Understanding the Campaign better

Hi there!

I’ve gotten very into the campaign lately and have a few questions around my experience so far.

#1: In terms of nations, it’s my understanding exporting a car to another country costs that consumer a bit more making your car less competitive in that market. For example, all my current production is in Hetvesia and I’m looking at starting a large premium car and heavy utility vehicle line in Gasmea. If my above assumption is correct, the car will be more competitive there especially if it’s more tailored to their tastes, ie bigger and prestigious. If those cars engines are built elsewhere, I would assume there would still be an import charge but smaller than a whole model correct?

#2: Designing a car for a demographics that other buy. For example, I have my Swift line of compact commuters with a sportier flair in the 8-12k range, my Sparrow line of medium sized family cars geared for b.family to family going for 5-9k range and my large Nutcracker line geared towards the b. premium and premium at 12-19k. With all three cars being built, they are all, even the higher end trims are mostly selling to the family and b.family demographic. It’s a huge issue as the Swift is killing it but the Sparrow and Nutcracker are underselling significantly.

I know it happens all the time in real life, cars selling to a unintended demographic but there are significant differences to these cars. I don’t get why my Nutcracker Gold is selling primarily to the family market when it’s double the price and not even very competitive with that segment. On the opposite end of the spectrum my Cardinal line, hand crafted luxury in small volumes has 50+ months of demand in the premium demographic despite being 37k+.

#3: Pricing and affordability. In the markets tab, we have an average and spread along with desirability. My intent with the Nutcracker premium car line was to make it very competitive with the b.premium and premium markets, make it affordable to manufacture, ie costs 16k to make. If I sell it at 25k, it’s in line with the premium average, that demographic only takes into account the sale price rather than the build price. In theory that should incur higher margins right?

#4: Marketing, Prestige and Reputation. I started spending money right off the bat in every country to boost my reputation and prestige. It’s grown from nothing to 25 rep and 12 prestige average. Are some of my above sales troubles have to do with my low prestige and how to do you grow these? I’m assuming higher quality cars boost rep and prestigious cars do the same with prestige, issue is that I’ve appeared to stall at around 12 with prestige for the last number of years. If prestige is too low is that why I’m having issues selling more prestigious cars at larger scales?

In terms of marketing, the individual safety etc tabs, I guess they market the features of your cars which in theory increases sales? With the current UI I have no idea and the 3 drop down menu’s next to it don’t appear to do anything.

#5: Market Awareness and Dealerships. I’m assuming my massive marketing budgets are what’s adding the 0.8%-1.6% I’m getting per year along with competitive products. Higher awareness allows for higher sales I would also assume. The issue I’m having is my awareness with Family cars is around 18% whereas in premium it’s 26% but as above my premium car is mostly selling to the family demo’s.

In terms of Dealerships, I’m assuming, higher awarenss = higher sales = more cars = more margin = happy dealers who expand their respetive networks. The more happiness and larger networks add to awareness and higher sales? What makes Dealers happy an grow? My cars with demo crossover seem to have improved Dealer happiness and gorw in size quicker than my more specialized projects.

This is a long post, but any insight, tips, tricks etc is appreciated, thank you!

  1. I don’t believe 1 has been implemented yet. Supposedly shipping a car across a border would charge you $500 and shipping an engine would charge you $250, but again, I don’t know/remember if that’s implemented or not.

  2. is mostly a case of the current sales model not being particularly understandable. Three extremely similar trims will usually sell the top trim model in my experience the most, unless you significantly stagger the sales price to fit the target demographics. Like, a premium car going for 80k, standard going for 20k and the budget car going for ~10k. 4.2 should make the sales model much more transparent than it is currently.

  3. That is correct, the market only cares as to what you sell the car for. However, this ties into question 5, in that you’re selling the car to the dealer, not direct to the consumer, so the dealer still needs to have some of their own margin to profit off of, which in turn makes them happy and more open to expanding sales of your car.

  4. Prestiege and reputation are based off of whether or not your cars that you’re selling are more prestigious or reliable respectively than the rest of the market average, as well as the marketing effort you put into it. Higher marketing offers a higher base level of prestige/reputation that the game will try to equalize you at assuming you aren’t actually selling anything.

  5. As mentioned partially in 3, your maximum sales are determined by the dealership size, or the market awareness of the people in the country, whichever is lower. To improve market awareness, you sell good cars to the market segment, and you can also invest into targeted demographic taste marketing (such as drivability or sportiness).

4.2 is coming soon, and it should make the campaign a bit easier to understand, along with the rest of the changes the game is going to have in regards to the sandbox and cars in general.

Thank you for the insight Admiral! In terms of 5, I guess that is part of issue. I’ve designed cars to fit their niche but they are instead selling to an entirely different demo, which makes those cars less competitive therefore hurting my awareness. It’s like a bad feedback loop.

I really don’t understand how I have a 2 door muscle car with performance bits, high revving V8 primary buyer is the delivery demo. Of course my expensive muscle car won’t be either affordable or competitive with the delivery market so I don’t get why they’re buying it.

That’s potentially because there is no competition in the delivery segment as of yet. The competition is a little bit opaque at the moment.

Once someone else offers a reasonable van, chances are your sales will drop off there significantly.

I do sell three other van models but for what ever reason for my 250HP 6.0L V8 two seat muscle car, that’s affordable and is just over 300 in the muscle demo is primarily selling to delivery despite it’s desirability being very low for that segment, it’s a little silly.

The competitiveness value is usually misleading, so don’t rely on it in it’s entirety to determine how well the cars will sell. You mainly want to pay attention to the affordability score and the desirability score.

If you want to sell to the muscle market, you can probably increase the price of the cars further to get more profit, and get your car out of the affordable range for people looking at vans.

Fair point, so in theory raise the price and over x amount of months the demo’s will change?

The demo should change immediately assuming the markets are aware enough of your brand and the dealerships have the capacity to sell your car.

The Muscle car market tends to be rather small at the beginning of the game though.

I tried everything IMO I could so, so I’m discontinuing the car and screw the Muscle Car market that appears to now be a main buyer of my 2-door utility focused Crane Truck with it’s latest V8. Even with large price increases, two refreshes I could not get the delivery guys to buy my dedicated Muscle car…

Don’t use a V8 for the delivery segment. It’s just generally not worth it. I’d imagine that using the V8 alone is the main driver to why it’s selling into the muscle segment (as it should be).

Most of my delivery segment vehicles use at most a V6, with some using an I4 and I3. You mostly want to focus on the gearing of the vehicle to give it acceleration and giving it a lot of cooling for reliability if you want to focus on the utility oriented segments.

Totally get that, it’s just really funny that my two door high performance V8 muscle car sold to utility customers and my torquey heavy utility truck is now selling to the muscle demo. It’s very silly IMO.