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Why can't I delete it???
The game said I would be making 150 million profit in 10 years!!! f**k you lying piece of sh*t
For everyone else it says they'll make hundreds of millions but I'm the only one who's losing those amounts. What the ♥♥♥♥ is going on with this game.
Why is every car I ever make losing massive amounts of money??? For no reason??? I'm building in the most popular category. A car that meets all their needs. It's affordable too. I am properly managing production efficiency between chassis and engine. What am I doing wrong???
I am losing money for no reason with every car I ever make. Lying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.
On higher difficulty campaigns I like to start with a design that targets more premium categories, as the higher profit margin is more compatible with the smaller factories and production numbers.
There's a lot that goes into determining the final production cost of a car, as you're taking the material and labor cost of building the car, along with the total factory, engineering, and tooling expenses involved which are then divided by the number of cars produced to recoup those costs.
Like the guy above me wrote, one of the most common issues may be having a too big factory for the awareness, where you can't make good use of the factory capacity. It will be running half empty and only be a money hog.
But that said there are a dozen sources for possible errors, some of which (or the combination of them) can be fatal.
*) The car may look amazing on paper and the audiences love it hypothetically, but may be still too impractical to produce for your factory, causing production costs way beyond what is reasonable for that audience.
If you then lower the margin trying to make that car cheaper, you will have no profits. Never go below 20% margin, or you will set yourself up for loss.
*) Tying into above... trying to please budget demographics early on is pretty much near to impossible for above reasons. Without a huge factory you cannot produce that dirt cheap as they expect. But at the beginning you have nowhere enough awareness to fill a huge factory.
Even after playing the game for so many years now I still have no rule of thumb of what is the best factory size for starters to please certain demographics. It still is lots of trial & error.
*) Same for a very expensive luxury car, the audience at the start of the game may be too tiny to offset all the costs. You may not even be able to return your development costs, let alone if the factory is too big. If at all that is something for tiny factories.
*) Try avoid picking car options that result in having flags on the factory which reduce factory efficiency, unless you have a rather small factory for lower production volumes. Because that efficiency loss can be a real bummer on a big factory.
*) Setting up engineering & factories correctly can be difficult. It is very tempting to go for very good quality or high automation and whatnot, but that is very costly for the first iteration of the car where you rather want to cut corners everywhere to save money.
*) Setting the margin in the forecast can be a extremely difficult task as well. But in general I often crank up the margin to 50% and more for the first car. (Somtimes I even go to 60-100% depending on the target demographic)
I gradually make it cheaper once I can afford & fill a bigger factory and can produce cheaper (because bigger factory = cheaper production per car).
On the other hand I even raise the margin further (even after releasing the car) when I notice that the pre-orders are skyrocketing and my factory capacity cannot produce that many cars before the facelift arrives. Because otherwise you leave money on the table, and you will get a slap to the face when customers cancel the pre-orders and want their money back once that model is not available anymore after switching your factory to the new facelift.
*) Try have a couple of trims that are very different from each other. Like a Sedan and a Convertible.
But avoid trims that are very similar and only differ in minor options, because they are actually detrimental to the sales (but also for engineering times)
To my experience "staggering prices" to appeal to different budgets of the same demographic does not work as good as one would expect it to because the various budget categories of a particular demographic are not nuanced enough to actually really care enough, so they will still all want one particular trim, which often is the cheapest one which gives you no profits.
*) Always schedule a new facelift once a car is released. Never have a situation where you are not doing a facelift for the car. Try to make it 24-36months engineering time or something. And when you do that facelift try to adjust the engineering & factory setups such that it will be wwaaaaay cheaper to produce than the previous facelift or original car, because that is how you actually return your entire project investment for the car in the long term, because the original car will often be not that profitable (if profitable at all) but rather the "I hope I survive"-phase of the project.
*) When you wrote that you have a factory you cannot remember having bought... are you aware that with the default settings you already start with medium sized factories for cars/engines?
Because if you bought another one during setting up the car project, that is where the additional factory came from. Obviously that unused factory will be a huge drain on your finances because it sits around idle.
*) If you start without a factory but build a new one yourself, well that is always a very costly option to go for. Especially some of the addons (like steel presses) can kill you fast.
*) Loans are always double-edged swords as well. They may seem nice because they cover your initial project investments, but once the investment is covered... the interests will kick in to pay that loan back. That will hit you hard and be a huge drain on the income.
*) In the forecaster you can enable to also include factory costs, which by default, are not included in the forecast. I don't know why that is the default setting because it can be very misleading and make the project look profitable when it is not. If you enable that, the forecast will probably be much more ugly, but more realistic too.
*) In general the forecast, while better than past version prediction, still can be extremely off and not as reliable. The thing there is... when you start the game it does not account for what happens when AI companies release their cars and what happens when there is active competition to consider.
