Originally posted by Ludwig Steiner:

I really strugge with the game. I wanna do contracts for the navies - they require powerful 500+ hp engines with a high tourge output. Im playing with a 1900 start but how the F should I produce that much power in 1901 ? I just have a V engine with 8 Cylinders. and whatever I do I cant strengthen the output.

Not all engines requests will be possible with starting settings. If you crank up your starting skill up points to 100, you might be able to hit 500hp in 1900. Although I would think Superchargers would be a requirement. Anyway. To get high HP, remember there is no replacement for displacement. Switch to Advance Designer and crank up the Bore/Stroke.

Also somehow my size-gauge is kinda broken, it doesnt react to any imput, doesnt matter if I move it to small or big.

If you are talking about the assisted designer, this is because it is designing an engine for whatever chassis you have. If you want to design for a contract, you need to select a contract at the bottom of the assisted designer screen or switch to advance designer.

Originally posted by Ludwig Steiner:

I really strugge with the game. I wanna do contracts for the navies - they require powerful 500+ hp engines with a high tourge output. Im playing with a 1900 start but how the F should I produce that much power in 1901 ? I just have a V engine with 8 Cylinders. and whatever I do I cant strengthen the output.

Also somehow my size-gauge is kinda broken, it doesnt react to any imput, doesnt matter if I move it to small or big.

There are a few tricks you can do, i don't remember which one, but if you mess with bore and stroke you'll find that one of them is more influencial on torque, but reduces top rpm a bit, so you might wnat to try them, not aways a "square cylinder" makes the most powerfull engine.

Later in the game if you want to make trucks, the power rating of the game is taken directly from torque, not hp, so if you want to make the most powerfull trucks i would recomend focusing on toruqe and not being shy on cost cutting on your engine RPMs, also going for diesel might be an option since it increases Torque a bit, and later for contracts if not specified you might want to go ethanol, as it has a greater power output.

Tangentially related, what do you have to do to get ethanol unlocked? Any engine I create, except Steam or Electric, the only option is always Gasoline.

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

Tangentially related, what do you have to do to get ethanol unlocked? Any engine I create, except Steam or Electric, the only option is always Gasoline.

As of v1.23.4, Ethnol requires 40 skill points. It is weighed heavily more toward modern e85 engines than the couple years they were used in the early 1900s.

Yeah, those naval contracts are pretty close to impossible. Same with some of the early ariplane contracts that want 90lb engines.

Copy and paste of very good advice:

Originally posted by deletethis:

Here are some quick observations about designing engines.

The stroke setting didles both RPM and torque. Power is RPM times torque. A high stroke has too much torque and too little RPM. A low stroke has too much RPM and too little torque. If you move the slider across, you will see a spot where you get maximum horse power. That is the peak setting. If you care about squeezing every last horsepower out of every cc, notch it down a bit as you don't surrender much horsepower, but are cutting down on cc displacement (times the cylinder count!)

Note that different length/width and bock type settings will affect exactly where the peak is. So, set the desired configuration first and then slide the stroke up and down till you find optimal.

Next, the bore setting produces power linearly. A bore set to 50 produces half the power of a bore set to 100. However, the area squares (and hence displacement too, since stroke is constant). So the best power to displacement is when the piston has the smallest possible bore. If you want a bit more power, you can notch it up a bit, but the squaring of area vs linear power adds up quickly.

This strategy can give you decent power with excellent fuel economy.

If you wnat more power but still keep the cc's down, add more cylinders. Of course, this drives up the price. (and the additional displacement also drives down fuel economy).

Have fun :)

Regarding bore giving linear increase in power, is that based on something in reality or a bug? It makes no sense to me that an engine with 50mm bore would give a quarter of the power of an engine with 200mm bore, all other things being equal. The latter is enormous in combustion volume.

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

Regarding bore giving linear increase in power, is that based on something in reality or a bug? It makes no sense to me that an engine with 50mm bore would give a quarter of the power of an engine with 200mm bore, all other things being equal. The latter is enormous in combustion volume.

Overboring a stock engine and only changing out the pistons, your power gains would be minimal to none. As engine efficiency drops as cylinder sizes increase. What really matters is compression ratio. So you will have to swap out a few extra parts to take advantage of the increased combustion chamber size.

Since the game is fairly abstracted, we do not assume the engineers design the engine exactly the same for each change of a slider. Wouldn't make much sense for them to do so, as their job is to optimize the design.

We don't go as far as doing all the mathematics behind compression ratios, cylinder efficiencies, etc. Back in 2011 when I started developing the vehicle development system I ran across our main competitor, Automation, which was just an engine designer at the time (still is as far as I can tell). Unfortunately for me, they had significantly more resources (especially in the art department) so I shifted focus and made the designer less technical (and less artistic) than it could have been.

Anyhoo, the system should match specs of real world vehicles between 1900 and 2020. You may have to fidget with some of the other sliders to get the exact HP/Torque/RPM Fuel economy data, but most real engines can be mimicked.

Originally posted by Eric.B:

I shifted focus and made the designer less technical (and less artistic) than it could have been.

And I sure am glad you did. It's already a learning curve if you aren't into engines before playing the game. I still just ignore the fact that we have "bore" and "stroke" and move them in tandem, treating the pair as if it was a single "displacement" slider. Since a few real-world engines I looked at had them fairly close to equal, I figured it'll be a good way to go for now.