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Also take a look at Kafka's advice, expand into larger cities (Chicago, NYC, and Philly) quickly.
This may be more of an exploit of the game AI than it is a genuine strategy, but hey, it works.
Where do I see that? It is a report I was looking for but I don't seem to be able to find it - Vehicle Class Market share? I'd like to see how many competitors there are but that report only shows units and share leader.
The issue is with demand. Detroit is a small city in 1900. And vehicles are expensive compared to the household income of the city. Compared to per capita ta, $1000 in 1900 is roughly $100,000 today. Thus you should target where wealth concentrates. The bigger the city is, the more wealthy people there will be. NYC has 10 or times the people than Detroit. So you can expect around 10 times the sales there.
In the 1900s cars are only for the wealthy. Even cheap cars of the time are priced around exotic car prices of today. So the key to the early game is to target where wealthy people live, the transition to a broader (more branches) market when manufacturing costs decrease and incomes increase.
If you expand too rapidly you may run into problems when more AI companies enter the market (depending on how many you are playing against).
There is, the most prominent place to find it is on the right side panel where you enter the sales price of the car. (Branch Distribution window.)
Also something there of interest to the previously mentioned info, right above where you enter the price is a graph button. If you click that it will give you a rough estimation of the potential max amount of customers in that city/price range for your vehicle.
You want to build factories when the demand outweighs supplies and will continue to be this way for the foreseeable future. If you expand too rapidly you might run into cash flow issues if there is a drop in demand.
I actually improved the AI somewhat for this in v1.22.3 ;)
Check the "Competion" button when you click a city on the world map. You can also view some of the data in the reports.
Sorry for the slow replies, i'm on a tablet.
Thanks for the quick responses all.
You gain new tech via design skill points and time. To increase skill points you design and use better products. Then slowly your skill points will go up. If your products are old, or the ratings are worse than your skill points, then your skill points will slowly go down.
You can boost these skill points by funding research teams. Go to RnD, then Research Teams up at the top. This window will give you your current skill points, up coming unlocked tech, current skill growth, and the ability to fund teams to increase that growth.
There are no tech trees in the game since in the auto industry, similar technology automatically falls into competitor's hands a couple years after the design is first used.
Unless you are starting to lose to stiff competition, typical design cycle of a vehicle generation is 5 to 10 years. Around 5 years I would look into designing a new generation. Around 12 years start retiring componets.
If you can't meet truck demand then adding a car to the production will hurt truck supplies and thus sales more. As you will have to give up some truck production to produce the car.
Sounds like if you have a healthy enough demand for the truck, it's time to build a new factory OR increase the truck prices to reduce demand without decreasing revenues thus freeing up factory production for a second model.
You got the right idea about reusing components though. :)
I've played excluseively on ultra violence nightmare with 300 AI and not for a great amount of time as I bought the game a couple weeks ago, but I've finally gotten to the point I can get a company at least off the loan and off life support into 1920 without having to IPO on the first turn. I'm not foreseeing huge challenge other than market changes and increasingly stiff competition going forward. It will be my mistakes and not the game if I fail going forward.
Your key factor is your first car and doing it cheap enough to make a decent factory at the start. You'll likely not be able to afford to design one from the ground up yourself so check for either components, or less likely, a decent complete vehicle to license at first (complete car that's worth it is very rare but happens make sure they're not marketed at low class or women in earlier years). Design the car around the body types in demand (report 1 list) and the components you can license. What you're shooting for is a vehicle with around 30 overall and type ratings that's cheap enough to produce. In 1900, I've had success with phateons and pickups in NA that cost $700 or less in materials and hit near thirty or higher in type and overal ratings. Sedans have too many requirements to meet for me at the begining. You can view an estimation based on inputed compnonents in all the advanced wizards of ratings and costs. Your difficulty level adds an increasing gap to this estimation it appears with final car design wizard being the most accurate. Dependability is very key on cars where it's needed. You can actually make some decent profit from OEM parts if warranties are low. My first model actually made 100k in OEM parts and 0 warranty costs because I cut prodcution of it with a new generation before it ever needed a warranty part.
When you design new components and license your first ones, don't design a vehicle right away! Use the modify R&D menu to improve them for a cheaper cost than designing a new part. Be aware these will be "one time expenses" on the next month and you can do multiple for instant one month time cost. If you do improvements after designing a car, you'll need to create a new generation to retrofit (seems odd to me if all I'm swapping is an improved engine or gearbox that otherwise fits the same chassis, but that's how it's designed right now). Feel free to set up initial things in the wizard, but use advnaced mode always to set the development pace and fine tune. There's nothing wrong with not having a car for sale in the first year if it ends up kick ass and keeps you from R&D'ing yourself into bankruptcy before a first sale. overall project costs are lower the longer you pace and there isn't a lot of customer potential in the first few years anyway I've found as even being the only phaeton on the market with rave reviews, I had sub 100 per month demand for NY, Philly, Boston, and Chicago as branches. Use low level lobbying during this designing time to cut factory build costs and set yourself up so your factory is done the same month as your car and open your branch(es) the same month they're complete.
Your first factory should shoot for about 1-2 production lines. Any more and you'll get killed in labor and running costs before demand heats up. You can always upgrade them later. Marketing is only useful to steal sales from competition so if there is none or little, you're wasting money there. Shipping range is the range branches will pull from factories, not the range they sell. Be wary of opening branches too far from your first factory as you'll get killed in distribution costs at the start. Your branch can afford to have dealership resources up to two stars as they're a lot cheaper than factories per month and that will grow demand quicker. Do NOT think you can sustain on one branch. Hit the most populous cities you think you can afford to ship to, my list in the paragraph above was for a factory and HQ in NY.
