I've played quite a few campaigns at this point and I basically had an idea for one final (for now) game. Take my most successful cars from all my campaigns and put them in one company the "Auto Union", similar to how in germany companies merged to form Auto Union or Audi.
When I play campaign mode I don't create the cars to be as detailed in design as I normally would because of the huge time sink so you will see they are more basic than what most people would post. This also is not a RP AAR, i'm discussing strategy and game mechanics.
I didn't get all of my most successful cars and I did variations but I had by far the most successful game at 76,000 points
Starter Van
I tried a variety of starts to see what is best. I tried later starts (1955, 1960), I tried messing with tech, etc. In the end I found that starting with less money but huge factories so you can pump out a van (engine) at the beginning was an extremely good way to start the game. This van was, however only temporary and not among my most successful vehicles ever. It was designed to engineer quickly and to raise factory skill. During this I also am expanding my dealership network in order to be able to sell all the production. I got down to E+ in rating but that was it. Having the huge factory to start gives you a good credit cushion even though I started with 300k less money.
In 1955 when I have radial tires + monocoque and i've saved money I switch to this van. Both this van and the previous one I have a delivery and a "family" version. By late game I have 3 huge factories selling millions of these and it covers all delivery, has around 110 family, and high family utlity as well as being a fleet vehicle. When I post my end game profits you will see it earns me billions. I have no need to design a new basic money maker after I design this. The late game engine I give it is similar to early game. Designed for best possible MPGs with lowest fuel mixture, late game I go larger displacement.
1960
By 1960 i'm making a ton of money and can pretty much do whatever I want so at this point I introduce:
Late Game front / back / engine
The idea behind this car is to make a supercar similar to the real life GT40, the car will be light and quick to engineer since it's early game and my profits are fully stable yet. I want to get it out ASAP. In previous games that was important if I built this, in this game it isn't but I designed it the same regardless. I went with aluminum panels because I intent on producing this for a while and when I get the tech to more effectively produce aluminum the car will stay relevant and will be cheap to produce. Late game this is a $30k supercar that competes in several categories.
The Flat 6
You will see I use a flat 6 in this. IMO it is a great engine, super nice smoothness near that of a straight 6 and easily fits in all sorts of vehicles even at massive displacements. I found I could get ridiculous benefits from using this engine vs others because of that. Easily an engine I can use in a luxury car or a muscle car and I can mount it anywhere.
I have come to light flat engines overall. I can have a front engine compact with a flat 4 and easily make it awd, fwd, or rwd depending on trim. I didn't build that car in this game.
The Muscle Car: Eagle I
I came on this by accident in a game. I was trying to make some goofy cars like mid engine and rear engine in the 60s chassis you have, in this car it was a 4 door luxury car. When messing around to see how engine placement changes stats I noticed I the rear engine setup in the luxury car with the engine I built had really good stats for a muscle car. It was top tier competitive the entire game. This is how the Eagle came about.
Eagle Premium/Muscle front / back / engine
Mid Eagle Turbo front / back / engine (mid game gt50 had version of this with 500hp)
Mid game I also produced a non turbo and premium
Final Eagle Muscle front / back / engine
Late game was muscle only and other cars filled the premium slot. I ended production of this car in the early 2000s.
The premium version has very similar stats and looks the same, just has automatic and is more comfort focused where muscle is manual or dct.
The engine in this car was my attempt at making an equivalent of a small block chevy but dohc and flat 6. Late game the engine was the same stats but redesigned to be ALSI and have VVL. The NA engine had max fuel efficiency and late game it had 430hp which matches irl muscle cars. The turbo engine had minimum fuel efficiency. It was put in premium, luxury, and muscle cars and was great in all.
This car, in it's muscle car form, was extremely competitive dominating the market all game but I decided late game to make a replacement made out of more modern materials which I will get into later.
The SUV: Treader
At this point I decided to introduce the UTE/SUV. I had a lot of success in a previous game where I was building all aluminum vehicles and I built an aluminum SUV that sold ridiculously well, especially after the early 80s when you get the aluminum factory upgrade. I decided to make a steel version of that same vehicle which I would replace with the aluminum version once I hit the 80s.
This would serve as the stop gap until I would get the real version.
The engine in this is simply a max efficiency downsized version of the flat 6 i use in the cars above. This body of SUV is excellent and covers a LOT of markets. I build almost every version and both the hard tops and soft tops. The soft tops have worse safety but are much lighter and seem to score better in the earlier game than the hard tops.
Late Game SUV (different chassis) front / engine
In the late game this covers more premium categories, however the van and one of the next cars I will get into covers the cheaper utility categories. I end up selling millions of these just like the van.
