questions complaints

[Fat Simba]

is untapped revenue/possible revenue measured yearly or monthly? also price perception penalty seemed a little overkill as it killed the sales of a budget car i made. i tried to make the car more expensive to offset and went broke. is this penalty company wide or just for that trim? this time i will try to make more expensive trims as well to see if this penalty is still an issue. my competitors affordabilty was 1 percent and mine was around 40, perhaps in archana only a small portion of the population can afford a car at all and this feature is working as intended.

[Medu Salem]

From my experience with the campaign budget cars in Archana are the most difficult audience you can possibly try to target in the game. They have the smallest budgets of all the countries with the smallest buying power.

You hardly can produce a decent car at the price range at the start of the campaign. It is even hard to do it in all the other countries with more buying power.

There is various reasons for that:

*) You would need a ridiculously large factory for mass production to offset the production costs. But initially you won't have enough market awareness to even fill the capacity of such a huge factory, so the running costs of the factory will bancrupt you.

*) The car would have to be sooo crappy that it is cheap enough for you to produce so you can target that audience and still make a profit.
BUT this is itself a self-defeating cycle, because making it this crappy also kills its desireability to the point they won't want it despite being cheap and a budget car.

*) You would have to optimize the various tooling/process/reliabiliy sliders etc during the car/engine engineering tabs and also factory setups to such an extreme that it is cheap enough for you to manufacture the car so you still make a profit.
But you cannot do that because doing it usually increases both initial engineering & factory setup costs as well as how long it takes to implement the project to the point the project might not be able to recover its costs, apart from being undesireable simply because it took you so long to implement that it became outdated by the point it is launched.



So as a compromise, in my opinion try targetting the middle classes of each category. Those usually still are large enough audiences with a budget that usually allows for a reasonable profit margin.

Premium audiences of different categories would pay more, BUT the audiences are not that big. Sale numbers are limited and may not be enough to keep your company alive, that is why I wouldn't suggest targetting them.



Also you totally need to do facelifts. The initial version of each car is usually still too costly to produce on longterm, eating up all your profits.
That is because as mentioned above you usually have to short-cut the engineering times somehow to crank out the car in a timely fashion, and usually you do that by initially neglecting the tooling/process sliders in the engineering tabs of the projects.
So try cranking out a facelift, and while doing that gradually improve the tooling/process sliders in the factories to make the car cheaper to produce.

I still haven't found a good/efficient numbers of when and how many facelifts or years to run each car project in total.
But I know at least that the initial version of each car often sucks in the profit margin because of above mentioned reasons and you need to "overwinter" it until the facelift is done to fix the factory processes to make it profitable.



Another thing is that the "blackbox" (as Killrob calls it) of the market simulation really is difficult to grasp, because you cannot really see why the customers are deciding to buy or not to buy your car.
Especially with trims taking away shares from each other. Some sell, some don't (even you feel like they should be different enough) and there is often no obvious clue why that is happening.

I experimented with but found that doing "price segmentation" (like doing a budget, middle and premium trim of each car) doesn't work at all in the game. It only increases complexity of the project, becomes a management nightmare and doesn't pay off. Usually the differences between the trims (like different quality of interior etc) are too negligible for the market to even notice, so they will still hog all the same trim, and usually the cheapest one at that simply because of the price (despite perception penalties). and the cheapest one is usually the one with the least profit margin and that sucks because it results in a zero-sum game.

Also making trims to adjust to particular audiences that are very similar doesn't pay off either.
For example it I found it is pretty much not worth it to build a distinctive Family car AND a distinctive Commuter or distinctive Premium car trims. One Sedan trim that is decent basically makes all of these Sedan categories happy. Simply because their stat desires are not distinctive enough to warrant doing specific trims. Maybe doing the "Premium" sedan as "Convertible" and selling it at a higher price can pay off, but apart from that, doing the same sedan with only minor changes in comfort/drivabillity isn't worth it.
Same for Light Sport and regular Sport categories. Not worth making 2 trims/lineups for that. Usually you can sell the same sport car to both types of categories. Maybe even Muscle cars, because their only distinctiveness is that they want a bigger engine, but usually that is not a killing factor, so a 1.8L turbocharged sports coupe still sells just as good into the muscle sector if the rest of the car is above and beyond in desirability.

In that regard some of the categories really feel redundant, or at least not distinctive enough to warrant making trims/lineups for them. I think Killrob really needs to look into this eventually again, because the hell... there is 60 categories or whatever and there is no point in targeting most of these because it simply doesn't work as intended due to how a lot are way too similar to each other and since market "overlaps" exist which then often funnel the buyers even of other categories towards one particular "jack of all trades"-trim which beats all other more specialized trims anyway.

[Fat Simba]

I took your advice to make less trims overall. The engineering time/cost of making different interiors etc was very high. i started with a family budget with around 4% affordability and made a station wagon trim to target the family utility budget. with the first facelift i added a new trim with an automatic and slightly better interior, as before the engineering time was too long to add all the features i wanted. Next time I will try to add more trims initially to take advantage of the engineering bonuses for my first project. Currently I'm plodding my way into 1952 with a B+ credit rating, the best ive done since the new updates.