Creation of markets

[freeman2344]

Here's the thing: I think we can all agree that in the early game years (1900-1945) shipping costs should be colossal and thus shipping vehicles across, say, the Atlantic, should be pretty much prohibitively expensive. What bugs me the most is the often repeated problem that you cannot keep a vehicle from being shipped, if you sell a vehicle in, say, the US and France and also produce the model in factories there (at both locations) - the vehicles are then shipped wherever there is demand. This problem can easily be handled by implementing a factory-to-branch interface, thus adding the capability of restricting a certain factory from shipping to certain branches or all branches of a certain region. That shouldn't be too hard to implement and could be the simplest solution. It should thus be a necessity to build factories wherever you would like to sell your vehicles...which would be very realistic in the early years. As time progresses, shipping costs should decrease, making production in, say, Mexico, profitable.

This problem could also be handled by making it FREE to COPY a model without modifying it in any way (and to finish it instantly). Then you could easily and at no cost make variants of a vehicle for multiple markets. This still adds a lot of micromanagement, but at least the player is not penalized for it. As I suggested in an earlier thread, small modifications should, in general, not take as much development time and cost as much as the original vehicle...I'm sure Eric will address this at some point.