Re-balancing development pace effects

[Eric.B]

Sorry for the late reply. It's a long post and wanted to make sure I give it my full attention, which means it had to wait until nightfall.

The system is currently designed to make niche markets in later game years profitable. So when you look at it, you should be judging from 1980s perspective.

However there were some complaints about how the sliders made the years jump, as such around 1.18.x the Development Pace system was tweaked but not balanced in the lower years. This is where much of your issues comes into play.

Dropping the development pace all the way down takes the $1,567,000 project into a $236,000 project (roughly 15% of the cost) but extends the project out by just four months. I just feel that's far too much, 15% of the cost for 125% of the project time.

The project time is currently skew more heavily for later years. In 1990 for example you'd be adding 1-2 years extra time. (Can't look right now for exact amounts.)

I will probably end up switching this over to a linear amount of time * modifier based on year. In fact I believe there is already a ticket for it.

What this all means is that project cost is really a non-factor as is.

Only because the AI sucks right now, and you make too much money in the game due to lack of competition... That's being resolved right now.

Yes, it takes time (30 months versus 3) but it should never cost less no matter how long it takes.

I assume by this line you mean that the project should always cost the same? That defeats the purpose of the development pace slider system. It's meant to reduce design costs at the expensive of time. Cars in the 1990s costs hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to make. Thus making niche market companies like supercars manufacturers impossible to play. In the real world, supercars can be developed with low development budgets, they just take many years to produce. But before development pace slider, it was practically impossible to run a company like Vector in the game.


Anyhoo yes, some balancing will be done to the pace system. Not as much as I think you want, but we'll be bumping up the early year time amounts some.