Preview: Automation

[Daunt]

Alright guys, so I just discovered this one. Maybe you all know about it already. This looks very promising, both as a very fun, challenging game, and a game where you can learn a TON. I'm sold on the concept, and it's been tried many many times, but this seems to have a great foundation as it continues to make its way to final release.

Take a tycoon game, and I'm a man who loves his good, challenging tycoons, and add the creativity of designing, building and engineering a car from the ground up. That's what you have. It has the super technical side for any gearhead, and the creative side of designing your own race cars, trucks, supercars and more. Then moving it to the market and competing with rival companies.

You can go by year, being forced to design a car in the seventies with the technology available, or design a modern day supercar. Or design the next best family sedan.

Currently the only thing that may worry me is the testing feature. Right now it seems very aged and may not be a very good simulation at all.

I'll be doing more testing tonight if anyone is interested what I think about it.

Check it here on steam:

Via Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/293760/

• Extremely Deep, Technical, Creative – Experience unheard-of creative freedom in a highly technical, realistic gameplay experience revolving around building a car company from scratch. Go ahead and build your dream-car company!
• Dynamic World Markets – Master realistically modeled dynamic markets, distribution, and demand. Try to cater to the needs of over 40 different target groups and their needs, or find your safe-haven niche in a cutthroat economic environment.
• Flexible Car Designer – Design the cars you would have in your garage. Choose from diverse chassis types and materials, engine placements and drivetrain setups, gearboxes, suspensions, brakes, tyres, and finish off you design with fully customisable body types, looks and styles.
• Highly Detailed Engine Designer – Delve into endless possibilities combining different 4-stroke petrol engine configurations, internals, head types, forced induction systems, fuel systems, headers and mufflers. All based on different 4-stroke petrol engine configurations: Inline 3, 4, 5, 6, V6, 8, 10, 12, 16, Boxer 4, 6.
• Dynamic Engine Sounds - Turn up the volume and blast out the awesome fully adaptive, unique engine sounds that directly reflect your design choices.
• Grand Campaign, Scenarios, Sandbox – Aim to dominate the world markets with your superior design skills in the grand campaign, play a quick scenario challenge, or just tinker away in sandbox mode to create the most insane engines ever.
• Complex, yet Easy to Learn – While the game is highly technical, it is made easy to learn by means of well-illustrated in-game tutorial videos, detailed descriptive texts, as well as a multitude of tutorial scenarios.
• Network Play – Play cooperatively with your friends or take your intuition for the perfect car design and challenge up to 7 human competitors in epic, multi-session network games.
• Community – Join one of the most awesome and helpful communities out there, share stories about your exploits, talk to like-minded people, discuss your IRL car projects and engage in community challenges.

 

[Daunt]

Upon further gameplay, I must say it's really fun and informative. Really perfect for the gearhead who wants to tinker with this sort of thing but not actually break things. The level of detail and being able to see what is going on in an engine and what is contributing to what is pretty amazing.

It is truly set up for success, but whether it reaches that is solely up to what is currently not in the game. Any tycoon aspects are not yet done, which really makes the game at this stage a mere scenario and sandbox only-game... really one dimensional. All stats that come out of building the engine, chassis, etc are made to contribute to a wide range of outputs that will determine how well a car will sell in a given market, etc.

Again, I think the make or break for this game will be the tycoon. Running your own mega-car company seems awesome, and being able to micromanage the car creation up to macro managing how marketing is handled, pricing, materials costs, factory specifications and setups, and everything else needed to succeed as a global automaker sounds incredibly intoxicating.

But will it be a complex economic simulation, with very detail-oriented stock markets, supply and demand, buyer trends, sales pitches and more? Or will it be a watered down, easy to beat tycoon that leaves you wishing you stuck with railroad tycoon?

 

[rcast]

I love this game the only thing it needs is the ability to drive the cars but there is talk that some third party modders may get the cars ported into rfactor so you build a car in automation and can drive it in rfactor sounds rally cool. cant wait until multiplayer is back and as just the engine designer was pretty fun.