Ooh I see where the balance shifts and while xwing and met_at still make a (smaller) profit, the effect of my small factory budgeting that I mentioned previously really hits me, turning my satisfactory profit to a bank breaking loss! This sure does encourage balance… I’m willing to give it a shot, it’ll be a challenge!
Reaper, I suspect your car still won’t turn a profit because the balance changed so much that your market share won’t be large enough to ever turn a profit… At least that’s what I think.
[quote=“strop”]Ooh I see where the balance shifts and while xwing and met_at still make a (smaller) profit, the effect of my small factory budgeting that I mentioned previously really hits me, turning my satisfactory profit to a bank breaking loss! This sure does encourage balance… I’m willing to give it a shot, it’ll be a challenge!
Reaper, I suspect your car still won’t turn a profit because the balance changed so much that your market share won’t be large enough to ever turn a profit… At least that’s what I think.[/quote]
I don’t know if it would turn a profit or not, but I think with the new scoring mechanics my car is priced out of the running when compared to the sportier hot hatches because the scoring is a lot more linear, so reducing the price a fair amount would have persuaded those trackday customers buying a hot hatch to come my way instead. I certainly had room to reduce the price a lot but I don’t know if it would have been enough to make some money
Now that looks more realistic, I can still make healthy profit but no longer insane fortune with a supercar. And that profit would have been bigger if I balanced it only for the SC market (much smaller factory, higher price).
Reaper, the annual costs are most likely what kill your sales in the new calculations. No price setting would have given you profits. The trackday market is very small and lots of people went into that category. Because your car was so tuned for that group, it just didn’t work elsewhere.
I will probably re-do the target groups, allowing for 0% weights for some stats (for example offroad for trackday cars). This should divide cars into the different groups a bit better.
xwing: Also, remember the very crowded supercar segment in this round. It must be hard to make profit with lots of supercars in the competition.
If it’s supposed to reward extreme highs less then how about punishing more for extreme lows? Would “produce” more reasonable, realistic cars. I’m mainly looking at cars with sub 10 comfort, very low safety. I know I mention that (minimum standards) a lot but vehicles as comfortable as full on race car shouldn’t be good sellers tbh. Same story with death-traps on 4 wheels painted with Hollywood brand exploding paint. Make some incentive to be decent all round since you aren’t getting much out of very low values. You know at least 20 comfort, some safety, decent economy etc. It shouldn’t be too punishing or you’d end up only with identical “jack-of-all-trades” cars though.
[size=50]Number one baby! I love the new model already.[/size]
The linear model already makes balanced cars a lot better, as it is easier/cheaper to build balanced cars. Extreme stats cost money and may make some other stats worse. It should work a lot better already.
I didn’t realise you increased the annual cost requirements too, I knew they were obscenely high but I completely ignored them because they were set to 1 in the original target group, so that certainly explains why everyone ran away from my car who wasn’t already put off by the looks
I wrote this because I noticed that under new model trollercoaster’s car wasn’t affected by these changes at all, still the same 1.5b$ profit. You know 4.76 comfort, 8.13 prestige, 16.31 safety. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice very focused entry that however isn’t very realistic 2003 car at all, it just games your model by investing money only into stuff most relevant for his target groups.
So now, it looks as if my next challenge to use a small factory, to create an extreme performance car, and somehow not go completely broke, will be harder than ever. Game on!
Seems incredibly better for Žnoprešk. Phew… I could face the board of directors again… point the revolver away from his head and put it back into the drawer
[quote=“Der Bayer”]I played around with the new scoring and I think I reached a better state than last time. This is what the results would have been with the new algorithms and the fixed trackday group:
(The labels on the bar chart are wrong, I know)
Price in general is a bit more important now as stats go into the calculations more linearily and extremes don’t work that well anymore. Thus, some players’ pricing is now a bit off of course (including mine), but I think the overall tendency is better. What do you think? Are the results promising enough for a use in the next round?[/quote]
Looks good, but the problem is that the calculations need to be balanced for each decade especifically.
There are no hard limits which have to be balanced.
It’s all about sum(weighted_stats)*cost_factor.
Maximum possible price for a positive car score is not even depending on the sum(weighted_stats) anymore.
The only thing that will change over the years is the general score level. But on a relative scale (comparing scores of different players) it will all level out again.
The new system is so damn simple and yet it basically works. I must have forgotten something.
Well Herman. The more challenges you do the better suited the score will be. Trial and error. So what I think is importante and that you are doing is triyng to improve with every challenge but don’t kill yourself thinkiing about every detail, we, the players will notice detail and give feedback too. But we can only do this if you keep making challenges.
The more sophisticated and complicated it is, the more potential there is for an abuse or to all go horribly wrong
On the other hand, using a neural network… THAT would be awesome! But definitely out of scope for a forum challenge
Keep up the good work, and thanks for keeping this challenge alive!
From what I understand of the types of neural network I studied at university they probably wouldn’t be very well suited to this competition. The first problem for using a neural network as a sales model for this competition is that they would need some data to learn from, and because of the difference in the scores that make a ‘good’ car in the various categories in the different manufacture years I just don’t think a neural network would be able to provide an accurate sales model with the amount of data we have from previous competitions. The other problem is that if a neural network spits out strange results they are incredibly difficult to fix.
This is all assuming I haven’t missed a very obvious way of applying neural networks to the sales model, or a different type of neural network that would solve these problems
Should there be some way of preventing some cars from selling into segments that don’t make any sense??
For an example, take my car, a 120kW, 2WD medium sedan with a 4 speed auto that takes almost 10 seconds to get to 100km/h.
It makes no sense at all that something like this would sell to someone looking for a super car yet somehow, 76 people that were looking for a super fast, super expensive super car walked out of a dealership with one of my cars.
It’d be like someone walking out of a Ferrari dealer to go and buy a Mondeo.
Honestly, I don’t have an answer but it seems there should be some sort of cut-off that says if a car is too many points behind the market leader for a segment then it doesn’t get any sales in that segment.
Especially when there were quite a lot of good SC to choose from. On the other hand, 76 customers is negligible in the grand scheme of things, and you can always imagine someone getting rich quickly, going to try out that Ferrari he/she kept dreaming about the whole life and finding out it isn’t really the best choice for daily commute, even if money is not an objection
Yes, I don’t think that sounds unreasonable… maybe that supercar wasn’t quite the way the buyer liked, so another round of driving around a reasonable car it is!
