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Anime Store Adventure posted:So I forgot that F1 Manager 2022 gives you early access if you preordered. Normally I'm good about not preordering these days, but I knew this game was almost certainly Day 1 for me anyway. I was trying to find the right thread to ask about it! I just started getting into Motorsport Manager, and also recently into F1 (but just long enough to conclude that Lewis Hamilton seems like a lovely person and form otherwise no attachment to any one team or driver) so have been unsure if I should jump into it or just stick with MM. I do like the GT series in MM, but the presentation for F1 Manager 22 is frankly bananas. I just can't tell if the commentary/voiceover will get old really fast. Could always turn it off, I guess! But I do like the fantasy element of MM too, so...this is a ramble. But tell me more about how much you do or do not like F1 Manager
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Aug 29, 2022 23:09
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Life Sim thread is up.
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Aug 29, 2022 23:44
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Did you mean for that post to link to the Stardew Valley Steam page, I don't get the joke if so 
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Aug 29, 2022 23:45
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Eric the Mauve posted:Did you mean for that post to link to the Stardew Valley Steam page, I don't get the joke if so Ha-ha, I edited, nobody will ever know what you meant. Oops.
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Aug 29, 2022 23:45
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I SAW IT!  Anyway, nice thread. Subbed.
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Aug 30, 2022 00:16
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Volmarias posted:I'm usually playing "everyone creates a wonderful society together" strategies, so relatively recently my newest start was being the insect people, with the idea being that everyone who was not an insect person was brought there as a slave, being worthless beyond their unique racial skills like "tree farming" and "reading / writing" and "dying in the blood pits while our mandibles clack in glee." It's definitely a change of pace, the biggest drag on being able to do that is the sheer amount of resources that have to be sunk into building prisons to process people before they're sent to the slave processor guy, and those prisons are obnoxiously expensive. I haven't been messing around with slaves this time(Only my third start) but I will probably start trying it out, now that I have humans living here as well. Currently slowly moving infrastructure from my outdoors center into tunnels I am carving out in the mountains, to make my bugs feel more comfy  One thing I am unsure of though is the difference between eateries and canteens/wells and baths? It seems like they are just as happy with the former, is it an efficiency thing?
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Aug 30, 2022 00:26
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Noir89 posted:I haven't been messing around with slaves this time(Only my third start) but I will probably start trying it out, now that I have humans living here as well. Currently slowly moving infrastructure from my outdoors center into tunnels I am carving out in the mountains, to make my bugs feel more comfy Canteens and baths are bougier than eateries and wells, and therefore much more expensive. But, it satisfies (most) people more, and for the ancients it's the only way they'll feel appreciated (they will demand luxury everything, but they are also a straight up murder unit in combat and they know it).
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Aug 30, 2022 00:31
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Squiggle posted:I was trying to find the right thread to ask about it! I just started getting into Motorsport Manager, and also recently into F1 (but just long enough to conclude that Lewis Hamilton seems like a lovely person and form otherwise no attachment to any one team or driver) so have been unsure if I should jump into it or just stick with MM. I do like the GT series in MM, but the presentation for F1 Manager 22 is frankly bananas. I just can't tell if the commentary/voiceover will get old really fast. Could always turn it off, I guess! But I do like the fantasy element of MM too, so...this is a ramble. But tell me more about how much you do or do not like F1 Manager It's very crazily similar in a lot of ways, but I guess that's Just Motorsports. Mind you this is only having done two race weekends so far, but to compare Motorsport Manager and F1 Manager: Things that are the same, and good: -Pretty similar in-race commands, giving you a good split of "I'm helping!"/strategy and the random chance left up to your AI driver. -Practice has a decent amount for you to do if you want to really get into the weeds with tuning for the weekend. -Decently chunky management elements for your HQ/campus, car development, driver and team management. -Your human 'touch' as a player can give you just that small edge without being so heavy it feels like cheating. Things that are the same, and bad: -It seems like you sort of have to manage practice if you want to maximize the performance bonuses from them. (TBD if this is massively significant.) -Maybe it makes both a decent sim given Pirelli's showing IRL, but tire management is a loving bitch and sometimes requires really boring rear end management stints. -It has some really janky moments where the AI slams on the brakes in weird ways, but doesn't crash. (Honestly you can imagine similar on-track incidents like this in F1, they just look super weird in the game.) -Race weekends just take a long time. In a way, hey, more game to play, but if you're doing practices and 3 shot qualy, its a several hour affair. (May not be bad for everyone.) Things that are new, and good: -F1 branding does sort of kick rear end because they've really made it look like you're watching an actual race. All of the radio voice clips, while they're already looping, are kind of fun. It'll probably get weirdly silent unless they also stole voice clips from like, F2 drivers if/when you start to recruit rookies. -Not as pretty as the F1 (driving) games, but Motorsport Manager just wasn't made in 2022 despite not looking all that bad. F1M is pretty. -Hoooooly gently caress, separating "Developing a part" and "Manufacturing a part." The cycle of this in Motorsport Manager was absolute trash, since you basically couldn't easily duplicate a part and it sort of forced you to always want to have a clear 1-2 driver set up. F1M handles this much better. -Finances feel a little better. You get money per race instead of the MSM strategies of: Sandbag everything for years except sponsors until you're making money per race, then actually buy other upgrades, or live and die by your start-of-season budget that you have to carefully plan out across the year. There's also little ways to earn more with sponsor guarantees and things. -I don't have to manage individual pit crew members. (I know MSM offered to automate this, but I never trusted it to do the best job considering how easily your pit crew could gently caress up.) -Racing incidents are more frequent. MSM it felt pretty rare to get safety cars, VSCs, or even just someone going wide. This seems pretty well tuned in F1M so far. (In my game, Latifi goes wide 3-4 times a race, so its realistic.) Things that are new, and bad: -Miss having a custom team, but I guess their emphasis on the F1 branding would make it pretty hard to have the same attention to detail for a custom team. (Maybe we'll get it as a DLC?) -I'd still like MSM's helicopter cam, personally. Flybys or onboards or "2d map" is all you get here. -Snoozefest DRS trains. (Realistic, but still.) -David Croft.
