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Vapourware Automation - The car company tycoon game

Burning Bridges

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http://automationgame.com/

Automation is an upcoming and apparently ultra-realistic car design and tycoon game (or rather simulation?).

Automation is a car company tycoon game in which you design and build cars from scratch.

It is you who designs everything from the very core that is the engine, over the chassis, to the suspension and the car's looks.

Several games have tried this before... but were able to merely scratch the surface.

Go ahead, build your dream-car company, or simply aim to dominate the world markets with your superior design skills!

You can get a design tools demo and access to the open beta (probably when you pre-order).

The demo does not show much of a tycoon part, but I already had a lot of fun with the engine test stand. It is insanely techy and detailed, and shows the car design in 3d. Cool.



With unfinished games the proof is in the pudding, but this clearly has potential to become one of those addictive games that you can't stop playing. I also think it's a chance to widen my horizon about engines and cars.

So far I had no time to check what's going on in their forum, but wanted to give you a heads up.

Currently we are working full steam on the marriage between Engine Designer and Car Designer, i.e. giving you the opportunity to place your engine designs into your car designs! This will take some time of course, but will be awesome once done. We are aiming for getting this essential part completed around end of October / early November.
 

Hellraiser

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At first I thought this is going to be shit, probably because I remember Car Tycoon or what was it called pretty well (I still should have the CDs for that around somewhere, unless they suffered the same fate as JA2: UB and Giants: Citizen Kabuto). Then I saw they want to go hardcore with the design part and I saw true :incline:, how could I doubt bro Burning Bridges would make a topic about it if he didn't see something good about it?

The main issue apart from a strong vapourware vibe is how they want to evaluate car designs as far as market performance is considered. At least part of the consumer decision-making process is how pretty it looks (even if some people do buy that ugly new fiat whatitscalled), how does the computer determine that? Although you could have market trends in design fads like "curves and streamlining are the hot shit" and it could rate the car based on how far off the median/average streamlined shape your design is.

Also can we drive them? God knows that even aimless driving of your created cars would attract many people. Wait, racing them in multiplayer, oh god that would be haevan with proper options like vehicles classes.
 

Outlander

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Of course it's not that complex but you guys should check out Detroit:

72402-detroit-dos-screenshot-researchs.jpg


36755-detroit-dos-screenshot-testings.jpg
 

Burning Bridges

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The main issue apart from a strong vapourware vibe is how they want to evaluate car designs as far as market performance is considered. At least part of the consumer decision-making process is how pretty it looks (even if some people do buy that ugly new fiat whatitscalled), how does the computer determine that? Although you could have market trends in design fads like "curves and streamlining are the hot shit" and it could rate the car based on how far off the median/average streamlined shape your design is.

Designs already have lots of parameters like durability, fuel economy, driving comfort, maintenance cost etc etc. So it can be calculated easily how a car would do on the market. I expect that for example the expensive high performance car everyone wants to create right away will not sell many units, but an inexpensive small car with low price, fuel consumpton and maintenance cost, or a mid range car with good comfort, safety and reliabilty would.
 

Turisas

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Neat idea. Can you make a Homer, or is it limited to more realistic cars?

TheHomer.jpg
 
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Oh yeah this is REALLY good. Problem is that it it's not exactly a game yet. Most of the gameplay right now comes from community challenges and whatnot. Like races, economy oriented "sell your car" ones or something like this: http://www.automationhub.net/reviews
If you're asking yourself: is it worth buying now? Ask yourself: do I have autism? It really is (going to be) Dwarf Fortress of tycoon games. Which is a good thing.
 
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It actually was, like yesterday. Early access though (you could buy into alpha on their own website for quite some time now too). For now it's still glorified puzzle game. Actual tycoon part is next on to-do list, if I were to guess it's probably a year away.
 

Burning Bridges

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1 year? I would rather say 2-3.

And then it is still to be seen if it will be much good. Right now all they have done is a glorious combustion engine simulator. So the campaign might actually become a huge letdown like Kerbal Space Program. My feeling is that they are only interested in the simulation part and in the end the manager part will suck. My recommendation would be a) if you are interested in building engines and see what emergent gameplay there is, get it now and forget about the tycoon part and all the other imaginary stuff they promise b) if not, forget about it until you see that it is released and we say that it does not suck

And by the way, I had some fun taking part in competitions lately, and it's very rewarding if one of my design wins. So there is actually more challenge in LARPing against other players than in the game itself. Make of this what you will, I got a lot out of it. I still think they should have taken the more logical approach and started with the tycoon part, but thats another story.
 
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I haven't been doing any of those lately. What's interesting other than new BRC? I really liked CTC but Der Bayer doesn't seem to be doing this one any more.
 
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I'm not giving out sensitive info like that. Let's just say I scored top 3 in every CTC I took part in.

As for 1 year. Considering CTC essentially was prototyping for sales model there already was a lot done, they just need to put it together. Making something workable shouldn't really take them longer. Remember they won't be working on anything else until that check box is marked. Frankly I would prefer if they would rework forced induction first though.
 

Burning Bridges

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Didnt realize the thread is already 1 1/2 years old, and oh boy how little has changed. Those guys are much too vain and unorganized to realize they are way behind any reasonable schedule.
I think they will stay in development hell for many, many years, perhaps the game will never be finished. It will probably erupt soon when the Steam crowd realize just how slow they work. Already looking forward to some first class drama when one of them decides to get a PhD or a real job.
It took them half a year to make the latest update which is mostly a whole lot of bullshit. The game still crashes with division by zero or accessing null value if you do something "wrong" by clicking a buttons in the wrong order or run the game full screen, how dare you. The UI is completely inappropriate for a tycoon game, consisting mainly of dozens of back/forth modal screens which crash on a regular basis because the programmer did not foresee the dependencies, and is apprently too dumb to initialize all his variables. What a bunch of incompetent losers. This should have been fixed long before they began charging money for this. The so called "car company tyoon game" has exactly Zero tycoon features and has been in development for how many years exactly? Right now there are 3 types of engines out of the advertised 10 or so, making even the engine designer barely 30% complete. As an edutainment course about combustion endines it is not bad at all, but calling it a Tycoon game is a big joke.
 

Riso

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The game will finally receive V6 engines and steam workshop integration in the next beta version this friday/week end.

To play a tycoon game you basically have to go to old stuff like Oldtimer or grab a copy of Gearcity in early access.
 

Burning Bridges

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"finally" :) Are people on Steam ok with the fact that everything takes years with this game?
Let me guess. Next is V12 in 2016 and inline 5 in 2017. Then up to 2020: V10, several Flat engines, and I3 ..
Oh and let's not forget many people already paid for "exclusive" V16s (V stands for vapour)
 

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