automationgame.com

Sliders for factory quality in the tycoon mode.

I was going to put this in developer questions, not sure what the plan is for this.

I'd like to see quality sliders utilized for the manufacturing line. This would allow more challenges and factors related to quality and productivity. The higher the quality for a manufacturing process the more reliable it is... so this would boost final product reliability and quality a little bit (a 0 quality vehicle would maybe be boosted to the equivalent of a level 1 quality car with say 5-10 quality level manufacturing process). This would also effect general line efficiency and reliability mostly. Working in the automotive industry, powertrain, we generally accept 85% efficiency based on maximum capacity using cycle times. This is due to several factors, one of the major ones being downtime for equipment malfunction. There should be a PPM of defects produced and released to the customer that is based on the line quality. This would be factored in how robust the process is. For example we test powertrain castings for leaks. Generally only certain cavities are tested depending on complexity of the part. The quality slider would be the difference between testing certain features or all features. This of course doesn't need to be that detailed in the came and would use the quality slider system like it does now for cars and engines.

It kind of doesn't sound like this is being planned, but it would be great to see a variety of manufacturing operations as this is also to a certain degree a manufacturing simulator. I'm sure it's been suggested but (by myself also in the past) for example, include a metal casting/plastic moulding process, a machining process, stamping, forging, tailoring (interior fabrics/leathers), and of course assembly.

Are we going to be able to build engine plants and vehicle operations separate?

There will be options of factory quality, technology, size etc. and potential add-ons to allow better quality, production of more exotic components (Carbon Fibre etc.)

Engines and Cars will be produced in separate facilities, but that's as far as it'll be broken down in that sense.

The current plan for the production stuff is reasonably simplified compared to engine design, but with still a lot of interesting and deep choices of how to setup production to acheave the goals you want (be that building the best supercars at any cost, or the most cheap hatches as fast as possible)


That's the basic overview, we'll put out more detail at some point though, explaining exactly what we're thinking.