Gearbox rating / car overall rating

[RavenDark]

Hey everyone,

been enjoying the game very much for a while now, but I can't seem to find any solutions for the following "problems".

First of all it's the gearboxes' overall rating. No matter how much money and effort I invest into development, the gearbox rating will always remain a single red star. Even with all sliders put to far right, the overall rating doesn't change at all. (See screenshot no. 1 - taken in a 1914 save game).
I'm absolutely clueless whether I'm doing something fundamentally wrong, if it's working as intended or maybe even a bug (?).

Second is the car overall rating. Screen no. 2 shows an example. My compact car (the Rover) compared to my biggest competitor's compact car. My car is better in every single aspect, yet the overall rating is a good bit lower than that of the other car. Does the production cost influence the overall rating?
However, even if I sell my car for a lower price than that of the Dulalaye, customers still prefer his crappy 4hp car over mine. And this is just an example. Every other of my cars has a lower overall rating than most rival cars, despite having much better quality, dependability and safety ratings.
Any suggestions what I can do to improve the overall ratings of my cars? Thanks!

[Arakash]

Hey everyone,

been enjoying the game very much for a while now, but I can't seem to find any solutions for the following "problems".

First of all it's the gearboxes' overall rating. No matter how much money and effort I invest into development, the gearbox rating will always remain a single red star. Even with all sliders put to far right, the overall rating doesn't change at all. (See screenshot no. 1 - taken in a 1914 save game).
I'm absolutely clueless whether I'm doing something fundamentally wrong, if it's working as intended or maybe even a bug (?).

Second is the car overall rating. Screen no. 2 shows an example. My compact car (the Rover) compared to my biggest competitor's compact car. My car is better in every single aspect, yet the overall rating is a good bit lower than that of the other car. Does the production cost influence the overall rating?
However, even if I sell my car for a lower price than that of the Dulalaye, customers still prefer his crappy 4hp car over mine. And this is just an example. Every other of my cars has a lower overall rating than most rival cars, despite having much better quality, dependability and safety ratings.
Any suggestions what I can do to improve the overall ratings of my cars? Thanks!

Hello, glad your enjoying the game so far.

I can answer some of this, as ive figured out some of it before.

On the Gearboxes it does seem puzzling until you realise the influence that multiple gears has on the quality of the gearbox.
Its actually really large, so for example, i really cant pry a decent gearbox out of my 1 gear setup no matter how hard i try.

I found once i started using more gears i got much better results with designing gearboxes.


On the overall rating thing, i believe overall rating is changed by its age as well, just like a lot of the other stats.
I know you get penalties trying to sell vehicles designed over 5 years ago for example.

[RavenDark]

Many thanks for Your quick reply, Arakash!

I know very well that obsolete cars get a massive drop in sales figures (I found out the hard way ), but my car is a brand new design. Engine, chassis and gearbox development started in late 1912, the car itself was released in early 1914, so neither the components nor the car itself are obsolete in any way.

As for the gearboxes I never bothered with single gear designs. During the last years all my gearboxes had 3 gears for smaller engines/cars, 4 gears for the sedans and I even designed a 5 gear gearbox for a 100 hp sports car. Still, for my designs the overall rating isn't affected in any way by the number of gears.

Another question I forgot to ask: What exactly is the purpose of the newly introduced research teams?
Will they decrease development times for components/cars or will they make new technologies such as turbocharger or automatic gearboxes become available earlier, depending on how much money you invest into them?

[Arakash]

Many thanks for Your quick reply, Arakash!

I know very well that obsolete cars get a massive drop in sales figures (I found out the hard way ), but my car is a brand new design. Engine, chassis and gearbox development started in late 1912, the car itself was released in early 1914, so neither the components nor the car itself are obsolete in any way.

As for the gearboxes I never bothered with single gear designs. During the last years all my gearboxes had 3 gears for smaller engines/cars, 4 gears for the sedans and I even designed a 5 gear gearbox for a 100 hp sports car. Still, for my designs the overall rating isn't affected in any way by the number of gears.

Another question I forgot to ask: What exactly is the purpose of the newly introduced research teams?
Will they decrease development times for components/cars or will they make new technologies such as turbocharger or automatic gearboxes become available earlier, depending on how much money you invest into them?

On the vehicle overall rating:
If it isnt any way an old vehicle(the usual culprit as basically everything decreases over time), which it doesn't seem to be, i cant say im sure why its so low.
If i was to guess, i suspect that the different ratings are given different weights towards the overall rating that produce that result. It still seems strange though, especially as the quality rating is so high, which i thought was quite important.

On research teams:
They are very new, (literally days old) but i think your question has given me motivation to add a Q to the FAQ about it.
As i understand it...
The skills of your R&D department (which i have explained in the FAQ) decrease over time.
These skills define your access to a lot of the equipment in components(like the V layout for example), as well as how well you can design and do various tasks e.g. how good your chassis designs are.
Before research teams, the only way to increase them is to build masses of components endlessly. Building some would make sense in a R&D process, but the quantity required was a bit over the top and extremely tedious.
Now you can throw money into General R&D projects, which are very expensive but also increase these skills over time.
They can also allow you do more creative things with your company like go into hibernation without totally ruining your R&D skills or focus massively on Engine design.