1968
City/Commuter/Sport: The Mav
I've built a car like this under a few games but used a different body this time that reminded me of the Ford Maverick or Capri. I called this the "Mav".
The goal of this car was to cover the categories listed above plus convertible and ute. All the cheap car categories.
front / back / engine / sport engine
This basically uses the same engine as the family van. Power doesn't really do much for these cars aside the sport and the sport engine simply has +4 quality for the top end.
The UTE version sells ridiculously well throughout the game as a surprise to me as that wasn't my intent. I was going to make a cheaper ute but this filled the role perfectly.
The early game ute uses the same engine as the basic cars.
I eventually introduce a sport turbo front / back / engine
Which sells very well all game. At end game of these cars I only produce the UTE and Sport (turbo). The late game engine is based on the Mitsubishi Astron engine. The 2.6l turbo sohc engine from the Starion except here it is VVL with 4 valves. It's an engine that has worked very well in multiple games.
Late Sport front / back / engine the 2.6l i4 has a very wide power band. It's about as perfect as you can make a turbo 4 in this game.
I basically keep refreshing these cars up until the 1980s when a few new major categories, materials, and factory upgrades are introduced.
1980s
The first thing I do is in 1983 I replace the Treader above with the Aluminum treader as I said. I also at this point have optimized my turbo engines.
I tried an experiment one game to try and build the lightest possible luxury car. I built a full carbon fiber car and I was surprised at how well it sold. That same game I also experimented with other cars in carbon fiber such as a full carbon fiber Suzuki Cappuccino.
Bug? There is a late game bug related to this where you have an option to build a carbon fiber upgrade to your plants but it only affects the cars made of it about 10+ years later, in this game that was around 2012-2015 or so.
Luxury Car: The Discovery
Wanting to build this car earlier than in previous games I opted to build it once I got carbon fiber chassis, which I got earlier, and I used aluminum panels. It was very effective, near the same weight, and much cheaper than my full carbon fiber version from previous games.
One thing I noticed is that it also makes an excellent Muscle P. car.
Late Lux Discovery front / (engine is large displacement flat 6)
Late Muscle Discovery front / back / (engine is the large flat 6)
These cars had such absurdly high safety because of the materials so I could use basic or no safety at all with little effect on their score. They were absurdly light for a class of vehicle that normally weighs 4000+ lbs. Late game I rushed HUD interiors with full luxury setups and they were still like 3200lbs. The body style I used was that Jaguar body style from the late 80s that I have done a variety of interesting designs on.
This car sold absurdly well capturing large percentages of the market and I wouldn't have had to refresh it often as well, the rating of the car hardly dipped at all. Both trims sold for $49.5k at end game.
1991
Lightning
The next car I created was the all carbon fiber "Lightning" based on the smaller RX7 chassis.
front / back / (uses supercar turbo engine)
This car made a decent amount of money until late game for some reason. This was my attempt at making a more powerful version of the Suzuki Carboncinno I mentioned earlier. It is my only "failure" in this run and I believe I needed to tweak factory settings a bit and add some secondary upgrades which I was not using this game. It was very competitive all game, just didn't make much money or lost money. It was the top car in the super and hypercar segments of which in supercar I captured 96% of sales and hyper I captured 75%.
City
At this point I was going to replace the Maverick with another city car and move the Mav to simply sport and ute. I had many different successful cars in this segment.
One was in a game where I was "rping" as a communist company. I built a cheap rear engined car.
The other was where I used a flat 4 and shifted the car between fwd, rwd, and awd and that was also very successful.
I decided here to go for mix of both. A rear engine car that had interesting features but is also cheap and light. This formula worked well.
I made multiple trims here trying to cover as many of the cheap car categories as possible. By late game I reduced them to those 3 of which covered them all aside the 'vert categories.
They all used the same boxer 4 engine
The engine was designed for maximum efficiency and smoothness. The cars were all decently competative but the Sport car, which took the Sport B category, was super competitive. I think the front engine boxer with mixed drive layouts would have been better but I had no problem selling millions of these the rest of the game.
Because I used decent materials for these cars they covered some of the premium segments as well. It was a great jack of all trades.
What's funny is that Pushrod suspension is claimed to be expensive but it hardly affected the percentage much at all while doing a good job at reducing weight.
At this point I was satisfied with my lineup but I decided to do two more cars.
2007
Here I decided to do a modern version of the Eagle and did a cheaper version of the Carboncino.
Espresso
Looking at sales data I realized I had a gap for a standard sports car and for sporty 'verts. I decided to solve that by making a sporty roadster.
