Gearbox rating / car overall rating

[Arakash]

Thanks again for Your explanations.

After a complete reinstall of Gear City I started a new game under 1.13 and did some testing with gearboxes. I let my researchers develop one gearbox after the other, all 3 gear manual generic gearboxes with every slider maxed out. After 4 1/2 yrs ingame I had 9 gearboxes designed and every one of them had an overall rating of 11/100 after development started.

One would assume that researching so many gearboxes in such a short time frame should give the researchers a nice amount of knowledge which would raise the rating of every new designed gearbox, but nope, the overall rating of 11 seems to be set in stone. The only thing that changed significantly were the unit costs that rose by approximately 50% (first gearbox had a unit price of 165$ after release, the last one 246$).
Bankruptcy prevented me from continuing the tests, but I assume that even 20 more gearboxes wouldn't have raised the overall rating to a value higher than 11/100.

I dont know if 10-20 is enough to increase your Gearbox R&D skill, last i checked it was glacially slow to raise. In my attempts to raise it in earlier games i noticed little change after constantly producing for years.
That's part of the reason i like the research teams, it was too hard to raise the skill to see meaningful results.

That said, im not entirely sure the R&D skill is something that's actually the problem here. Ive yet to play to 1910-1915 in the current version to check whether the Gearboxes improve, because i know they did in earlier versions. If you give me a save i can have a look at how much they have changed in the save file, as i know how to edit them.

You'll have to ask Eric(Gearcity dev) about the Gearboxes specifically, personally i just go on what i said about them originally. There may be scope for a suggestion post(or perhaps a bug post) if you can get confirmation from Eric about whats going on.

On the price changes, that is something that's partially hardcoded to the date and not related to your R&D skills afaik. At certain times in the period the game represents vehicles were cheaper than other times.
This is most noticeable if you make a car in 1900 then another in 1907 with new components with the same sliders. The 1907 one should be quite a bit more expensive.