CTC - Car Tycoon Challenge #4 - 1977 [RESULTS]

[Der Bayer]

Car Tycoon Challenge Round 4: 1977

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 1977 -> 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?

• Completely new cost scoring
• Linear stat scoring (Less focussing on single stats, balanced cars will perform better)
• Rebalanced buyer preferences
• Flexible factory sizing
• Different year of course
• Car names are needed now
• Two cars per participant allowed

Current number of participants (Monday 7 p.m. UTC+1): 70
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, shown are the numbers for one participant):

Now the most important thing:

How do you participate?

• Build a car in Automation (with the right manufacture year 1977) and save it with your nickname as as car name (attach a "2" to you second car, e.g. "nickname2").
• Go to this spreadsheet or download the spreadsheet from here (GoogleDocs, things might be screwed up when downloading for Excel or OpenOffice) or here (OpenOffice) in your preferred file format (for example .xlsx).
• 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. Set the number of cars you want to produce. This will determine factory size and cost.
• Once you filled every cell of the form, copy the cells from your name all the way down to Factory Cost (everything inside the red border) 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.
• Two cars per player only! Your first two PMs count, no extra revisions! The challenge will be open for more than one week (until Monday, 3rd of November 8 p.m. UTC+1) 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! If you find any errors in the spreadsheets, please inform me as soon as possible.


Participants Overview: Top Trump Cards

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4x5S3wQzQFlUlhuYXlEWHRmVzQ&usp=drive_web


Final Results

PDF files are available here.

























Price Overview for every player: Google Folder

Grats to the winners and thanks to everyone for participating! I hope you had fun! Please post your thoughts and ideas. I don't know when the next challenge will start, probably in 1-2 weeks. At some point, I will release the unofficial results of the cars in this round with the new scoring system before the start of the new challenge. Stay tuned!

[VicVictory]

FINALLY!

Err... uhm...

I look forward to this challenge.

[Sebulba09]

nice one!
will each car from one participant be rated seperatly or will they treated as a 'company' for the 'overall profit', 'marketshare' and 'most cars sold' categories?
therefore a company-based-rating (only participants with 2 entries) and a car-based-rating (all participants) would be nice.

[Der Bayer]

For now it's separately, but I think that I will make an overall profit table, too. Good idea!

Before further thoughts come up: this challenge will definitely not take shared technology or factories in one company into account.

[Dragawn]

Cheers for the new challenge Bayer!

Two cars, will be interesting and give a better bigger market Now Ill have to decide if both will be sportscars or try another niche. But I guess that's a first world problem.
Are you planning a simple tech/factory share in the future or leaving it for Automation 1.0? Like if fully identical engine/platform.

[Der Bayer]

I think I'll leave it simple. Two standalone cars and that's it. It is already one of the more complicated challenges and I don't want to scare the less hardcore players away with more possibilities to screw up.

[Janekk]

Two cars per participant allowed

Hell yes!

Car names are needed now
...
Build a car in Automation (with the right manufacture year 1977) and save it with your nickname as as car name (attach a "2" to you second car, e.g. "nickname2").

Is it's supposed to be something like Janekk2 - 1977 RM Your Mom or just Janekk1, Janekk2?


I already started building my cars. Family, comfy car like I always do and for first time in CTC I'll do a proper sports car (I'm aiming more for lower end though) so it would be nice if everyone else made super cheap, super crappy compacts and high-end luxury cars .

[Der Bayer]

Just the player name is enough. The car name is in the text file, not in the name of the text file.

[Reaper392]

Thanks for the new challenge, the revised sales mechanics and extra entries should make this very interesting.

One thing you may want to do is check that no one is using the techpool to get more modern equipment, or better quality stuff for a lower car cost. For round three I originally designed the car and engine in the default year of 2014, but then changed it back to 2003 after noticing that mistake. Instead of removing the advanced tech the game added techpool to the sections of the car that required it so that the modern equipment was unlocked. Thankfully I noticed this when writing up the stats and corrected this too. I cant remember if this only affected the third part of the design process (after chassis and engine) or whether it affected all parts, but its something to look out for at any rate

[Janekk]

Ok, so full fancy car name goes only into txt file with calculator output? I want to be absolutely sure since no revisions allowed.



Anyway, I'm still working on my cars, I still need to fine tune them a bit and run them through calc sheet to see if I'm hitting right consumer groups, however I don't think I'll be changing how they look so I can give you sneak peek at my entries.

First is my sports car, the 1977 RM Bulldog. I said I'm aiming at lower end but I ended up making it faster than Countach LP400 in 1 km race ... Well, main stats/cost is all that matters though, so we'll see how it does on the market.



Second comes much more humble 1977 RM Terrier. Comfortable, affordable family car.

[GenJeFT]

I get a browser error trying to open your spreadsheets for some reason. I cant open your spreadsheets at all.

[VicVictory]

If you're using IE that could be why. In the past I could only open his spreadsheets in Chrome. Haven't tried this one yet.

[mer_at]

Here are the two Mars Engineering Entries.

on the right: ME Ambassador
on the left: ME Hohlraumduebel

[Dragawn]

Already two sports competitors, seems like this will be an interesting round once again

[Der Bayer]

One thing you may want to do is check that no one is using the techpool to get more modern equipment, or better quality stuff for a lower car cost. For round three I originally designed the car and engine in the default year of 2014, but then changed it back to 2003 after noticing that mistake. Instead of removing the advanced tech the game added techpool to the sections of the car that required it so that the modern equipment was unlocked. Thankfully I noticed this when writing up the stats and corrected this too. I cant remember if this only affected the third part of the design process (after chassis and engine) or whether it affected all parts, but its something to look out for at any rate

The anti-cheat script checks for tech pool cheaters. No way anybody could cheat that way. There are ways to cheat, of course, and my anti-cheat scripts are far from perfect, but I trust in the honesty of the competitors and don't check every stat (yet). Most of the stats are checked automatically, but if there seems to be something weird, it is up to me (and you to remind me) to check if something went wrong with the calculations or if someone really cheated. So far, I can say that the competition was really fair, but if you feel cheated by a certain participant, just tell me (PM) and I will check the respective model file manually again.

Ok, so full fancy car name goes only into txt file with calculator output?

Yes. I don't want any file name with a car name. I corrected 70% of the file names in the past by hand because most of the people don't want to read. But the trump card generation script will make sure that every car without a proper name will get a dumb one instead this time. It won't help me, but at least it will show who didn't name the files properly.

I get a browser error trying to open your spreadsheets for some reason. I cant open your spreadsheets at all.

Weird, no adress has changed since last challenge. If you continue to have problems (when trying other browsers), contact me in a PM.