>Balancing wheels and repairing parts have now become minigames. The
>wheel-balancing minigame is OK (you just have to line up highlighted
>segments on a wheel diagram with a marker and click a few times), but
>the part repair one is seriously tedious.

Now that I've been playing the full version of the game for a while, my attitude toward the part repair minigame has softened somewhat. I still disagree with the idea of structuring checks around player ability in a game with RPG-style character skills, but the minigame itself seems substantially less annoying in the finished game than I remember it from the demo. For one thing, in addition to the red "failure" and green "success" spaces, there are now grey spaces in the bar the pointer slides across. If you hit one of those, you spend a little money on the attempted repair, but nothing else happens. I don't remember the "neutral" spaces from the demo. For another, the way they structured the skill tree, buying levels in the repair skill does two things: it unlocks different tiers of parts you can attempt to repair (for instance, at level 5 you unlock the ability to repair fiddly components like fuel injection rails), and it increases the chance that you'll completely repair a part with a single success.

Under the old system, you just got a flat "chance to repair" with each repair skill upgrade, and all you could do was click on the part. The RNG would then determine whether you improved its condition or instantly ruined it. Now, each time you hit a green bar, you'll either fix it a bit or fix it completely, while hitting a red only ruins the part outright if it's already in very poor condition. I haven't done the math, but the upshot seems to be that even with my old-man reflexes, I have a better success rate (with fully upgraded repair skill) in CMS 2021 than I did in CMS 2018, and trying it is more interesting.

Besides, if you really can't be bothered with it, by the time you're skilled up enough that it's worth trying to repair parts, you should have enough money that you don't really need to fix them anyway. You can just buy all new ones. I like to try to salvage as much of my own barn-find and junkyard salvage cars as possible for RP purposes, but in practical terms, apart from costing more, buying all new parts has no in-game effect that I've noticed.

TLDR: I still think it would be nice if they had included a way to shut off the repair minigame, as one of the devs noted in the Steam discussions on the demo that they were considering, and just go back to the 2018 system if desired, so that players would still have at least a chance of repairing parts if they can't be arsed to play the minigame, but the minigame itself isn't so bad.

(Also, now that I've gotten good at the tire balancing minigame, I can mount and balance a set of four tires way faster in the new game. People defended the balancing minigame as something to fill the time that used to be spent just sitting around waiting for the balancer to work automatically, and it is that, but it's also much faster once you get the hang of it.)

Oddly, there still is one "automatic repair" tool in the game: you can buy a brake lathe for your repair shop, and it works completely on its own, like the tire balancer in CMS 2018 did. You just put a brake disc on it and wait for it to stop animating, then take a fixed brake disc off. No minigame.

Finally, here's a strange thing I noticed earlier. When the game came out, the confirmation dialogue that came up when you clicked on the pressure washer in the car wash asked, "Do you wanna wash this car?" A tiny update dropped quietly on Steam today, and now it says, "Do you want to wash this car?" I guess someone didn't like the informality of the original wording. :)

(I don't know why the car wash and detailer even have confirmation dialogues, to be honest. Neither costs money to use, and I doubt any customer is ever going to complain that the car came back too clean.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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