What I’ve observed the most about new players and their struggle with the campaign is that they don’t know how base mechanics work. With that many variables, there is no way to know right away at what range to aim. The second one is that people have a very vague view of older cars, often skewed by a more modern understanding of what vehicles should be. Because of those two often things become very overengineered. It is only exaggerated by how much leverage low difficulty settings get. With that, a campaign run is doomed to become frustrating.
So what I propose.
Instead of giving more resources and starting with no factory, cars, and knowledge. Do an introduction campaign.
Such Introduction should explain:
Multiple Trims for adjacent markets, Facelifts, Targets for engineering time and affordability, Tech points, Marketing, Markets, Market awareness vs factory size. Bring back to earth those who think cars 1950s cars should all have 100hp or more.
For example.
Such campaign would have starting factories producing cars and players would be taking role of assisting character given tasks to do before taking over role of company owner.
How it would play out. First of all starting message need to be possible to read for the person with modern attention span.
There would be 2 cars in production in factories. One engine finishing development as game starts.
The first task would be explaining facelifts. Asking a player to make facelift to the car and to replace the old engine with newer developed one, adjusting gear ratios for it, stucking some newer tech and putting car and engine into the factory and signing it off.
Such a task would explain facelift mechanic, explain what players can develop engines and cars separately, give an idea to save on initial car development installing tech later and giving an idea of factory retooling. Also giving peek at what cars were back in the day. There would be needed guiding messages through the course of action because finding the replace button on trim is not really straight forward.
Second task would be similar to the first one but this time players would be needing to replace the currently produced model with newer and condition to achieve success would not be measured on exact things installed but rather on achieved stats. Task itself would be guidance requiring to have power and torque at specified ranges at specified rpm (e.g. 40-60kw below 5k rpm), achieving comfort/drivability/x values under PU/ET/Material Cost limit. Factories for this task also would need to be upgraded with cars production match market awareness, with no engine factory overworking under specified factory cost.
For the third task, players would need to make a new model with 3 trims achieving desirability scores on each of them for a specific demographic. For factories, players would have to buy new plots and build factories. And engineering would have to be under a specific time. Introduction ends at this point.
How well player managed to do the tasks would also determine difficulty after giving full control to the player.
I am not sure this is exactly how its suppose to be, but sure some kind of tutorial would benifit game a lot. Maybe you allready thought about it, but I’ll still post w/e.
I also have other things to post so I post them right there.
Bugs
If you drop some points into chassis quality tech you can have situation when transverse layout would be available before transeverse FWD drivetrain, with warning message wrongly saying engine is not fitting.
Someties sliders do not scroll down with mousewheel unless you scroll them up first. I do not know what causes it.
There is leftover on right click, I guess you want to style it in accordance
Critique
There is no way to know when is engine is going to finish engineering after you sign it of.
Game should bring you back to hub instead of car projects after signing of project. There are also shouldn’t be popup if you signed of all projects.
Show soon to be available body models with grey overlay.
There is slider on “Trim body” screen but no “Trim Statistics” window, kinda annoing to switch back and forth. Maybe something can be done about it.
Things I noticed
Wheelspin Calculated weirdly with N / Q tyre type. It goes up when its suppose to go down.
https://streamable.com/fgwmu
There is no red warning message when car safety drops too low and tanks desirability.
Loudness on premium vehicles weighted way too much. This can lead to some meme setups being way too good.
Weird calculations on ride height. Desirability drops of the cliff without apparent change in stats.
https://streamable.com/w6uoy
Quality on entertainment reduce material cost. Was it always like that?
Adding gears adds reliability
Extra cooling does not add reliability anymore. Is it intended?
Markets broke. There is 0 markets prefering manual over adv.auto, including sport markets, muscle and light sports. Only track still have slight preference for manual. This is not only unrealistic it reduces choices you can make to single one.
Last couple of suggestions.
So since we got the ability to add multiple cars to the photo scene could it be also possible to add props, like chairs, tables, trees, yachts, small passenger planes or more importantly light sources.
Second one is since there is already defined area of glass on each model and making them transparent becomes ever more popular. Could it be possible to add to the painting menu option to replace windows texture for semi-transparent and transparent options.
cheers