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Aug 30, 2022 00:44
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Wonderful thank you, that is very helpful! Great write up
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Aug 30, 2022 03:35
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I do not recommend it at all unless a few patch cycles fix all that is broken in the simulation. I'm super hyped for this game and wasn't expecting Football Manager here, but to get something as basic (and important) as the tyres wrong is a very big deal. Basically Tyre Management is 90% of race strategy. You design when and where to take a pit stop to change tyres in relation to where you see the rest of the field, who you're directly racing and what kind of tyres they're running, etc. It can make or break a race for you. And on release there is next to zero difference in pace between running S-M-H or even I-W tyres at all in the dry (Yep, currently you can run Wet tyres in Dry conditions with 0 difference in pace. They heat up a bunch but also tyre heat and its effects are also not working). There is also 0 tyre dropoff between 100%-30%, meaning that old Hards can keep pace with new Softs. This means every race devolves into a M-H one-stop strategy as long as you can keep the tyres over 30% wear. I'm trying not to sound like I'm grogging about something that I want crunchy; that's the most basic thing that needs to work for a racing game of any kind. The game looks amazing, yes. The onboard cameras are super cool. But the UI between races is a mess and with all the other bugs and omissions under hood it's not even on par with the F1 mobile gacha game right now. Edit: I'm not writing it off completely, I'm just hoping that because it's a new IP by a new developer that this and will all be fixed in the next couple of patches. Fhqwhgads fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Aug 31, 2022 |
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Aug 31, 2022 14:33
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There's some jokes to be made there about some of the seasons' derivative tire strategies in real life. But yeah if that's the way it's working, that kind of deflates race strategy a bit.
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Aug 31, 2022 15:00
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I watched Waypoint stream F1 Manager last night and it looks like a step down from Motorsport Manager in most of the ways that matter. It's cool that you can watch the cars driving around but the view of the map sucks compared to the chase cam thing that MM has when it comes to giving you the information you need.
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Aug 31, 2022 15:08
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Tavern Master is on sale! Is it semi-decent? Would I get an evening or two's entertainment out of it?
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Aug 31, 2022 18:55
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Yeah after playing a few more races I started to realize what you noticed with tires, certainly. There’s just something fucky about it and after 4 races a lot of my initial excitement has calmed. I, too, won’t write it off completely, but I’m hoping that maybe in a month or two it’ll deliver a little more excitement
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Aug 31, 2022 19:05
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I think not being able to make a custom team, and the tyres thing, will have me holding off for a while.
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Aug 31, 2022 19:57
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I enjoyed MM and I have been enjoying F1M as well. I'm pretty casual when it comes to these games though, so the simulation accuracy hasn't bothered me. It feels like watching a race while getting to make some of the decisions which is good enough for me.
