First i want to say that i’m a huge fan of these kind of games, or rather the illusion of these kinds of games as as you yourself states many have tried and most have failed… Looking forward to this game a lot and will definitely pre-order!
Now on to the case:
In real life, automakers have had to endure several up’s and down’s trough history, mainly due to large-scale happenings on a world-scale or nationwide-scale.
Good examples of these is the dual Oil-crises of the 70’s which effectively killed off the big-bore V8’s of GM, Ford and Chrysler and forced them to build smaller more economical cars and brought the US car market wide open for smaller, more fuel-effective Japanese and to some extent, European cars. Will the game feature some kind of randomized events that drastically alters the price of, for example, oil which will rise fuel prices and force the player(s) into making smaller cars or more effective engines? That would be a really cool feature.
Shortage or dramatically raised prices for resources such as steel and/or plastic is also a possibility that would make the player want to use less materials, or alternative materials for his/her cars for different reasons, East germany had quite a big shortage of sheet-metal during the 60’s which made them manufacture the Trabant in Duroplast, a compound made from cotton waste and phenol resins, lowering weight and making it easy and cheap to mass-produce with the resultant car never rusting, but bursting into flames producing higly toxic smoke when crashed … It would nevertheless be interesting for game-purposes to have materials have a cost that randomly goes up and down, forcing players to try to think outside the box if steel becomes too expensive or hard to get by.
Other events may be Legislations by countries forcing the player to alter their strategy. Emission-regulations, crash-safety regulations and other legislations like the 1958 US law that required all cars to feature dual headlights is some examples. Will these be featured in the game or can i fit the same old gas-guzzler or smoke-machine into every car trough the entire era of the game?
Lastly, in the Trabant note - I know it’s a longshot, but will we be seeing 2-stroke engines for small cars in the early game? East germany had their Trabants and Wartburg with 2-strokers, here in Sweden we had the 2-stroke Saab 93 and 96 into the mid 60’s and some other smaller carmakers like Bond Minicar utilized 2-stroke engines into the late 60’s and early 70’s, i know it’s a longshot but it would still be a fun feature… What if the 2-stroker never died!?
Quite a few things in your post and all but the 2-stroke stuff can be answered with: yes, that will be in the game.
If everything goes as planned we will have different grand campaign modes:
Historic/Realistic, with the appropriate strengths and weaknesses of countries, their rough demographics and economy, and car preferences of course. Crisis and legislation will be reflected as accurately as we can make it.
No Green Wave/Oil Crisis, in a fictional world that starts very similar to historic events but then never got “green”.
Randomized world with some customization options to create a game of your liking.
As you can see in the demo now already, we do have material costs, and no, they will not be static - although they are currently for making things easier to balance in the scenarios.
Thanks for the answers, those campaign modes sounds like they will be really awesome and offer some truly great replayability. I could never guess you planned on demographics, car preferences and such for different markets! That is a great thumbs up! I remember back in the day when i was heavily playing Detroit and decided to start up a manufacturing plant in Russia in the '50s, building cheap and extremely simple cars as it were in real life. It turned out it was a big flop and the big heavy V8 luxury cars that sold gold in the US sold at least as good in Russia in that game… Big facepalm and that small, sleek and cheap car i spent a long time on building was thrown in the dustbin to be forgotten by history…
Yes i noticed the materials cost and the workhours for assembling the engine and found it to be a really nice touch to the game, playing in some very important aspects when efficiency and mass-production is the main point, the tech-level feature is a really good thing to have there.
Keep up the good work! Really looking forward to the I6 and I3’s!
I didn’t want to create a new post, so I’ll write here.
Will something like this be possible in the released game?:
Say I have a car that no longer meets the requirements of my country. Will I be able to move the production and distribution of that particular car to less developed markets? (Like VW did with the beetle or Lada did with 2107)
[quote=“RoninGT21”]I didn’t want to create a new post, so I’ll write here.
Will something like this be possible in the released game?:
Say I have a car that no longer meets the requirements of my country. Will I be able to move the production and distribution of that particular car to less developed markets? (Like VW did with the beetle or Lada did with 2107)[/quote]
… It would nevertheless be interesting for game-purposes to have materials have a cost that randomly goes up and down, forcing players to try to think outside the box if steel becomes too expensive or hard to get by.
