Marketing | The Undercut Wiki

The Marketing app is where every commercial contract in your career is won, kept or lost. It merges the old Sponsors and Suppliers apps into one shell with five tabs, all feeding off a single pool of Marketing work units (WU). Sponsors are pure money; suppliers are money and car performance — and both now hold you to a per-race objective instead of just cashing the cheque.

How to open it

Desk icon 1 (Sponsors) or the hub’s Sponsors entry → opens on the Sponsors tab.
The hub’s Suppliers entry → opens the same app on the Suppliers tab.
A deal ready or rival interest email’s action button → opens straight on Missions.
Tab cycles the five tabs, Escape closes the topmost modal, then the app.

The app is write-mode only in the pre-season (it goes read-only the moment a season is running). One exception: the Care / Court buttons stay live all year — account management is an in-season decision.

The negotiation window (read this first)

Everything in this app runs on one clock and one budget.

One window per season. The negotiation window opens with pre-season phase 2 (Sponsors) and closes at the end of phase 3 (Suppliers). Each phase is 5 turns, so the window is 10 turns long, and both the sponsor race and the supplier race tick on every one of those 10 turns — a supplier mission started on turn 1 of the Sponsors phase keeps advancing while you are still looking at sponsors.

One WU pool. Capacity per turn is:

marketing_capacity = 10 + marketing_level × 5      (Lv1 = 15/turn, Lv5 = 35, Lv10 = 60)
free               = capacity − sponsor missions − supplier missions − care WU

Sponsor missions, supplier missions and partner care all draw from that same number. A mission that has completed (READY) releases its WU — a finished deal costs you nothing to hold, only a slot.

Mission size. The WU a deal takes is set by the brand’s stature:

wu_required = 15 + (budget + prominence) × 3        (sponsors)
wu_required = 15 + (budget + size)       × 3        (suppliers)
→ 21 WU for the smallest brand, 75 WU for the biggest

Progress per turn is not just the WU you park on it:

progress += wu_per_turn × (1 + 0.03 × marketing_level)

That multiplier (marketing_nego_boost) is why two teams committing identical WU do not finish at the same time. It applies to the AI too.

Choosing WU/turn. The start dialog steps in units of 1, minimum 1, capped by your free pool — every last WU can be committed. It shows ~N turn(s) to complete. A level-1 office (15 WU/turn) fully focused can land even the biggest brand inside the window; a big office runs several missions in parallel instead.

Contract length is rolled, then unlocked. At mission start the game rolls a duration cap (1–5 seasons):

s   = (marketing_level/10) × 0.6 + (stature/20) × 0.4      # stature = the two ratings summed, 2..20
cap = 1 + floor((rand × 0.5 + s × 0.5) × 5)                # clamped 1..5

Half skill, half dice. You then unlock years as the mission progresses:

unlocked_contract_years = 1 + round((cap − 1) × progress/wu_required)

A completed mission unlocks the full cap. This matters most for client supplier deals, which you can sign at any moment: sign with no mission running and you get one season only.

Completing a deal is not owning it. A completed mission sets deal_ready — the offer then waits for your signature. It is not a reservation:

Rivals keep negotiating the same brand. The AI signs the same turn it completes, so it never sits on a stealable deal — you do.
The moment anyone signs, every rival mission on that brand dies (for suppliers, only the partnership offer is revoked — see below).
Any ready-but-unsigned deal expires when the window closes at the end of the Suppliers phase, with an “offer expired” email.

Past relationships bias the start. A brand you parted with on good terms (or courted with care WU) starts the new mission part-done; one that left angry demands more:

bias > 0 → progress starts at wu_required × bias%
bias < 0 → wu_required is inflated by (1 + |bias|%)

The bias is shown in the Negotiation column as +12% / −9% when no mission is running. A brand that refused you outright shows Refuses (N sn) and cannot be negotiated at all until the ban lapses.

Tab 1 — Sponsors (directory)

The full sponsor pool your marketing network can see, sortable by every column.