In a previous game I made a non-vert version of this that was all carbon, in this I figured regular materials would suffice and that would be overkill and in 2007 the engineering would take too long. The end result works, it is like a Miata weight S2000. The engine is a 86/86 2000cc version of the "Astron" engine with a race header. Overall it sold very well and took the sport segment like I wanted but I went overkill on factories because I had billions to burn.
Eagle II
Since I couldn't see myself designing a more successful UTE replacement for the MAV and my lack of will there I decided instead to just refresh the Eagle.
front / rear / (uses 430hp version of the 5.7l flat 6)
Bug? That wing model cuts badly into the lights when moved towards the rear, it should not do that. It would otherwise be more towards the rear.
My goal here was to make a car of similar stats and spec as the 1960s chassis I used and meet or exceed the rating. I did that using aluminum. I had less production numbers but I compensated by building more factories, in the end I had a car that was a great replacement. Much like the luxury car above I could go very low on safety here because of the safety properties of the materials. What results is a super light musclecar.
Now aside this I also used the strategies I found were good from playing many times along with some observations of playing so many games.
Factories
For the vans once I got enough money I built 2 huge factories and several engine factories for them and the other cars that used their engine. Due to the something like 80+ months to build that when I did the refresh I basically maximized reliability and a few other things which gave me a great boost once that was done.
For other cars, especailly late game, I found that it was better to build multiple factories at once. I could build several large 1 factories which only take 52 months (iirc) and a 52 month engineering for a new car was fairly easy to achieve with sliders. In the end I had probably 20+ engine factories and some of my cars, like the muslce car above, I had 6 large factories building them. The construction times for larger factories are just ridiculous, I think this is the better way to do things most of the time unless you are building something like those vans where you will want huge factories.
Sliders
Another thing was the sliders for engineering times. I noticed especailly late game when I am trying to have high safety or HUD interiors I would get insane 130+ engineering times on refreshes. I made a rule. No car will have longer than 52 engineering time or longer engineering time than factory construction. This means VERY MUCH lowering reliability and other sliders which in the end didn't really affect the cars, after which I would immediately refresh the car at 52 months and in the end you get normal sliders. MUCH better and MUCH quicker way to get a car into production.
Ahead of Time Research
I found this to be very useful once I had money to rush for ball bearing turbo (i would never use journal), VVL, chassis and engine materials, body styles, etc. The turbo + vvl would be the biggest benefit and in this game I did just that. Late game it is useful to rush for dual clutch transmissions. Probably also useful to rush for advanced automatic but I never have felt the need to do that.
Early DCTs give many builds, especially more premium cars, MASSIVE boosts. I rush that whenever I can.
Sudden Jumps in Cost
I noticed that if I was playing around with power and speed I would get sudden massive jumps in cost. I noticed this must be because of tire Z rating or something that you otherwise don't seem to have control over. When testing cars some cars would top out at 140 for no reason, despite their maximum speed being listed much higher, playing around with transmission settings the price would suddenly jump by a large amount and the car would be able to go much faster.
This is something you can manipulate that isn't very intuitive but it can make a HUGE difference in competitiveness. I've seen massive jumps of 60+ points.
Strange Refresh Mechanic
For some reason supercars RARELY need new designs and mass produced cars often need them. I found that city cars, family, and suvs I need to redesign very often as they quickly tank in competitiveness especially the cheaper categories, in previous games I could leave a supercar for like 15-20 years and not have to worry at all.
Here are a couple of end game screenshots
Competitiveness, At this point I would probably be a year or two away from finishing a refresh design but as you can see these still dominate the table aside the cheapest categories. I don't find going after the B categories to be very effective aside Sport B and Premium B
Sales, share of family begins to go down after a refresh but early on it is much higher due to the factors I talked about above.
That quick refresh for the carbon fiber cars you see there was for when the carbon plant finally started working.
You can see what I was talking about above starting to set in here. Cheaper cars go below 100 in rating while the sporty or more expensive cars are stable or at least stay above 100.
Normally if this wasn't end game I would have started a 52-~60 month refresh on all cars, as you can see from the bars before the blue bars. At which point all the factories that are ~100% right now would be near 135 or at that. The Treader would be a little over 100%.
I suspect my two supercars ate into each other a bit but soon after a refresh they wouldn't be below the 60s. The Espresso I overbuilt the factories on and it's super-competitive and that is as much as I could sell it.
That's about all I have to say about this. A long post but just some insights on the campaign and what worked. I'm going to take a break until the next major update and see what changes it brings but this game just sinks hours lol.
Hope you enjoyed the post.
Submitted June 25, 2020 at 09:34AM by Kanaric https://ift.tt/2VgcQO9
via Blogger https://ift.tt/3eACmW6
June 25, 2020 at 10:57AM
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