[WONT]Back Orders?

[Geredis]

I often find that generally, the cars I build end up exceeding whatever demand there is.

What I'm wondering is, and provided this is in the game, do let me know, but if I were to build cars below demand, is there any mechanic for back orders/pre-ordering vehicles before they come off the assembly lines? And by that same token, touching on something that Franky touched on very tangentially in his latest bug report, provided there is such a figure, is there any way for disconitnued vehicles to simply not take new orders, with an option to shut down the line once these back orders that may/may not exist are filled?

And now, provided none of this is even in game, or if only certain aspects are...the suggestion portion: is there any possibility of adding these aspects to the factory/branch side of things?

[Arakash]

I often find that generally, the cars I build end up exceeding whatever demand there is.

What I'm wondering is, and provided this is in the game, do let me know, but if I were to build cars below demand, is there any mechanic for back orders/pre-ordering vehicles before they come off the assembly lines? And by that same token, touching on something that Franky touched on very tangentially in his latest bug report, provided there is such a figure, is there any way for disconitnued vehicles to simply not take new orders, with an option to shut down the line once these back orders that may/may not exist are filled?

And now, provided none of this is even in game, or if only certain aspects are...the suggestion portion: is there any possibility of adding these aspects to the factory/branch side of things?

Its late here, so i apologize if my posts are less clear than my usual unclear rambling posts.

I see where your coming from there.
I usually have either problem. I produce too much or too little. Sales tend to fluctuate a fair bit, which makes it very difficult to predict how many vehicles to produce with any degree of certainty.
(the calculations behind sales are very complex, so even if its brought up, ill avoid going into that kind of discussion)

Yours is a fair suggestion, but i think that (perhaps controversially) you could go a lot further.

I may be derailing the thread by mentioning it, but personally, i would be quite happy to hand the production numbers off to an AI or subcommander(manager in this case?) unless im in one of the specific situations where i need to stockpile or reduce numbers.(which i find is rare)
That said, im far more comfortable with automation than most(Distant Worlds or Command ops anyone?), so i don't really expect to see that in the game.

[Sarchez]

Isn't that part of the balance of the game ?

If you get back-orders, you'd always be producing less than you're selling, because there's no risc to it. Any excess sales, will come in later on.

If something like this was to be implemented, I'd think it should be with huge fixed % discounts so you could end up loosing money on a sale. (% should increase for each month it's delayed/underproduced).

I understand what you mean though, and back-orders are part of the sales strategy today, but you'd have to build in some kind of desirability (is that a word?) factor into the car. Otherwise the customer will just go buy something else.

[Frankschtaldt]

I may be derailing the thread by mentioning it, but personally, i would be quite happy to hand the production numbers off to an AI or subcommander(manager in this case?) unless im in one of the specific situations where i need to stockpile or reduce numbers.(which i find is rare)
That said, im far more comfortable with automation than most(Distant Worlds or Command ops anyone?), so i don't really expect to see that in the game.

This, I feel, is a brilliant idea!
I mentioned in another thread how I almost never want to advance more than 2-3 months at a time without adjusting something and the fluctuations in sales and the need to adjust productions is the reason.
It would be brilliant to have a check box somewhere to tell the game to manage production levels for you whilst receiving notifications when you're using more than 80% of your production lines so you can start building upgrades! =)
Perhaps to be fair and to make it something less than a must-be-used button rather than just matching sales for the month (I imagine that wouldn't be particularly realistic) it could instead use an equation like this to calculate production (Last months sales +10%) - (Current stock on hand).
Then, having a "Build surplus" option would simply change the equations to (Last months sales +20%)
Obviously, production numbers would be rounded up to the nearest whole number produced by a production line.

The biggest issue I can think of with this is controlling which models get made where when you have different factories to manufacture for different regions. The easiest answer I can come up for with this is to only allow factories to build cars that are sold in the same city. The problem with this is it wont work when you have a factory in a city without a branch. Perhaps another check box to turn this option on or off?

The other issue would be working out the first months production. Perhaps this one could be based off actual demand for that months but have a randomiser of +/- 20% to simulate the difficulty of matching sales on the fly?

As for my answer to Geredis original post:
From what I can gather, what you are talking about is kind of simulated by the sales equations. Sales of a vehicle when its released always seem to be fairly high and the game seems to push demand up for a vehicle when its current demand isn't met. This seems to simulate pre-ordering the car before its release or people putting in back orders for when there are none available to sell.
Note: This is based purely off gut feeling from playing the game. I could be just imagining it =)