Column	What it means
Name	Logo + brand. Grey name = not clickable (signed, refusing, or an offer is out)
Sector	Cosmetic (12 sectors) — no mechanical effect
Origin	Home country flag; feeds title-sponsor placement and the Economy ranking
Budget	1–10 — the dominant money driver
Prominence	1–10 — money multiplier
Income	What this brand would pay as a Secondary at your current Marketing level. The `×2 P` suffix is the reminder that a Principal deal doubles it
Negotiation	`—` no mission · `NN%` mission running · `READY` completed · `100% READY` (green) discovered by your own marketing · `+N%/−N%` past-relationship bias
(dot)	Discovery dot: green = your marketing found it, amber = a rival’s did
Status	See the status table below
Marketing	Care (a brand you hold) / Court (a brand you don’t) / `N WU` in gold once WU are parked

The discovery circle

You do not see the whole pool. Visibility is deterministic per brand:

score   = (budget + prominence) × 4 + hash(name) % 20        # 8 .. 100
visible = score ≤ 30 + marketing_level × 7

Level 1 sees roughly the small half of the market; level 10 sees everything. Raising Marketing does not just make you negotiate better — it puts brands on the screen that were literally invisible before.

The money formula

base = budget × 17,550                                        if budget ≤ 5.5
base = 5.5 × 17,550 × (budget / 5.5) ^ sponsor_income_spread   if budget > 5.5   (spread default 1.5)
money_per_gp = base × (1 + (prominence − 5) × 0.1)

The sponsor_income_spread slider (Settings → Career, default 1.5) only acts upward: brands at or below rating 5.5 keep the plain linear scale, headline brands pull away on a power curve. That fracture is deliberate — a top team stacking headline sponsors can cover a top driver’s asking price; a backmarker lives on scraps.

At signature, two more multipliers land:

deal_quality = 1 − 0.02 × (10 − marketing_level)     # Lv1 ×0.82 … Lv10 ×1.00
tier         = ×2 (Principal) or ×1 (Secondary)
money_per_gp = base_payout × deal_quality × tier

The deal-quality malus is permanent for the life of the contract. Signing a 5-year headline deal with a level-2 marketing office locks in an 18 % haircut for five seasons.

Slots

1 Principal + 2 Secondary. You may complete more missions than you have slots — the surplus just sits unsigned (and stealable) until the window closes.

The green dot: direct signing

A sponsor your own marketing department discovered (green dot) arrives pre-negotiated at 100 %. The Status button reads Sign now instead of Negotiate, the modal lets you pick tier and 1–5 seasons, and it costs zero WU. It still pays the deal-quality malus.

Discovery happens once per pre-season (at the end of the Infrastructure step):

draws = marketing_level × sponsors_per_marketing_level     (slider, default 1)

Draws are weighted by each hidden brand’s drop_rate (common 6–10, rare 0.3–1). The hidden pool is topped back up to slider × 10 each pre-season, refilling only the shortfall — the ~12 AI marketing departments are drawing from the same pool, so draws are genuinely contested.

A discovered deal is free and un-stealable, but it consumes a slot. The AI knows this: an ambitious board holds its free reserve back for a turn when its own running mission targets a clearly bigger cheque, and always signs it on the window’s last turn.

Variable income and per-race objectives (0.5.0)

Every sponsor contract carries a variable share of 30–50 %, deterministic per brand name and scaled by the “Variable Share ×” career slider:

effective_per_gp = money × (1 − share) + money × share × (happiness / 100)

A brand at happiness 60 with a 40 % variable share pays you 84 % of its sticker price. This is the number Finance and every income display use.

Happiness moves per race against a team-classification target:

stature = round((budget + prominence + 1) / 2)          # 1..10
target  = num_teams + 1 − stature                       # stature 10 on a 12-team grid → P3

base  = clamp(gap × partner_hap_per_place, ±4 places' worth)     # slider default 2.0/place
if base < 0: base ×= (1 − care_absorb)                            # care WU soften only the malus
delta = base × (0.5 + 0.5 × races_done/races_total)               # degressive: early races count half
      + 5 if you won  /  + 8 on a 1-2                             # clamped −10 .. +12

The Race Debrief’s Partner Objectives panel gives you a ✓/✗ per brand each weekend.

