For starters, Buenos Aires isn't that remote.

Check the size of the factories. You'll find at minimum slider settings, normal game mode, London is a 1-line / 19-estimate and Buenos Aires is a 1/13.

So the size of the London factory is greater. That accounts for a little bit of the time.

Next, the population and per capita of the city plays an effect. Bigger cities are going to have more regulation hurdles to clear settings up a factory. So building in bigger cities is going to require more time in the game. (I believe lobbying will speed it up a little, but I am not 100% I ever got around to implementing that.)

Beyond that, it's a time sink to try to force players out of NY, London, Paris, etc. Since historically, it was smaller industrial cities (and suburbs) that made the vehicles, IE Detroit instead of NYC. Anyway this decision was made about 10 years ago, and won't be changed before release.

As you may know, the game is in release candidate phase, which means the game is done. I am only fixing bugs and finishing up text content now. The later of which is 95% my efforts the last couple of weeks. After release, I will attempt to crowd fund money in what I call the Feature Bounty program. In that fund raiser, there is a chance I will completely overhaul the factory production system, including the factory construction system. If that happens, then there will be changes made to the factory construction time limits. As I won't have to force players out of major cities the way I try to do now.

Fair enough on being feature complete, and I wasn't suggesting you should change how it works. Rather, the point is that this along with many other mechanics is a bit opaque and confusing. It's not necessarily clear how things work and why you see the result that you do.

Now that the mechanics are settled, do you have any plans to release documentation describing the formulas for how exactly various features work? If not, any plans to release the source code at some point, so that we can figure it out ourselves and build up a wiki?

The current wiki is pretty lacking, and I'd guess this is because nobody except you is 100% sure how exactly things work, since the game's complexity makes it a hard to reverse-engineer just by playing.

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

Now that the mechanics are settled, do you have any plans to release documentation describing the formulas for how exactly various features work?

A formula manual will come after the game is released, depending on how successful the feature bounty is, it may come after that has ran its course.

If not, any plans to release the source code at some point,

Being a commercial product, and at times, my only source of income. Releasing the source code at this time would be financial suicide. (Even though continuing to work on the game has been financial suicide since 2017.) The game will go FOSS when either 1) I go out of business, or 2) It no longer makes me decent income. It won't happen before then, unless the feature bounty system is wildly successful.

Eitherway, I suspect you won't have to wait too many years to peak at the source code.

so that we can figure it out ourselves and build up a wiki?

If you look around here, I explain much of the information you seek already. Even the topic of this thread has been discussed at least twice in the last 11 years from my memory.

There is already a couple user made wikis in other languages, but the user base of GC isn't really large enough to support them for the long haul.

The current wiki is pretty lacking, and I'd guess this is because nobody except you is 100% sure how exactly things work, since the game's complexity makes it a hard to reverse-engineer just by playing.

The game manual (Wiki) will be completed before the game is released. I've been bogged down finishing the in-game content, such as newspaper articles, vehicle reviews, etc. The manual (Wiki) currently only has unfinished, unedited information on the mod tools because 1) I needed a way to show people how to make mods, and 2) the game wasn't completed yet. It would have been a waste of time writing a manual for something that wasn't done, because a lot of the information would have been obsoleted.

I did recently make several hours worth of tutorial videos. Significantly more people would rather watch tutorials than read the manual. So it was better to put the effort into those first.

I will start working on the manual (wiki) once I'm done with the remaining in game text. I have 220 more paragraphs to go until I'm finished with car reviews. After that, I will work on the last remaining maps in parallel with the manual, a final play through test, with PR, and then the game is ready for release.


In the mean time, you can find the old draft of the 1.12 Open Beta manual here: http://gearcity.info/Downloads/Beta/gcManualTextFin.odt (Sadly I don't think I have the released manual anymore, at least I can't find it with a quick look. It's probably on my file server.)

It won't however answer the question of this forum topic. This topic is too specific to how the math behind the game works, which is sort of giving away trade secrets, and will be saved for the formula manual.

You are definitely one of the most engaged devs when it comes to responding to community questions, but still a forum discussion is often not as in-depth or precise as a wiki page that accumulated multiple clarifications and detail edits from the community would be. There's also the unfortunate matter that forums are pretty terrible to search. On the balance, I'm still frequently mystified by how parts of the game work, after years of following your progress on and off, many discussions with you and others here, and often digging through old threads in search of answers.

I have no idea what is and isn't appropriate to release from a business viewpoint, you are obviously a much better judge of that, but from a player's point of view, you have to be able to understand the rules of the game you are playing. If a game is simple (which yours isn't), it can be intuitive. If a game is complex, but there is a way to learn what you need to understand how the simulation works, then it can be a long and fun journey of discovery. But if it's complex and there isn't a way to learn, then it's just a confusing thing similar to a random number generator, and so much of your work building intricate details into the systems is wasted on the player, who just goes: "I don't know, it's just some weird mechanic again that makes no sense, just find a way to make enough money to ignore it."

