In the game, you unlock design sub-components through two variables, the current year and your design skills.

The year requirement is obvious, but how does Design Skills work?

You can view your current design skills by opening the reports and then selecting Industrials, Labor Skills.

You can find the Engines, Chassis, Gearbox, and Coachwork skills on the right side of the table.

We mainly base your design skills on the overall rating of the designs you make.

The game takes an average of the overall rating of all designs built in the last 5 years. The game then compares this number to your design skills.

If this average is greater than your design skills by over 1%, your design skills will go up.

If it is less than 1% greater, they will go down slightly.

And if the average is below your design skills, your skills will go down.

Besides your designs, you can fund research teams.

To access your research teams, enter the RnD Department.

And then Research Teams.

The Research Teams window also displays locked sub-components and their requirements. We’ll cover that shortly.

On the left-hand side are sliders and text boxes. These are the budgets for your Research Teams.

Research teams add bonus points to your quarterly change of design skills.

The amount of bonus points research teams add is linear to the amount of money you’re spending on research.

At the maximum budget, you can completely compensate for design skill loss from your average component’s overall rating, being below your design skills.

This amount of funding is generally not economically feasible.

Research Teams are only a bonus added to your design skill change. If you expect to lose 0.25 because of your design’s ratings, then throwing 20% budget into the research team can lower the loss to 0.2.

If you expected to gain 0.15 design skill points, that 20% budget could raise it to a 0.20 gain instead.

To adjust your budgets, slide the sliders or type in the dollar amount you want in each category’s text box.

You can also check the “Lock Percentage” button if you want the game to automatically update the budget to the same slider position every year.

Please note, we may not update the slider position on the same month we update the maximum budget.

Click the Apply button to save your changes.

Racing is also another way to raise your design skill points. By having the team focus or series focus sliders toward development, you will gain a small bonus to your design skill points.

You can view your current design skills for each class here.

And the expected change in rating here.

The sub-component design your most likely to unlock first is in the first location.

The next three most likely are in the smaller boxes.

The design skill requirement is here. This value will decrease every year until it reaches the minimum value of 1.

The first year you can unlock the sub-component is here.

Once you unlock a sub-component, you will receive notification in your memos.

When you purchase another company, the game will average the design skills of that company into your design skills.

The game will not re-lock any sub-component designs you have already unlocked.

We also use design skills in calculating your component and vehicle ratings. So the usefulness of these variables and systems extends beyond unlocking sub-components.