The year is 1977. You are building a supercar or high-end sports car for a wealthy Swiss buyer. The car will be used for spirited drives in the Alps, and occasionally as regular transportation.
Sportiness - For this type of car, an absolute must
Cost - These are expensive cars for a wealthy buyer, but the buyer didn’t get wealthy by spending recklessly (at least up until this purchase). Purchase cost, running costs, and fuel economy will be important. I’m taking a bit of a page out of the ongoing LHC challenge here, whether your car is more affordable or more expensive will be judged against your competitors; make sure the buyer feels it’s money well spent compared to your competition.
Other important factors
Perfomance figures - I’ll be looking at acceleration figures and top speed. A bit of a caveat here: this is important up to a point. Aim to be in the range of the performance of the inspiration cars: fast is good, and being slower than the slower inspirations will hurt you, but being faster than the fastest inspirations will bring you no extra benefit.
Drivability - Spending this much money on a car, it should be a pleasant experience.
Comfort - See above; should be pleasant.
Reliability - These cars aren’t well known for being reliable, but regardless, the more reliable, the better.
Smaller variables you may want to consider, but will most likely only come into play as a tiebreaker
Environmental Resistance
Prestige
Safety
Practicality
Rules:
Trim and Variant no newer than 1977
Please use radial tires to keep everyone on an even keel
No downforce: lips, spoilers and wings are allowed but they can onlly be used to reduce lift. Make sure from the aero tab that neither front nor rear downforce go into positive values.
Techpool: This will be handled in the form of point-buy. You have 25 techpool to spend, and you can distribute those 25 points in any way you want. Send me your list of techpool or a screenshot of your techpool with your submission, as well as the purchase price you are expecting your car to have, so we can make sure cars are being judged as intended. I will allow resubs on a case by case basis if there are unexpected discrapancies. I recommend before any .car export, to click on the engine summary tab, then click over to any trim tab, as this may be necessary for recent changes to TP that effect the engine to correctly effect the trim.
Leaded gasoline. Switzerland would not switch to unleaded until well into the next decade.
Model and Family named QFC14 - yourforumname
And that’s it. These are supercars, have fun. I’ve chosen and era and class of vehicles where almost any choice in-game could be seen as realistic, so consider realism a non-factor. I honestly don’t know how the techpool point buy is going to go, but I hope seeing what you all do with this level of freedom will provide me some insight.
I think this ruleset is possibly a bit ambitious, but I want to see what happens giving you this much freedom with your ET and techpool, and letting the price parameters be your primary limiting factor.
Grr, I want to enter (and wanted to enter QFC13) but the Kitbash3D Mission to Minerva Challenge is winding down and I need to get my entry done for that, too
Observation. I lowered the techpool to two points for each area just to get started, and then built for a few hours. Then, I saved and came back (so techpool didn’t fry), changed techpool up and down in a few places and…LUA errors and it won’t process any further.
Techpool is half-baked and possibly able to destroy effort. Can anybody else confirm?
The freedom to use 48 tech pool points anywhere you want as you see fit may explain why PU/ET limits are not present in this specific QFC.
However, with so many tech pool points available on offer, this brings a lot of potential for abuse; for example, it could be possible for someone to assign 15 points each to three different areas, and distribute the remaining 3 points elsewhere. To prevent this, I suggest imposing a limit of a maximum of 6 tech pool points (give or take one or two) for each area.
Yeah, I’d suggest ditching techpool altogether. Try playing around with it on a test car and quickly you’ll see how unbalanced and half-baked its’ implementation is. It won’t take more than five seconds for a meta to form about where to spend the points. The other thing I ran into is you have to reload the car every time you change it in order to have the price adjust accordingly.
Have a lower limit for all categories so that the amount of points in play is reduced, and place a greater emphasis on the non-stats values. Should reduce the effectiveness of any perceived meta.
Also this is QFC, there won’t exactly be any major drama if somebody follows a meta and wins.
My issue is that we have zero anchor point for pricing and quality expectations, and I’m not about to accept “oh well you’re going to be judged against the arithmetic mean of all competitors” because that means we’re not actually benchmarking the inspiration cars.
At some point tech points need to be used in challenges effectively. Csr allowed quite liberal tech points and ran just fine, albeit with a smaller entry list
Imo Donutsnail has come up with a good brief allowing people to build some very interesting vehicles.
If it turns out someone finds the meta regarding tech points then at least being qfc and having a faster turn around it means we all know maybe to reign in the points usage next time.
This was intentional, I’ve really enjoyed in LHC (and the last JOC, for example) how you simply couldn’t know prior to submitting if you’ve built a budget option or a pricy option; you just have to do what you think will turn out competitive. The benchmark against the inspiration cars only comes into play in regards to acceleration figures; benchmarking automation car pricing against irl is generally pointless, and obviously we don’t have intangible stats like sportiness to benchmark against the real cars.
If this is really not something people want to do, we can just do the plain old, Max ET Max Price system, and if we’re going to lock techpool usage to specific amounts we might as well just save everyone the hassle and not use it at all. That just seems less interesting because it just gives everyone an exact target to aim for and makes for a less diverse field of cars.
Maybe I’m way off base here, but does this make sense to people?
I’m mostly concerned about it’s stability. You must follow a specific order of operation to set techpool. Can it be done? Yes but you must set, exit, go back in, and then work (or face LUA errors). No changing on the fly like the rest of the sliders.
Cloning a broken car seems to fix the errors so you can continue.
I have a badass car in the works though, so I do hope you host!
Well, if it’s intentional, then at least I have the peace of mind that you know what you’re doing. I’m just concerned that we have flat out no idea where to go; the last JOC at least had a price limit which told us the upper limit, and of course you ended up winning it by correctly electing to go cheaper.
Like, right now, I have a sporty two-seater mule, and I can make it a $25k car or a $32k car depending on how much bells, whistles, and quality I throw at it. It’s fine that I have a decision to make, but now I have nothing grounding that decision.
That being said, I totally see your point on not just giving people a target. This community could use some practice in self-restraint when making cars.
