Hi Eric. I really like Gearcity, specially the tycoon side, because it allows you to take control of a car company while you deal with economics, history and many more aspects. We've all heard speak about Automation, and I've read in many places that they have spent lots of money on the designing part of the game, while neglecting the tycoon one. Since I first got the game on the Open Beta, I have always been curious about something: If you had the possibility to have more economical and human resources invested into GearCity, would you create something similar to Automation (detail level and vehicle building) on the designing part of the game or would you invest it on the tycoon part? Thanks for taking your time in reading this.

My apologies if this is covered somewhere else. To the more experienced players out there, what are some good actions to take after your first car hits the market? I always get to that point in my games and then I don't know where or what to do.

Been playing GearCity for about 100 hours on steam so far; one of my favourite things is the parody car company names... They make me laugh sometimes - some of the names are genius.

One thing I was wondering however was the existence of a Saab equivalent in the game. I know GM owned them during the 90s and 2000s but they don't exist under the Marques.

Anyone know if they're in the game?

So, I revisited this game after a year... also got the "Automation: Game" and after I researched some I noticed the engines here are just a bit strange XD.

This game favors stroke heavy engines, while Automation and the real world seems to favor varying degrees of bore heavy engines. When I'm building a compact motor for example Bore size should be dominant if only slightly, but here stroke makes the most power dense engines.

So, for example a formula engine (based on a website I went to), currently has a tiny 1.6 L. v6 and it is a bore heavy engine. In fact as much as I know,  If you want the most potent sport engine that revs. super high you want a bore heavy engine. However here, if I want to make a "race engine" with poor dependability I just lower respective research in that field and make a compact 5000 cc engine with a long stroke (as bore size drastically increases weight). And stroke aside from lowering your RPMs, doesn't do much in terms of increasing weight. However in real life, this design would fail because you would be essentially be making a lazy 5L diesel that has excellent fuel eco/low end torque properties (i.e. less wear due to lower revs, better fuel effiency due to lower revs and better thermal dynamics... etc.). Actually if you look in the past, that's why the GT40 wound up beating everyone in the LeMans race, because it had a lazier 8 cylinder vs the tighter wound Ferrari engines which were higher rev'ing and if you don't know LeMans ( is more a endurance race than on based on speed, speed still matters though).


Thoughts?

My question here is the somewhat broad "what determines how many vehicles are sold", particularly in cities where there is a very large amount of competition. I just bought the game a few days ago (running Test Branch 1.23.1 new main map), and my expectation would be that the main drivers of sales (1900 start) would be price and overall rating, specifically the overall rating that fits the vehicle type. But I consistently notice that cars with higher ratings and lower prices are not outselling their rivals, and particularly even wild outliers in price can often get really decent sales. Going into a sandbox game, I developed cars which cost me over 2k and sold them for the cheapest in the big market. Somehow sales were nominal. I proceed to max out my branch spending and try again. Sales increase but not by too much. I figure the key is marketing, dump max into 3 categories of marketing... sales double and I do become the market leader but not by a terribly big margin. I figure the problem is therefore my brand image, so I create a new sandbox game and start with higher (though accidentally not higher than the AI just close 40 vs. 50) in luxury, and higher into the regions of image that the AI seems to have none of as well. I quickly develop a reasonably balanced car, sell it for approximately the same as the AI and sales are again pretty mediocre. Now I wonder if there are thresholds where if, say, my Cargo is not at least X certain customers just disregard my cars completely? I'm not entirely sure. And as a final test I "observed" an AI game and let it run about 7 years from 1900. The best seller (~100) is a 1903 car with a super low HP engine and pretty mediocre everything. A new 1907 model priced the same with higher values in almost every category sells about 20. Perhaps it's unfair to compare these since I don't know what the AI was really doing, but it seems to me that customers are picking cars off of some weird factors that are not obvious to me (and overall rating alone seems to have no bearing on anything).

So I wonder if I'm missing something fundamental about how the game works and why these supposedly mediocre cars are selling so well, or if the AI is actually being too generous in its purchasing decisions. I tried adjusting for many possible "X Factors" and found none. If my car (or another's car) is vastly superior to the field, why does it have such low market share? Is it actually a distribution problem related to dealerships, or what else could be happening here? I'd like to play with 300 AI because it makes the game feel more alive, but I can't actually figure out how to get the lion's share of a city's profits when a city has any competition. Any help on the topic would be appreciated.

