Engine Designer Suggestions

General Chat Suggestions
1

Hello, I wanted to make a few suggestions to the engine designer section. I have a few, so I will just bullet them below. I know that some may make things more complicated than many would like to see, so maybe offer an “advanced” option? I noticed that Bronze seems to be very easy to achieve, so maybe make all medals harder and make it only possible to get platinum by optimizing the advanced options?

1: Cylinder heads:
Head material’s effect on knock tolerance. I have noticed that head material doesn’t seem to do anything to increase RON. It has been my experience that because of the higher thermal conductivity, an engine will tolerate a higher compression ratio. Also, how about having gasket technology increase over time? Go from standard composite styles, to MLS, and maybe require an extreme service “copper o-ring”. I know in the 80’s some F1 teams were even welding their heads to their blocks to deal with the outrageous cylinder pressures!

Combustion chamber shape? Hemispherical vs pent-roof, etc?

2: Valve timing - I think a lot more can be done in regards to valve events than a simple 0-100 “cam-profile” slider, especially considering how important the cam’s effect on the engine behavior is! Have you considered making a whole new tab, similar to the turbine tab? I don’t like that the cure for valve-float is a more aggressive cam; this is the exact opposite that you would do in real life! I would love to be able to play with lift, duration, lobe profile, and overlap. Perhaps having to balance spring force with RPM/lift/ ramp-rate would be a good solution? The new tab could also let you play with variable valve timing.

3: Variable valve timing - It looks like VVL is not really variable valve-lift, but is really cam-switching (a-la VTEC)? VVL would be similar to Nissan’s VVEL system. When it comes to stricter emissions/ power requirements it would be nice to play with variable valve timing overlap, etc to get some internal EGR.

3: Bottom end - Connecting rods length! The rod/stroke ratio is the biggest factor in determining piston acceleration. The longer the rod, the higher the maximum RPM. Also, when a dimensional requirment is given (—mm X —mm X —mm) can you specify L, W, and H? It took me a while to figure our what is what!

4: Turbochargers: How about variable geometry turbochargers? titanium-alumide turbine wheels, magnesium compressor wheels?

5: 2014+ future tech:
Future Engine:
Composite block, CCM rods? Ceramic pistons? Rotary valves? hydraulic, pneumatic or electric solenoid valve actuation.

Different fuels? Isobutanol, E85, etc?
Challenges similar to the military genset for hybrid vehicles?

I have a ton of ideas!

2

Firstly, the engine designer is pretty much locked down in it’s functionality now, besides more forced induction options and engine types, and probably some tweaking to some of the existing balance/stats it won’t be changing much.

An advanced option would still create a lot more complication, as even if you don’t choose to select those advanced options they still need to get selected by some means, so that’d also mean creating an automated way to choose those advanced options when you don’t want to set them manually, that was pretty hard for turbos and adding more problems like that is not a good plan I feel.

  1. That’s a good point actually, don’t know if we’ll get a chance to do it, but it would be quite easy and interesting to do. Headgaskets aren’t going to happen though, that’s too smaller gameplay benefit for the complexity it adds. Headgasket improvements are considered to be part of the improving quality/tech in the top end and are the reason why the reliability penalty for early engines with dissimilar metals between block and head improves over time. Combustion chamber shape I agree does make a fair difference, but again, once you get to a certain level of complexity you kind of have to draw a line somewhere. Higher quality heads are considered to have better designed combustion chambers and as such knock less and other good things.

  2. We already tried this ages ago, it used to be lift, duration and timing options. It was very difficult to communicate to players how to set it up correctly to get the results they needed, didn’t really allow you to build much that you can’t build with the current setup. Valve float is cured by more cam as it also rolls in spring stiffness and potentially other valvetrain tweaks.

  3. Yes, the current one is basically VTEC, we may add more types later, but that’s all you get for now.

3.1. Again, we have to draw the line of complexity somewhere, in terms of interesting gameplay trade-offs, stroke vs piston speed/RPM is a good one, even without throwing rod ratio into the mix.

  1. Maybe after we get the basics of forced induction in, like twin turbos for inline engines, superchargers etc.

  2. Those are things to consider after we’ve covered what even exists now.

Please do understand that Automation is not trying to be a comprehensive engine simulator, some design decisions are simplified in the interests of making the game easier to learn and keeping engine design simple enough to be doable in a game where you’ll also have to spend time designing cars and running your company,

3

Ah okay, I didn’t know you were so far along with the engine side of it! I’ll admit I have yet to even touch the car designer yet because I have been enjoying it so much! haha

Anyway, yeah I think it would be nice to see a difference between iron and aluminum heads knock tolerance. There is definitely a real-world performance benefit there aside from the weight savings! I find myself using iron heads on almost everything that doesn’t have a weight requirement.

As far as Tycoon suggestions have you considered having the company use racing as a marketing tool? Compete in a race series for every era - “what wins on Sunday sells on Monday!”.

I think it would be awesome to be able to build something to compete in 60’s-70’s Trans-Am racing, or 50’s vintage Formula 1! Every series could have different specs: In an endurance series (something like 24h LeMans?) response, reliability and fuel economy would be heavily scored, where other series raw power and weight would be most important. I know the main gold of the game is to run a company, but this could serve as an optional sales bonus or something. It would add a whole dimension to the game - balancing running your business and playing with race cars would be interesting. Do I want to spend my R&D on perfecting a beige passenger car that will sell in the hundreds of thousands and have NOTHING to do with racing (ie rhymes with Boyota), or do I want to build a race pedigree and use that to push less mass-production friendly cars?

It might be neat to choose between GT/LMP, rally, drag racing, formula, or circle-track every year. If you stick with one series for decades you gain more prestige in one demographic, but lose another?

Also- I REALLY hope you can include something to simulate the management problems that plague large auto companies. It would an interesting challenge to see some new CEO come into your company and decide that he likes money more than he likes cars, or some merger that forces you to use another company’s sub-par parts.

4

Doh, I just read there will be no motorsports in the release! Oh well :blush: