Will there be just one tech slider for all factories or each one have it’s own? Also what about a speed/quality slider for each factory. That way we could put a few ticks to speed on our cheap econo box production and a few ticks to quality on our more premium cars. The cost, man hours and mtbf can be the swing stats for the slider.
I think you set the quality of the cars with the quality sliders for the engine, platform and model components. Another production quality slider would be totally redundant. QA is a different topic though.
We’ve been having hours and hours of design meetings about these very things this week, I think the current theory is that you’d set a tooling tech level when you tool up your factory to build a car, and that you could spend more for higher production output etc.
Ahh, so each car would have it’s own production tech. What about sharing engines between car’s? Can a central factory in a region with a tech boost, or with a one of the rpg characters who specializes in that type of engine be tooled to just build engine’s, and then have the crate engines shipped to the other countries to be assembled with the car platforms?
In the current design doc, the theory is roughly as follows.
Only two things are tracked as seperate objects (in terms of inventory) Engines and Finished Cars.
You’d have separate plants built to make each platform (E.G you’d have a plant that made 3 Series, and a different plant that made 5 series if you were BMW). But each plant can make lots of models (E.G 318i, 320i, 330Ci, 320 Estate etc)
Engines would be a seperate plant, and you’d be able to ship those engines produced to use in any of your car factories.
Not sure how the RPG elements would be handled, I imagine different types of “Hero” would be slotted in different places. So you might have an engineer who slots in your research and improves that, but a production expert that slots in a specific factory or region? Not sure yet, that’s not really had much design work beyond the initial idea yet.
Well that’s just awesome, will there be multiple production lines per factory? If yes can we get some kind of bonus to cost and time if the lines use common parts, like different models of the same platform or engines with minor variations?
Okay, I’ll try and rein in my craving for what hasn’t be planned yet. Sorry for all the questions and suggestions, but I blame you guys for planting all this in my head 
This game sounds more and more amazing every single day! Thanks to all the Developers for the hard work and outstanding implementations so far! 
<3
Well, a single factory can only produce models based off the same platform, so that forces your hand on that point.
Not sure how we’re handling it for engine factories, but there will be something similar, I’ll bring that up next design meeting.
Thanks for the time daffy. You folks are nothing short of amazing
In my opinion think 3 would work better to have 3: Engines, Platforms, and Finished Cars. That way, if you could transport it all fast enough, you could build engines one place, platforms another place, and do final assembly somewhere else. That way (once again, if you can transport everything) you could have either more production or higher quality with little to no increase in cost (other than transport)
Sorry if I’m just nitpicking and making this to complicated, I love the game and will play it no matter where you take it (unless you delete the cars and make it a shoe designer 
)
Nah, we thought about that and it just got really nasty from the point of view of making sure you had appropriately matched production of platforms/chassis and cars. After about 5 hours of debating the merits of it we decided to avoid that 
Okay one last question, retooling by year? Can we keep a engine unchanged for a period of years, I the sandbox when we change year the costs change, but what happens in the campaign?
In the sandbox, the year represents the advancement in technology to that point in time. If you build a 1971 engine in 1973, I don’t think the cost will change. I could be wrong however.
But were I to put a engine into production in say 1967 would the quality of materials I use change if I did not make any alterations to the engine till 1975? Or would I only gain the benefits when I updated my factory?
I’d say you’d only gain benefits by updating your factory and revising your engine design
Right got it.
Does this mean you’ll have to finance “updates” to your factories to set them to a certain tech age?
If yes, would it be somewhat cheaper to update your factory once from 1967 to 1975 compared to 1967-1971 and then 1975?
Sounds like this is going to be awesome
Yes, every retooling comes at a cost and it would definitely be cheaper to make a 10-year jump than two 5-year jumps.