A followup of a discussion started on steam:
I am having issues to produce cars with differents engines in the current little campaign. Every playthrough I end up with problem as soon as I tried to get different engines built.
In the last one, I failed even with engines variants of a unique original model.
I am not sure what I am doing wrong, I am sure I must doing something wrong. But the engine factory manager get in odd status (nothing selected, impossibility to remove newly created factory). Even if it looks ok at signoff time, it is not afterwards, no model looks out of the factory.
I cannot upload the savegames here for some reason, being a new user on the forum. I made a zip available at https://ufile.io/il5x87zj but it’ll last only 30 days.
dxdiag is there: https://ufile.io/5jdepgys
Inside the zip are 3 different attempts where I all end up stuck not knowing what do to do for production to go on.
(Besides, I really love the game! I Keep up the good work. As someone that worked as developer a while ago with experimental physicists, I appreciate how deep the engine design/build goes and I recognize the required state of mind to manage to create such a game. Cheers!)
For the record, original discussion is there https://steamcommunity.com/app/293760/discussions/2/1842440600597495047/?ctp=7
(not allowed to put more than 2 links in first post by new user)
Thanks for sending the saves, they indeed look like you are misunderstanding something fundamental in how to make multiple engines work (not blaming you, the UI is everything but intuitive at the moment as a whole). Once we’ve got you sorted I want you to describe what thread of thought you followed to arrive where you did 
as that might be helpful for us to know where to put additional barriers so that you don’t even want to go down that path.
The following is the most direct way of making a car use two different engine families. There are more advanced, more efficient, and more elegant ways of doing this, but this is the most direct way.
Do the following:
- Start a new campaign.
- Make a new car project, and complete your chassis choices.
- Now click the new engine project button in your first trim slot.
- Make the family choices and complete the first variant of your new engine.
- Now you can edit your first trim, do that and complete it.
- From the Trim Overview, clone your first trim via the “Clone Contents”.
- Delete out the engine from the second trim’s slot via the garbage can button.
- Click the New Engine Project button in the engine slot of the second trim.
- Make your second engine with a different engine configuration and size (for clarity).
- Set up your one car factory to produce both trims. They are slotted in by default.
- Leave the car engineering at default and move on.
- On the engine panel you should now see Family 1 Variant 1 and Family 2 Variant 2, in their own slot respectively. Both slots blinking red.
- Edit the upper one first, Family 1.
- Go to the second tab, production management. You see your existing starting factory being used by default.
- Edit it. On the third tab Variant 1 should be slotted in by default. Just up the Automation and “Sign Off Factory”.
- Go to the third tab of the engine, engineering, and leave it at default.
- On the fourth tab you choose to sign off the engine project.
- Now you see the first engine in the engine list turned green. The second still has a red warning. Edit it.
- Going in there throws you to the final engine tab (that’s a bug), so navigate back to the second engine tab.
- Here you see that there is no factory assigned. Make a new one.
- Choose an appropriate country, plot and factory size.
- On the third tab you see your engine is automatically slotted in already.
- Hit the sign off factory button. It is now marked with a green dot in the factory overview.
- Go to the fourth tab and sign off the engine project.
- Now you are back in your engine project list for the new car project. Both engines are now with a green check.
- Move through the forecaster to the final car project page and ready the project for sign off.
- On the mass sign off screen select all three projects, then hit the sign off button.
- Speed up time in the hub until the car comes out of engineering.
- Boom, car with two variants using two different engine families.
That at least shows you that it indeed works. Where have you gone wrong before?
Ok, so following this exact order, it seems to work.
I think the general issue that makes this hard to understand for me is the fact that engine production is not independant from model production.
To me, it would makes more sense to have the possibility to start engine production and gradually had this engines in car models.
And the UI looks like it would allow you to do that. Except it does not but I think that was my problem each time.
Anyway, I tried a new campaign like this and it looked ok up to a point. To a point that car seems to fails to on the market. I think it is a different bug. The game crashed and my campaign savegame got suddenly named SANDBOX_… (while the earlier had the company name as savefile). That could be the reason why the campain seems broken.
Here’s the file (I was considering posting a new bug report but it looks like the consequence of a crash, so maybe not so useful) https://ufile.io/w5u5umzf
Engine production is tied to car production to eliminate micromanagement, it is kind of ready production, the car factory gets the exact amount of engines it requires and there is no engine inventory.
The ordering of operations doesn’t have to be what I described, it seems pretty solid in doing it whatever way you see fit as long as you follow that basic concept: all engine production needs to be assigned inside a car project.
I’ll have a look at your save file.
Ok, so I guess here lies my main misunderstanding of the game system.
But the UI is quite confusing in this regard because it looks like you’d be able to, on the fly, build an engine factory and set a model to be built there, independantly.
Also, it lead to my previous situation where I would not find how to get my engine built while they were indeed included in a car project.
I think it would be clearer to me if the factories where listed and signed off on a same page per car project.
We sure would do that (sign off engine factories with the car project itself) if that wouldn’t cause all kinds of unnecessary limitations, i.e. you not being able to set up something like 2 models sharing 3 families (and timing them to all finish at once). That is what we have the mass sign-off screen for.
Seems odd you’d suggest that seeing that what you’re asking for is there already, but one screen later to give more options. Maybe you misunderstand the “ready to be signed off” for a “sign off”?
I did not have time to play since a while so I have no further experience to share.
One thing is sure, out of three playthrough I ended up with a broken engine factory interface, allowing me to create factories but not to remove them and with buttons seemingly to assign/modify something that does not permit to actually pick anything.
It is always the same issue with UI: even if it is well tought, if users end up in a broken mess. Good interface allows smart user to achieve what they have in mind. Best interface allows also morons to get proper result, considering that the goal of the game is not to master the UI per se
It especially delicate at this stage because the user wonder whether he is doing something wrong or he hit an actual bug in the interface.
Just to be clear: no issue like this with the current version. Either my brain adjusted to your UI design or the UI has been improved
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as that might be helpful for us to know where to put additional barriers so that you don’t even want to go down that path.