Still Confused - Car Making Details and Wealth Details

[Ukir]

There is currently no way of knowing how the different shares of wealth are distributed. It would, however, be safe to assume that this distribution is in accordance with historical realities. Meaning that only a very small portion of the population can be classed as "wealthy" in the early 1900s. Therefore, common sense kind of dictates the target groups you should cater to. I also don't think it's possible to go beyond 2 stars in the early years, I don't know whether that is intended or if that will be tweaked so that the stars rating depends on some kind of general average for that specific timeframe.

As for costs and car sales: your HQ should be located in New York or London (at least for your first few games). Stick with Sedans and Compact Cars in the beginning. These are usually the most profitable. Pick-Ups also have a high profit margin in the US market, but don't do well in Europe. You should also not be afraid of producing a "lesser quality" vehicle (as in low quality sliders), you can generally outsell the competition as long as your vehicle is cheaper. Ratings detoriorate very quickly in any case, so the inital investment may not be worth it. It's usually no problem to design a half-way decent car with a unit cost of less than 300$, which will be even less once a few thousand of these have been produced (in this case, it may even make sense to go for a low initial profit margin in order to produce more units and in this way decrease production costs - Ford did this with the Model T for some time). "Normal" or non-budget cars should always be marketed at at least 2x the manufacturing costs in order to turn a halfway decent profit. Depending on the market and vehicle type, you can even get away with more than that (such as 3x costs). You're probably also trying to build fairly "big" engines, but you have to understand the difference between early automobiles and today - though they are arguably more exciting, it doesn't make sense to put a gigantic V8 engine into early cars. Start out with something small and crappy. Even an I3 would honestly be considered overkill before 1918. That being said, you don't have to move significant numbers of vehicles to be profitable. I've played a number of games where I restricted myself to only building expensive sports cars or high-powered sedans for the super-rich.

Well, thanks for the information. It's too bad there is no way to know about the wealth, but this did clear a few things up.

I was indeed trying to make big engines - 44' big, at least. I was simply worried the top speed would be too low and it would lower the profit - seeing as I can easily make engines with only 10 Horsepower if I don't invest enough.

However it seems that was a bad idea in itself - perhaps I should make a smaller engine yet still invest in performance/fuel economy somewhat?

I've had a session where I had great profits with sport cars, with huge engines which were described by the game as "saturn v rocket" lol. But once they stopped selling I quickly went bankrupt due to investing too much in factories and branches(It was my first game, so I made the scale too big, invested 7 million in factories a month, but was getting positive profits nevertheless, for a while).

My newer sessions were far less ambitious, but it seems I still have no clue how cars were back then, considering the whole engine thing.

At any less than 50 horsepower I get worried for some reason. Probably because nowadays having even 200 horsepower is sort of slow for a sports car, for example...And since I have no clue about cars THAT old, I don't know how to design them, hehe.

Just one last question, how small and cheap can I make my car and engine without making it become too bad and having fewer sales?