Want to play against other players' companies in the Campaign?
Now that it’s possible to add player-made cars to the Competitors.db file and there’s only a few kinks left to work out, I’d like to start adding some save files to a Competitors.db file which I will share. The goal is to get as many human-made cars as possible into the competitors file, so you can try to compete against them.
What I need from you are some save files! If you’ve played a full campaign since Ellisbury update, upload your save file and post a link to your file host of choice EG google drive, dropbox, file.io, whatever.
You can also find this folder by pasting %localappdata%\AutomationGame\Saved\UserData\Campaign in your Windows file browser.
I can also take all the cars from a company in a Sandbox.db, it’s located in one folder above the campaign folder. It also requires me to make up some numbers with regard to that company’s market awareness (and therefore sales numbers).
How do you play it?
I’ll add them to a competitor database on my Google Drive. Then you can download that competitors.db.
Place it in Automation\UE427\AutomationGame\Content\GameData\Camso\tycoon (back up the original first!)
If you want to have the thumbnails visible, you’ll need to add them to the save file you are playing.
Click the Attach button, and attach your save file. It will ask for a name, name it ‘savefile’.
Run the thumbnail script from my Google Drive link.
Once this is done, you’ll be able to play with human competitors! In the future I’ll make a few more improvements to this script, and maybe even make a tool that does all this in a few clicks (eventually). Then just look in the Sales Breakdown (AKA Sankey Chart) in the markets tab, and see your competition’s sales. They’re competing for the same customers you are, so it might make the game harder!
Competitor companies will produce ONE trim from EACH FACELIFT for EACH TARGET MARKET. That means that if you did not choose a DIFFERENT target market for EACH TRIM, then only one trim will appear in-game from that facelift!
The current version of the script also only causes companies to appear in months you actually played. So if you submit a save file from 1980, your company will disappear in-game after that. If you have a starting year later than 1946, your company will not appear on the list until you actually started playing.
Some details will not be accurate: Price is calculated automatically, and I don’t know how margins are decided, so it won’t be the same price you manually chose. Sales numbers will not be the same either. Competitor companies also get only one Market Awareness number for each country, it’s the same for all markets, and my current script tries to estimate this number to be based on your single highest market but it is not exact.
Thanks to OB Tanker on discord for our first save file, with the company name of Dunbar III. I will shortly be including it in the Google Drive version of Competitors.db.
Edit: I re-did this again! It looks like this save file did not have a complete Company Awareness history, only from 2008 to 2013 for some reason. I just copied the company size profile from Generalist 6 Gasmea for now, although I think that means the awareness in late game is actually rather low compared to the real thing. If it’s normal for save games to remove older Company Awareness data I may have to change a few things.
Edit 2: Did some initial gameplay with this! The most I’ve done so far is basically just test to see if the competitors show up at all. There were some lua errors which I think were related to the incomplete extra models in the save file, and all the engine families show up as an option in engineering which is annoying.
I will experiment more with this, but I think it might be better to try an “unsafe” alteration to the CarThumbnails table where I can have the thumbnails in the save file WITHOUT the trims (and engines etc) actually being in your save file.
I’ve re-written the Thumbnail Import script. It should no longer cause unwanted cars/engines showing up in the comparison window, or lua errors, because instead of important all the required models/trims/engines/variants related to the thumbnail it just uses a command to ignore that requirement. New version is on google drive.
Another update:
First, thanks Camso taking some time just to make this more convenient, you no longer need to add thumbnails to your save file. They now read from Competitors.db automatically.
Second, the google drive version of Competitors.db now includes the new baseline competitors for Patch 3, the Dunbar III save file, and my Carota save file so far.
Third, the script has been updated again. It now handles duplicates properly, so you won’t get an error message if you run it twice. More importantly, you can import an incomplete save file easily. For example you could save the game in 1970, add them to your competitors, then play to 1975, and add that same company again and any new cars will be copied without errors. Previously you had to start with a fresh competitors file when you did this.
Edit: Companies were not appearing as CompanyProfile data was not imported due to a typo. New script and competitor database uploaded.
Thanks to foxalfa from discord, I’ve added another company to the competitor db! Vezere Transport is a fiat-like manufacturer with cars up the 90’s. You’ll be seeing them as a competitor company in the my youtube series. I’ve also updated the db to include Carota cars from the latest episode.
I’ve just updated the Competitors.db to be based on the Ellisbury Patch 5 version, still including the two save files I’ve been sent, plus the latest Carota save. Also on my google drive now, is my sandbox save file with the competitor companies, and a script for removing competitor companies (or other companies) from a save file.
I also made some fixes to the save import script. While it was seemingly working okay, I managed to omit the tables EngineProjects, EngineFacelifts, and CarFacelifts during one of the rewrites. Oops! That’s back in now.
The new AI competitors are MUCH more competitive- one of my goals when I started this was to see how the game played with more serious competition, and it looks like the AI got better before I collected enough save files to round out the database. That said, I’m still looking forward to seeing where player save files fall in line, and creating a a competitor file with player cars for more fun and flavor, so of course I’m still seeking more save files if you’d like to share them!
