I’ve been playing the game more frequently lately and the family system has begun to annoy me a little bit. Typically I’ll start a campaign and quickly throw together a cargo van to generate some income while I micromanage everything else. Recently, I decided to do a long and a short wheelbase version of the van. I’ve read through some of the previous threads, I’m familiar with how changing wheelbase can mess up the calculations, and personally I’d hate a wheelbase slider anyway because I would overthink it. It did get me thinking though, that the family grouping is great most of the time, but every once in a while there is a trim that would benefit from a model on a different wheelbase. My cargo van for example. Building a new factory just to produce a nearly identical vehicle rubs me the wrong way, especially if it’s a low volume production. While I acknowledge in many cases it would be completely pointless, the solution I came up with was to leave the families grouped by wheelbase, but then group them again based on relation to another family. You’d still be presented with all the bodies in the family, but you’d be able to go into a submenu and look at a bodies in a related family. It would definitely help when you have one trim that could benefit from a change in size but is otherwise identical. Just my two cents.
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I agree with this. I definitely feel like the family system is a bit limiting. For example, nowadays GM usually has their SUVs built on the same chassis as their pickups, but using different more comfortable suspension. You can’t do that in Automation without building a whole new vehicle, which is a bit silly seeing as it’d be fairly straightforward in a real life setting to just adjust the production line to split off the chassis meant for SUVs and give them different suspension.
EDIT: I forgot to check that this post is 9 months old lol
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