Auto production, parts modification and sale price adjustment [1.22.2 SP1]

[Eric.B]

Hello,

First of all, this is a great game already!
I picked it up about two years ago, but only now did I finally give it a serious try. I just managed my first successful playthrough on CFO difficulty and after some 30-odd hours I can say I quite enjoyed it.

Glad you're enjoying the game.

The auto-production option in the mega-menu is a great idea and would relieve the player of a lot of the fiddling with production in the later game. The way I played the game, this became a repetitive and tiring task.
There are some problems with the auto-production, which make it completely unusable (for me) at the moment however:

Improving the auto production system for both players and the AI is the main focus of v1.22.3.

First, it adjusts production so that no sales are missed, which is good, however it builds up HUGE amounts of stock in the process. It seems the stock is not taken into account while calculating needed production. I suspect the new contract system might mess things up as well, due to the heavily fluctuating demand (I usually had 5+ contracts running at any given time).

This is due to a bug caused by a limited amount of time the game is allowed to use to calculation slider positions for auto production. It will be resolved in v1.22.3

Secondly, auto-production caps the shipping distance for all branches at maximum (20,000km). If like me, you have branches in every city between 1920-1935, the resulting shipping that occurs kills any chance for a profit, rendering the option pretty much useless. I'd like to have the option to set a flat shipping distance for the auto production option, or even better of course, not have the district shipping option locked, so I can still adjust that myself, and auto-production has to deal with it. Although that option might be a lot harder to get right I presume.

The locking of shipping to global will not be changed. The game does not have the processing ability to figure out which factory needs to produce what based on branch shipping distance overlaps. The current iteration of the Auto-production system spreads out the production lines as evenly as possible throughout all your factories. So if you want to improve your shipping costs, spread your factories out across the global.

As for the next iteration of auto-production, you will be able to limit production at factories based on marques and possibly models. Thus allowing you to shape where the vehicles are made. Shipping will still be global, but that should give you some options to limit global shipping.

I attached my save game, just enable auto-production and see how it messes up the production.

Thank you for the save game, it will help me when I start working on the autoproduction system. Was about to start asking folks for some.

But what made the game "click" for me, basically the moment where I felt like I had beaten the game, was when I discovered parts improments (or modifications). I basically got along by developing one chassis, engine and trans, doing about 5 major modifications on them respectively, and then using them in basically every available car body. That created cars that were way ahead of the competition in every category and made the game a little too easy in my oppinion.
Long story short, I think parts modifications are overpowered, especially since they require no time whatsoever.

I will probably be increasing the modification costs soon. That should help alleviate the issue. As for using the same components for every vehicle type, many companies are known to do this. GM practically used nearly the same 305 and a 350 engine in every vehicle they made in the 1980-2000s.

The AI needs to improve its business management skills and the used market needs to have more effect. Both of those will increase competition thus making the game harder. Both are planned for v1.22.3.

I use the district presets in the mega-menu a lot, they are essential for me managing production and sales.
It would be great to have an option to set sale price differences per district, either percentage based or flat. I usually sell cars for less money in markets like Asia or South America, than I do in Europe and North America. Manually setting this up is a chore. Once the price difference is set up, I can of course adjust sale prices percentage-wise globally, but for the initial setup this would save a lot of time.

This one probably won't be happening. If i'm not mistaken, you can adjust prices as a percentage in the auto-commands. (Or it may be a ticket or proposal to do that.) You would just set your prices globally, then bounce over to the auto-commands and adjust as a percentage quickly.


Thanks for the feedback. I think you'll be happy with v1.23