CTC - Car Tycoon Challenge #3 [RESULTS]

[Janekk]

xwing has 124.1, it's a bit more expensive though. Also your cars are looking more and more ridiculous, that grille seems to be designed to suck in small children into that massive turbine you have there .
In other news I seem to have most tame car. I have a feeling I should do pretty well, I'll be surprised if I don't turn some profit.

[VicVictory]

I'm pretty satisfied with where I'm sitting. May not hit my initial target audience like I thought, but I should score at least one of the secondary markets pretty well.

[strop]

Alas, as suspected I am faced with the challenges of being a small factory, forced to price high to aim for a gain, yet undercut by high volume manufacturers who drop their prices as they have a larger margin. Yet, if the small supercar and track day markets are saturated, what good is high Max production? All it achieves is disappointing margins, and making the little guy broke

[Reaper392]

xwing has 124.1, it's a bit more expensive though. Also your cars are looking more and more ridiculous, that grille seems to be designed to suck in small children into that massive turbine you have there .

Yeah, my car needed a fair amount of cooling because of the ridiculous turbo but I didn't have much time to make it, so I just slapped a giant hole in the front and told the customers to deal with it because the performance of the car was more important than the aesthetic.

[xwing]

Looking at Reaper's car I remember making a large front grille which gave me exactly 0 effective cooling which felt reasonable (the engine is in the back) so I have no grilles/vents at the front... trying it now gives me quite a lot of cooling so I dont know what went wrong.
Looking at the fuel economy I though mine would be worst, I didn't imagine something over 40l/100km was even possible with and engine that produces less than 1000hp

And I'm surprised nobody else went over 100 sportiness, each point over 100 generated more and more ridiculous score in that score calculator, to the point that I could afford a $500 000 price tag and remain the better track day car over anything with less than 100 sportiness regardless of price. But much more than 500 000 and the score plumeted. In the supercar segment the score didn't change much even when I doubled the price, but the track day segment is much bigger so I gambled a bit with the lower price and bigger factory

[strop]

My company is very small so I deliberately limited myself to a small factory as part of my personal limitations. That was the main factor that held me back, unable to invest ridiculous amounts of money to engineer a car with that much sportiness! Else, I would have gone all out. In the end, I ended up offering something that just seemed... More sensible, insofar as a car with 1000hp is sensible

[xAleks]

Price........... lowest $10,775, average $101,311, highest $900,000
Top Speed.... fastest 339 km/h, average 252 km/h, slowest 153 km/h

That's me. I'm even faster than the 1500hp car.

[GenJeFT]

I dont think my car will do all that well in this contest.

[Janekk]

Bonhin once again set price at such point that if he doesn't sell every single car he will lose money. Still HighOctaneLove literally can't break even. I'm puzzled why people make such simple mistakes. Calculator provided by Der Bayer gives you exact values for this. Maybe some kind of potential maximum profit figure would make it clearer? Honestly it isn't very fair for people who will go into red but otherwise would have done much better if market wasn't saturated by severely under priced entries like this (saturated is a bit strong word though, it's not that bad in wider picture and don't get me wrong, I believe these are honest mistakes I'm not trying to start a witch hunt here). It's all fine going for maximum market share but at the end of the day I think actual profit you can squeeze out of your car is the metric to aim for.

If you're going to run CTC again I would suggest 2 changes. Make bigger factory sizes scale up in price bit more. Make it a requirement for entries to set price at such level that your maximum production is some arbitrary % higher than break even sales value.

[strop]

While Janekk has pretty much voiced my own concerns (but on a more general level, as opposed to my specific lamentation that large corporations can squeeze out smaller companies with relative ease), I'm not sure that imposing a limit on pricing is properly in the spirit of the challenge, nor optimal for balancing purposes of the eventual Tycoon model. That said, the lack of consequence for a poor showing in these challenges doesn't exactly encourage constructive learning, either. Would it be too much to propose penalties in subsequent rounds for poor outcomes or fiscal irresponsibility?

[07CobaltGirl]

Honestly, I think I might do OK this time around. I'm not going to fare well in TD or SC markets, but I should do alright with GT and MS segments (I hope). I just need to be in the black this time!

[Janekk]

Would it be too much to propose penalties in subsequent rounds for poor outcomes or fiscal irresponsibility?

Very bad idea, if your profit/loss carried over to next round some people could end up in spot where it's pointless to even try since they are drowning in debt. Which would be even worse if I for instance could use my rather large profits from CTC #1 and 2 to monopolize market at a loss even just because I can. Current formula of fresh start is best especially if you want people coming back to participate in more rounds. I'd want to keep that 40+ number of participants and make it bigger.

For my proposition, that % doesn't have to be high obviously leaving you room to set your own price. The point is to filter out entries that are doomed to lose money. If it's requirement to get your car into competition I bet people would pay little more attention to this aspect of challenge.

[strop]

You make good points: I'd hasten to add that given just how significant engineering costs were I would hardly have wished for the profit/loss to carry over to the next round, but it would still end up being detrimental to community participation. In a way I was attempting to draw an analogy to how the industry in real life works: companies that make constantly irresponsible decisions, even if they are large or well established, end up going under (e.g. Saab, Australian manufacturers), unless the government decides to bail them out because they don't want their national pride in unregulated industry to fail (e.g. American manufacturers ). But that's probably something best experienced in single player campaign mode!

I second the motion to raise the factory costs for larger factories, there should be some incentive to think about the potential consequence of producing more units if the market saturates.

[xwing]

Price........... lowest $10,775, average $101,311, highest $900,000
Top Speed.... fastest 339 km/h, average 252 km/h, slowest 153 km/h

That's me. I'm even faster than the 1500hp car.

By 1km/h...
Good thing for me we dont get sales boosts for these things (highest top speed, most hp, highest price, lowest price, rarity/limited numbers manufactured, best time on track...) because that 1km/h would bug me

If you are record braking in one interesting area, it should generate more sales than what that number would normally suggest because you get free PR/marketing in the media. How hard would it be to implement it in this challenge? Maybe even give us the option to invest in marketing (more fixed costs vs uncertain sales)?

[Reaper392]

Looking at Reaper's car I remember making a large front grille which gave me exactly 0 effective cooling which felt reasonable (the engine is in the back) so I have no grilles/vents at the front... trying it now gives me quite a lot of cooling so I dont know what went wrong.
Looking at the fuel economy I though mine would be worst, I didn't imagine something over 40l/100km was even possible with and engine that produces less than 1000hp

And I'm surprised nobody else went over 100 sportiness, each point over 100 generated more and more ridiculous score in that score calculator, to the point that I could afford a $500 000 price tag and remain the better track day car over anything with less than 100 sportiness regardless of price. But much more than 500 000 and the score plumeted. In the supercar segment the score didn't change much even when I doubled the price, but the track day segment is much bigger so I gambled a bit with the lower price and bigger factory

I didn't go over 100 sportiness because I just didn't have time to look at the score calculator. The plan was to make a good few potential entries at the beginning of October and calculate what worked best, but real life got in the way so instead I just took the cheap sports car approach that worked well last time and hoped. For some reason I thought the price preference for trackday cars was a lot harsher than it actually was in the OP, which makes the tactic of a good amount of sports for the money possibly not the greatest for the trackday car I entered.

By the way, the lack of front vents really does look good on your car. Whatever caused the cooling not to work at the front seems to be a happy accident. Also, my car has such a terrible economy because it is running maximum downforce with very big wings, lips and undertray. Its probably less aerodynamic than a bus, has a stupidly high pressure turbo, and a fuel mix richer than an oil sheikh