Announcement: CTC - Car Tycoon Challenge

[nialloftara]

Well this has just made my week! New update and new challenge all at one time? Amazing! I'm looking foward to this a lot, already have a few cars setup for this that are pretty close. Will the time we spend tinkering with the engines effect the R&D costs or only the chosen parts and systems?

[Dragawn]

I don't really think that Der Bayer can limit tinkering time, I'm sure that a bunch of people who want to participate already have started tinkering on an engine at the least, like me to be honest.

I'm wondering if different engine types (i4 vs v8, NA vs turbo) will have different engineering/tooling costs though.

One thing Der Bayer can do though is make us send in the cars in phase 1 and give us the means to calculate the exact price of the car only in phase 2 to determine the pricetag.

[Der Bayer]

I already prepared a GoogleDocs spreadsheet where you can see how your major design (->part) choices affect engineering and tooling cost. This is only a simplified version of how it will work later in the game but it'll do for the challenge. You then calculate your costs in the spreadsheet, add important car stats, copy and paste all the values into a .txt file and send the txt file and the savefile of your car in a PM to me. Once all participants have sent me their files, I can run my evaluation program which reads in the data from those files. So I have nearly no work to do. Only the winners (i.e. top 3 per category) will be checked for cheating manually.

[Dragawn]

If its not much work once you've figured it all out, can we expect to see more challenges like this, but on other years/ with other target audiences?

[Der Bayer]

If the system works as intended I don't have much work. Thus, I can see this kind of challenge happen in a 2 week rhythm.

[Der Bayer]

Updated the first post with more info and new pics.

[Dragawn]

Looks even better now! Target audiences are looking good now, I expect a lot of fighting to come over the sports ones.

Question: Despite no real teams and max 1 car / person, are we allowed to associate with eachother as under the same brand?

Edit: Seems like the target group balancing might need more work for the supercars, since the hot hatch took 75% of it.

[Der Bayer]

You may name your cars like you want and they may be from the same "brand". All that matters for me is max. 1 car per person.

The sporty hatch was just too good for the price. The balance should be better when there are more cars on the market. The target groups are somewhat fine but I can still adjust some exponents in the sales calculation if stuff does not work out the way it should.

[ronnie4444]

@Killrob I know, but I'm 13 years old and haven't even gotten into 8th grade yet!

[xwing]

It looks interesting, I just want to share my opinion - consider thresholds, zero or negative numbers for some preferences for some groups of buyers - for example luxury/supercar buyers would probably never buy anything below certain price or below/above certain values of sportiness, comfort, prestige... and some are more likely to buy the car with higher price, not lower as is usually common. You dont have to hard-code the threshold values, it could be something like more than average of all cars in competition, twice the average etc.

[Der Bayer]

I will take a look at my sales calculation again, but I'm not a friend of hard limits. "What this car has only got a sportiness of 56.9? With 57 I would have bought it!" But I agree that the price is still too important in the calculation.

[Dragawn]

How do you incalculate the price in the scoring system? Do you multiply the stats by their weight reduced by the price multiplied by its weight and a constant? (considering this is the easiest approach) Maybe a more exponential approach to the weight of the price could be beneficial?

[lztd15]

The gasoline type will have some influence in the final results?

[Der Bayer]

@Dragawn: Exactly that. Multiply the stats with the weights, use exponents, sum them up, divide them by the sum of the cost stats (again with exponents) times weights and another final exponent.

@lztd15: The gasoline type will only affect fuel price and thus running cost.

[lztd15]

another question, how do you measure the utility and "offroadness" of a car?