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There is no limit to the amount of upgrades you can do. However since the amount and time grow exponentially, eventually it will be cheaper and faster to build a new factory.
The goal is to have you improving your factories with Reconditioning and Upgrades until you reach the point of equilibrium where building new is cheaper. What is that exact point? I don't know. I would figure a mega factory would get you at least 30 to 50 years before building a new mega factory is cheaper. But of course, you can always keep the old one running and build a new one in a different city.
As far as building small and upgrading to bigger slowly over time. I imagine you'd hit the equilibrium much sooner. As moderate sized factories are cheaper and easier to come by than big factories. Again, remember upgrading is exponential, so the more you do it, the higher the price per upgrade becomes.
This is correct, however it is a very slow growth. Do the vast scale of time in the game, any rapid growths causes gameplay issues.
Anyway, the more people you employ in the city, the growth rates will get a boost. It is generally a small amount, around 0.1%-0.5%. (I don't recall the exact amount, but it's low.) Which does not sound like much, but in 50 years of gameplay, compounding that change yearly leads to... 1.0025^50 = 13.3% larger city than historically... And full game play 35% larger city.
Anyway, it's too low to think about, unless you're playing specifically to improve the socioeconomics of a city. :)
Must say I'm a bit disapointed that the City growth can't be more heavily influenced but understand your reasoning. Does make me think harder about trying to build large scale factories someplace like Bangkok or Hanoi though since they have such poor Labor Skill ratings it might just be as cheap and easier to build those Mega factories someplace else and absorb the extra shipping costs via fewer and overall more efficient factories.
While more money circulates in the local economy it won't be enough to drastically change the economy. A half percent growth rate change is quite a large share of growth when typical growth rates are 1-2%.
It is the dynamic growth rate of the smaller cities where the system doesn't work realistically.
Unless you mean build a new factory in a different city. Few reasons for that, transportation costs, labor costs, might be playing on a smaller map, etc.
I would think the "factories" were more abstractions of the industrial operation like branches are. That way you can build more than one factory per city and actually cluster like companies did IRL instead of hopping to the next city over for more capacity (Redesigns cost you to rebulid over your existing lines, right? I don't see why'd you ever do that beyond being forced to.).
As Eric said you can continue operating an existing factory while your new facility is being built.
It's a good way to upgrade the tooling which allows greater production from same number or fewer lines and employing fewer people. (same benefit as building a new factory in another city.)
Since your going to replace an existing factory you don't end up with extra factories to manage or that you'll end up wanting to close for cost/management reasons.
If you already have a factory located in what you feel is a stratgically good location (labor costs/shipping distances etc.) why would you want to relocate major production to another city unless the new city offers some other benefits.
Also if you play on smaller maps, like the territory maps, you might not have other options.
And yes, I view factories similarly. As Abstractions. AFAIK there are no single factories with 100 production lines. When you redesign, you are decommissioning and replacing factories with new ones. That is why the system was implemented (so you don't have to close all the factories).
Upgrading costs are exponential to make you redesign the factories. If "redesign" was not there, players would just close the old factory and build a new factory in the same location. Which is more clicks. If upgrading costs were not exponential. Then you would just continuously click it over and over and over again, until you have infinite production lines. Similar to how the Modify components system is abused.
It costs the same amount of money as building a new factory in an adjacent city. If that is what you want to do. Do it. Nothing is forcing you to use the redesign system. Nor does anything force you to build a new factory. Both Soul and I have given you valid reasons why you would want to redesign a factory instead of producing another one in a different city. You don't have to listen to what we say. The game affords you this freedom.
That being said, try a game on Old School Territory Map. After 17 factories, you have no choice but to use Redesign. Try Roll Playing a British-only manufacturer. Build a company in Africa. Once you fill up the three South African cities things get a lot more expensive to build new... There are many reasons why this function exists. You can choose to ignore it. It won't kill your company if you do.
