Better use of trims with continent / country demographic needs?

[Cerberus23]

I don't know if you already planned something like that - if so : sorry!

This came to my mind this morning since i'm making very little ... no, i'm not making any use of trims at all. So sometimes i think to myself how different i'd had to make a car to be fitting for the U.S. and the European or Australian or even Russian market but end up selling one trim in all of them.

I think planning cars on different continent / country needs for target demographics would be a really nice feature to add even more depth into this game.

Let's say you plan to produce are Pickup Truck for the U.S., European, Australian and Russian market and they all have to be slightly different to match their market needs.

U.S. would need decent dependability, safety, quality, driveability and power like Europe, but the Australian and Russian market would require a higher amount of these stats since it has a rougher landscape etc. You could just select them like in the Target Demographic tab when producing a car.

And if a country has poor manufacturing quality if should be of interested to keep the requirements down etc.

So you have a lot of options to play around with to get the maximum out of each demographics needs.

Sorry for the long text - have a nice Sunday

[Eric.B]

Sorry for the late reply. I have been busy as a bee!!!

Demographics are not split up regionally beyond vehicle type popularity. Even if I were to implement this feature it would be on a continental bases and not on a national level.

So why isn't something like this in the game yet? Simply enough, turn times. If each city or region had their own demographical wants specific to vehicle type the turn times would increase dramatically. As such distribution of buyer wants have to be calculated semi-statically based on the core ratings of the vehicle type and the vehicle popularity in that region.

The solution to this from a modding standpoint would be to create various types of vehicles specific to markets. Make them popular in the regions in which they exist and not popular in regions which they are not. And have them require what the demographics typically want.

(You could even use the various names people call their vehicles in other regions. For example, use Saloon for European demographic and Sedan for North American style demographics....)

[Cerberus23]

Thanks for the explanation Eric.

Just for my personal interest: How do you use trims? For what situations and how do cars differ from each other when you make a new trim?

In my last gameplay i heavily (over)used trims: so i had about 104 cars (6-10 in each category) with 2-4 cars for lower-middle demographic, 2-4 for upper-middle and around 2 for wealthy and sometimes even 1-2 for super wealthy. This inluded variation in cars with gasoline, diesel or even electric, fuel saving inline 2's or 3's, inline 4' or 6's, v8 versions, charged v10 and v12 versions, luxury flat engines, manual or automatic, fwd's, rwd's and awd versions of them, cheap and affordable to maxed out all possible ratings.

This resulted in taking all top 50 places for 15 years (with a pheaton taking place 1-5 all the time ), gaining close to 80% marketshare in Europe and the United States (with Holgin's mod and his 1000 car brands!) and making about 80 million $ per turn.

I stopped the savegame in 1939 with 3 billions in cash (when i was about to design a new line of cars and trims) cause there was barely someone left to compete.

[Eric.B]

I personally use trims to attack/gain marketshare in a segment in which I have competition.

If there is a monopoly in the market, people will buy your vehicle no matter what. They have no choice. However the more selections they have, the less sales you will get. Therefor if you produce more of options you should be able to eat more sales from your competition than from your other trims.

Eventually you'll saturate the market, you eat more sales from yourself than the cost of making a new trim. Thus you will lose money.

Putting it into numbers, all things equal, if you sell 1 model and the competition sells 1, marketshare will be 50/50. If you produce a new trim, it will be 2 to 1, you will have 67% marketshare and the competition 33%. You will have lost 17% of sales in your base model, but gained 16% overall marketshare!
If you saturated the market, say you had 8 models and the AI had 1. You will have 88.8% marketshare, producing one more new trim, will put you at 90% marketshare. Is that extra 1% in sales worth the expense of a new trim?


So why use trims instead of a completely new model? 1) Trims are cheaper, 2) Trims take less time to make, 3) Trims share image ratings with other trims/base model which will increase sales overall.



The main problem right now is the AI is too weak to compete with the player on the scale which it needs to. Thus making it easy to flood the market with trims and creating a brand monopoly in it.