Also their expense adds a lategame money sink(still with a lot of rewards) to very rich players who can ramp it up to max and spend 40+mil a year on it. (max cost goes up over time.)

But ive digressed a bit generally speaking, you can(and might want to) do both types of research at once.

In response to the part on turbochargers.
Each of these things has a release date and a skill requirement. So as long as your past the release date then yes, you can potentially access a ton of new parts. 10-16 cylinders is the best example of this(available at the start if your skill is high enough), but i think the turbochargers release date is 1930ish, so im not sure there is anything you can do to access it before then.

[RavenDark]

Thanks again for Your explanations.

After a complete reinstall of Gear City I started a new game under 1.13 and did some testing with gearboxes. I let my researchers develop one gearbox after the other, all 3 gear manual generic gearboxes with every slider maxed out. After 4 1/2 yrs ingame I had 9 gearboxes designed and every one of them had an overall rating of 11/100 after development started.

One would assume that researching so many gearboxes in such a short time frame should give the researchers a nice amount of knowledge which would raise the rating of every new designed gearbox, but nope, the overall rating of 11 seems to be set in stone. The only thing that changed significantly were the unit costs that rose by approximately 50% (first gearbox had a unit price of 165$ after release, the last one 246$).
Bankruptcy prevented me from continuing the tests, but I assume that even 20 more gearboxes wouldn't have raised the overall rating to a value higher than 11/100.

[Arakash]

Thanks again for Your explanations.

After a complete reinstall of Gear City I started a new game under 1.13 and did some testing with gearboxes. I let my researchers develop one gearbox after the other, all 3 gear manual generic gearboxes with every slider maxed out. After 4 1/2 yrs ingame I had 9 gearboxes designed and every one of them had an overall rating of 11/100 after development started.

One would assume that researching so many gearboxes in such a short time frame should give the researchers a nice amount of knowledge which would raise the rating of every new designed gearbox, but nope, the overall rating of 11 seems to be set in stone. The only thing that changed significantly were the unit costs that rose by approximately 50% (first gearbox had a unit price of 165$ after release, the last one 246$).
Bankruptcy prevented me from continuing the tests, but I assume that even 20 more gearboxes wouldn't have raised the overall rating to a value higher than 11/100.

I dont know if 10-20 is enough to increase your Gearbox R&D skill, last i checked it was glacially slow to raise. In my attempts to raise it in earlier games i noticed little change after constantly producing for years.
That's part of the reason i like the research teams, it was too hard to raise the skill to see meaningful results.

That said, im not entirely sure the R&D skill is something that's actually the problem here. Ive yet to play to 1910-1915 in the current version to check whether the Gearboxes improve, because i know they did in earlier versions. If you give me a save i can have a look at how much they have changed in the save file, as i know how to edit them.

You'll have to ask Eric(Gearcity dev) about the Gearboxes specifically, personally i just go on what i said about them originally. There may be scope for a suggestion post(or perhaps a bug post) if you can get confirmation from Eric about whats going on.

On the price changes, that is something that's partially hardcoded to the date and not related to your R&D skills afaik. At certain times in the period the game represents vehicles were cheaper than other times.
This is most noticeable if you make a car in 1900 then another in 1907 with new components with the same sliders. The 1907 one should be quite a bit more expensive.

[RavenDark]

I know about the price changes form my former game in 1.12. The 1907 Compact was significantly more expensive than both the 1901 and the 1913/14 model. Guess it also has to do with industrialization/mass production that set in in the early years of the 20th century.

Still, the 11/100 rating of the gearboxes is very strange. I just repeated the test with engines, and my first 1 Cyl engine already had an overall rating of 37/100, which is obviously far higher than that for the gearboxes.

But well, I guess the only person who can definitely explain this and the somewhat low car overall rating is Eric himself.

[Arakash]

I know about the price changes form my former game in 1.12. The 1907 Compact was significantly more expensive than both the 1901 and the 1913/14 model. Guess it also has to do with industrialization/mass production that set in in the early years of the 20th century.

Still, the 11/100 rating of the gearboxes is very strange. I just repeated the test with engines, and my first 1 Cyl engine already had an overall rating of 37/100, which is obviously far higher than that for the gearboxes.

But well, I guess the only person who can definitely explain this and the somewhat low car overall rating is Eric himself.

Indeed. I imagine he will chip in at some point to clear it up. I may test it myself at one point though ive been occupied with other forum things and a lot of bugs today


Edit: Save is attached for a savetrading discussion i'm having on IRC, will be gone in a few hours max.

[Eric.B]

I will take a look at the code during my lunch break to see what the gearbox issue is, right now I have my artist cap on!

Arakash gives a good answer for everything else... So expect a reply in about 3 hours.

[Eric.B]

Also forgot to add, if you upload your save game I can tell you why the AI car has such high ratings...