Contract end: bias and refusals

When a contract expires (before the retain pass), closing happiness plus accrued care writes the negotiation bias for next time:

happiness ≥ 60 → +((h − 60)/2), capped +20
happiness ≤ 40 → −((40 − h)/2), capped −20
+ care accrual, total clamped −20 .. +40

…and the brand rolls whether it will talk to you at all (× the “Partner Refusal ×” slider):

Closing happiness	Refusal chance	Ban length
< 30	35 %–80 % (worse the lower)	1–5 seasons
30–49	10 %	1–3 seasons
≥ 50	2 % (“strategic shift”)	1–2 seasons

A refusal greys out Negotiate and blocks client supplier deals, and you get an email about it.

Care WU (account management)

The Care button parks Marketing WU on a signed partner. It does two things:

malus absorbed   = min(WU × partner_care_absorb, 0.60)     # slider default 4 %/WU, cap 60 %
renewal head start = WU × 0.15 % per GP, capped at +25 %

Cap is 10 WU per partner (CARE_WU_MAX). On a brand you don’t hold, the same button reads Court and the accrual becomes a head start for the next negotiation window. Court is hidden while the negotiation window is open (negotiating directly beats courting) unless WU are already parked there.

Read-only status board: your signed sponsors with their terms, plus the field-wide deal feed (who signed what) and a “under negotiation — see Missions tab” section. Use it to see which rival is stacking which sector, and which brands are entering their last year (the ones worth courting now).

Tab 3 — Suppliers (directory)

Three categories — Engine, Tires, Fuel — and one slot each. There is no way to hold two engine suppliers.

Column	What it means
Category	Engine / Tires / Fuel, colour-coded
Valuation	The brand’s budget rating 1–10
Prestige	0–100 racing pedigree: category base + PFS seasons, GP wins and titles of the teams it supplies. It grows with results on your grid
Client Cost	What a client contract costs you per GP right now, with your live mission discount shown as `−N%`
Partnership	`+$X/GP` (what a works deal would pay you), `yours`, or `taken · N yr` — the holder’s remaining term
Negotiation	Same semantics as sponsors: `NN%` / `READY` / bias
Status	See the status table below
Marketing	Care / Court, same as sponsors

Two completely different contracts

PARTNERSHIP (works deal) — the exclusive one, and the thing the mission race is actually for.

income = max( profile rate (clamped), 40,000 + stature × 7,000 )     # stature = budget + size, 2..20
→ a floor of $54k .. $180k per GP; engine deals are uncapped,
  tire/fuel partnership income is capped at 140,000 × (budget / 5)

Perks on top of the money:

+2 reputation on signature.
+5 work-order WU per turn, every turn, added to your Engineering (Repair/Improve) pool — per active partnership.

Only one team on the grid can hold a given supplier’s partnership (has_partner).

CLIENT — non-exclusive, instant, no roll, available to everyone at any time.

cost = −( base rate × (1 − discount) )
discount = min(progress / wu_required, 1.0) × 0.02 × marketing_level, capped at 0.20

So a fully completed mission at Marketing 10 buys a 20 % permanent discount on the client rate. Client contracts do not lock the supplier for anyone else.

The key subtlety: a lost race is not wasted WU

If a rival signs the partnership first, your supplier mission does not die. Only the deal_ready offer is withdrawn — the progress stays and keeps buying you the client discount. You can even start a mission on a supplier whose partnership is already taken: it races for nothing but grinds the discount. The only hard block is a filled category slot.

What each supplier actually does to your car

Only three stats feed the car model (infra_to_car_model). Everything else on the spec sheet is display only.

Supplier	Stat	Effect	Weight
Engine	`base_power`	Engine part performance	0.12 (the single biggest part contribution in the game)
Engine	`base_reliability`	Engine part fiability	up to +0.12
Tires	`base_performance`	Suspension performance	0.02
Tires	`base_reliability`	Suspension fiability	up to +0.12
Fuel	`base_consumption`	Fuel-system performance	0.04

base_endurance, heat_resistance and base_potential are shown on the profile card and are read by nothing. Do not pay a premium for them.

With no supplier signed in a category, the car model substitutes 5.0 (mid-range) — an unsigned category is a mid-grid car part, not a broken one. The engine itself is rolled once per motorist per season and shared identically by every customer and partner of that manufacturer, so a works engine deal buys you money, WU and reputation — not a better engine than that supplier’s clients get.

Tab 4 — Supplier Market

Signed suppliers with full spec cards (all four stats, contract type, term, happiness) plus the field-wide feed and the “under negotiation” list. This is where you check whether the partnership you want opens up next season.

