timing suggests that it was a carefully planed move to use those factories in the next Whaleshark update, or a mistake, were someone added a factory without assigning it to any project? Again I will put them to a good use in the part two 
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wouldn’t a SOHC3 have been even cheaper? it’s not like it’s revving that much and for such small heads the efficiency at top range should be negligible
Hmm it might have been better. I have never tried that approach. I was under the impression that those markets care so much about fuel economy (it’s impact on affordability) that DOHC is still the better choice. Nevertheless I will try out your suggestion next time.
Part Two
After dealing with Ideosepius, Starfish, Beluga and Bristlemouth, I had surprisingly little to do with the Whaleshark and Clownfish.
Whaleshark
Rather minor updates, except of the engine. Less restrictive exhaust (mostly thanks to the valves), dropped some unnecessary quality sliders, a bit of retune (restrictive exhaust was eating ~3 RON). Scores improved only by a couple of points, but having 340HP V12 vs 510HP V12 sounds much better to me.
Now, as the game was coming to end, Whaleshark was selling well, I’ve decided in this facelift to leave the current factories untouched. The ~14 months downtime wouldn’t be worth it. I’ve just added four L1 factories for the car and four L1 for the engine (no time for L2 left). Total costs were around $40B. I didn’t dare to add more - it has already been $246B in the investments over the span of 1.5 years. There were a couple of empty huge factories lying around idling. But I decided to keep them for the Clownfish facelift, as it will have the least time before game end (otherwise I could only reasonably build medium factories).
About the quality sliders. Decreasing them (either from +3 to 0, or even from 0 to -something), was something I was doing a couple of times. With high research values I think it’s double important. Otherwise the production units are hurting by a lot. In a couple of cases, simply going with the engine’s valves quality from 0 to -5 I was able to save 10% of the factories output, with really marginal decrease in the scores.
Frankly until recently I thought that research’s quality bonus is for free, but now I have a feeling that’s it’s often prohibitively expensive in many cases. I’m still not entirely sure how is the research affecting the engineering time and production units
Clownfish
Fast forward one more year. During this time we bottomed out with credit score B-, $-94B in the account and $100 + something evaluation and… clownfish happened… Boy had I realised how much production boost was scheduled by probably @SenseiB12, and how our revenue/evaluation would sky rocket, I would have invested at least $100B dollars more into factories somewhere $1.2B profits, with 200% margins…
Again, very small changes here and there. I might have updated the interior to move the Clownfish a little bit up the market (Bristlemouth will take care of the lowest segments). I’ve added I think those three remaining huge factories, again without touching the existing ones (both pre and post facelifts versions are going to be produced in parallel).
End game
With that, there was very little for me to do. Except of a one more thing. There were no new engineering projects scheduled, our credit score was improving, so what could I do with the rest of the money?
Yep. I went full in. Level 10 marketing and dealerships spending EVERYWHERE.
After that, over the last three years almost nothing has happened. All of the releases went fine. For every model I could have invested more. My demands estimations for Beluga and Bristlemouth were the most accurate, but even there I underestimated the demand a bit (maybe because I was assuming 70% market awareness and we ended up with 90%?)
One thing that was showing, is that in the last year or two, we were starting to get more and more recalls, as our number of factories increased and I haven’t updated many of them. In one single recall we lost $1B 
But it didn’t matter in the end.
Final screenshots
Note Octopus still going strong 
I just didn’t have any use for its factories 
I think both Octopus and Clownfish are now 20+ years designs.
335 in track premium 
375 in Hyper? 
90% almost across the board.
I don’t know why are we doing so poorly in the convertible sport. Maybe it’s still the same problem with the safety ratings? That when I was doing the facelift I paid attention for Coupe version to reach 40+ safety rating, while I forgot that convertible version might have a slightly lower score?
Why so small market share in the Track Premium segment? Is Competitiveness 335 not good enough for those remaining 25 buyers? 
Besides that, nice… Congratulations Comrads, every second sold car in the world comes from us While on many markets we have 80% or more share.
^^^ this I don’t understand It looks like a bug to me? Look at the Family segment. We have $1.1B in revenue, 75% market share, and still $1.5B untapped revenue? Premium is even worse. Could it be because we are selling cars under the demographic’s budget?
save game
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so proud of octopus&goldfish 
As usual, the cheapest cars earn the most money, when you can produce enough of them. RIP to Company Prestige though (who needs it anyway). I think we did pretty good, considering I almost bankrupted the company with my stupid first car. 
Also, I think the reason we’re at like 300 competitiveness in Track Premium is probably the Kraken or something. Sure, it’s super great, and there’s not a lot of real competition in track premium, but its affordability is actually poor. The Idiosepius was supposed to have to potential to get into that role with the right trim, but I don’t think we ever made a premium trim. I’m glad to see it did well later, I was worried it was just too expensive with its aluminum construction.
I’m pretty sure the “untapped revenue” values are in fact because we’re selling under budget. Not only are we selling some cars in the budget price range (and you basically have to sell them all at the same price) but it’s probably more or less impossible to get ALL the untapped revenue. Besides the fact that Awareness caps at 95%, you’re always going to be leaving money on the table unless EVERY buyer is paying their maximum budget, so to even get close you would need a lot of different trims at different price points.
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I think you are mostly right. But I wouldn’t be surprised that facelifted Idiosepius scoring that well in the Track or Track Premium markets. 
It would have been much better if not for the fraudulent marketing spendings that forced our CEO to seek asylum in Burkina Faso, and where still showing during my term (tens of millions of marketing spending were disappearing somewhere 
)