Weird sales forecast

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1

Hey, I have been playing with the LCV3.7 for the past ~two weeks and I’m deeply enjoying my play through. Engineering cars & engines works really well. I think the most confusing part is actually selling the cars. Putting aside lack of some informations that would allow me to understand why is car selling better or worse or what are my competitors actually doing (I’ve heard those are coming), the biggest issue that I can not work around are quirks with the sales predictions.

  1. For starters I’ve observed that sometimes, increase of the profit margin actually increases the car sales?
  2. For some settings and some cars, sales & profits are jumping up and down every year, while slightly adjusting some parameters (things like expected economy, market awareness or profit margin), stabilises the sales prediction.
  3. I think my biggest complain. Sometimes if I add a new trim for my model, it destroys sales/profit of other trims for inexplicable reasons. For example in the attached screenshots. I had two trims: 760 for luxury/premium market. 760C convertible that were expected to fully saturate one factory with great scores. I’ve added a much more expensive GT trim aiming the GT Premium market, and the sales for the previous trims collapsed. I slightly tuned working pressure (+3 clicks) for engineering to have release at the same time. There are also some other quirks, like the factory utilisation seems to be dropping from 1.8 to 1.1 in the second and following years (the same happens to the profit), but number of sold cars remain the same?

Screenshots

Are those real issues, or am I misunderstanding something? Also, are that issues of just the sales forecast and the real sales will not be affected? Or if I see issue like that in the forecast, in can also happen after the car is released?

I’ve heard that new sales model is being developed, is it aiming to tackle those issues?

Anyway, great game! Cheers!

2
  1. That can happen if you decrease production due to the higher overall price. You make more margin, but the overall overhead cost drops.
  2. That just happens. Not entirely sure why, but remember that it’s just a forecast.
  3. That seems like the price of the GT trim is upping the cost of the other trims being produced. Probably because of engineering. Factored utilization being high, then dropping is usually due to the game trying to keep stock of cars.
2 Likes
3

Thanks for your answers.

  1. It’s strange, but ok :slight_smile:

  2. Does it mean, that I shouldn’t try to optimise out such patterns from the forecast and that the actual sales numbers will be either way different? For example because of parameters have changed (GDP growth, competitiveness, market awareness) since the forecast?

  3. But the price hasn’t changed that much (200$?). Also if you look at the number of cars sold, actually forecast is telling me I will sell more cars with the GT trim (205k vs 201k after 5 years), but with much lower factory utilisation (???) 1.0 vs 2.0, with 3 times smaller profits. I doubt that the 200$ higher cost would explain that - that’s only a 1% increase, while those cars are selling usually with margins ~100%.

I wonder if what’s happening here, is that the trims are competing between one another - dragging the margins down? This experiment with setting minimum price seems to suggest that’s what’s happening. It looks like AI is adjusting the price of cars trying to optimise it individually trim by trim. And when I’m setting really high minimal price on a trim that would sell to GT Premium market regardless whether it costs twice as much or not, I’m allowing AI to set a higher margins on the other trims?

However still I can not understand the factory utilisation :confused:

4

  1. The “wavy” forecast seems to do that when the economy is at a plateau, or the lowest point of a drop in the current trend. So it can go either way. Adding your adjustment makes the variables less pronounced, so less/no waves.

  2. You will sell more value in car. You will actually end up selling fewer cars, and the factory utilization will go down, because the cars are more expensive, with fewer buyers, in turn leading to you making fewer actual cars.

5

re 3. Sorry, I still don’t get it. If you take a look at my last two screen shots. They differ only in the first one, I’ve set really high minimal price for the GT trim. Some things that I can not understand:

  1. The second one is selling/producing twice as many cars, with very similar overall factory utilisation as the first one.
  2. Increasing the minimal price of the GT trim, decreased the score (?) and sales of C trim?
6

That’s indeed a strange one. I might attribute it to how the game handles the sales model, but I’m not sure about that.

What does make sense is that the higher price does drop the overall production pretty fast though.