automationgame.com

I've noticed a few posts mentioning this slightly but not in great detail. As ive only seen the youtube clips showing the car designing/ building progress here are a few suggestions for the commercial aspect of the game.

Every major car company as you well know suffers recalls, some minor some major. Will these be evident within the game e.g. you start out building as cheap a car as possible (will there be options with regards to quality of manufactured parts/reliability issues) and you find out after a months worth of sales a component is failing on 30% of your cars. Now you could be given the option to either recall all your cars to carry out the repair to the recall at £x or risk leaving the cars with the fault and hoping your company reliabilty image isnt impared on. On the other hand if a serious issue develops and starts causing accidents your company could be sued. Its upto you to decide what best suits the company you want.

Will it be possible to create design faults that only appear later on like big V8 engines being put in small cars and cracking welds in the chassis. Handling issues due to incorrect weight distribution etc etc ....

When you install patches and updates for the game would it be possible for to to create your own problems for players to overcome, if they have installed x component and y component on a certain chassis their company starts getting compaints about certain issues. Only until they replace one of the items the problem and costs to the company dont improve. This could help boost the forum side of the community to get people discussing their customer complaints and cars manufacturing ideas and what changes they have made to attempt to solve issues.

Depending on how in depth you want to go with the engine design and relaibilty aspect, looking at how your models of the running engines work would it be an idea to give us the option to find the problems within our designs. Say when your company has a problem with production, for a basic example like the 30% component failure one, lets say the failure is a engine knock/loss of power. Using your running engine model and how you can strip it away to view components could it display say on the closed loop system cars engine readouts like a system tester would show i.e. emmision data, voltage readouts
, misfire detection etc etc ... Then on the engine build screen you can see areas getting red to indicate the problem (in this instance the crankshaft). Using the info on the area the problem lies in, you cross reference the data readouts available to check what each cylinder is doing. By looking at all four cylinder figures you can see the injector readout on one cylinder is incorrect and staying open. By clicking on the incorrect reading you get given information that lets you know that an open injector can cause misfires, poor running, incorrrect emmision data and in our case its washed the oil and destroyed the crank bearings causing our failures. This can then be addressed by using a different injector supplier and reclaiming compensation from the previous one.

I know the list is endless but would it be possible to create these scenarios that could be expanded over time. It would also be a great way to educate people on what engines they are creating and how faults affect cars.

Enough rambling for now, ive not really played many tycoon games as im a console gamer but the idea of this game seems fantastic now. As I said the ideas above are what id like to get involved in with a game.

Some nice ideas in there Cunny. Adding special scenarios as extra content does sound like a good idea and probably will be the case at some point after release if the product is successful enough.

I'd like to point out though that these need to be separate from the main campaign mode of the game, as introducing artificial random events can be utterly frustrating and is not a wise choice from a game design standpoint. In a scripted scenario this would be a different thing entirely, and could be both educational and fun.

I love your ideas here and the idea of playing a game with that much detail fills me with nerdy glee, however...


I suspect it'll be quite a lot too complex for us to implement in a good way, however we have discussed how we will handle recalls etc. and its something we'll develop further in future. (when we start working more on the business side of the game)

Hopefully a few years down the line when your company is huge this will be a walk in the park

I've sent you an email to the address you registered on Pistonheads with, now i know you cant use specific marques in the game and im not sure if your gonna be developing flat crank engines for the game but any info you require on a certain German Sports Car manufacturer be it any aspect of the cars or development just let me know I now dont work for them so I dont need to worry about losing my job as i know how seriously they take their copyright (why they have sold out to EA I have no idea)

I've spent more time looking into your plans for the game as I never knew it was being based from the end of WWII. With the scenarios you said you plan to create for the game from oil crises to whatever else you plan, are these going to be historically accurate or designed to benefit the game where you see fit ?? The reason I ask is a World War as a scenario may be an interesting concept as it massively impacted the production of cars at the time.

Companies had to start making detuned versions of their cars or modifying existing ones due to a lack of fuel. Parts were in shortage but obviously the companies still needed to function as well as they could whilst factories were taken over to produce ammunition.

Sorry for just thinking randomly but I thought id share my thoughts then at least they are out there. In my head a game like this to keep you interested has to spring up elements that your not expecting and cause you to think logically and have those "oh S%*t" i cant believe that has just happened moments like in Sim City when Godzilla trashes all your hard work and you need to rebuild from scratch.

There is talk about having a historic mode for the events and one or maybe 2 (historic events at random times and completely random) random modes.

A world war 3 event would be interesting, but it also comes with complication especially for multiplayer games e.g. player A is based in one of the war going countries, and gets his factory are taken over by the war machine. Player B is in a neutral country and counties to have control over his factory. Now we have situation where player A will barely have anything to do and will have to wait for 4 or 5 years or even longer. and since player B is still playing normal-ish you can just increase the speed off the game.