Lemon; for those of you who use a different term.
A car, often new, that is found to be defective only after it has been bought. Any vehicle with numerous, severe issues can be termed a “lemon,” and, by extension, any product with flaws too great or severe to serve its purpose can be described as a “lemon.”
It will add some realism and replay value to the campaign if a engine/car that is designed may have some manufacturing flaws. An example of this will be an engine that’s a prototype will have more time and oversight then a one that’s on the production line. The engine can be out of spec, resulting in a wide range of problems. A lot of engines during the 1970s-1980s clamed to be of higher HP then what the engine was able to create. Another option is to have a slide bar(quality bar?) like the technology in which time spent on checking parts to make sure they are proper but have an increase in time and production costs.
The whole production of the unit will not be effected perhaps only 10% of the total production. A forge or CNC will have a lower chance as they are measured once completed and the following production will be almost of the same quality. This will have a chanced to be caught by the “quality bar”.
A Recall can have a greater effect. It can be something from one worker forgetting to place a barring into the engine/transmission/ect to a manufactured part failing on every car of that model/year ect. A fixed recall will fix the problem forward so the car can be continued to be produced without issue. Some time may pass till the issue is found so if a car is sold for 10 years which has body changes but uses the same engine, a recall on the engine will perhaps force a max of 5 years of recall (the first 5 years are over the warranty or something)
A fail car is a working car that might be the best car in the world but fails to attract customers. It can be anything from the name to the shape of the cat(which is underneath the car but who knows)
Although it might be realistic I don’t think it would be wise to have too many random acts that are detrimental to your strategy. That sort of thing could be quite a turn off, there needs to be some sort of action the player can take to mitigate things.
Now if your company pursued a policy of cheap and nasty then so be it.
From what i can tell the Quality - Tech pool bar isn’t working as intended as some engines in the scenarios have some tech pool points that are removed if you click to the left and increase the quality. The tech pool maybe the max that you can use to increase your parts quality.
What I’m saying is that the tech pool and quality bars should be different bars.
The Tech pool will make your parts of lighter, stronger, last longer ect, ect. Wile your Quality bar will lower/raise your production standards which will make/lower/stop problems from happening.
For example a high end car will use the best technology a car manufacturer can produce. The lowest end car will not use the same manufacturing process of a car that’s over 20 years old.
If the technology bar is a 0 to 20 stat then having a 20 tech level will allow you to say… build a tech level of 10 at the same price as another company who has a max of 10 and builds a 0 tech car.
Its kinda like how options that used to be options that are now standard, like ABS brakes, at least a drivers airbag, power locks/windows, ect, ect.
The quality bar would be a -10 to +10. (Which would not have to be researched or unlocked)
Set at 0 a chance of something bad happening would be low, but if you want to make cars cheaper, or cant produce cars fast enough you can lower your quality which would allow your workers to build instead of measuring every detail. A car set at -10 may still perform good, but has a slight difference compaired to the prototype. Making every car at -10 quality may produce working cars but some people may test the advertisments that clam the engine that has 160hp when it only has 140, granting your company a bad rep.
Perhaps have some “marking” research that would be to offer a PTI or PDI (pre trip or pre delivery inspection) which may find that flat tire or miss aligned headlight before its sold to the customer. Having a forge or CNC machine will lower your chances of having issues as only the first item and every 100th item will be checked to standards. If the 100th item and the first item are the exact same then most likely the 2nd threw 99th are too.
The tech pool is working as intended, but indeed is difficult to fully grasp. Tech pool and quality slider are merged into one.
This is what happens:
It costs tech points to unlock future tech. So say, you are in 1990 and want to unlock MPFI which appears in 1992. To unlock that tech you need to spend 2 tech points, thus lowering your pool by 2.
As a consequence of using still “unreliable” future tech, you get an MTBF and quality penalty on that part, equal to the difference in years - in this case 2. So it is 1990, you unlock MPFI, but it’s quality is extrapolated back to 1988. This you can fix by spending more time on it, upping the quality!
You don’t really care about using MPFI and want to stick to SPFI which by default already is unlocked in 1990. Hence you have all your tech points lying around. These can be used to increase quality at a marginal cost. Having 2 tech points lets you up quality by 2 without much penalty in cost, but the full quality gain.
You don’t really care about either unlocking new tech or upping quality with your tech points… so now you can just leave them as is and produce to the quality you would get by default, but at a somewhat cheaper price than someone without tech points.
As you can see this offers quite a few possibilities, and this is the best solution we have after weeks of fiddling around with it and redesigning it several times.
If you have a tech-pool of 15, then you can produce parts to a quality that is considered “standard” 30 years in the future, at almost no additional cost. This means: you pull up the quality slider to +15 for almost no cost.
How do you turn up the quality slider, it might be a bug or something but the only thing that changes when i change the slider is tech goes from -15 to 15 but the quality is always 0?
Quality and tech are on the same slider as they are interconnected. Put the Tech/Quality slider up to +15 means an equivalent of +30 years of quality. Some scenarios have locked quality sliders.