Hello,
First of all thank you for this management game that is out of the ordinary and full of potential.
It's been a few days since I bought this game and I have already more than 80 hours of play But frankly I have a problem that is spoiling my pleasures is the autobuid mode with delivery in boat with non-modifiable world distance. It ruins my margins on my vehicles and falls on my sales.
I saw your solution to create a sub brand for each continent but in addition to wasting time and money to create as many models for each continent ca also leads the global sales stats and thus removes the challenge gambling.
I think it would take you very little time to set up a hotfix patch creating a check button for each district to force sales on a single continent and it would allow many players to wait a little longer for a real patch that you would have more time to create that would solve this problem.
So gentlemen the devellopeur please put us a hotpatch very quickly to block the sales of a district on a selected continent.
I would be satisfied with a small unofficial downloadable on steam.

Bonjour,
Tout d'abord merci pour ce jeu de gestion  qui sort de l'ordinaire et plein de potentiel.
Cela fait à peine quelques jours que j'ai acheté ce jeu et j'ai deja plus de 80 heures de jeu. Mais franchement j'ai un probleme qui est en train de me gacher mon plaisirs c'est le mode autobuid avec livraison en bateau  avec distance mondiale non modifiable. Ca ruine mes marges sur mes véhicules et plombe mes ventes. J'ai vue votre solution de créer une sous marque pour chaque continent mais en plus du fait de perdre du temps et de l'argent à creer autant de modele pour chaques continent ca plombe aussi les stats mondiale de vente et ca enleve donc du challenge au jeu.
Je pense que ca ne vous prendrais que tres peu de temps pour mettre en place un hotfix patch creant un bouton à cocher pour chaque district pour forcer les ventes sur un unique continent et ca permettrais à de nombreux joueurs de patienter un peu plus de temps pour un vrai patch que vous aurais plus de temps pour creer qui reglerais ce probleme.
Donc messieurs les devellopeur s'il vous plait mettais nous un petit hotpatch tres vite pour bloquer les ventes d'un district sur un continent selectionné.
Je me satisferais d'un petit non officiel telechargeable sur steam.

First off, I love this game, it's amazing, especially the realism of it.

There's one thing that seems unrealistic though, early 1900's race cars, right now i'm in early 1910 and I made a 4.999cc W12 with 252hp & 424Nm, the entire car weighs 437kg and does 0-100 in 5.4 seconds, tops out at almost 260Km/h

I know cars, I don't know that much about cars in the early 1900's but i'm pretty sure they would not beat my my 105 years younger CLA250.
So question is, were machines like this possible in this time period? If they weren't, why is it in an otherwise super realistic game? It cost $3.800 to make in 1910, that's $91.000 today or the price of four model-T fords in 1910, a lot but not that crazy. I'm not asking if they existed, I know nothing like this existed, I'm asking if it was technically possible with the technology they had.

I'm Belgian, a lot of the early car engineering was done here, I know the 1899 speed record was a Belgian engineer doing over 100km/h in an electric car, the 1903 record was an american doing 135km/h in Belgium, the 1904 record was a french man doing 168km/h on that same Belgian race track. I googled the gaps in what I know, the 1910 record was 211km/h in a mercedes with a 200hp 21.000cc engine, bigger than the rolls royce engines the british air force were shoving in their best WWI bombers.

TLDR : Why am I getting 250+hp from a 5.000cc engine in 1910 when the actual record was 200hp from a 21.000cc engine

After almost a year I've started a new game in Naples (but not only, Paris, London etc...) - (Classic Map and Base City Map - Diff. CFO)
I've created a cheap but functional Sedan, and despite winning the award as the best European sedan, I can't sell it (Zero sales)
Why?

Is there any way to change a Marque name after you purchase a company ?

I notice that when you enter the second world war that all sales stop and unless you plan a little bit you can have huge stockpiles of cars sitting there until 1945 and then all of a sudden they all get sold as the war ends (As in real life). But although you can pick up the odd engine or vehicle contract they are few and far between. Now I know a lot of the American and British automotive industries switched to war materiel but this is not really reflected in the game. I am thinking of things like Jeeps which were mass produced by Ford and GM because Willys didn't have the capacity but other things like Chevy WB trucks which were adapted from a civilian design and the big Packard Limousines which were used to ferry top brass about. The military also used a lot of off the shelf stuff rather than a specific design for them and used as staff cars for various commanders etc. I wonder whether this might be better reflected with contracts offered for existing designs more than a new design spec which can take 2 years to design and test.