Which engine do you design in 1900?

[Shepherd]

While chassis and gearbox are quite easy to design in a way they do perform reasonably good, designing an engine is quite hard.
The per capita is very low in 1900, so engine prices should be as low as possible.

Most times i end up with an 1 hp single cylinder engine with very low sliders (except fuel efficiency) which gives excellent MPG and reasonably good reliability, but it feels somewhat gamey. Even with the "too low power penalty" an 100 MPG engine produces 25 MPG in any car. And there is no need to invest a single buck to fuel efficiency in gearbox or car as that will not increase the MPG with such a low power engine, making the car even cheaper.

There seems no point in designing an 10 hp engine as its still abysmal in power but price, reliability and especially MPG are much worse. Even for microcars 10 hp are way too low to give any benefit over 1 hp.
You would need to design an >25 hp engine but that is extrem costly to produce and limit the target market to the few very wealty.

How do you design your first engine?

The game really does not care about horsepower. It's more or less used for calculating top speed only.

Now what the game really do care about is torque. Fuel efficency is higly dependend upon torque, weight, and size (aerodynamic drag). Both chassis size and body size make a huge impact.

And after Eric nerfed torque output, designing engines with high torque is even more crucial.

So my first engines are basicly 2-stroke tractor engines (extremely long stroked). What type depends on wich difficulty I play on. On my current hard game i started with a S3 (Tech limitations on hard means a straight is your only viable option). Most sliders all the way down, the need to finish it in 3 months without breaking the bank was a priority (main focus was to keep the design cost down, part cost was secondary). Why 3 months you may ask. Because thats when you need your first car to be designed, to contest in all the first season racing series.

I might post a picture of the settings when I get back to my home computer.

The engine did not break any records, but was decent enough. And far better than most of the rubbish the AI designs. The AI really sucks at engine and gearbox designs, and often uses gearboxes capable of only handling a fraction of the torque the engine it's paired with puts out.

Another thing, engine size sliders should always be kept at maximum. This gives you higher HP, better reliability, better cost and only slightly higher weight. So design your engine first. Then make the chassis fit the engine, not the other way around.