automationgame.com

Car Tycoon Challenge Round 2: 1965

Another round of the Car Tycoon Challenge is now ready to go! Build a car according to the needs of the masses and compete with lots of opponents or search for your niché. Keep an eye on the expenses. Guess a good price tag (according to today's standards). Sell cars and see if your model can take a big slice of the cake! The awesome thing is: There are no fixed opponents or calculations! All depends on what the other players try to sell and you won't know it (unless you talk about it).

Features

• 15 groups of buyers with different preferences
• (Hopefully) lots of opponents
• Management of engineering, tooling and pricing (tools for estimating engineering and tooling costs will be provided); fixed R&D and distribution cost per sold car
• Insecurity of what the rivals will throw on the market
• A detailed analysis of your pricing: How close to the optimum price tag for maximum profit have you been?
• One single rule: Build a car in 1965 -> build whatever car you want and see how your company would do

Winners in different categories:

• Biggest overall profit
• Most cars sold (with profit)
• Biggest profit per car
• Biggest marketshare per target group

What has changed since last round?

• Revised target groups
• Revised sales calculations: The price is now more important for the customers
• No more spying on all of the stats of other people in the spreadsheet, only the stats relevant for finances are shown.
• Mighty Anti-Cheat script for automatic checking of the entries: It reads in manufacture years, tech pool and all the stats from the .lua-files automatically. Cheating impossible.

Current number of participants (Sunday 6 p.m. UTC+2): 40

These are the target groups (the number of people in each groups scales with the number of participants, but the share in percent will stay the same):

Now the most important thing:

How do you participate?

• Build a car in Automation (with the right manufacture year 1965) and save it with your nickname as as car name.
• Go to this spreadsheet (Direct Link):
• For each major design choice you have to pay engineering or tooling cost. Depending on what you choose, copy the respective 4 white cells next to the chosen part from the "Template" spreadsheet" to the "Calculator" spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will then calculate engineering and tooling costs for you. (The example in the spreadsheet will be my own entry for the challenge)
• Fill in the other data, your name and choose a price tag for your car into the other white cells in the form on the "Calculator" spreadsheet. Around 2...3*production cost is reasonable for high-volume cars. Small series production cars need to be more expensive if you want to make profit. Choose a factory from the first page of the spreadsheet and copy it to the second page.
• Once you filled every cell of the form, copy the cells from your name all the way down to Factory Cost and paste the values into a .txt file. Save the file without any manual changes with your nickname as file name, i.e. "Der Bayer.txt" or similar.
• Delete your data from the spreadsheet so that not too many people can see what you built and that other people have space to make their .txt-file.
• Send me the .txt-file together with the car .lua-file in a PM (zip-file would be best) and you're done.
• One car per player only! Your first PM counts, no extra revisions! The challenge will be ope (until Sunday, 21st of September 8 p.m. UTC+2) and the overall number of entries is unlimited, so take your time.
• Questions? Ask in this thread!

Have fun! Feel free to share pictures of your submitted cars in this thread!


Participants:
Google Folder

Final Results

Target Groups:

Participants:

Total Sales:

Marketshare per Group:

Finance Overview:


Biggest Marketshare (with profit)
1. NormanVauxhall (16.21%)
2. GenJeFT (11.54%)
3. hermmie (10.38%)

Most Profit:
1. Janekk (4.34 billion)
2. Leonardo9613 (3.34 billion)
3. GenJeFT (2.81 billion)

Most Profit per car:
1. Xwing ($22,136)
2. Reaper392 ($17,926)
3. oppositelock ($13,222)

Compact $:
1. NormanVauxhall (38.5%)
2. GenJeFT (20.3%)
3. hermmie (20.2%)

Compact $$:
1. NormanVauxhall (23.4%)
2. hermmie (15.4%)
3. GenJeFT (15.0%)

Hot Hatch:
1. GenJeFT (17.7%)
2. NormanVauxhall (16.9%)
3. hermmie (12.9%)

Mid $:
1. NormanVauxhall (18.5%)
2. GenJeFT (14.9%)
3. hermmie (12.0%)

Mid $$:
1. Bonhin (12.8%)
2. Janekk (9.1%)
3. Leonardo9613 (7.9%)

Mid Sport:
1. Bonhin (10.5%)
2. Reaper392 (9.4%)
3. Dragawn (8.2%)

Large $$:
1. Bonhin (11.8%)
2. Der_Bayer (8.1%)
3. Molotov (7.9%)

Large $$$:
1. Bonhin (14.0%)
2. Der_Bayer (10.6%)
3. bullko (8.8%)

Trackday:
1. Reaper392 (38.8%)
2. Xwing (25.3%)
3. Dragawn (7.4%)

GT:
1. Der_Bayer (11.4%)
2. Bonhin (10.9%)
(3. xAleks (7.9%) - not profitable)

Supercar:
1. Reaper392 (19.5%)
2. Xwing (18.0%)
(3. fralbjabar (17.4%) - not profitable)

Transport:
1. NormanVauxhall (37.2%)
2. Kubboz (19.0%)
3. hermmie (14.0%)

Family:
1. NormanVauxhall (13.2%)
2. GenJeFT (11.7%)
3. hermmie (10.9%)

Offroad $:
(1. Renowrench (20.5%) - not profitable)
2. Kubboz (19.2%)
3. NormanVauxhall (15.4%)

Offroad $$:
1. Janekk (7.2%)
2. NormanVauxhall (6.6%)
3. Kubboz (6.4%)

Price Overview for every player: Google Folder

Are the excel value changed from previous challenge?

It's not the same spreadsheet, if that's where you're going with your question.

I'm almost tempted to see if I can find a way around your anti cheat just because you said its impossible
I say almost because I've tried manually editing the lua files without much success



I think a few values have been tweaked slightly, but it looks to be generally the same as before

Break even calcs have changed. Please always use the current spreadsheet and not an older one.

I assume the change of year doesn't change the tooling and engineering costs since the template for those looks to be the same

I didn't change anything there, no. Inflation is not modelled by the game (yet), so I didn't change things, too.

the number of buyers in the target group image is for how many players?

I guess it was eleven.

Just put the values for a car I had already done in 65( it's on my car company thread). The engenieering cost was 12,935,250,000.00!!
What the hell man?! Just because I had a sider at 12 and other at 13? I even have negative sliders to compensate. I mean, if I add my quality points I have less than your example but yet I'm paying 10x more, an insane amount of engineering cost! This doesn't help if you want people send more high priced cars.
Also raising the L$$$ price factor is a hard blow for my taste of rolls-royce style cars.

That would be the law of diminishing returns. There is a limit to how much money you can save by making something worse and worse for its time, but you can spend ridiculous amounts making something the best it can be. Don't forget that 12-13 quality is the equivalent of the standard tech to be found 24-26 years in the future, which would cost serious money to engineer properly today, whereas making something as bad as 20 years in the past wouldn't really save you a small amount of money since the basic machinery needed would still cost quite a lot of money

Just decrease quality by 1-2 clicks everywhere and you are fine... The sales model has changed completely and it was neccessary to adjust some values of the target groups.

Might I suggest presenting your feedback to the guy who's running these quite complicated challenges for people's enjoyment in a bit more of a friendly manner?

Are cheaper fuel costs incalculated for the year? I'm not sure, but I thought generally people couldn't give a single F about fuel before the crisis hit in the 70's?

No, that's not modelled because fuel economy is too low and inflation is not in the game anyway. I don' think that around 90 to 100 automation cents is too high, given that it is measured in today's standards. In the last challenge fuel costs have probably been a bit too low though.