What I like to do is mass produce as many cars as my factory will handle for ONE MONTH ONLY on a new model. If you can eat the costs, this will give you an estimate of your bottom line per car at full production in your branch statistics. Then you can cut production to zero and sell the cars until you're low on reserves which should net you enough early profits to payoff your loan and design a new car (possibly from ground up) if you've made a good bond issuance. Note that this is bottom line for the entire company's costs and if you're doing research or get new loans/bonds, this will fluctuate. Check it when demand spikes or drops. The less cars you prodcue per month rolling, the more they'll need to be sold for to meet the bottom line. This does improve quality if you use less than a certain percentage of the capacity, and lowers it if you use more, but it is minimal per unity if I'm reading the effects stats correctly.
In closing, to Eric: Thanks a lot for a good looking game that's got great niche potential. I loved Motorcity (also sold as Detroit I believe) back in the day and this hits the spot for it that other business sims aren't hitting. There's still some way to go I think, but overall it's a great product and idea, just unfortunately, a niche market. It's great that you're quickly responsive to your customers/fans and it looks like you've been honing this project for some time. I do have one question though, how the heck do you improve your manufacturing labor skill? I've made and sold thousands of cars and it's the only skill I cannot figure out how to manipulate. The wiki manual linked in game is very sparse and only seems to contain modding info now. Only thing I can think of is I usually shoot for low end tech and manufacturing requirements as anything else costs too much at the start.
edit: Some money tips for ultra violence: take out a middling bond, not max one, and payoff that loan ASAP. I made it with a $64k yearly cupon amount that was paid off a couple years ahead. Not doing the best, but making at least $20k in profit most months off only 2 models and 4 branches. Trial and error mostly. License your own components too and use the AI recommended prices (they appear in the edit window when you examine the component or car a second time and I think this could be changed to just display it first). I've had months where my ass was saved by licensing components I wasn't even using in production models.
One of the major problems with nightmare mode is too much of the AI dying off. I believe I have fixed this issue through a number of changes to the game. The longer the AI stays in the game, the more competition you'll have to deal with.
There is still room for improvement of course, but I think v1.22.3 / v1.23 is headed in the right direction.
Also note, 1920 is close to a boom period. The bubble will pop soon! ;)
Just to let you know, this is getting a major nurf in the future. We'll probably limit you to 1 modification every couple of years, even more increase in cost per mod compared to the current system.
When I redesign the bottom bar (and add it to every "room" ) we'll get a little tabulator for your one time expenses that occur next month, and it will tell you if you're overspending. It's ticketed for v1.24, and will be probably one of the first tickets for that build.
You don't have to create a new generation. Just a new trim. Generally major changes such as engines are separated by trims. For example early 2000s Nissan Sentra S = 1.8L Nissan Sentra SE = 2.5L.
Unless your base model is several years old, you will want to use the trim system as it will raise the vehicle image for the original model as well as the trim. For example Dodge Charger SE is not a very sporty car with it's 3.6L V6. But the Dodge Charger Hellcat looks nearly the same and has a 6.2L v8 with 707HP. The cars look almost the same, thus increasing Dodge Charger SE's vehicle image. (And Again, shows they put engines into different trims.)
When you do a new generation, it's a redesign of the car. You only get a fraction of the original model's vehicle image and the new vehicle does not effect the original vehicle's image.
Lobbying has gotten a bit more expensive in v1.22.3 / 1.23, as I fixed a couple bugs which were preventing the maximum budget from growing as your company grew.
I'm glad you're enjoying it!
Motorcity and Detroit are actually two different games. Detroit was much more successful product than Motorcity. But are good games, I was hoping to address the flaws in each with GearCity. I think I fixed most of Motorcity's issues, but GC is effected by some of the same issues that plagued Detroit in my opinion.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/detroit
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/motor-city
I agree, we've got at least 1 (possibly 2 depending on which build you're currently on) major builds left plus clean up and content before I have to release the game (barring some financial changes). I've got enough funding to go until v1.25. I believe quite a bit of polishing and balancing can be done between v1.24 and v1.25.
Is labor skill based on manufacturing and tech requirements? It's the one skill I've never improved.
It depends on how much is changed. If the new trim is drastically different, such as changing a chassis or adjusting the sliders greatly, then there will be no time reduction. Otherwise, it's generally around 10% of a new vehicle development time.
You can also make trims at the same time of designing the base vehicle, this will finish the trim at the same time the base vehicle (or shortly there after). (Unless of course there is a huge difference between the two models)
Where are you looking at the Labor Skills? The Labor Skills reports has various ratings from Manufacturing to Engineering abilities. If you have a specific question about a skill rating, let me know, and I can give you a more exact answer.
If you're looking at a City's Labor Skill, you do not effect this greatly. This is the skills of the people in the city. It is not the skills of your employees. A general person in London is probably more capable of working one of the many various jobs in your company compared to a general person in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As such, you can generally build more cars, cheaper (not including labor costs), and higher quality in the London area than in the Addis Ababa area. The counter to this is generally as the more skillful the labor force becomes, the higher the wages are.
The more people you employ in a city, you can effect the city's rates. However, these are small gains, fractions of a point. It would take you several decades to raise Addis Ababa from 2-ish labor skill points to 10-ish labor skill points.