So, it's great to hear a formula manual is planned! I suspect it will make the game much more enjoyable and light up a lot of cool things that I currently ignore.

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

but still a forum discussion is often not as in-depth

I disagree, I often go into details and give explanation with forum posts. I will not be going into explanation with a formula manual. It will be literally the game formulas, rewritten in pseudo code. I won't be explaining much, if anything outside of code. And what the variables are.

or precise as a wiki page that accumulated multiple clarifications and detail edits from the community would be.

The game manual is not a community wiki. Nor will it ever be. I believe a wiki format is the best way to create a manual, which is why we have an official wiki. That will host the game manual and formula manuals.

There's also the unfortunate matter that forums are pretty terrible to search.

I don't disagree with you here. Our official forums where significantly better, including with search, but sadly the user base choice Steam over the official forums. I've ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about the quality of Steam Forum software for years on Valve's board. But nothing changes.

On the balance, I'm still frequently mystified by how parts of the game work, after years of following your progress on and off, many discussions with you and others here, and often digging through old threads in search of answers.

Here is where we're different. I believe that the eighty thousand+ words of help buttons. 2-3 hours of interactive audio tutorials, and the 4.5 hours of video tutorials are WAY more than enough explanation on how to play the game.

What you want goes WAY beyond how to play the game. You're looking for detailed explanation of every variable that goes into why London takes more time to create a factory than Buenos Aires. A subject which is practically completely irrelevant to playing the game, and is really only useful for min/maxing. Personally, I believe min/maxing breaks games, and make them worse as a player.

But there has been enough requests for these details over the last 8 or 9 years since the game was publicly released, so it will come. But like the manual, I want to wait until the last minute before I write it, because it's a waste of time for me to do it, and then have to rewrite it when I make revisions.

but from a player's point of view, you have to be able to understand the rules of the game you are playing.

Again, I disagree with you here. You don't need to know the details of the ~20 variables that go into the amount of time it takes to build a factory unless you are modding the game. And even then, only a handful of them are modifiable. The information you need as a player is presented to you. The game shows you how long it takes to build a factory. You adjust the sliders, and the finish time updates.

99% of the people playing don't care to know the details that goes on beyond the scene. Knowing the formula on factory construction time is irrelevant to most players.

If a game is simple (which yours isn't), it can be intuitive. If a game is complex, but there is a way to learn what you need to understand how the simulation works, then it can be a long and fun journey of discovery. But if it's complex and there isn't a way to learn, then it's just a confusing thing similar to a random number generator, and so much of your work building intricate details into the systems is wasted on the player, who just goes: "I don't know, it's just some weird mechanic again that makes no sense, just find a way to make enough money to ignore it."

Look at it this way. It takes me a month (200 hours) to write the formula manual. It creates 0 new sales, 100-200 people out of 20,000 are able to use the information, and it improves their enjoyability of the game only slightly, only in the fact that they can see the detailed information of why something is the way it is when they think it should be another way. Or they use the information to exploit the game. In addition to all this, all my competition now has access to the game formulas and can roll them, themselves.

So really, in my opinion, formula manual doesn't really improve your understanding of the game. It won't help you play the game any better. And it's not needed for the vast majority of people playing the game. It's just data. Maybe it helps find a few bugs. It will generate a lot of time wasting forum post for me to reply to. It might save me some time just pointing to the manual instead of getting bogged down in forum posts. Even if I don't really see the usefulness of it as a player, it will get done, because I said it will get done.

I won't try to convince you that the way I play games is valid. You're, of course, free to cater or not cater to different types of players and you succeed or fail in part based on how well you read the market, so for all I know you are correct about the 99% ratio, even if it seems unlikely to me.

But I am curious about your line of thinking. If you mean to cater to the playerbase who doesn't need to understand the complex factors involved in your simulation, then why did you go to such great lengths to build them? I think as it stands, if half of the complexity suddenly disappeared from the game, I would barely notice, despite being one of the few who actually care to understand how everything works. Those who don't care to understand it definitely wouldn't have noticed. So why not just build the minimum you need to satisfy your target audience? Why build something with so much depth if you don't want people trying to understand that depth?

For example, you could've just hard-coded a set of multipliers for each decade to determine factory cost/duration by region and most players wouldn't really care, but instead you came up with a very intricate system that takes into account tens of factors, including such non-obvious ones as red tape scaling with the size of the city and lobbying efforts potentially counteracting that. It must have taken you quite a bit of work to do that, but other than hardcore automotive historians, who know that factories were easier to build in smaller towns in early 20th century, almost nobody will notice.