Yet if your car takes too long to engineer then there definitely will be a competition around already when your car comes out and then your car will not nearly be as desired anymore as it was during the initial forecast, hence less sales. Hence try to avoid having ridiculous long engineering times, because your car will be outdated if it takes too long even if it has the nicest options in it.
*) Too high research & marketing investments will also drive you into bancruptcy. Try not to be excessive about that and rather focus on what is important to you.
There are a couple more things like that that can also ruin you run at any time, but above are the most common things I see people regularly struggle with.
The issue I am having is, I never make profit fast enough from my first car. Even 10-15 years after the car has been launched, I am not breaking even so I can't even afford to produce a facelift model even if the car is profitable. It just doesn't make enough yearly.
Also, the factories don't exist. Every time I start a game with factories, I don't build any new ones, yet every time I start to produce a car I lose like 15-35 Million from building the factory. I never bought a new factory. I am using the starting ones I got for "free", yet those same "free" factories are costing me 15-35 Million to build ???
Like wtf. Why is it building already built factories? The game is actively lying about the factories being free. Because they're free. They cost to build even if you already own them. Makes no sense.
Raise the margin at which you sell the cars. If your factories cannot keep up, just raise the prize of the car gradually until your factory is not overwhelmed. Raise the prize little bit, let it run another month, and check again, if still too much demand, raise further. Rinse & repeat until the output roughly matches whatever demand is left. At some point you get a bit of a hang of it and won't need to adjust as often because you get it ball-bark right. (I wish there was an option for the game to adjust that automatically, but sadly there isn't).
At least it doesn't matter if the car is atrociously expensive... not your problem if customers are willing to buy a stupidedly overprized car that objectively is not worth it. xD
All that matters is making the most cash out of the factory capacity you got.
The same is true (to a certain extend) when you have capacity left, lower the price, get more cars sold.
BUT there is a reason why I write certain extend... if the price is too low you basically make no profits. So that is why I say never go below at least 20% margin.
You can also use excess production to build up some stock which can cover any factory downtimes (which you can't avoid if you get a fecelift or new car project in place).
Well, as said, the first car may be a total flop when it comes to profits. That is why you need to swallow it and do a facelift of the car immediately the day it comes out, because with the increased engineering familiarity of parts, better engineering/factory settings for the facelift you can crank down the production costs significantly, which leaves more room for profits (asuming you don't change the end price at which you will sell the facelift).
At least the 1st. iteration of a car project is usually a real pain in the *ss (until later in the game where you may have money to throw around). The 2nd iteration & 3rd iteration of a project is where its at.
The game sadly does not say that, it totally lets you run into your doom if you stick & try to make the 1st iteration more profitable.
However there is a limit to how good facelifts will perform. Eventually the car body will be outdated or you can't do some of the new car tech options with it (especially the cassis). Then you will need to do an entirely new car. But usually you can totally crank out 3 or 4 facelifts within 10-12 years or something, each one more profitable than the previous one (because lower production cost, more awareness etc), before that happens. You will need to do so anyway if you want to keep with the development & desirebility curve because some tech unlocks that will increase the desirability of the car.
Engines are not as problematic, you can swap those out during facelifts and don't have to make a new car project for that. So you can totally have 2 (or more) engine projects going in parallel and go back and forth between them between facelifts. (That is how I usually do it, because engines can take a looot of engineering time, and that is how I cheese the sh*t out of gaining familiarity & reducing development time). Engine projects also don't necessarily need to be attached to a factory, rendering them into "prototypes", which makes this approach even better. So you have one being produced for the car in the factory, while the other is just researching & increasing familarity or experimenting with new tech. ^^
If you have the default factories, they exist. But while the plot and factory (the building itself) come for "free" they are not entirely free of setup costs.
If you select an addon the factory did not come with, you have to pay the difference for that & it will take some time to build.
Same for having to pay for major & minor retooling the factory (basically the assembly line inside the factory) to actually set it up & make it ready for the car project. You have to pay major retooling every time you set the factory up for a new car project, while minor retooling usually happens when you do a facelift.
That retooling for a project is what causes an initial cost for you, and depending on the size of the factory & what level of automation or quality of staff and other things you selected in the car project, that can be extremely hefty for the major retooling.
That is also a huge reason why a facelift will also be waaay cheaper than the original car because you don't necessarily have to pay the major retooling (you can pay for major retooling with a facelift, but I advise not to unless your factories are really worn torn and need to be repaired. But it would be better to do that with a new car project because of the annoying downtime it will cause and because new car projects take quite some time anyway.
But apart from that the factory will also have running costs from paying the staff even if you don't produce any cars in it yet (for example because the car project may still be in development). That is why medium and bigger factories can be a real serious money drain if they are not doing anything.
