Hello - first post - this is your fault

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This game was not really what I expected when I purchased it. I saw the bits of the demo with rotating assemblies and the like, and figured that we had ourselves a new rendition of “Burnout” or one of the other hot rod games. Wow was I wrong.

If someone had told me two weeks ago that I would spend three hours “playing a game” that involved trying to build a generator engine that passed muster, I would have laughed and asked them what was “in their coffee”. But that is just what happened.

I thought I was buying a car designer simulator, now I see it is a car * company* simulator. I decided to dig around found the world regional map - very Corporate Machine… After all of this, I watched the most recent mini dev updates and caught myself up.

You already have this world partially built - where as part of some scenario - all of this research for all of the parts, the costs of new model lines, a comprehensive racing program, and “side quests” of the building the v8 motorcycle engine, or maybe an engine for a new ultra efficient lawnmower, or a new military type car, etc. etc. If these side quests are completed - that is when the advertising and marketing people produce material that up’s the company prestige and desirability - depending on how big the marketing budget that your company has in place to toot your company horn.

There could also be ways to mix an organic way to change trim desirabilities (make one headlight or a car color, or a handle design, etc. more desirable than another) which would involve a racing program. I started in 1944 and set a spread of 11 years, building the fastest car I could of that era - so it is 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, and 99. If I were to enter these in some sort of “race” where they go around a track, however they place may influence my company desirability and prestige, but for the next 11 years - the design cues from the race winner (or top 3 or whatever) might have some sort of increase in desirability for the buying public. That might be again where the player can either make educated guesses or spend money for the market research department for the (mostly correct) report.

Winning the race does not have to be an ultimate test - if it is endurance, just finishing with a production model could be a benefit. I.E. If your brand is known for low cost reliable cars, that would reinforce your brand image. We could even make it into a partial multiplayer where people come together online for race events (by year) - and the results affect the single player campaign listed above. The player’s car might not have won, but it came in sixth out of 10 and it was half of the cost of the winner - and all of this affects the different desirabilities.

Anyway - this is all your fault. Now after playing the scenarios and having so much fun with pretend car playdough I want this world as the campaign.

Just my thoughts everyone. Back to finagling with fuel mixture / turbo psi settings on my other screen. :wink:

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When I first started reading this the way you worded it made it sound like you were going to be disappointing. Boy was I’m glad i was wrong, welcome aboard! Wer’e all waiting in a pack together to pounce on the campaign/multiplier the moment it comes out so feel free to join us! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Heyya! Thanks for sharing :slight_smile: glad to hear you’re enjoying what’s in the game so far.

Unfortunately, the racing stuff is out of scope for the game - but we are considering taking a look at making a racing team manager expansion once the game is done.
The additional complexities you propose in conjunction with the race results are very interesting, but ultimately would limit people’s designs to “optimal choices”, which would take away some of the creative freedom of the game too.

Anyway, enjoy!

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[quote=“Killrob”]Heyya! Thanks for sharing :slight_smile: glad to hear you’re enjoying what’s in the game so far.

Unfortunately, the racing stuff is out of scope for the game - but we are considering taking a look at making a racing team manager expansion once the game is done.
The additional complexities you propose in conjunction with the race results are very interesting, but ultimately would limit people’s designs to “optimal choices”, which would take away some of the creative freedom of the game too.

Anyway, enjoy![/quote]

The stuff about using marketing teams and the like to enhance a brand or model’s image in terms of prestige (or even any of the major categories) sounds really good, though. Maybe that’s something to implement further down the line when the business side of things is almost done.

(I’m relatively new to Automation, and have enjoyed what’s on the current version and enjoyed the direction you’ve talked about in the dev videos :slight_smile: )

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Perhaps in the base game there could just be an option to sponsor a factory team, which costs some amount of money per year, and awards some amount of prestige etc. on an ongoing basis. The results could be based on a few racing-relevant stats of the various car models you have in production. You could have several types of motosport, from rally (speed, cornering, off-road), to touring car (cornering, speed, reliability), le mans (reliability, economy, speed), and maybe a few others. The racing team would automatically select the best car in your lineup for the types of racing they’ll be entering, and then you get a return based on the quality of your cars. There’s no need to fully simulate all of motorsport straight off - that’s an expansion well worth paying for down the road, once the main game is complete.

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I feel as if the most appropriate kind of company race teams for the game would involve production-based homologation and using the in-game designer to build race versions of your standard cars. I realize that Formula 1 is huge, but the spirit of the game would seem to be more about Group R and its predecessors in production-derived race car standards. [Edit: Possibly also NASCAR - I’m not familiar enough with the details of stock-car racing to say.]

I … sort of assumed that this would be a thing, actually. It seems like such a natural fit for the game - a form of marketing for the brand that’s not purely about budgeting funds to be spent on vaguely-defined categories of advertising, but on doing the thing you do in the rest of the game: build cars.

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The thing about NASCAR and stock car racing in general is, they are absolutely nothing like the production counterparts. They are a lightweight shell on a tubular (I think they’re still using tubular frames) chassis. Engines are fixed capacity across all manufacturers. The manufacturer might build the engine, but it isn’t anything you’ll have available in a showroom. ( I challenge you to show me a 5.7L 16 valve V8 in any modern production Toyota) That being said, even the Big 3 US auto manufacturers don’t use carburated motors anymore, although most of them have something comparable to the 5.7L OHV gem used in their NASCAR bodies, albeit with far less horsepower. I would hardly consider NASCAR as a homologation-based motorsport.

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NASCAR switched to EFI in 2012 and are not using carburetors anymore.

As for NASCAR being an actual stock car series, while it is not the case at all now-a-days, it was the case in the early days.

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I remembered hearing something about NASCAR not being particularly production-based - fair enough!