Hi everyone,
I haven’t played for quite a long while and now started again with the Al rilma update.
After several hours of play, I have to say: designing an engine is no fun anymore. Back in the day, every slider seemed to be important. Everything you did, changed the performance of the engine and everything seemed to interact with everything else. You really had to be thoughtful with what you do.
Now, I feel the exact opposite. When I design an NA engine, most of the sliders seem to do close to nothing. You can change some values from 0 to 100 and the engine loses or wins 2 kW or something and still works just fine. The only reason I still even bother fiddling with the sliders is that you have to meet the emissions criteria. To achieve that, you basically have to ignore the engines performance anyway because if you want an engine that meets all criteria in +10 years, you really have to dial the sliders to extremes. Which of course, doesn’t do much harm, because they don’t impact the engines performance anyway.
It’s a little bit more interesting if you add a turbo or a supercharger, but then for some reason, most demographics seem to absolutelly hate them and will just stop buying your car, even if the turbo adds like 70% of power. Which I think is ironic, because in real life, there was a time when even just writing “turbo” on your car increased sales numbers by a thousend percent even if the turbo didn’t do anything at all.
The rest of the game is still fun! I really enjoy the campaign, even though I think the menus and how you do stuff is still not very intuitive.
Can you provide your sample engines, for what’s not having a large enough impact? And list specific sliders? There’s a lot of sliders that have more or less impact based on other stuff, and you might be in a realm where certain sliders are having their effects masked.
As for emissions… That’s more on the explanation of the system than on the system itself. There’s three numbers that determine emissions compliance - HC, CO and NOx. HC and CO behave the same, being improved by high compression ratios and lean fuel mixes… while NOx is the opposite of these two, being worsened by high compression and lean mixes. Emissions optimisation is especially important to NOx, too, especially with fuel mix not in the ideal-for-NOx region, but there’s a point where it stops mattering - and that point is defined by your power, gearing and (in rare cases) weight. Materials and quality matter a lot too. The upshot of all of this is that you can get good numbers 10+ years in advance but only if you know what you’re doing and the game makes it hard to know what you’re doing.
As for turbos… Again, can you show the cars? There’s a chance you’re dying in all manner of ways. Torque curve penalties, throttle response, reliability, cost… A lot of stuff can cause issues.
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I’ve attached an example engine.
V8_-_Begonia.engine (2.9 KB)
It’s a NA single point EFI V8. I dialed down the Lambda-slider to zero, which I wouldn’t normally do, but I think this lambda-thing has some potential to override other settings. I’ve also lowerd the compression a bit, to lower the current octane well below the fuel octane so I won’t run out of octane when I change some sliders. So, let’s play with the fuel system. The desirability ratings below are for an (outdated) Luxury car.
Fuel Map:
0: 152 kW, Desirability: 138.8
100: 157.5 kW, Desirability: 139.6
Optimal power: 158.9 kW, Desirability: 139.6
Lambda = 1
0: 158.9 kW, Desirability: 139.6
100: 154 kW, Desirability: 139.1
Optimal power: 158.9 kW, Desirability: 139.6
Timing:
0: 157.3 kW, Desirability: 140.2
100: 159.7 kW, Desirability: 116.9 (for reliability reasons)
Optimal: 159.7 kW: 140.2
So, from all the fuel system, the only significant effect seems to be, that you can make your engine unreliable when you advance your timing to extreme levels. But even then, it’ll apparently still run just fine, make the same power, be just as efficient, have the same performance index etc.
The only remotely significant secondary effect seems to be, that you can slightly lower the current octane with the “right” settings, but not by a lot.
I haven’t loaded it up, but one of these isn’t meant for performance and the other two are somewhat complex in their actions.
The lambda=1 slider only effects running at low-throttle, low-RPM combinations until it gets very high. The lines you see are full throttle. That low-throttle, low-RPM range is very, very important for emissions - put the engine in a car and you’ll often see it having a big impact there.
For fuel map and timing… Again, I haven’t fully looked, but the impact of these depends a lot on your compression and design. If you’re already close to knock, they do a lot. If you’re pretty far from it, they don’t do much. The sliders have far more variable impacts, which makes for far more subtle, nuanced and interesting gameplay… Once you figure it out, and there isn’t a ton that helps you figure it out.
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