If you're referring to auto-production, we'll be getting a "damn shipping distance" function added to it where it will only ship inside a continent. Because I am personally sick of hearing this complaint :) . Of course, it will be replaced by, "Why is my Factory in Istanbul not shipping the 50 miles to my Branch in Izmir?" questions, but game development is a never winning battle. :D https://bitbucket.org/EricBJones/gearcity/issues/264/continental-regional-autoproduction
That being said, if you hate the amount of GUI in the game, you might be interested in the more casual spin-off of GearCity I plan to put together once the game is done. Much fewer clicks. (Less complexity of course, but much fewer clicks, and big buttons. Big buttons that pretty much do most of GC gameplay automatically for you. (And yes, I'm serious about this.) )
Speaking of annoying clicking, it'd be cool if there was an option to automatically replace the old model year when I design the new one and the research finishes. Also, this doesn't really bother me because I've got a ton of time ingame, but I very much understand new players lack of feedback as to why their cars aren't selling. It seems a bit much that you have to analyze their savegame to get that info. If the formulas were just more directly explained in tooltips, that may help?
This is just another tangent: I noticed chassis safety seems to matter, but the tradeoff in strength for unibody vs perimeter or ladder doesn't make up for it. Are most safe frames perimeter instead of unibody?
Put it into another prospective. Buy a house built in 1750. Now wire it for electric, plumbing, cable, telephone, internet, insolate it, AC, Heater, etc. By the time you did all that and brought it up to code, it would have been cheaper to just tear it down and replace it. Same concepts.
How often do you "upgrade" your factories? It takes several decades of game years, constantly upgrading before redesign is cheaper.
Redesign is also not required. As mentioned before. Reconditioning does boost production per line (aka tech slider). However redesigning every 50 or so years will give you a little more production per line because the factory building is newer.
It's already ticketed. https://bitbucket.org/EricBJones/gearcity/issues/111/add-replace-model-check-box-to-new
There really isn't a way to tell the player why their car isn't selling. Selling forumla has hundreds of variables and many combination of demographics. Not to mention the AI now has a few dozen cars in each city/category now. Generally if the car is selling zero units, it comes down to three things, It's too slow, the Price is too high, or the Fuel Type is unpopular. The assisted designer will not let you design a car that is too slow. You are given a warning in the advance designer. Both the price and the fuel type are mentioned in the tutorials. In price's case you are given a graph which shows you how many people could buy the car. Thus hopefully preventing people from over pricing the vehicles. And if you design a vehicle with an uncommon fuel type you get a popup warning message as of SP1. There really isn't much more that I can do.
As of this writing the buyer function is 4,338 lines long. Not including sub-functions called by the function. A quarter of that is actual loops and math. It's too much data to be put into the game. That being said, we don't really have tooltips in the game. They're a pain in the ass to implement with the GUI lib I am using. Instead we have the help buttons. I can fit about two paragraphs of text.
I suggest everyone who wants knowledge of how the gameworks, read the advance manual when it is completed. http://wiki.gearcity.info/doku.php :) This is generally not the newbe to the game. New players use the assisted designer then get stuck with axle placement (on top of axles that already exist on the car) for some reason... The Assisted designer generally won't let them build a car that won't sell. If they've made it far enough to use the advance designer, then they're far enough in the game to read all the little help buttons that already exist in the game explaining how things are important. :)
Anytime you have questions like this, you could just load up the mod tools and find out. :)
Chassis strength probably plays too much of an effect on safety. Unibodies may or may not be safer than perimeter frames depending on their construction. The primary reason unibodies are common now days is costs and weight. That being said, perimeter frames are pretty strong. Essentially they're the big American car bodies of the 50s-80s. The frame (big chunk of steal) was up higher and the passengers sat lower inside the frame. They're also extremely stiff. One could make an argument that modern unibodies are safer in a head on collision. Because they explode out like Indycars. Perimeter frames are safer on side impacts. NHSA is the one to ask this question. But they probably won't have any data, because as I pointed out above, almost everything is unibodies now because of weight (emissions regulations) and profits.