One thing I just noticed (after getting to 1980) with my playthrough of the campaign is that the scoring system doesnt seem very good to me. My company was making $1B+ per year at some points but I was getting very low scores out of it. It seems with the current system its better to spend lots of money on your cars to engineer them faster/produce them cheaper and effectively waste a lot of money since that allows you to sell more car and sell them at a higher markup.
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Let me give you some details on how the scoring works and then you can criticize that, as (at least to me) what you wrote makes little sense.
ScorePerCar = (CarCompetitiveness - 50) / 50 * ProfitMargin * DemographicBrandStrength * DifficultyModifier * ArbitraryScaleFactor
Where the car competitiveness multiplier is limited to being between 0.0 and 2.0 and the scale factor just makes sure scores are in a reasonable range.
The demographic brand strength is a modifier that gives more score for selling to less populated and more prestigious demographics. For example it is:
Family Utility = 0.6
Muscle = 1.25
Luxury Superior = 2.75
This means you need to sell a lot more low-markup, low-prestige cars in every-day categories like Family than you need to sell high-markup hypercars to make score. This balances out various approaches to playing the game and makes them viable. I finished two playthroughs of the game, one with a luxury vehicle manufacturer and one with a Utility/Transport manufacturer and was able to score 200k+ in both playthroughs, so it is at least somewhat balanced in its current state.
If you end up with a lot of money that means you have already been given score for that money, having it lying around should not give you more score as “doing nothing” is not considered being a good player or indeed businessman in most circumstances.
With the current system it seems as though you get a higher score by spending more money (either on funding engineering or increasing automation on factories) and making it more difficult to make profit. By increasing the funding you are able to begin making cars sooner which means you make more cars to sell giving you a higher score and by increasing automation you are able to make the cars cheaper allowing you to use a higher markup to receive the same competitiveness rating. The problem is by doing these things is it often results in the break even date moving further and further into the future to the point that by the time you break even it will nearly be time for a new model so that overall you make less profit on that car.
It may just be that I’m terrible at making the right financial decisions in the game, I’m certainly no businessman, but thats the impression i get from my playthrough of the campaign.
Hmm, yes, that doesn’t sound like a problem with the scoring system per se. Don’t know what to comment on this really apart from maybe reading into the concept of “opportunity cost” might help you become a better player in regards to the financial decisions you make?