1: Advertisements: You should be able to pay for your ads (TV ad, Magazine ad, etc.), have each type of ad vary in cost, and others.
2: Jobs + factories: You should pay by the 100 how many workers you want to employ, which is maximized by the size of your factory. Everyone starts with a small factory, and that factory will grow larger if you pay more. You can also have muliple factories.
3: Sold places: I think that you should be able to control where the cars you sell go. You can have cars going to the USA only, maybe all of North America, maybe only Europe, etc.
4: Dealerships: Cars should be sold in dealership chains: 1 chain for every country.
Advertising is perhaps one of the most important aspects of selling a car. However, it’s difficult to make the mechanic function in a way that’s fun. It usually comes down to, “how much do you want to spend on X” – and that’s it. I don’t know how difficult it would be to implement, but I envision something along the lines of importing a background picture into the game, and being able to overlay a photo of the car you designed. Then, you can add text via a text box and make (and save) your own ads in game. Each ad you create is the basis for an ad “campaign”. That is, you choose how long you want the campaign to run for (which will determine cost), the target audience (which will determine the effectiveness) etc. I think that would be much more engaging than, “TV ad = $X amount = Y sales boost”. Although if the latter means the game is released sooner, I’ll take it!
Why should everyone start with a small factory? Suppose I want to recreate an actual car company that was already well-established, well-funded, and making cars in 1946. I think the game should allow for a variety of starting scenarios.
That’s seems to be a given, IMO.
Again, why the arbitrary limit? I envision something more along the lines of franchising agreements. Various AI dealers compete for your business. Depending on the size and location of the dealer network, they will offer your company franchise fees (and ongoing royalties) for selling your car. The revenue from which can be used to advertise or build more cars. So for instance, AI dealer #2948 will pay $50,000 for the right to sell your cars and $5,000/year for 5 years. If the cars the dealer buys from your company fly off the lot, not only will you have more dealers competing for franchise agreements (and you can have as many as you want), the terms will become increasingly favorable. On the other hand, if the dealer ends up with a crap car that has an average 500 days turnover, you’ll have a hard time getting franchise agreements and the ones that do come along will be very small. The easiest way (and the one that would probably take the shortest amount of development time) would be to bypass the dealer mechanic entirely, and do as Tesla does. Direct sales.
Basically, everything summed up is ridiculously obvious. Those are all aspects that belong in a company tycoon game.
As said by Slim Jim, advertisement is ridiculous obvious. The screenshot part of the car could be used to let you choose a backdrop belonging to a certain era and position the car well on that. Next is writing a line of text saying; The new #CARNAME is here! or something like that. Then have that picture with texst advertised in the newspapers or so. If you ‘force’ the player of taking a picture of their car, you can can use that created image to display too when you win a Car of the Year prize or something.
Jobs: If you have a small factory, a 100 workers might be a lot. I would say you need a minimum for every factory to function well, so 100 for a medium factory maybe or so? As for different factories you can change the scaling when you add extra workers. Small factories can go up by 1-5 people at a time with a single click, big factories go up by 50-100 or something. This way you ahve more control if you need more workforce but dont ahve a lot of financial space to get 100 people inot the company straight away.
Sold places: pretty much set as you will get reports on sales in regions every month perhaps.
Like factories you could set up dealernetworks ranging from small to medium to large and huge. small would be only like 5 dealers, huge would be 100+. But as Slim Jim said, direct sales could be interesting too.
I think we should “borrow” the advertisement Ideas from Game Developer Tycoon. Wherein, you not only select how much your interested in spending, but what it will be spent on.
General Advertising:
Not only will general “marketing” be deployed but target audiences, usage of current market trends to determine which style or model should be sold at which time, but also setting up booths at trade-shows and expo’s where people could physically get in and play with the car.
Live test drives, be they prerecorded for TV adverts or something like Top Gear.
I’ve mentioned it before, but the main gripe about advertising in Detroit was you had no idea what your advertising spend got you.
Did $500 per month on tv in 1960 get you 1 ad per hour,week,month or have you now bought every slot going so the only adds were yours, you just didn’t know.
My thoughts, to avoid this would be to buy advertising based on air time, column inches, etc and show the associated cost to allow you to make that decision.
I’m wondering if their should be some form of in game advisor to assist your decision making process.
Maybe a marketing exec could be one of the “hero” staff members?
Agreed, player feedback is king, it should show you how the brand awareness and model reputation is improved by the advertisement choices you make. To set levels right independent of markets we could try to make an Easy Mode which suggests different levels adapted to market size.
I think an easy mode is a good idea because the player would be able to choose how in depth they like to deal with adds. I also think that a visual presentation should be implemented because it could help some players to identify even more with their in game brands and the whole game.
