Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 141: Restoring The Balance

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 141: Restoring The Balance

It is with great pleasure that I am here to tell you that I have finally recovered from my brief illness - my sense of balance has been mostly (entirely?) restored, and I no longer feel dizzy or faint when I attempt to stand up or sit down. This brings us to our next point: how to balance a tech pool distribution. Ever since tech pool was introduced to Automation's sandbox mode, the default tech pool distribution has been +5 in all car and engine categories; with 10 and 6 areas for the car and engine, respectively, this equates to 80 tech pool points in total. However, some challenges require you to use fewer (or more) tech pool points at most.

Using the tech pool limit for QFC19 (which I am currently hosting) as an example, the maximum tech pool allocations for the car and engine are 20 and 10 points, respectively, for a total of 30 points. However, this limit on its own is insufficient to deter techpool spam, in which one area is given a very large number of tech pool points (up to 15), sometimes at the expense of other areas, which receive few or no tech pool points each. So I decided to impose a limit on how many tech pool points can be invested in a particular area - in this case, I mandated a maximum of 5 tech pool points in any one category. Thus, you could theoretically allocate 5 points each to 4 different areas on the car and leave the other areas at 0 tech pool points each, while the engine could have 2 different areas with 5 tech pool points each, leaving other engine-related areas at 0 points each. With tech pool limits imposed not only on the whole car, but also on individual areas, you have to carefully decide which parts you want to unlock with a limited tech pool allocation.

An example of a tech pool distribution with 10 points allocated towards the engine and 20 points used on the car, for a total of 30 points. If, in addition to this, a maximum of 5 points can be assigned to any one area, then in theory, 4 different parts of the car (and 2 different parts of the engine) can receive 5 tech pool points each.

The result of not having tech pool limits for individual areas was shown quite clearly to me in CSR 152, which had a very generous tech pool allocation (55 and 35 points in total for the car and engine, respectively), but no limits on how many points could be assigned to any given area. Inevitably, this led to some entrants resorting to techpool spam, and predictably, their submissions were among the first to be eliminated for the sake of realism. On the other hand, a few other entrants used few or no tech pool points for their submissions, and as such were also eliminated early on due to being too close to (or even above) the budget cap.

You could avoid the problem of techpool spam by requiring all tech pool sliders to be set to 0, but this defeats the point of having sandbox techpool in the first place. The best use for this would be in old-school challenges designed to emulate the earlier builds of Automation, which did not have the tech pool feature. Even so, this setting also prevents you from unlocking parts sooner than usual (and in fact forces you to take longer to do so than with even a modest use of techpool in any area), as well as increasing the cost, production units, and engineering time for your build even further.

In short, working with an overall tech pool limit greater than zero forces you to choose your tech pool options wisely, especially if there is also a tech pool limit for individual areas - but in that case, don't leave behind any unused tech pool points. Deciding which parts you want to unlock (and use) with a limited tech pool allocation (budget permitting) can therefore make a huge difference.