Just like the manual, it's X hours for 0 extra sales. So why do it? Is it an artist's satisfaction at the inner beauty of the thing or maybe you think it does contribute to the enjoyment of your target audience even though they don't know it exists or understand how it works?

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

I won't try to convince you that the way I play games is valid.

I'm not trying to invalidate the way you play. I'm just pointing out that I don't think the information is needed to play. I am more than happy to provide the information, but on my own schedule, because I don't think it's required knowledge to play. Until then, I'm more than happy to answer individual questions as people have them.

But I am curious about your line of thinking. If you mean to cater to the playerbase who doesn't need to understand the complex factors involved in your simulation, then why did you go to such great lengths to build them? I think as it stands, if half of the complexity suddenly disappeared from the game, I would barely notice, despite being one of the few who actually care to understand how everything works. Those who don't care to understand it definitely wouldn't have noticed. So why not just build the minimum you need to satisfy your target audience? Why build something with so much depth if you don't want people trying to understand that depth?

The premise of this statement is false. If I didn't want people to understand the complexities of the game, I wouldn't have 11,369 forum posts here on Steam, several thousand on my forums, and 17,382 emails.


The difference is, I don't think you require to know every variable of every formula to know how to play the game. You don't understand every bit of code on your computer, most of it is not publicly available for you to view, yet you interact with it just fine, and probably have mastered its use. And a computer is much more complex system than GC is. That argument could be applied to every facet of life.



And before you say, you should just release the code/formula manual to cut back on forum posts, I have doubts that most people are going to be able to understand them. It will require a fair bit of math and formal logic knowledge, compared to me just explaining in words and using real life examples.

Just like the manual, it's X hours for 0 extra sales. So why do it? Is it an artist's satisfaction at the inner beauty of the thing or maybe you think it does contribute to the enjoyment of your target audience even though they don't know it exists or understand how it works?

Multiple reasons, chief of which, the end result is significantly better the more realistic you can simulate it. While it's harder to create, it's much more satisfying than a table. That being said, even if it was a table, you'd still get the same reasoning from me. I don't think most people need to see a results table to work with the complexity of the game.

Ultimately, GearCity was designed for me. But I seriously considered feedback from everyone for a long while there, because you guys get a lot more play time than I do. Plus I know how the sausage is made.

Anyway, it's all moot. I have said I will supply a formula manual after the game is finished several times over the last decade. It still stands, I plan on releasing a formula manual when I am done working on the game.

Oh, yeah, I hope it doesn't come across as an argument trying to spur you to do something or do it faster. You already said you'd explain the formulas eventually, and thanks for that. I'm only carrying on the discussion partly to understand your thinking better and partly to better explain my view where I think you may not be seeing it because, like you said, having made the sausage there are many things that are obvious to you that aren't to me. Because you made it, I don't think you really know what it's like to play your game without understanding it, and hopefully hearing my viewpoint helps.

The difference between many forum answers in general terms and a fully detailed formula (or better yet actual useful conclusions people already made based on the fully detailed formula) is the ability to make decisions on how to play.

For example, after all these years, I just realized yesterday that various skills (besides the obvious three design ones you see prominently in R&D office) also fluctuate, and some of mine dropped in just two game years. I have no idea if this is a threat to my long-term success or not, why it's falling, what I can do to stop or reverse the fall, and whether it's worth doing those things right now or if I should ignore the situation until later when I'm better positioned to address it.

So, I searched the forum and came up with this from you:

Administration skills effects costs, negotiations, strikes, branches, etc.

It grows based on the size of your company. The more branches and factories you open, the higher your skills will go up.

OK, cool, that's interesting, but it's not sufficient to make any of the decisions I described above. I'm still no closer to understanding if this is a problem for my company or not. To do that I need to know, at least roughly, how big is the effect on costs(and what costs - everything you pay for, or just maintenance of branches and factories), how the size of my company influences this rating.

Let's imagine the formula is something like cost = [something-something-something] * (1 - 0.2 * (adminSkill/100)). Then I know the effect is limited to 1/5th of the total value, so in the absolute worst case I'll still be fine, and I can ignore it for now. But if the multiplier is 1-0.8*(adminSkill/100)), then I know it's a very important factor that can make my costs 5x what they could be, and I really need to figure out how to control this because it can make or break the company.

Of course, I don't actually particularly want to dig through math formulas, let alone code, to figure this out and I'd rather just understand the conclusions, but I don't know of any way to get there without asking you about every little thing, which will get really annoying to you really quickly regardless of how willing you usually are to answer.

Not everybody will be able to understand the formulas once they are revealed, but I suspect there will be enough players who will analyze them and come up with conclusions that can be shared with everyone else in a wiki or a guide. Then you won't be the only person who has to answer all the questions and the community can support itself to a much larger degree.

