What's your starting strategy?

[Skala]

Mine is to research power production to eliminate the electric bill.

I also build the car slots in this ratio to start: 1:3:3:2:2:1:1 etc

This is because the second slot/process takes roughly 3x longer than the first. However I still go bankrupt with this start and have to take a loan.

[cliffski]

Power production is definitely something you can worry about in mid/late game. At the start its not a HUGE chunk of the expenses. Your problem is likely a low car throughput. get the body production sped up (split apart) ASAP, and make sure you either research painting, or have more than 1 paint shop.

[Giert]

First up: DON'T do predictive stock control in early game. You WILL go bankrupt as of now.
Space up the initial slots and never split them up until you have a solid income.
Researching all the features that can be installed at the electronics slot is my go-to. Gives high value and rare features early without replacing any slots!
Then move on to research efficiency of your current, still basic, setup like overhead conveyor speed and more robots.
Keep expanding the troughput of your basic slots at least until you saturate one QA slot.
Research more body styles to give variety, with budget and mid-range of all styles you dont need fancy features to sell all cars you make
While your design department researches body styles, start researching production of expensive and high volume parts to get significantly cheaper productions costs. Setting all slots to local anly, and dedicated single resource stockpiles to prefer local, you get a reliable but mostly local production going.
Keeps expanding your basic production line. Expand different slots into different adjacent facilities.
Now you may produce local power.
You shold be saturating at least tho QAs and an export slot. Thats one car every 2.5 minute
Marking is awesome!
Now you should be rolling in cash!

By this point you can start to research specialized slots.
Start considering what kind of features you want to go after, see what category your competitors have focused on and just research everything in that category before building. You can afford it!
All features and slots researched, replace the basic slots to a baseline production speed, say one car every minute. Thats's 3 instances of a slot that takes 3 minutes.
Remember to take more robots and additional features into account
Leave space for future increase in volume

Repeat until you have researched everything
????
Profit!!!

[Skala]

Thanks for the tips. They did wonders - it worked a little too good. Now I'm producing wayyy too many cars and not enough customers. I have 60 vehicles on my lot. Guess I need to branch into different body types?

[jpinard]

Originally posted by Skala:

Thanks for the tips. They did wonders - it worked a little too good. Now I'm producing wayyy too many cars and not enough customers. I have 60 vehicles on my lot. Guess I need to branch into different body types?

Try marketing and price adjustments.

[Giert]

More body types, and have both mid-range and bugdet models. Also adjust the amout of each model being produced, as often there is a few that stack up. I usually find the offroader to sell significantly less the the others