Tue Apr 28, 2015 5:58 pm by maffc
I was wondering about the engineering handover and production. I presume this is part of the process to get your design into production and take some time in game to complete, depending on design complexity and other factors such as previous history with the tech used.
Also I was wondering if there would be game choices to alter the outcome of the engineering process, based on the "quality, Cost and time Triangle".
e.g. Your design will take 12 months to implement, however you could reduce that time by either throwing more money at it or skimping on some of the process quality.
These decisions would then have consequences further down the line, if you chose money then you would have to be able to afford it in the 1st place and also the break-even costs of your car would increase. If you chose to sacrifice quality then you are risking a shoddy product, recalls and reputational damage due to Design flaws not being worked out. In this case, if you wanted to address the issues you would have to resend your design back to the engineers to fix them.
Likewise if time is not an important factor you could increase quality without increasing cost, but obviously it will take far longer. This means your current products risk falling behind the competition as they age.
I was also thinking a similar thing could apply to the actual production line. Your design takes150 prod units to build. Your production line can handle 150PU per hour, so basically one car per hour rolls off your line (figures are for examples purposes only). Reducing quality of build or increasing cost per production unit, so adding more workers/robots would increase the hourly PU rate with the associated risks with either.