CTC - Car Tycoon Challenge #5 - 2014 [RESULTS]

[Der Bayer]

Car Tycoon Challenge Round 5: 2014

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 2014 -> build whatever car you want and see how your company would do
• Full modding compatibility: Everything which is downloadable on the forums is allowed (except stated otherwise)

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?

• Adjusted scoring system with (low) soft limits
• Rebalanced buyer preferences
• Different year of course

Current number of participants (Sunday 5 p.m. UTC+1): 43
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 three participants):

Now the most important thing:

How do you participate?

• Build a car in Automation (with the right manufacture year 2014) 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 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, 1st of December 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

The submission deadline is over and here is the overview over the 61 participants: Google Folder


Final Results

The PDF file with the results is available here.

























Price Overview for every player: Google Folder

Grats to the winners and thanks to everyone for participating! I hope you had fun (because this is what the challenge is all about)! Please post your thoughts and ideas. Stay tuned for the next challenge (very soon)!

[SeriousSimon]

I am not sure I understood what to copy where and why, but this looks pretty awesome and I am excited to build something right away.

Right? I build the car first and then focus on the data? I.. I just woke up..

[Zabhawkin]

I see there are no emissions requirements

[Reaper392]

I didn't realise you were happy to use modded cars for this competition. I haven't actually tried any yet but this could be a good place to start. Presumably we should say if we have used a modded car in our entry PM so you can go and download it if you haven't got it already.

[Der Bayer]

I am not sure I understood what to copy where and why, but this looks pretty awesome and I am excited to build something right away.

Right? I build the car first and then focus on the data? I.. I just woke up..

Yeah that's how it is supposed to be done. Of course you can tweak things afterwards, but you need to adjust the spreadsheet inputs then, too. So to avoid mistakes: First build the car, then enter things into the spreadsheet.

I see there are no emissions requirements

Yes, that is correct.

I didn't realise you were happy to use modded cars for this competition. I haven't actually tried any yet but this could be a good place to start. Presumably we should say if we have used a modded car in our entry PM so you can go and download it if you haven't got it already.

Right now there isn't much modded content, so I can see what is missing on my side by the LUA error I get when I don't have the respective mod installed. In the future I will have to think about limits of course.

[3rayman3]

Are we still entering 2 cars?

[VicVictory]

It says so in the last bit of his instructions.

[3rayman3]

so it does

[darkjedi]

it's weird how a GT requires less comfort than a supercar )

[VicVictory]

Yea, Darkjedi, I was going to say the same thing... it looks to me like those two should be switched.

Der Bayer - I think one of the "minimum limits" is broken in your spreadsheet. Your chart on the thread says CS has a min sportiness of 11 or so. I've got a car with 6 sportiness that is still registering a score with buyers in that group. It's got a "0" in several other groups because it doesn't meet at least one minimum.

[07CobaltGirl]

OK, I am still completely confused by the scoring on the spreadsheet. What exactly is a "reasonably good" number for the scoring in a category? I know it can drastically change dependent on what other cars are submitted, but as with the CTC-4, the numbers are nothing like the ones from the CTC-3 in this competition. Either I'm doing it very, very, very badly, or the scoring system is very different. Can anyone assist me with this? I really don't think my cars are that horrible, although I did not make a profit in the first three CTC events, so I could certainly be very, very, very wrong about my cars.

In fact, the scoring on the spreadsheet is what kept me from entering CTC-4...

Is this good, average, or bad?

Buyer Group Scores
C$ 1
C$$ 2
CS 6
M$ 5
M$$ 9
MS 21
L$$ 31
L$$$ 18
TD 26
GT 49
SC 52
TP 0
FY 3
OR$ 0
OR$$ 0

[Slim Jim]

The scores give you an idea as to which markets your car appeals to most. Your scores suggest you built a supercar/GT car that may have some crossover sales in the mid-price large market. There really is no "good/bad/average" on this sheet. You'll know what's good/bad once your car is ready to compete with other cars and the final results are released.

edit: I sometimes use the "total" score (meaning, add up all the numbers you listed) to get an idea as to how broad an appeal my car will have compared to other cars I created. It's a catch-22 though. Make a car that tries to appeal to too many markets, and you'll have a car that isn't very good in any one of the categories (even though you may have higher sales due to the crossover effect). Of course, that's just my interpretation based on what happened to me in the last round. I could be wrong. Note also the highest "total" score does NOT mean the best car. It just means that you have a car that works really well in one particular segment.

Hope this sheds some light on the subject. Again, just use it as a guide to let you know "who" wants to buy your car. If you don't, for example, want buyers in the mid-price large segment, increase sportiness, decrease comfort and watch what happens to the score sheet.

[07CobaltGirl]

I understand what the scoring is for, and how it helps. I'm asking if the numbers really changed this much from the original (CTC-3) scoring sheet. It sounds like they did, as you didn't fall out of your chair laughing...

Here are the scores from the CTC-3 entry I submitted. Not that it was really successful, but you can see the scoring numbers are quite different.

Buyer Group Scores
C$ 0
C$$ 0
CS 0
M$ 0
M$$ 617
MS 24,198
L$$ 27,901
L$$$ 39,999
TD 186,453
GT 49,380
SC 129,275
TP 0
FY 0
OR$ 0
OR$$ 7,462

Buyer Group Scores
C$ 1
C$$ 2
CS 6
M$ 5
M$$ 9
MS 21
L$$ 31
L$$$ 18
TD 26
GT 49
SC 52
TP 0
FY 3
OR$ 0
OR$$ 0

[Slim Jim]

I understand what the scoring is for, and how it helps. I'm asking if the numbers really changed this much from the original (CTC-3) scoring sheet. It sounds like they did, as you didn't fall out of your chair laughing...

Here are the scores from the CTC-3 entry I submitted. Not that it was really successful, but you can see the scoring numbers are quite different.

Oh my bad, misinterpreted that badly. Yea, they changed that much...

edit: In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they changed again in future iterations of the challenge. Don't let that put you off though, just keep playing! The one CTC you missed, I happened to make a profit. You could've done the same! (we both struggled the with first 3)

[07CobaltGirl]

OK, thanks for your answer!

Here is my entry: