Pre-war Japan is doable, without contracts, even on Nightmare mode. It is more difficult than average though, so it requires some experience with the game.

I will do a quick play through and explain what I do.

For the start, design something like an Oldsmobile Curved Dash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_Curved_Dash Your unit cost goal should be around $600-$700. Meaning you should spend around $150 for each component. (Might need a little more for the engine.)

Open branches in any city with more than 500,000 people in them. Should be Tokyo and Osaka.

Your sale price should be around $1000, or between 1.5 to 2x the material costs.

You might not be profitable at this point, or just barely. But either way you're not using your factory at 100%. The best thing to do would be to reuse your components and build a second design. Such as a Sedan, using the same chassis, engine, and gearbox as you did with the Phaeton.

You can also play with the laws of supply and demand, if you developed the phaeton cheap enough, dropping the price to say, $800 would drastically increase sales.

Don't be afraid to take out a bond to cover expenses.

When your Sedan is finished, it should be only slightly more expensive than the Phaeton. Open branches in Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kyoto.

By this point, you should be turning a profit, and selling around 110 units per month.

From there, it's playing Supply and Demand. Your goal should be to use your factories at 100% production. If you have missing sales, you need to increase prices, if your factory does running at 100%, you need to cut prices, expand, or create additional models.

Share your components across multiple designs. Phaeton parts can work with compact cars, micro cars, low end sedans. Sedan parts can work in larger vehicles, etc.

Use the bond and loan systems to cover expansion of your factory. Then increase demand through price/expansion/model selection.


Over time, Japanese cities become more populated and more wealthy, as cities hit the 200,000 population mark, open branches there.

Around 1905, you should have used to the financial tools to raise enough funds to upgrade your factory, design a few new components, and design a couple more vehicle designs. And pulling down around $20,000 to $100,000 per month in positive cash flow. As the population gets richer, you may need to adjust prices to get more profits.

Your hit with a minor depression in 1907, you'll also have competition eating into your sales.

Around 1910, you'll want to refresh all your designs using new components. You could also consider taking out a bond at lower interest to pay off your old bonds and open a new factory. With 5 vehicle models, operating in 5 cities, against 2 AI companies, you should be getting around 150-200 sales per month.

WW1 hits, you can choose to do Truck contracts or make munitions.

From there, the game continues as it was, Up until the great depression, at that point, you do what you have to do to survive.


Now let's look at real life history.

The first Domestic Japanese car was built in 1907, called the Takuri. It wouldn't be until 1910 until there was any sort of traction in the industry. So anything before that is before cars were historically viable in Japan.

Most of the vehicle designs built in Japan were licensed from Europe, The domestic industry struggled throughout much of the 1910s and 1920s because of economics and natural disasters. The big US companies came in around mid 1925, and took much of the market share. US companies produced 200,000 vehicles in Japan from 1925 to 1936, while Japanese companies produced 12,000 vehicles in that time period. In 1936, Japanese government passed a law making it regulating foreign car companies in Japan, which pretty much shut American companies out of the market in order to promote Japanese companies. (And that's part of the reason American cars aren't as loved in Japan today...)

Anyway, from those numbers we can guess that the Japanese market was around 250,000 cars between 1925 to 1936, which is about 25,000 cars per year. Interpolating down to 1910, and you're looking at about 2500 cars per year. In the above play through example, I was producing 180 cars per month, or 2160 per year. Which is almost spot on for the Japanese market at the time.


Here are a couple of videos that might help you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDJnuK8hvkk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SopvCUqL2Os

Originally posted by tor-pferd:

The game mode is normal.
It starts in 1900, but do we have to keep selling military trucks and phaeton cars in small quantities?
I don't see how I can increase my sales by branching out to the US and building cars in the Japanese factory because they won't get the cars from Japan to the US.

Military truck contracts are not stable.

I'm in a bind.

I forgot to mention, if you want to branch out to US, you need to increase shipping distance for the vehicles you sell at the US branches. A quick warning though, transportation costs are very high early in the game.

a neat way to make money is to purchase vehicles in bulk from other companies through the outsourcing system, then sell them in the Japanese market for a small profit which at the start of the game will not have any competition at all, you should be able to make a decent and consistent profit from this to start designing your own vehicles and building new factories

I am trying to survive in 1900s Japan as a beginner player (bad idea I know) but in my last run I stumbled on a lone contract for a chassis. They bizarrely wanted to pay $4.5 grand for each of them, even though the specs were trivial (my crappy mass market chassis was plenty) and had they asked me for a bid I would have put in something like $300.

I landed the contract, paused construction of my borderline-unprofitable car and sold chassis for a single month for 2.5 million dollars. Well, that's one way to get a good start! I assume this is a bit of a hiccup in the contract mechanism of the game though, since there's no earthly reason they should have offered that much money for specs that are met by literally any chassis on the market.

I can echo the observation that there are sometimes ludicrous contracts. I once had an offer to make a chassis for a price above $40k and there was exactly one requirement - it had to weigh less than around 250kg. That requirement was met by half of all chassis I had designed, including one costing around $40. Unfortunately I didn't take a screenshot.

On the whole, though, I have to say that given the complexity the contracts system is working incredibly well. The occasional eyebrow-raisers are really quite rare.

Apologies for resurrecting an old thread, but I've tried the Toyoda Kiichiro achievement multiple times now and I have never made it beyond 1903, usually not even 1902. In my latest run, the best so far, I had my starting factory running at full capacity by the end of 1902, making and selling five different models (3 phaetons, 2 sedans).
The models are priced between 1250 and 1500 and I have only 5 branches in the largest Japanese cities.
Revenue from sales is twice my materials cost. What is "killing" me appear to be distribution costs from my five branches. But if I redesign those to cost as little as possible, my sales tank and disappear. I really don't know how to fix this, despite a lot of experience with this game.
Has something changed that would affect the difficulty?

Originally posted by Pioneer320:

Revenue from sales is twice my materials cost. What is "killing" me appear to be distribution costs from my five branches. But if I redesign those to cost as little as possible, my sales tank and disappear. I really don't know how to fix this, despite a lot of experience with this game.
Has something changed that would affect the difficulty?

Nothing has changed in difficulty. Try subsidizing dealerships. Also reduce your branch costs, even if your sales tank, the goal is to be profitable, or nearly so. Look at playing with bonds to keep your company afloat and growing. You want to be able to grow enough to pay off previous bonds with new bonds just before the old one matures. If you can do this, you should be able to last long enough for the Japanese economy to grow into something more sustainable.

If you want to do Toyoda there are a few tricks you can use to get you going. The first is just to ignore the Japaneese market, it is actually a bit easier if you start on Nightmare :). Are you on the Discord channel? I can give you a few tips there.