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That being said, if you're min/maxing ratings, then large trucks are always better than small trucks. What is the primary purpose of a truck? To put stuff in an open back. So then which is a better truck? A truck you can put more stuff in the back or a truck that fits less stuff in the back?
If you're trying to market toward sub-niches, you're going to have to avoid min/maxing ratings. Otherwise things like luxurious sports cars, or sporty economy cars is pointless as well.
Depends on the job at hand. If I want a local delivery truck for pastry shops, then an 18-wheeler is too big. If I want a military scout car, I'd rather slap a machinegun on the back of a Jeep than use a HEMTT.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if it'd be even possible to mod something like that in. Cargo is still very important for a compact truck, but only up to a certain limit. Torque is also important, but only to a point. And at the same time, keeping size small is important.
My understanding is, the way the game models importance of various components, it's a linear "more is better" and the only difference is a multiplier that determines just how much better every extra cubic foot or luxury point is. And size by itself is not a consideration at all, only its effect on cargo volume, frame strength, etc. So "as much room as possible while still being small enough" wouldn't be something that can be modded in, correct?
However, maybe it doesn't have to be a separate class. The contract system is much more precise than just vehicle type multipliers. In civilian market, bigger is better is probably an OK-ish approximation. But it would be good to be able to make it so that contracts for for small Jeep-like trucks show up frequently. I'd say contracts with minimum specs somewhere between 10-20mpg, 50-70mph, 80-120lb-ft, 20-70 cu ft would be perfect. Would that be possible to mod in?
If you do want to market a smaller truck at very cheap prices, there will probably be a market in GC for it.
Little sports cars with small, weak engines also sell quite well, as long as handling is OK.
Overall rating will suffer, but you can serve other segments at lower price points.
Do not purely focus on "overall" or "spec ratings". If you want to make a sports truck, make a sport truck. A sports truck will not be the best overall truck. Because a truck is made to haul stuff. However, because a sport truck has a higher performance rating, it will sell more vehicles to people who want trucks with performance.
Ditto with compact trucks and the game. In general, compact trucks have better fuel mileage and are cheaper. They'll sell more to people who want better fuel mileage and poorer demographics.
Will they get as many sales as big trucks? No, they won't. But they will still sell in the game.
You would just lower the importance of the cargo, power, and wealth index ratings while increasing the fuel economy ratings. Next, you'd throw in smaller vehicle bodies to prevent the size from going too high.
Not sure what you're trying to say. I believe you're trying to ask if the stats can be penalized for being too much.
The answer is no. You adjust the weights and de-emphasize the importance of cargo. If a player wants to make a max cargo compact truck, it will improve his sales with people who want max cargo'd compact trucks. But the negative side effect of increasing cargo is decreasing fuel economy and increasing price. If those are weighted more heavily, they'll hurt their sales more if they're trying to Min/Max stats. (Unless of course, they already have a min/max stat vehicle and need to diversify their offerings.)
You don't need a separate class, you just make a compact truck. It already serves its core niche inside of the broader truck category. The only reason to make a compact truck class is to Min/Max the stats if you believe that the sales of your compact truck should outweigh full sized trucks. Otherwise, the people who want compact trucks will get compact trucks.
In the contracting system, price is the most important than most other ratings. Guess why chicken-tax trucks sell well?
Compact SUVs already exist in the game. And militaries do generate contracts for them when the class becomes available. (Mid 1930s).
There is no ~JEEP~ class of vehicles in the game. Jeep is a registered trademark/marque of Fiat.
Contracts are moddable, but not included with the mod tools yet. You can make temporary edits to the EngineContracts.xml file located in the /media/scripts folder.
Both of these guys are 100% correct.
Although on xt6's point. What about sharing bigger truck stuff with SUV's. With the rebalancing of vehicle popularity, I think one would make good margins with this as well. ;)
Its' sort of the reason there are no more small trucks in the American market. They charge higher margins, and platform share with their SUVs. Where as small trucks have lower margins.
Wait, do you mean things like subgroups of customers who want one area more than another are modelled in the game, or are you saying "pretend it is so"? So if I were to make a low-cargo truck with better performance, there may still be a niche of people for whom my truck will score higher than the competition, despite the competition having a higher "type rating" due to cargo's importance? I don't fully understand how customers work under the hood, so I'm not sure if niches are a thing in the game or you are talking real-world.
I'm also really excited lower-case-j jeeps are in the game (interesting history with that name, BTW, first a nicknamed class of vehicles, then ultimately a trademark, but not until well after the war! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_MB#How_the_jeep_got_its_name). I looked through the XML at one point and thought they weren't coming until 1950s. Glad to have been mistaken. If they come around in the 30s and armies want them, then I can be the Willys-Overland of my game after all! :D
I think the large vehicle superclass, characterized by requiring mid-high cargo and mid-low perf, is reasonably represented in the game. Trucks, vans, limousines, later SUVs, and even some of the larger upper-class vehicles can all share parts reasonably well. That's the beauty of the game: a more general component design can hit more classes at once, and while not being optimal for any of them, benefit from mass production, while specialized components would be better, but be built in fewer numbers and so cost more overall.
That was the original reason for this thread. I was surprised just how much cargo dominated everything else in trucks, and how cheap it was to increase. So much so that a bigger frame and body was worth doing even if your powerplant wasn't enough to support it. You end up with a slow, struggling, fuel guzzling contraption that should be a hard sell according to common sense, but still scores pretty high on type rating and is significantly cheaper than a proper truck that size. And I get that it's a game and can't be perfect; I'm not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, just thought it'd be an interesting topic for conversation.
Also, don't forget that a lot of companies must transport a lot of volume, but not a lot of weight. In those cases those heavy, underpowered vehicles are cheaper than the competition, and don't have the fuel consumption of more powerful trucks, which makes them a perfect fit.
