Purchasing AI

[Eric.B]

There are well over a hundred variables that are taken into effect when vehicles are sold. So I can not break them all down for you in one post. You'll have to wait for the "In-Depth Manual" for a break down of the formula.

But I will do my best to point you in the correct direction.

and my expectation would be that the main drivers of sales (1900 start) would be price

Vehicle price is important in getting the maximum amount of people who can afford it interested in purchasing the vehicle. For example, using modern money values, if you were making $20,000 a year, you would not even bother shopping for a new Ferrari or Rolls Royce. Instead you would look at new cars between $15,000 and $25,000. There are a lot more people who can afford Honda Civics than Ferraris.

So lowering the price increases the pool of potential customers. You can actually see this pool by clicking the "Line Graph" button where you enter prices for your branches.

Pools overlap somewhat, but not always. Again using modern money, while someone who makes $150,000 a year can afford a $20,000 Honda Civic, they are not interested in purchasing it. Why? Because their economic demographic is too high. So depending on how much price distance between your vehicle and the competition is, you may not even be competing for the same customers.

Secondly, the lower the price of your vehicle is, the more competition it has in the used market. The $20,000 new Honda Civic Sedan has to compete with the $20,000 4 year old low mileage Jaguar that cost $85,000 new.

and overall rating

The overall rating does not factor that much in vehicle sales. Using the same cars above, a Honda Civic would have a higher overall rating than a Ferrari. It's a much more useable vehicle. But if you were in the market for a performance car, and had unlimited money, which would you buy? As such the overall rating is not that important. This is why we show importance stars when using the advanced designer. The ratings effect on consumer AI is weighted for the type of vehicle they are. A very rudimentary example of this rating is the Specific Vehicle Type Rating. This is what you would use to compare the quality of your vehicle to other vehicles of the same type.

. But I consistently notice that cars with higher ratings and lower prices are not outselling their rivals, and particularly even wild outliers in price can often get really decent sales. Going into a sandbox game, I developed cars which cost me over 2k and sold them for the cheapest in the big market. Somehow sales were nominal.

The main issue here is you're selling cars for 5x (or more) per capita in 1900. This is equivalent to $250,000 in today's money. There is very little difference in the amount of people who make $250,000 per year and people who make $1,000,000 a year. Specially in early game years. Instead, try doing a vehicle that costs $500. And see how well it does against competition selling for $2000. You won't be competing in the same economics group, the masses will be able to afford it, and you'll get more sales.

I proceed to max out my branch spending and try again. Sales increase but not by too much.

Branches sell vehicles to dealerships, dealerships are third party companies that sell vehicles to customers. Increasing the sliders of the branch will take years to build up and increase the amount of dealerships your company supplies. The more dealerships you have, the more sales you'll make.

I figure the key is marketing, dump max into 3 categories of marketing... sales double and I do become the market leader but not by a terribly big margin.

Marketing also takes several years to build up to max value. It just doesn't happen over night. It is also only effective against a lot of competition. So it sounds like whatever market you are in is flooded.

I quickly develop a reasonably balanced car, sell it for approximately the same as the AI and sales are again pretty mediocre.

Depending on the vehicle type, balanced may not be a good idea. Phaetons don't need luxury. Microcars don't need performance. Supercars don't need cargo space. Etc.

Now I wonder if there are thresholds where if, say, my Cargo is not at least X certain customers just disregard my cars completely?

Cargo space matters for some vehicle types. Such as pickup trucks, vans, luxury cars. Just as smoothness of the engine matters for luxury types vehicles. I suggest trying the designer in advance mode and reading the help buttons for more details.

As for minimum requirements, the only minimum requirements are minimum top speed. Which you will get a warning for in advance designer. If you're building $2000 unit priced cars, you're not hitting this limit. The other minimum is for fuel type popularities. You can view these in Reports -> Reports 1 -> Body and Fuel Type Demand. If you're not using Gasoline, you're limiting your sales.

And as a final test I "observed" an AI game and let it run about 7 years from 1900. The best seller (~100) is a 1903 car with a super low HP engine and pretty mediocre everything. A new 1907 model priced the same with higher values in almost every category sells about 20.

By 1907, there is more competition in the game and an mini economic depression. There is no wonder that the sales fell.

but it seems to me that customers are picking cars off of some weird factors that are not

In short, the customers all follow the same formula.
-Consumers are pooled by vehicle type, demographics (wants), and economic demographics.
-Each car of a type, in each city, is given a buyers rating for each pool. If you're selling sports cars, then performance and power are more important than luxury or safety. The overall rating weights luxury and safety the same as power and performance. Consumers do not.
-Additional information effects your buyers rating, such as the number dearships you have, marketing, image ratings, what type of fuel you use, if your car is lower than the minimum speed, the price, etc.
-Used vehicles are given a buyers rating
-All buyers ratings is summed together for the entire type for that pool.
-Your buyer's rating is divided by the sum, that is the max percentage of sales of all customers for that pool you can get.
-The price of your vehicle is then compared to the economic demographics you're in. The number of sales are extrapolated from that.
-Consumers that don't purchase a vehicle are recycled to the start and it's repeated again.

So no black magic funkery going on. Everyone is playing by the same rules.

So I wonder if I'm missing something fundamental about how the game works and why these supposedly mediocre cars are selling so well, or if the AI is actually being too generous in its purchasing decisions. I tried adjusting for many possible "X Factors" and found none. If my car (or another's car) is vastly superior to the field, why does it have such low market share?

Without actual details from your save game, I can't really tell you what is going on. Some obersvations:
1) $2000 unit priced car is not cheap. There aren't going to be many customers.
2) It sounds like there is a lot of competition in the city. This effects everyone equally. New cars in the market does not increase the number of customers. If you sell 50 cars, and I sell 50 cars. And a third company jumps in. All of a sudden you're selling 33 cars, i'm selling 33 cars, and they're selling 34 cars.
3) Age of the design matters, if your designer is older than 5 years, its time to build a new one.
4) Fuel Type is very important.
5) Every vehicle type has important ratings. Maximize those ratings.

If you do a search on the forums, specially the steam forums, it'll have several post of me answering similar questions.

if you want to upload the save game on here or email it to me, I'll be more than happy to point out what you're doing wrong http://wiki.gearcity.info/doku.php?id=tr..._save_game . But most likely it's high priced vehicles + lots of competition. Try for going for lower priced vehicles if you want to top the sales charts. Also overall rating does not matter much, focus on specific vehicle type rating.