Economies of scale and commonality of components

[porph]

I had a bit of a search for this and couldn't find if it was previously discussed.

Will economies of scale be factored in? i.e. a firm manufacturing 500,000 widgets can make them for less than a firm making 50 due to bulk purchasing, fixed overheads distributed over a larger production volume etc. Obviously the firm once gigantic could suffer dis-economies of scale, crisis of bureaucracy etc..

Following on from this, I understand we can share platforms but what about components? e.g. a firm uses the same parts where possible in its 4 & 6 cylinder engines.

[Punkal]

I asked about this a long time ago unfortunately they are not going to have that sort of complexity.
I was told that when you create the engine and save it that determines the price and crating over X with generate a saving of Y...

I would really like that level of complexity included I think it would be something that people could use to make there company competitive, if your company creating a 1.5L I3, 2L I4 3L I6 & V6 and a 4L v8 with the same stroke and bore a large number of parts would be interchangeable between engines.

I am glad this has come up again, I would like for this to be a feature but I understand it could require a lot of changes from the way the engine and car designer already works.

[porph]

I think exchangeable components would be more difficult than economies of scale which should be a prerequisite for the economic model. Even if it was a simple algorithm applied to the build cost or even thresholds as simple as 1-100, 101-1,000, 1,001-10,000 & 10,000+ with simple modifiers.

[LoSboccacc]

just a quick consideration about game design

economy of scale works as a positive feedback loop: if your production goes strong, then you get cheaper prices on components and get stronger overall; if your production stagnate, then you get increased prices and your game will become harder and harder

while I think that a game to be interesting should model the domain area to the fullest because that's the only way to actually have interesting emergent behavior one has to be very careful in adding positive feedback loops because they make the game inherently difficult to balance: one or two botched model, and you ma very well be in a position where you're unable to recover your game.

while not a problem per se (I like my game on full hard "losing is fun" difficulty), it makes very hard to backtrack your errors and to learn from your previous games, making the experience potentially frustrating, because if you go bankrupt in 1979 for an error you made in 1952, then it gets very disconnected and hard to 'get' for casual players.

so, while I'm not arguing in favor or against economy of scale, I think one should think carefully of their effect on gameplay, even before on the development costs themselves

[Killrob]

@LoSboccacc: Very good post. Indeed I already shudder now thinking about the final big beta test which focuses on play-through... all the emergent behavior surfacing once the set pieces are put together will be really hard to get right, feel natural, and balanced!

[LoSboccacc]

thank you.

you see, I'm a full time game dreamer

[XT6Wagon]

The great car game of the past "detroit" handled economies of scale in a very easy to understand way. It didn't. Yet you still got a very powerful overall benifit from being the biggest guy on the block as if you sell 1000 cars you got to spread all your fixed expenses across far more cars than if you sold 100.

More to the point they actualy put in fairly brutal punishments for pushing the edge of production and sales. Soon you are spending fairly vast sums hiring more assembly workers who do less than the people you hired before. More cars you sell the more money you have to drop on advertising to keep selling cars. This all in an effort to keep the first person to stand out of the pack from running away from it all. That said it never worked as R&D was the knife you slit all the competitions throats with and its punishments against the person leading were ineffective due to it being far too expensive for the smaller CPU players to do more than token research and yet too easy for a slight early lead in tech to snowball into selling cars 20+ years ahead of thier time for less than the other guys can sell a car for.

I think personaly any savings from being the larger company selling more cars ( or the same number of cars using less variation in parts) is to have fees upfront that don't depend on the quantity ordered. Like a $1M emissions certification for a engine configuration after year X. If you sell 200 luxury cars thats painful, but if you sell 200,000 econoboxes it works out fairly cheap per unit. Also this kind of fee is great for removing constant tinkering with parts anytime a little improvement rolls around unless it will really pay off.

[onasnerd]

while not a problem per se (I like my game on full hard "losing is fun" difficulty), it makes very hard to backtrack your errors and to learn from your previous games, making the experience potentially frustrating, because if you go bankrupt in 1979 for an error you made in 1952, then it gets very disconnected and hard to 'get' for casual players.

I think that the designers should include enough ways to track sales/costs, per engine, per model, etc. so that this disconnect won't happen. But I still think if you make an engine that is not practical and put it into an model that doesn't sell, you should face the consequences, whether that happens a year later or, 10-20.