Hey, it’s me again, I hope you are not tired of me yet. I have almost finished my first play-through and I accumulated a list of things (mostly UI related) that was making my game more difficult than it could be.
Sales forecast
For me that was one of the most important tool of the campaign despite it not being very trustworthy. Some thoughts/suggestion:
- It should take into account all of my models, including those that are being engineered.
- It should also allow to manually exclude impact from your current models (trims?) that you are thinking about phasing out/replacing (note there might no 1 model to 1 model replacement, but for example 2 to 3, and they might be produced in completely different factories)
- It should allow manually including/exclude WIP models, useful if you are trying to evaluate how two WIP models will be interacting with one another before signing them off
- Why there is no access to the forecast during engineering and production? If I could access it all the the time, first of all I could observe continuously how the forecast is being adjusted after certain events/actions so I could build up understanding of it’s accuracy and what are the consequences of some actions/events (adding another model, changes in the economy, competitors, my marketing spendings, dealership networks, etc…). Secondly, access during the production would allow me to plan for facelifts/replacements.
- Could you provide some way to “snapshot” forecast prediction for comparisons? Or even snapshot whole car project setup (including factories?). Currently when I’m trying to decide whether to add a 3rd trim or modify my trims, I’m doing:
- Save the game with 2 trims.
- Take a photo with my phone of the sales forecast for just those two trims.
- Add third trim.
- Compare new sales forecast with the photo on my phone.
- Maybe reload the game, or do some more modifications and go back to step 1. or 2.
Factories management
I think this is another important pain point. As long as I had just a couple of small/medium factories, I didn’t have big issues, but once I grew above 10 factories in the late game (14 right now?), factories management/planning became major pain:
- Why building factories is tied down to facelifts? It doesn’t make sense and makes some mistakes super painful. For example I’ve started some 6+ years engine engineering facelift (for example adding some sport variant, without changes to the existing “lux” models) and one year later I’m getting message that my engine factories for the previous “lux” versions are critically overworked. Now I’m screwed… I should be able to modify/change/add/remove factories independently of the ongoing engineering efforts.
- Current chart of engine family factories being overworked is not very helpful if I’m producing different engine variants in different factories.
- If I do not touch/modify some factories in one facelift (I wanted them to keep producing previous versions of the engine/car), they are disappearing from engine overload graph, despite still producing engines. I have to manually take them into account…
- … the only current way of getting the actual number of engines being produced and number of models/trims being produced is to manually go through them one by one…
… but:
- Why I can only access detailed factory stats when I’m planning the facelift? Like automation/tooling settings, production efficiency, price per unit, engine produced count?
- When factory is finished, I can see only some very rough stats in the table listing all of my factories and if I try to enter the factory details, it’s being wiped out clean.
- When factory is part of a facelift/being upgraded, I can not check anything…
… hence:
- … so, to get the final count of engines/cars/trims being produced I have to always save the game (or take a photo) before signing off a project, and when I need to later check the details, I have to keep reloading the game to get those numbers
- (Lower priority issue) since retooling of medium and large factories can take soooo long time and I can not afford my most important models to not be produced for 1 year, I had to come up with some rolling upgrade plan. Replacement of model 1 goes into a new factory. Once this retooling is done, replacement of model 2 goes into the old model 1 factory. Once this is done, replacement of model 3 goes into old model 2 factory, … The UI doesn’t help with timing that.
More details about sales
- Historical sales charts please!
- Breakdown of sales per demographics per model/trim
- Some info about effects of marketing/dealerships. Currently I have no clue what’s happening and what should I do (except of increasing dealership networks if I reached max awareness cap)
- Generally speaking, some more info what are the reasons why so much or so few of my models/trims are being sold.
Markets/Competitiveness
- Could you add some view, that would allow me to analyse overlap between my models/trims (both existing models and WIP models). Current markets’ “competitiveness” view is a nice tool to check for current market gaps, but the only way how I could check what models/trims are overlapping is to manually go into every trim….
- Why I can not see competitiveness of the trims during the engineering?
- Instead of manually selecting for which countries to show the data, couldn’t you present the sales/revenues data as bar charts for different countries at the same time? Currently going through 5 countries is really cumbersome to do one by one. I struggle to imagine how would the current system work with grand campaign.
Engineering
- Feature to compare cars? Similarly how we can compare engines, but also including the competitiveness? Useful if I’m trying to make a decision whether to add a new trim and to which model to cover some new market. Like whether to add GT/GT Premium trim to my luxury car or to my sports car and I would like to compare which option would be better.
- Why during the engineering (after signing off) I can not access so many of the data? Like factories setup, before mentioned sales forecast, competitiveness, etc?
So… after sharing those thoughts with you… allow me to start my second play-through 
Again, great game already, even with the current limitations! Thanks for all of your efforts!
