Suggestions

[ManSex]

Hi there.

I have a couple of suggestions regarding the game.

Firstly I would like to say that I absolutely love the game. I've played it on steam for 166 hours. I feel, when it is completed, that Automation will be a new benchmark for car design games.

Suggestions. Please understand that I have no technical knowledge so if you feel the need to bag the suggestions please be gentle.


1) In some of the scenario's would it be hard to use a lap around one of the tracks as a criteria for passing? It would be cool if you had to create a track car that had to lap the 'airfield' track in a certain time.

2) A possible future revenue stream would be to integrate a racing car design element into the game and release it as an expansion pack. Using a similar set of criteria as in suggestion 1 for qualifying and some sort of racing sim would be sweet.

3) In a previous tycoon game 'the movies' reviews came out based on the rating of the movie you created. This was a great way of connecting the numbers with emotive language which translates more universally than a set of numbers. A similar idea occurred in Hitman Blood Money with a news paper article after each mission reflecting the players skill. Interaction with media is often how brand awareness is built also.

In automation currently it's difficult with the numbers because we don't know what to scale them against. If you made it so in the final section with all the ratings for driveability, sportiness etc, a bunch of different magazines that the gamer could click on, IE, 'air field sports car magazine', 'family magazine' or even 'budget car review' we could see a magazine translate the numbers into a format gamers are more familiar with. Perhaps the magazines would only be present in cars that where competitive in that particular market, and, if the car company you created had a number of reviews by a certain magazine, they could then become more adept at selling in a particular market.
So if I built a number of small, budget cars from 1940-1950 of a good competitiveness, the brand awareness built by the magazine reviews in 'budget car weekly' could cause my budget cars to sell better in the future due to their positive image.


Just some thoughts. I've never posted to a forum before. Please be gentle.

[strop]

Hi, welcome to the forums. Some of these questions have been covered in one way or another before over the months, so I can provide some brief responses based on general knowledge:

1) Don't know about this one, but I do like that idea when it comes to a criteria for tuning. I have no idea whether the game can parse that kind of information in the way you're asking.

2) Definitely not the original focus of the game, but fortunately something that is being constantly addressed on the forums. What I'd do there is watch to see how the various 'racing' oriented tournaments on the forums play out first. In particular check out Der Bayer's BRC, which is integral to the track performance calculations, and I suspect you will find most of the things you are looking for in there. It's still a work in progress, too, so there's potential for it to further change things.

3) I think that the 'brand awareness' thing is certainly something that will be written into the tycoon part. You will be rewarded for building cars that stay true to your philosophy (if successful), and strengthen your brand image. Exactly how this will manifest is still up for discussion.

[Killrob]

Heyya!

Good suggestions, so good even that they all are on our ToDo list in one way or another already:

1) Sure, that would be possible and would make sense once we have a multiplayer scenario component which is about getting the fastest track time with a set of requirements.

2) The race team manager expansion pack is something we'd love to do after the game is done and some "Diesel" and "Engine Pack" DLC has been made.

3) This has been talked about and while we're not certain if or how it will be implemented yet something like this would add some good immersion / flavor. Brand image is planned to be part of the game in any case though.

Your final comment I agree with, but the "context" of these numbers will be apparent once you have actual competition during campaign gameplay seeing the respective category leader's stats will give you the benchmarks of "state of the art" at all times, which can vary from region to region and also from playthrough to playthrough.

[ManSex]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm looking forward to seeing the future developments.