Trim Options

[Racer13]

One thing that is common among medium-high level cars these days, and almost all cars in the past, was 'specing out' your car at the dealership when you bought the car. What this meant, particularly in days of yesteryear, is that most cars, on the whole, were more or less unique to want the customer wanted. And this got me thinking about the way trim levels work in Automation and the workflow of the game. So my suggestion is, trim level options.

How the game works now, as you all know, is you make a base model of the car, then you build your trim models off of that. Which is fine, it's a great system, and it's very familiar to anyone who has bought a regular car at a dealership in the past couple years. There are a couple trim levels you can choose from, all at a higher price point than the next. And these trim levels are usually based on what the customer expects for that price point, and the necessities to be competitive in that market. An example would be a family sedan from a nondescript manufacture. They will have anywhere from 3 to 5 or more trim levels, ranging from entry level/economy, the cheapest, and comes with the barebones stuff. A radio/CD player, manual seats, maybe climate control (I don't know if that has become standard yet, but you get the picture.) From there there are varying levels of luxury and equipment. Most of you, if not all, will be following what I'm saying and are waiting for me to get to the point. My point is, even with those trim levels, there are still options you can choose from. For example, while it is making it's way out the back door, on some cars you can still choose between automatic and manual, whether you want traction control, and other such extras. You can choose those without changing the trim level, and in some cases, without making much difference in the price tag.

This doesn't exist in Automation at the moment. If I want to create a manual version of a car and an automatic version of the car, I have to make two different trims for that car. So here's my suggestion, make it so we can pick which options are available on this model or more specifically this trim. As a user, I think that would be awesome. It saves a lot of time on my end going through tedious work just to have a slight variation in a car. Plus, I imagine it would save on save file size, not that it's really an issue, but optimization is always important. If I can say I want these two engines, and these transmissions, and these driver assists to be options available for this trim, that would save me time as a user, increase my workflow, and I would probably enjoy the game more because I get to spend more time on the fun stuff rather than making new trims for every different option.

As far as development goes, I don't know how long this would take. It would probably be in correlation to how many statistics this would change or void entirely for final statistics. If you could select which options the game will test for, I imagine you could still keep a lot of the same algorithms in place.

What are peoples thoughts on this? Would it be a welcome and useful addition to the game? What are the developers thoughts on it?

Cheers - Racer13

[Killrob]

Nice write up, but yeah, not going to happen. The game is very engineering focused and you design decisions matter greatly, in every detail. We've heard the complaint

"If I want to create a manual version of a car and an automatic version of the car, I have to make two different trims for that car."

a lot and our reply is: have you seen how different in stats that change makes cars? They are not even close to being the same and you can argue in the same way for all kinds of "trim options" like upping from standard to premium interior, which makes a huge difference. We don't want to black-box off these very meaningful choices and put them in a list for you to tick, that defeats the love for detail in the hundreds of dependencies we've created and visualized (numerically, at least).

It is very simple to make more trims now. Say it takes you 20 min to make a car, cloning it three times and adjusting the individual trims won't take longer than something like 2-5 min a piece depending on how different you want to make them. We don't want people waste time on making loads of options either, that's not the fun part of the game as you are just wiggling around settings on an existing solution. The interesting part of Automation is to find the solutions in the first place, or so I would argue.

Another argument is that on the production line your automatic is treated differently than the manual version and the standard interior version is treated differently from the premium version in a lot of steps during assembly. In engineering that is even more pronounced. Keeping these separate and obvious makes the most sense.

[ArnRno]

THIS THIS THIS a million times!

I've been thinking this since I bought the game - why not have a sort of consumer's option list or the like? The trims you can build can differ in appearance, and engine choice maybe, interior, etc., but I think (especially on pre-2000 era cars before things got stupid) that if I buy a base model car, maybe I could just option an auto trans if I want to. Different final drive ratios? Better audio choices? Or alloys over steel wheels? Etc.

Granted, I have no idea how this thinking would come across in the actual game.

Personal story - I was looking at a 2016 Dodge Dart online (didn't really want one, I was just curious) and it didn't seem like a bad base model, but I did like the look of the black alloy 17" wheels over the stock steel 15s, so I click the checkbox... If I wanted the ~$400 alloys over the steels, I could only get them as part of the car's "performance package," which was almost three grand. The package was full of useless upsells - air con, in-dash sat nav, a completely different interior trim, exterior decals, and more useless garbage. I AM NOT KIDDING, check the website.
If I just wanted the alloy wheels, I also had to have everything in this package, things I was specifically trying to avoid by selecting the base model. What the hell?