So while you might be technically right in that it's possible to play without understanding all mechanics, it's only possible as far as you just ignore them and hope for the best. :) That's why I say when the details are going to be available to the community, I think it'll make the gameplay a lot more enjoyable for some of us. Not because we enjoy so much to geek out on math formulas, but because we'll finally understand what's important and what isn't and how to effect the bits that are important.

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

For example, after all these years, I just realized yesterday that various skills (besides the obvious three design ones you see prominently in R&D office) also fluctuate, and some of mine dropped in just two game years.

Well then you failed to watch the video tutorials.

https://youtu.be/EzVGGSTAOM8?t=122

I believe there are several help buttons in the game that explain it as well, but that might have been in the old reports system.

I have no idea if this is a threat to my long-term success or not, why it's falling, what I can do to stop or reverse the fall, and whether it's worth doing those things right now or if I should ignore the situation until later when I'm better positioned to address it.

And again, I fail to see why the formula should be given to you. Practically every other game gives you variables, and the formula is hidden. Lets take a EA Sports game as an example. In soccer is given a number of stats which cross over. You have a Ball Control, 3 Passing Variables, Aggression variables, vision variable, composure variable, Position variable, Balance variable, Agility, Strength, and Stamina. Everyone of those would are probably involved with passing the ball.

They don't give you the formula, they don't tell you a percentage of how useful each of those variables are.

You play with a limited knowledge and the rest of the magic is hidden to produce slightly different results for each player, or for you to learn either by trail and error.

OK, cool, that's interesting, but it's not sufficient to make any of the decisions I described above. I'm still no closer to understanding if this is a problem for my company or not. To do that I need to know, at least roughly, how big is the effect on costs(and what costs - everything you pay for, or just maintenance of branches and factories), how the size of my company influences this rating.

Personally, I think you being able to predict the impact of it on your company hurts the game. That's why the information is hidden in most games.

Let's use a real life example. You know going to college can get you a better job. But it does not guarantee you a better job. It can be a great decision, or it can be a very bad decision if you pick the wrong major. If you gained the power to predict the future (knowing the formula), you would only pick the most optimal path in life.

You shouldn't know the impact of the administrative skill in to the long term effect of your company. If you can predict the future, then there is no trial and error, you'll always pick the most optimal path. If you knew all the optimal paths, then what's the point of playing? To find a better optimal path?

You should know the basic effects of these ratings, you should know how these ratings change. If I failed to document it in our current documentation, that's on me. The manual will give me more flexibility for details like this.

But your argument for seeing the minute details of these ratings in both generation and effect fails to sway my opinion. To me, if you know exactly how everything works, then you're just trying to find an optimal path in a math program rather than playing a game or simulation. If that's your thing, that's fine. I don't mind catering to you. Otherwise I wouldn't be giving out the recipe to the game by making a formula manual. I'm just not a fan of playing games that way.

And again, I fail to see why the formula should be given to you.

I don't think what I'm trying to convey is being made clear. I don't want a formula, I want *quantified* understanding of the game mechanics, which I am supposed to use while playing it. I want to know what it means in practice when it says in the report "Administrative 18%". I started with 20, so clearly it went down for some reason. Is this normal, an inconsequential problem, or a big one? Does this mean my people are, figuratively, filing endless TPF reports while nothing gets done, and a competitor's managers are running a well-oiled agile business machine that's about to eat me for lunch, or is my business more or less on par with what everyone is doing in that era and I shouldn't worry about it? If I don't know that, I can't act on the information, so at that point it might as well not exist. That's what I mean.

You should know the basic effects of these ratings, you should know how these ratings change.

Yes, but not just that. You also want to know how important these ratings are and how hard they are to change. This isn't soccer, you have hundreds of pieces of data about the company, some of which are critical and some aren't.

I mean, it's possible that for some running an early 20th century automotive company is as intuitive as playing soccer, but not for me. :)

There's no need to show minute calculation details if you can explain all that's needed about everything, but that is much harder to achieve, IMO, and showing formulas is a way to offload some of that to the community and let us figure it out together.

Sure, some will use it to fully solve for the "optimal" strategy, but as you said doing only that is boring. Much more likely, people like me will use that to learn things about the game they don't know, and be better able to work within the mechanics to achieve whatever goals they set for themselves.

Sounds like you just want the manual then, which is coming as I get the time to work on it. Right now, I am finishing the remaining text content for the game when I have time on a PC. The manual is a high priority before release, so it will be finished.

If it does not have the details you're looking for, you may check the formula manual, which is less of a priority, but will be done eventually.


As for user wikis, that has nothing to do with me. I'm more than happy to host it, but the official wiki is just a medium for me to write the manual to.

Yep, that's exactly what I'm hoping for and what I was saying will make the game better for me. :)

The wiki thing I just brought up as something that the community can write ourselves to fill gaps in the official manual if formulas are available. But, hey, maybe it won't even be needed.