Tab 5 — Missions

One screen, one capacity banner, three stacked sections.

The banner shows total / capacity WU per turn allocated · N free over a single bar, with the breakdown line sponsor missions X · supplier missions Y · care/courtships Z. The bar counts everything drawn from the pool, care included.

SPONSOR NEGOTIATIONS and SUPPLIER NEGOTIATIONS — one card per running mission: progress bar, WU/turn with −/+ steppers, rival team logos chasing the same brand, a Stop button, and — once READY — the signature controls (tier + year picker for sponsors, years for a partnership).

ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT & COURTSHIPS — every brand carrying care WU, signed or not, with its allocation and accrued head start.

Status column reference

Label	Meaning
`Available` / Negotiate button	Free to court
Sign now button	Discovered by your marketing — signs at 100 %, no mission
`Offer Sent`	A legacy offer is pending resolution
`Negotiating…`	You have a mission running (supplier directory)
`Signed · N yr left`	Under contract to someone — the number is the years before the brand is free again
`Signed · last year` (red)	Expires at the end of this season — start courting now
`Partner · N yr left` / `Partner · last year`	Your exclusive works deal and its term
`TEAM · N yr` (supplier)	Another outfit holds the works deal, and for how long
`PF2 · this season` / `PF3 · this season`	A development-series team is backing this brand; it frees up at the rollover
`Slot filled · N yr`	Your own contract occupies that category slot — this is when it frees, not when the brand does
`Refuses (N sn)`	The brand blacklisted you at a past contract end

Advanced

Order of operations per turn: orphan sweep → your missions tick → each AI team prunes, re-plans, ticks, and instant-signs any completion → player-facing events become emails. You are always the one holding an unsigned deal at the end of a turn.
The AI negotiates with a doctrine, not a formula. partnership_drive (reputation 75 % + marketing 25 %, ±0.25 by finance model, −0.30 when Critical) decides whether a team chases works deals or takes the safe customer contract. sponsor_priority (0.75 − marketing/10 × 0.35, +0.25 when Critical, +0.10 for Small teams) decides how much of its pool goes to sponsors first. A big AI marketing office spends less on sponsors — it discovers them for free.
AI care allocation is care_share(posture) of its free capacity, biggest cheques first, cap 10 WU each: balanced 0.25/0.45/0.65, aggressive 0.10/0.30/0.50, conservative 0.40/0.60/0.80 (Comfortable/Tight/Critical). Leftover capacity courts the biggest unsigned brands — the AI builds head starts for next year too.
Reputation is earned here as well as on track. The end of the Sponsors phase adds ((marketing_level − 1) capped at 8) / 2 reputation every pre-season (Lv1 +0, Lv5 +2, Lv9+ +4), and a partnership signature adds +2 on the spot. Reputation gates loan size, driver signings and partnership drive.
Title sponsors are assigned at the end of the Sponsors phase from the whole grid’s signed sponsors: any brand with budget ≥ 7 and prominence ≥ 7 can prefix a Grand Prix name for 5 years, preferring its home country.

Common mistakes

Signing a big deal with a small marketing office. The −2 %/level deal-quality malus is baked in for the whole contract. At Marketing 1 you are permanently giving away 18 %; the office pays for itself before the deal does.
Sitting on a READY deal. It holds no WU, so there is no cost to waiting — except that the AI signs the turn it completes and unsigned deals evaporate when the window closes. Sign the moment you know the tier.
Chasing a partnership on a supplier whose slot you have already filled. The mission is blocked outright. If the slot is free but the partnership is taken, run the mission anyway — the progress is a permanent discount on the client rate.
Ignoring the variable share. A sponsor at happiness 40 with a 50 % variable share pays 70 % of the number you signed for. Care WU and race results are income levers, not flavour.
Buying supplier endurance / heat-resistance / potential. Those three stats are not read by the car model. Engine base_power and the reliability stats are what change lap time.
Spreading WU too thin. Progress is WU × (1 + 0.03 × level) — twelve WU across three missions finishes nothing inside a 10-turn window against a rival concentrating on one.
Forgetting the window is shared. Spending all ten turns on sponsors leaves the supplier categories to be filled with 1-season client deals at full price.