King Cars - hard difficulty (with small tutorial steps at the start)

[Curse]

After my first non-tutorial game went to 1925, learning much about the game and getting rid of many of the first newbie mistakes, with more than $100 Millions profit per month the game went, at least for the second, a bit boring.

So, here's my second real game and I try to get an AAR running up for you guys, but also to have a small history for myself. City names are always the biggest ones, so London is always in the UK and Frankfurt is always in Germany, despite the fact there might exist more in the world.

Settings:
-1900
- hard
- all AI (+ real company names)
- no advanced options/changes


The company is called "King Cars" as all my companies are part of the "King Corp." group.

The goals are:
- Make profit by the end of 1902.
- Avoid losses except when building early factories.
- Shift to high quality and expensive cars as soon as possible to build up image and worker skill (etc.).
- Deliver quality products for high prices. However, this also includes not screwing over customers and not maximize profits on the cost of our products or customers.
- Never produce so many cars the quality starts to decline. Quality over sales amount. An exception may be financial difficulties.



1900:

I decided to HQ the company in London. As biggest city of that time and the UK being one of the technological leaders I see a reasonable real world background to jump in and get the 28% tax rate as well as a top factory place, just short of New York.

Auto settings for hire and wage were deactivated in the first round. Wages for all groups were set to average, branches staff was fired for the moment.

Cash on hand: $ 450.000, no loans, no IPO.
Factory: 5 production lines in London, bad quality.
Branches: 1 branch in London, bad quality.

Three design projects were started with the goal to make them not too pricey while keep at least a minimum standard in quality and to keep them as multi purpose as possible, while maintaining a specific item level somewhere around 28.
Of course the first design was the engine, as this will, especially later in the game, decide how big the engine spaces in our chassis must be.

Uni 1 engine:


Uni 1 gearbox:


Uni 1 chassis:


Research teams were staffed to 100%, timing was set for all the same and a very cheap approach. Loss was about $22k per month, so there was no point to rush designs to get cars earlier as that would never have made up the rush costs.

As soon as the parts were done I offered them for licence. One time fee was set to be at about 80% of the maximum the game suggested, same for the one time unit fee, both rounded up or down to make it a nicer looking number.

Same I checked the competition in London (and Paris) and there was a huge list of sedans already, about 8-10 different ones. Phaetons, Coupe 2+2, Town Car and Landaulet were completely uncontested.

As Landaulets (as well as Limousines) are low piece high profit cash cows and the Phaeton is a mid-high piece cash cow I went for those two designs. As creative as I am they are called the
King Cars Phaetom (yes, seriously):


King Cars Landaulet (you didn't see that name coming, eh?):


Both were designed in a few minutes and with two goals in mind:
1) We can't produce too much of them anyway, so our target audience is not everybody, therefor we must have not high ratings everywhere the usual target audience likes. The landaulet for example isn't that much luxurious.
2) The most important stat is specific type rating, followed by dependability. GearCity citizens somehow love things that basically never break but unfortunately we don't produce bricks. Or diamonds. Or Chuck Norris.

Again rush (= development pace) was done just very slightly as there was no way 1-2 months earlier car sales can make up for the rush costs.


1901:
Research of the Landaulet was finished February 1901, a single product line with 10 units per months was created.
Price per unit was set to $8000, as landaulets are the most expensive and "best" cars in the game.
We also started Newspaper marketing at 100% at all branches.

Auto hire staff was put back on, wages were again set to average everywhere.

We opened several new branches on the lowest possible resources level and therefor making them as cheap as possible.
Thought was: Just a single sold unit can turn such a branch into profit. Also numbers of production and therefor sales are so low there is no chance 100% resources branches will create noticably higher sales that would be necessary to make them a financial success.

New branches were: Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Leeds, Birmingham.

King Cars made its first profit in March 1901 with 8 sold by 10 produced landaulet. Actually London hat just a single sale but Brussels and Amsterdam had two each.

The King Cars Phaeton research was completed in May 1901 and one production line with 15 cars per month was opened. We opened branches in Belfast and Berlin. One Phaeton is going to cost $2000.

The months after we had sold 14 landaulets (4 from reserves) and 15 Phaetons with 5 possible more deliveries. Therefor a second production line was opened and we build 2x 15 Phaetons per month now.

Profit in June 1901 was $42.557.
Cash on hand is $207.495, no loans, no IPO.

Sales 6/1901:


Revenue 6/1901:


Landaulet Sales until 6/1901, monthly:


London Factory 6/1901 with Phaeton overview:




I'm going to play a bit further and come back when a bit more happened or the company went bust. Also feel free to ask or let me know what you think about this AAR.
The current savegame will be attached at the bottom of the post. Especially for someone new who read this and wants to see how things unfolded in the game this might be useful. Or whatever.