King Cars - hard difficulty (with small tutorial steps at the start)

[Curse]

King Cars won again some GCM-Awards in 1903. It totally speaks about world car quality when our old and badly put together nonsense wins prizes years after it was designed.


I also decided to end 1903 with the payback of all loans. We are debt free and still make profit despite the fact we have an expansive factory under construction.

To check back with some of my goals from the start:
- Make profit by the end of 1902.
That worked perfectly. The company made profit the second it started to actually sell cars and had just a single month (I think it was the third after sale started) that brought us losses (except construction payments).

- Avoid losses except when building early factories.
I guess this can be seen as done starting with 1904.

- Shift to high quality and expensive cars as soon as possible to build up image and worker skill (etc.).
As the usual starting car possibilities, mostly sedan, were massively overproduced by competition from the beginning, we achieved that more or less coincidentially right from the beginning. Of course quality must improve soon.

- Deliver quality products for high prices. However, this also includes not screwing over customers and not maximize profits on the cost of our products or customers.
Worked well and the second we tried to get more buck for the products the customers stepped in. Lesson learned. Maybe.

- Never produce so many cars the quality starts to decline. Quality over sales amount. An exception may be financial difficulties.
I'm glad we made profit without killing off car quality and even right now, where we could sell way more cars in Europe, we stick to the "~45% rule" in the production lines.


1904:

With money coming in I decided to spend about 1/3 of the incoming cash in Research and Development. Therefor our quarterly skill will increase 0.433 instead of 0.4 the part development alone gave us.


I try to keep the RnD investment at about 1/3 of profits until no more money can be spent. Experience is this can nearly double the amount of research we have compared to right now.

In February the Pickup entered production in Chicago. Two lines with 78 units each for the start. Sell price is $2000 instead of the $3000 I usually take for a Pickup. Two competitors offer very high rated Pickups (34 and 36 compared to our 38) and one of them is a company called "King". I guess I must invest in the stock market as soon as possible.

March shows us this Pickup thing failed massively. We produced 156 Pickups and sold 15, basically giving us nearly 0 profit this month. Price is reduced to $1500. Competition is numerous and it was a bad sale month at all, so I guess sales will increase. Production for now is stopped and I ordered billboard and magazine marketing 100% for all branches in North America.

In April the Pickup sales are up to 83 units. Way below my expectation but ok, it's a start. We're also introducing the King Cars Sedan for about $2000.

(I had a game crash and the last savegame was somehow from 12/1903, so I had to redo things as good as I could to get back here.)

Until end of 1904 I had to lower the price of the Sedan to $1750 and it has still bad sell numbers. Competition in this sector, but in all now, is really demanding. I like it!

Stuttgart factory was completed and London factory now focusses on Landaulet and Limousine, everything else for the European market is being produced in Stuttgart.


Not sure how exactly it's coded in the game but I imagine I feel how bad my workers and my company itself is. Even very bad parts cost a fortune and my production and sale numbers are a joke. Hopefully that'll improve, for now the new parts are in design.

Uni 2 Small Chassis:

Uni 2 Small Engine:

Uni 2 Small Gearbox:



Uni 2 Chassis:

Uni 2 Engine:

Uni 2 Gearbox: