Interestingly enough, I tried to merge with Automation back in 2011 when they were just an engine designer and I was just an office and world map. The caveat being they switch to Ogre3D and the GUI lib I was using since I was a bit further along in actual game development. It's a good thing it didn't happen though. I find Killrob to be a jerk and Caswal is a complete asshole, so I would have probably dropped from development at some point. (Duff, their artist, is amazing and a key component of their success in my opinion.) Anyhoo, Caswal scoffed at an (game) engine change, and shot down the idea of merging immediately. Funny enough, they ended up rewriting the game for UE4. (Upgrading Ogre would have provided the same graphical capabilities for far less work.) And their first attempt at a tycoon system came out so badly, they adopted core technologies like SQLite that GearCity has been built around since the start... (I have my opinion on programmer competence over there, hence their attitudes, but I won't get into libel.) They get the last laugh though, all the way to the bank.
So back to your question. Would I have been more detailed and made a better designer or would I have invested it into the tycoon?
I would have put most of the resources into the car designer. For one obvious reason, graphics sell video games. You can just see how much snowball success Automation has had with minimum game play and extremely slow development time. Pretty graphics drew people in, those people brought in more people, and so on. With increased audience, it led to a bunch of third party content, and it kept snow balling. 9 years later, they're still not a tycoon, yet they frequently get called the "best tycoon game every made!"
So yes. I would have made everything prettier. Some things would be less abstracted, but I probably wouldn't have made it as detailed as Automation. I'm not a fan of things like material selection for example. Because of Automation's graphical superiority, and because all my artist friends had zero interest in working on a tycoon game, I did make compromises in GearCity's designer system. As a result, we ended up a little more abstracted than I would have liked. Funny enough, I only came across Automation because I was trying to find some engine 3d models to test my designer rendering system with. I ended up dropping the entire visible portion of the component designers because I couldn't compete with them on my minimum wage income.
I firmly believe if there was no Automation, I would have had that snowball success. The game would have turned out significantly prettier, the designer a little more in-depth, but not quite as much as Automation, but I don't think I would have simplified the tycoon side of things.
As for increased focus on tycoon stuff. What hurt me with the tycoon stuff was the scale of GC. It took about 4-6 years too long to finish the game. And the sad thing is, there is room for it to grow even more. The difference between improving the tycoon stuff vs improving the designer is the fact that I have the power to improve the tycoon side. Whereas, the designer is at my artistic limits. So it requires capital to improve. Sadly, we haven't found enough commercial success to improve it yet.
So resources put toward the tycoon part of the game would have only sped up development. This would lead to an earlier full release. Business wise, that would have been perfect for me, especially since the market is saturated to the point where I imagine several moderate sized indies developers will be bankrupting soon.
Anyway, that is all the past. I do plan on doing some fund raising just after GC's release. Depending on the success of that, we could get new vehicle types for as little as $5,000 per type, new tycoon features around $60,000, an overhaul of the vehicle designer system (with much better artwork) for $200,000, and Multiplayer at $500,000.... I don't expect to get into those upper ranges. But if we did. The answer to your question would be, both!
