In the final product it would be nice to have car shows that you can choose to be apart of or not … put as much money into it as possible create concept cars for these shows to get a buzz around your company meanwhile able to view what the other companies in your game env are up too. Including in this having to pay for a spot in the show offering plots of different size on the floor. also able to place your cars where you want as a display. With the car show you can change the buzz about your company or hurt by being out classed by competitors. This all can factor into some kind of global view of your company just like we have today … You make a few crap cars and it hurts your image kind of thing. When you think BMW what do you think – “a drivers car” When you think Ford what do you think … so on and so on … just a thought of something I would find fun and a very cool little dynamic IMO.
It would also be cool to have some kind of 3rd party rating groups to rate your cars compared to competitors in the class… I understand this is all part of the game that’s yet to be worked on but just some ideas …
Company image will be in for sure because this is one of the most important influences on the customers.
Car shows could be an alternative marketing method for the cars which will go in production soon, boosting demand for that model. I’m not sure about concept cars though. They could boost interest in your brand (like newspaper and TV ads), but how would you take the specific attributes of the concept car into account?
This question made me think of this: Concept cars have to be extreme in some regard (for example better performance stats than usual, cheaper than usual, more space than usual, more luxury stuff than usual…). So they could boost your brand image in one specific direction. If you are known for building luxury cars and build a concept car which is even more comfy than the ones on the market, but you don’t want to sell it because it’s totally expensive, it could boost your reputation for being able to produce even more luxurious cars.
So the game somehow has to determine what is special and what is not. Here Tech Pool can be interesting: Focussing on specific tech (such as fuel systems, top end or - to keep the example - interior choices) can easily be detected by the game. If you build a concept car which features “future” tech, which you unlocked by research and your opponents do not yet have access to, it’s considered as revolutionary. The good thing here is: To get it in production and reliable, you have to spend more money (or tech pool) on it. That might not be possible because the car might become too expensive. But you could still show off what you can do at car shows! No one will be able to notice that your new stuff breaks down after two days. So you can use your recently researched stuff to push your reputation and don’t have to build a production car yet. This could be a pretty interesting gameplay mechanic and would make the potential benefit of R&D bigger. You of course would have to pay for the concept car and the area at the car show then, so it would be an interesting choice to pay for room for your concept car and/or for your new production models.
Third party comparisons (aka car magazines): Definitely would be nice to have. The problem here is to develop a system which puts your car into car classes, which the game as it is planned right now probably will not do. Right now, it is planned to have many different groups of customers with different needs. They don’t say: “I want a small hatchback!” but more like “I want a cheap and economical car with some space for stuff, reliability and a bit of comfort”. If it is possible to reliably pidgeonhole cars in their car class, it would not be a big deal to have some fictional car magazines (with different foci) in the game.
Isn’t that easy by simply tagging a car body to a class? I thought that was already there, like, right now the car designer has 3 bodies - a hatch, a sedan and a sports car. So, if you create a model from them, the model automatically has that specific class. Doesn’t seem too hard…
You could do that, sure. But that way you limit the players’ creativity to what you can make out of a body. I would like to try different stuff, for example make a totally insane hatch with 500 hp which will never sell in the usual compact car buyers class. So the car’s stats determine what buyers group will buy it, not the “class marker” the body has.
Sure, the usual hatch buyers won’t buy the extreme version: Way too expensive, not eco enough, too hard to drive. It will more sell in the sportscar market but then probably will suck because the center of gravity is too high and performance will be worse because of that. And if you don’t have the image for building good sports cars and some exclusivity, it will suck even more.
I suggested in some thread that it would be nice if you could do the normal marketing stuff and fake your cars stats. So if your engine creates 80hp you could advertise it as 90hp car and to do the same to rest of the stats also. On some supercar you’ll could reverse that and say that the car got 400hp even if your engine really pushes 450hp. That could be a positive suprise for testers. For example Nissan GTR is stated to have far more HP than officially announced… Link to GTR-story
Logical continuom to this would be that you could state that your car is hatchback even if you create it from sedan body. If this will make in the game I would also like to have some additional parameters. For example Sedan - Sporty. Sportscar - supercar. Hatchback - ecobox, wagon - luxury. That way you could easily compare two or more cars with eachother.
Then when we come back to the car magazine tests (if those ever make into the actual game) it is up to you what kind of car you want to put against your competitors. For example Skoda Octavia (the old model) was mostly compared to Corollas and Golfs here in Europe even if the car is almost as big as Avensis and Passat. Some of that is ofcourse because of the pricing…
How exactly things will work remains to be seen, but there are many things mentioned in this thread that mirror our ideas. Also, stuff that Martin (Der Bayer) writes usually isn’t far from the truth.
