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

[Curse]

Still in 1901:
King Cars hit a bit of a stall for the rest of the year. As sales some day will grow and car park is for free as well as produced cars don't lose value in a form they can't be sold anymore, I let the London factory run at 100%, going two lines of Landaulet and three lines of Phaetons.

Profit hit an average of $60.000 per month.

In November 1901 the company seemed to be stable enough to go a step further but not rich enough to construct a new factory. In theory there would be money to expand the London factory from 5 to 8 lines, however, I want to increase sales radius, not just output capacity. Therefor we're going to save some money. Our goal is to establish a roughly 30% lines/50% technology factory in Chicago that has about 5-8 production lines to start a US division of our company. This division will also be the backbone if tensions in Europe some day get too rough for daily business.

So, for now the step further is to open some new branches in Hamburg, Lyons, Marseille, and Madrid. Marketing was extended to those places.


King Cars Phaeton is the best Phaeton in 1901. I'm not an expert but that may be partly due to the fact there is no other Phaeton around.



1902:
We started the year with new branches in Copenhagen, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Luxembourg, Zurich and Barcenlona.

In February 1902 we at King Cars learned about something new - a limousine. I don't know exactly what this could be, but as it is something new I expect competition to be scarce, therefor we develop such a thing. Of course we use our reliable Uni 1 parts for that.


Profit is now above $100.000 per month. Unfortunately we achieve this by selling through our build up reserves of cars:


April 1902 will change the course of the company. I start building our second factory at Chicago, USA. King Cars lacks a bit of funds but at the same time the London factory is constantly at 100%. As emergency money I can IPO the company so I go for it anyway.

The second we announce the new factory the bank is willing to loan us about $4 Millions instead of just $1.8 Millions. Financial problems seems to be fixed for now.

As our potential sales are now nearly double the production capacity and car reserves run dry I increase prices from $8000 to $9000 for the Landaulet and $2000 to $2500 for the Phaeton. The cars are still unmatched in terms of specific rating on the market so I guess the prices are fair.

I also start gathering funds for the USA campaign. The Chicago factory of course is not planned to produce cars for the European dealerships...


One month later the price increase for the Phaeton turned out to be a really really really bad idea. Sales decreased from over 80 vehicles per month to about 20. We set the price back to $2000 and fired a guy named Steve. We also burn through our cash reserves faster than Greece. Hum. That is actually not working as thought.

Another month later we have to take back the price increase for the landaulet, too. We fired Steve again. Or another Steve. Not absolutely sure about that.


In October 1902 sales have stabilized. Seems the fact we focussed public hate on Steve worked well. Research for the Limousine has also finished. We cut back Phaeton production from three to two lines and produce 16 Limousines in one line at the London plant. Sale price is $7000 despite the fact production cost per unit is noticably higher than on the landaulet.


1903:

1st of January, 1903. The car reserves are gone. I switched another production line from Phaeton to Limousine a few month ago but I don't want to end production of the Phaeton just to make more profit. There are many people who saved money so they can get one of the famous King Cars Phaeton and we are not going to disappoint them!

At the same time I gave green light for the London factory expansion. 8 production lines instead of 5 will be made available in half a year thanks to the $1.5 Million investment. The money was taken from the already taken out bank loan as profits increased and I expect US sales to pick up in 5 month as the Chicago factory is likely to go online in 4 month.


May 1903 has come! The Chicago factory opened as planned. The initial production will be
1 line with 80x Landaulet.
1 line with 60x Limousine (ouch, they are this harder to make?).
2 line with 80x Phaeton each.

We opened branches to sell all those cars in Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Lous, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto, Montreal, Atlanta, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.


The next move will be to design one or two "new" cars, of course with the proven Uni 1 parts. One of them will be a mid-size Sedan to start gathering market share there and the other one might be a Pickup, even our parts are abysmal for that kind of vehicle.

Edit:
That's the King Cars Pickup.. Pickup:


And this is the Sedan:


Clearly the Uni 1 parts are not top notch anymore. Haha, ok, they never were, but the situation for them clearly has not improved the last three years.

As soon as we know how well our Sedan and Pickup sell we start the design of two new universal part lines, one bigger and better one and one small and maybe a bit cheaper one. Later in the game one can use the same gearbox and engine for both but I'm not sure if this works in 1904/1905.


July 1903 brings us the expanded London factory. That means more branches in Europe: Lisbon, Barcelona, Bordeaux, Genoa, Milan, Rome, Naples, Stuttgart, Oslo, Stockholm, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw.



(I'll update the post below this text here as soon as something more exciting happens besides the usual adjusting factories to demand.)

I also started to pay the lobbyist 100% locked amount of cash. This is useful as we start to generate noticably profits every month.

One month later, August 1903, gives the last evidence our sales are stable and increasing while the Chicago plant has still lots of unused production capacity. Instead of paying back the bank loan we are going to re-invest the money that's left over as well as our incoming profits. What could a three year old car company in mid 1903 do? Right, it could start the building of another factory! As our London factory has way too less capacity (and it would actually have been smarter to rebuild it instead of upgrading it...) we move to Stuttgart for now. Concept is the same as for the Chicago factory, so about 50/50 slider: