Really hard to know why my cars aren't selling it.

[❆🎄Douglas 🎁 🎂]

So I have a Basic Sedan and a Premium Sedan. Its the beggining of the game, so nearly everything on Basic and Mid-range is very rare.

So I ship Basic car with nothing and Premium version with lots of things.

What happens is that I have nearly 126 cars in showroom. I already changed the price to + 80% and -80%. It doesn't change. My Premium version that is supposed to be Luxury is sometimes in Mid-range, sometimes in Basic.

I don't understand how that works.

1) I can't sell cars.

2) I can't put my Premium version to be shown as Luxury. Even having a lot of features that are still rare on Luxury versions.

The whole market system is complicated. There's no customer feedback.

[Molybdane]

Yep, ther's little feedback. I have muddled through on experience. Here's what I think:

While you can make a model more expensive by increasing its premium, there's only so much of a premium the market will accept. I go roughly for a max premium of:

budget 5 %
mid range 15 %
expensive 30 %
luxury unknown, never gotten that far.

Besides that, you need to take into account whether there's enough demand for your models. When you look at the showroom, you have access to the market tab too. Here you can see how many cars you can sell per hour (roughly). This number changes! So it is possible that you will end up with a temporary excess of cars.

Obviously, if you have 120 cars on stock already, you might have been overproducing for a long time.

[boksiora]

i had the same problem 100+ cars not selling for no reason

i restated the map and now i don't have this problem on the new map

[shine.leo]

Maybe when you have a warehouse full of cheap Sedans the customer feedback for them should be "I'm looking for an SUV" so that the player knows that people are looking at their cars and deciding not to buy them because they are not the right type

[AUSSIE OUTLAW]

Restart and do not adjust the price when adding Upgrades and see what happens

[cliffski]

I'm aware that feedback here is not yet good enough. There is a kind of curve that models the extent to which each customer is 'price-sensitive'. So if you have all your cars really overpriced, they probably *will* sell.... ...eventually, when someone with more money than sense walks into the showroom. Cheap-priced cars will sell much quicker.
So basically you need to scale your mark-up to how many cars you are making. if the showroom fills up, your cars are overpriced, or in the wrong market segment, or you are producing too many cars to sell (at which point you should boost demand using marketing)

[Molybdane]

Originally posted by shine.leo:

Maybe when you have a warehouse full of cheap Sedans the customer feedback for them should be "I'm looking for an SUV" so that the player knows that people are looking at their cars and deciding not to buy them because they are not the right type

Actually, this kind of feedback was removed a little while ago because it is not relevant (yet)

The game has a set customer pool for each type of model AND price range, i.e. 16 customer pools for the four models and price ranges. Customers do not hop from one pool to the other, hence the irrelevance of this imformation.

[❆🎄Douglas 🎁 🎂]

What I've experienced (correct if I'm wrong) is that they don't care how many awesome feature you put in the car, only the price. Of course if the features are universal, common, etc you must have them, but I'm talking about being a pioneer. If I put a very rare feature on a Budget car, or even an Expensive one, it won't sell cause its too expensive (features have costs) even that I'm giving then a rare feature.

I think the main problem is that cars are categorized by price. I think that is wrong. If I put many features that are common in a Luxury car that car should be categorized as Luxury (or better, let me choose it). I don't want to HAVE TO mark up 400% to sell luxury cars. Where is the competition in this?

That is most obvious at the beggining of the game when all features are rare. So I can sell 4x4 (16 types of cars) that are exactly the same with different price range. So a budget car is budget because of the price and a mid-range car is mid-range because of the price even tho THEY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME PRODUCT.

[cliffski]

Indeed, that will be changing. I am currently sticking customers in price groups where they are price-sensitive but feature-agnostic. In other words, if they are in the market for a mid-range car, they simply dont care what features it has, they only care what markup the overall car has. This clearly sucks :D

I'm hoping to move soon(ish) to a model where customers have a narrower price-range, and maybe even some 'must-have' features, to give the player more scope to appeal to customers across price categories 9at the edges) and also remove the automatic incentive to always pack a car with features up until the next price category jump.

[trackday]

cliffski - that's a change I'm looking forward to.

yz250 - hi, I'm 300 XC

Douglas - Make as many models and variations as possible, and adjust production output to meet demand for each variation.

[Dirty Dale]

Originally posted by Douglas:

That is most obvious at the beggining of the game when all features are rare. So I can sell 4x4 (16 types of cars) that are exactly the same with different price range. So a budget car is budget because of the price and a mid-range car is mid-range because of the price even tho THEY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME PRODUCT.

Haven't the really auto makers been doing this exact thing for years? You know like chevy, GMC, catallac all have a 1/2 ton truck that is basicly exactly the same execpt for the logo on the grill..

[❆🎄Douglas 🎁 🎂]

Originally posted by Dirty Dale:

Originally posted by Douglas:

That is most obvious at the beggining of the game when all features are rare. So I can sell 4x4 (16 types of cars) that are exactly the same with different price range. So a budget car is budget because of the price and a mid-range car is mid-range because of the price even tho THEY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME PRODUCT.

Haven't the really auto makers been doing this exact thing for years? You know like chevy, GMC, catallac all have a 1/2 ton truck that is basicly exactly the same execpt for the logo on the grill..

You Sir, have a very good point! People pay more for steel shapes than features.

[trackday]

Originally posted by Douglas:

Originally posted by Dirty Dale:

Haven't the really auto makers been doing this exact thing for years? You know like chevy, GMC, catallac all have a 1/2 ton truck that is basicly exactly the same execpt for the logo on the grill..

You Sir, have a very good point! People pay more for steel shapes than features.

The difference is that the cadillac comes with all the upgrades as standard. The chevy requires you to check a lot of upgrades boxes off to achieve the same truck.

[SpeedDaemon]

What I normally do is try to research the new body styles as soon as possible, then spread my production around as much as possible. If you look at the market matrix, you can see the percentage of the market in each segment. So at the beginning of the game when I can only really make budget and mid-range sedans, I'll look at the percentages (12% and 10% respectively, I think), and set my line to produce at that ratio (6:5). When I start making budget compacts (15%), I'll switch to 2:2:3 or 4:3:5, and keep adjusting with every new segment I enter.

That keeps the number of cars per segment low, so I can jack up the premium, because, as Cliff said, they do sell *eventually*, and eventually comes sooner when you have more market segments shopping.

Cliff, you should take a look at Stardock's "The Corporate Machine" game if you haven't already. It abstracts the actual production and focuses a lot on marketing, so you could probably get a lot of inspiration from there. For example, market research to see what features are "hot", and maybe leveraging your marketing dept to hype a feature that only you have at the moment.

Another thing that would be cool is patent protection for certain new techs. Some basic stuff, like in-car audio and heaters wouldn't be patentable, but the higher-end stuff like adaptive cruise could have an exclusivity period where no one else can research it to allow for a little more market differentiation (and opportunities for you to use your marketing dept to FUD your competitors' exclusive features, or license tech for a fee). To balance, the research cost would be significantly reduced for everyone else after the patent expires (so you can be a pioneer investing in research and selling high-margin expensive cars, or cheaping out on research selling a bunch of commodity cars).