This is just from my quick experiences and watching videos of the Lite Campaign V2 in the Kee engine.
The most frustrating thing to me is the management of the UI when attempting to
- Balance production of a vehicle
- Manage factories for new vehicles
- See how a car is responding to market
My suggestions will focus on mainly factories, but I have a few ideas about managing markets as well.
My main thing I really, really recommend you do is entirely 100% isolate factories into their own tab. The idea is this: When you start design of a car, it stays just that. A design. You then go to your factories tab and build a factory or reassign a factory. If a car is still being engineered, the factory will wait to retool of course. Once assigned, it works like normal.
This would probably require splitting up the UI a bit more, where you need Designs, Productions, and Factories. If you wanted to go even further, it would be Cars and Engines, with their own tabs for Designs, Productions, and Factories. This seems like a lot of tabs but would make it so much easier to manage every aspect of your company.
You could give each tab more quality of life things as well with this system. Productions could have easy access quick sliders to adjust production levels of trims or the shifts themselves. Design could make it easier to make new trims quickly as well as manage engines easier (for example, offering multiple engines to choose from to a customer.) This would add a crap ton of tabs, but I think it would be a general improvement.
This is just my rough ideas anyways, if you decide to do something like this you’ll probably find a better way to streamline it.
Now about my third complaint. I think per production, you should have a way to analyze the market with some simple graphs and stuff, but that’s honestly the best idea I have. There is probably a much better way to display the relevant info.
Thanks for making a great game (even so far, I have fun in sandbox.)