I don't know how long your engineering time for your car project is, but if it significantly exceeds the 36 months of engineering time you get for free once at the start of the campaign... then you will totally have to pay for the idle staff of that medium factory while you don't output any cars yet. With a medium factory that can amount to quite the sum every month and eat up all the reserves.
I don't know whether the bug still exists, but sometimes that "36 month bonus" can be "lost" and not applied if you started over the project a few times. Make sure that is not the case, because it would be really ugly to start off a campaign and having to engineer a car for like full 5 years with no income yet.
But anyhow, it is no shame if you actually crank up your starting money to 5 billion and play a few campaigns with that. I also did that at the beginning when I was not so sure about what I was doing. Then gradually decreased my "starting benefits" to increase the challenge. Because with 5 billion as starting money, you will really have a hard time going bancrupt except if you push ridiculous tech levels or let a HUGE factory sit around idle for a decade. It is basically good safety net to toy around to figure stuff out and get to know the campaign.
It's just a perpetual dilemma of exactly two scenarios;
A) Small factory can't produce enough cars to meet demand, yet high profit margins aren't generating me any income either. In 10 years I still made a net loss.
B) The supply from the large factory is way too big for my company awareness and dealership levels, and smaller profit margins aren't making me sell any more cars either.
Both scenarios I lose money no matter what. It's genuinely impossible to consistently make a profitable car in this game.
Like, what's the point of playing if you're not learning or improving? Success is a complete fluke and can't be repeated anyway. Oh wow, 1/20 of your cars has been actually profitable?! Well congrats, your next car will bankrupt you anyway so progress is meaningless.
Yea, the optimal point is somewhere between A) and B) and that window where you are going to be successful is probably narrow.
As said I have no exact rule of thumb for how big of a factory you want to start out with either because it largely depends on the demographic you pick, your starting country (because that can be difficult too) & awareness, as well the complexity of the car, in terms of production units & if it has any efficiency penalties.
For that reason I usually change the starting rules in the advanced settings of the campaign to only start with existing blank plots of lands and rather build car / engine factories on them myself and give myself some more starting money instead to build those factories because I am more flexible that way and I don't have to restart the campaign because I realize 3 years into the campaign that I picked the wrong factory size.
With that I make judgement which car factory size I build by going back and forth in the car project a couple times and looking at the forecaster to see whether it "asssumes" the factory will be running at full 3-shifts or if it will have some spare capacity. If it predicts that will be running full 3-shifts I go back to the factory selection & pick the next bigger car factory and look at the forecaster again. Rinse & repeat until I have a little spare left and can run the factory at 2-2.5 shifts or something.
Usually going with some spare for all eventualities because I know I won't be able to build an additional factory for quite a while. Makes getting ontop of the "pre-order wall" & downtimes more easier if you have some spare capacity. Usually my factories end up being overworked despite that (usually because of growing awareness from marketing), but that is why I then crank up the sell margin further to get it under control. Better to have more cash & p*ss off some customers, than not being able to deliver all the orders.
The engine factory usually can be one size smaller as the car factory as well, because for some odd balancing reason the engine factory capacity barely aligns with the same-size car factory, and a same size engine factory is running always half empty for me, so to avoid that I build one that is a bit smaller. than the car factory
Anyway, it is totally possible to consistently make a profitable car. But you need more experience to do that and make the right choices. That is why I suggested you to pick 5 billion for starts, look how it goes because you almost can't fail with that because you even get tons of interest income from the 5 billion. Make notes what works and what doesn't. That way you can narrow down. The game totally is a spreadsheet game where you kinda need to make some notes. And eventually once you are more sure what you are doing you can decrease that "safety net". ^^
But that said, I know, it is going to be weird, but if you make your cars beautiful in campaign, that is kinda a waste of time. You are likely going to restart the campaign a few times if you figure something out you want to do. Making the cars beautiful to look at is just exhausting and you get absolutely no sell bonus from it (unless it is aero parts which increase cornering stats etc). I suggest making beautiful cars only for the sandbox unless you are a total masochist and want to torture yourself. xD
Not only in the game. xD Look at what Sony is doing with the Playstation 5. Prices were through the roof, because they could not (or didn't want to) produce enough to meet the demand. Don't know if it is still the case, but for a while it sure was. ^^
The market for Gaming consoles was prepared by Atari and others in the 70es when a real computer was still too expensive to play games on. After a low of "cheap" PC computers it were the portable game console companies Nintendo (NES) and Sega (Mega Drive) that started the revival. Today it feels like a console builder can do anything and their fanbase will buy it even if they need to sell a kidney for it, but that was not the case in the beginning of the console revival.
That would for sure not the case for some new market entry car brand.