And no, due to optimizations in the sales formula the data for these demographics can not be displayed. As there is no predefined demographics groups, nor would the results be the same at report time than at end turn generation. The data is also not recorded due to optimizations.
In short, the more lop sided your design is to a rating, the more the consumer ratings will weight toward that rating. In comparison with the other vehicles in that group. And within a set of bounds. You can already see some of the weight adjustments if you change demographics in the advance designer.
You ever notice that not a single small truck is for sale in the US anymore? There is a reason for that.
1) Big trucks sell more than small trucks.
2) Big trucks are not that much more expensive to make. Extending a frame and throwing a bigger body on a vehicle is not that expenses. Remember, most of a truck's volume is air.
This is GM's more current small truck (left) compared to the biggest version of their previous small truck model (right): http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h295/boxman7481/coloradoS10.jpg
And their most recent small truck is even bigger than the truck on the left.
Then if you compare that with their normal sized trucks: https://www.cheatsheet.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2015-Chevrolet-Colorado-SilveradoHD-Silverado-037.jpg
Small trucks can do well in the game because they are low priced. That's the entire reason they sold well here. Yes, in the real world some folks bought them because they were small. And there is some random variation and minor adjustments to the weights to compensate for that. But they were primary bought because they were cheap. That's why the US Congress imposed a 25% Chicken Tax[en.wikipedia.org] to stop them from being sold here. (And eventually that worked. Although not so good for consumers imo.)
Anyhoo, small trucks never had the sales numbers of big trucks:
http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/ford/ford-ranger/
http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/ford/ford-f-series/
Fx50 outsold the Ranger by 2-3x for instance.
One of the big missing things from the game is emissions. I really hope I can add that in an expansion. But anyway, emissions and displacement taxes are a key reason why Europe never grew a ~large~ consumer truck market.
Their markets are artificially shaped to have greater small truck sales than large truck sales. Then again, the US market is the flip, as imported small trucks are 25% more expensive than they should be. (Or at least a bit more expensive if they built them with some loopholes.) Our markets artificially encourage the large truck market.
For example, Tacomas sell almost twice as much as Tundras. They can't move as much and they don't have the cargo volume, but because most people who have one don't just haul hay every day, being a better commuter, able to park easier is a selling feature. As is the lower price and better fuel efficiency, of course.
That's kind of what I was getting at when I talked about cargo being important for this segment, but not at the expense of bloating the vehicle too much.
I think what surprised me the most was that I was allowed to trash many categories that you'd think would be important, so long as the resulting vehicle was nice and fat, resulting in a high cargo rating. One of the selling points of smaller trucks is fuel efficiency. But my design gets almost half as much mpg and lower top speed as my bigger truck, due to the engine being underpowered for how fat I made it, and that's not considered a problem, according to type rating because cargo is so much more important than fuel efficiency, power or perf for a truck.
In all fairness, though, I don't know whether it will do well in the market or not just yet, since type rating is not always the same thing as what customers actually like.
EDIT:
Just to rephrase my thoughts, I think it's the same general thing that cofused me in the past when I ended up with an 11kph luxury sedan. More powerful engine and transmission are big expense drivers in a vehicle, but their effect on most vehicles' "type rating" is not proportionate to how costly they are. So in a quest to build a cost-efficient vehicle, I keep ending up with underpowered contraptions, which common sense dictates are crap, but the type rating keeps telling me are good. And since type rating is the closest thing exposed to the player that tells how good a vehicle is, it's a bit confusing and counterintuitive. Feels like if I build a truck that would be good in the real world, it wouldn't be the optimal thing according to the game.
I once had the opportunity to be a passenger in a ninth-gen Ford F-150 in a european village. That. thing. is. massive.
And it didn't make us to popular with the other road users. Although converting a 2-way street into a 1-way and revving their profanities away probably had something to do with it.
Good times :)
So no, there are no small trucks sold anymore in the US.
Yes, there is. Nothing prevents you from designing them in the game.
Cargo volume for consumer trucks moved from the bed to the cabin about 15 years ago when they became trendy for suburbanites. Every Tacoma sold has more passenger space than my econo sedan.
Do not equate bed space with the only type of cargo volume in the game.
This just shows you're not designing a small truck correctly. Why? Because you're trying to maximize the cargo rating because you're focused on Min/Maxing stats and ratings. I already told you to ignore min/maxing if you are targeting sub-niches. OR if you absolutely must min/max your sub-niche, create a new vehicle type for it. Because it will always be over shadowed by the generic vehicle for that vehicle type.
Yes, you can make a large cargo, underpowered truck. And it might even do well if it's cheap enough to overcome the other problems. If you don't like this, adjust the weights for the class type.
(In general, the smallest engine trucks outsell the the strong trucks thanks to fleet sales.)
That being said, post WW2, much of Europe's infrastructure could have been rebuilt to support large vehicles. It was not, as displacement taxes killed off the 1930s "big car" boom that preceded the big truck boom. Thus shaping the European car mindset.
So I believe it's a combination of factors. EU states wanted money in the 1910s. This restricted the growth of the big car industry (which Europe led at the time), this combined with small road networks led to the dwarfing of EU vehicles. And they kept the same mindset post war.
Actually, Smart did fairly well in the US. At one point they were fairly close to Jaguar sales numbers here in the states. Their move to electric has practically killed the brand though. I don't think Mercedes is pushing them as hard anymore. Anyhoo, they're popular in big cities and with RV'ers. They are certainly the most successful Kei car sold in the States. Unless the Geo Metro is considered a Kei car.
9th gen is a fraction of the size of the 13th gen. The 9th gen base model is about the same size as BanDHMO's 2018 Toyota Tacoma (Which is "small truck" these days in the US.)