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Aug 31, 2022 20:32
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Guess I'll copy paste my steam review because I have strong opinions against F1 manager unfortunately. I don't think I'm a hyperbole goon and I think I'm being pretty objective with this. Edit: I'm actually going to spoiler this because if you're having fun with the game who cares what other people think just enjoy it - I don't want to dampen anyone's enjoyment of a video game because it wasn't for me. I was really excited for this game in a way that I don't normally get about games. I loved motorsport manager and have followed F1 closely for as long as I can remember. I love management games and even do sim racing in a dumb little cockpit with the other bearpope goons. I'm essentially the perfect target audience for a game like this and I'm fairly disappointed with it. As soon as I started playing I started noticing little things. As they started to really pile up I decided to note them down. Please consider the following observations. I'll start with the things I think are nice about the game: Pros: 1) The drivers and engineers seem to have their actual voices in the game through to F2. I think everything outside of F1 they just took actual RL snippets and cut them into the game. 2) Cars seemingly have incidents in parts of tracks that make sense - high error corners IRL like T1 at Spa. Cons: 1) There's no option to simulate entire weekends or to simulate the race. Especially for those playing a backmarker team, we'd like to get the first season or two out of the way a little bit faster as we prime our development for future years 2) The windows that pop up during races on either side of the screen above the driver control stuff are absolutely obnoxious and you have to run your cursor over other game elements to get them to disappear enough to see the full driver list on the left or the track on the right side. Clicking in a neutral area does not dismiss these extra windows. 3) The minigame of driver preference with the setup is an interesting layer, but the choice of making the adjustments to critically important race car parameters like wing angles is counterintuitive. You would expect in a management game that shows downforce levels to 3 decimal points in other areas of the game that adjusting the wing angles would have very real consequences in the race - however it doesn't at all. They could have used different arbitrary captions for these things and it would have made more sense. 4) The audio snippets after qualification etc don't seem to pull from any data about the session. You can come in 19th and 20th and Karun will excitedly mention how great your qualifying was and express hope that you can keep that up in the race. Huh? 5) The syncing of events that occur in the race, the audio bites from your engineer, the replies from your driver, and the replay button thing at the top, could not be worse. It's severely out of sync and often delayed by several laps. A single lockup might be talked about for 3 laps as if it's just happened. 6) There needs to be options for which alerts pause/pop you into 1x. It's pointless for you to be pulled into 1x when DRS becomes available since that rarely means you are adjusting anything. If you turn off the single option for these things you'll have your game not slow down or pause when it starts raining or there is another actionable event. There needs to be a list of alerts/radio messages with options for them to pause the interface or move to 1x speed so that we can choose what we'd like. 7) The safety car is visible on the track way way earlier than the alert for SC comes up, and much earlier than you engineer will tell you a SC event is occuring 8) The safety car never allows lapped cars to unlap themselves and seems to move at a speed much faster than real life - it's not uncommon for a safety car to come out for 2 laps and for a car that was less than a lap behind to not be able to get to the back of the pack before the SC pulls in. 9) Steam VR starts with this game. Makes no sense and unbelievable that this didn't come up in testing 10) Crashes are not nearly impactful enough on the cars involved. I would estimate 20% of crashes end up with a car's retirement. It's not uncommon for a car to have a full speed crash into a wall and lose only 5-7 positions. Massive multicar crashes almost never result in more than one car being retired. Crashed cars often pit for a new front wing and are on exactly the same pace afterwards that they were at before. 11) When you leave the pits there is an animation that shows "pit complete" which completely blocks your ability to interact at all with that car/driver. This animation just runs for a set amount of time and if you're running the game in 16x (which most people are) you have to pause the game and wait for this animation to finish before adjusting strategy and unpausing. Why? 12) The display/graphics settings don't let you select which display to run the game on 13) The pace adjustment for how hard you ask your driver to push does not seem to have any impact on their frequency of incidents like crashing, spinning, locking up. 14) The game suggests that you lower this pace setting if your powertrain components get worn, but the pace adjustment itself suggests that it only impacts tire temperature and laptime 15) The car parts are numbered so that iterations are easily identifiable (1, 2, 3, etc). However, when you go into the Design menu and you are scanning to see which parts may have the fewest design iterations, you cannot see this and instead see ie: "Latest Design: [item part] Research". It would be more helpful to see the latest iteration number. 16) If you put parts on your cars while the rest of that order is still being manufactured, the game notifies you at the end of manufacturing that all of the parts are in the warehouse (it doesn't see that you have parts on the cars) 17) Drivers who are not lapped but are at the back of the pack will finish the race before those in front of them???? 18) One-stopping every possible race seems to be always the best strategy. Conclusion: I've played this game for 18 hours at this point and I get the horrible feeling that this is more hours than the game was playtested for internally. I don't know if this is a matter of a studio running out of time/budget, management that just wanted to get a good-enough product out the door for people who watch the F1 reality show, I don't know. I have to expect that stuff like Football Manager doesn't get away with this quality of product. I'm not sure I'll put any more time into this which is really disappointing and not at all what I was expecting. Actually super happy I found this thread because I love management games, look forward to benefitting from everyone's posts. VelociBacon fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Aug 31, 2022 |
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Aug 31, 2022 22:23
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I definitely hadn't noticed a lot of that (yet) and now I'm more bummed. Granted again, I only did about 4 races so I am still in the "figuring out where even the buttons are" but the more I read beyond what I played it starts to feel worse.
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Aug 31, 2022 23:17
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I definitely hadn't noticed a lot of that (yet) and now I'm more bummed. Granted again, I only did about 4 races so I am still in the "figuring out where even the buttons are" but the more I read beyond what I played it starts to feel worse. Actually that sucks and I'm sorry - I spoilered the poo poo in my post so this doesn't happen to anyone else.
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Aug 31, 2022 23:22
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VelociBacon posted:Actually that sucks and I'm sorry - I spoilered the poo poo in my post so this doesn't happen to anyone else. I didn't mean it like that at all! I thought you had a very objective take and honestly, the only reason I bring it up is that I had an initially positive post that I felt guilty about because I had done two races. By the time I had done two more, I got a sneaking suspicion the trend wasn't going to leave me with a positive outlook. For me, your post just saved me some time in frustration until they either patch it (hopefully) or don't.
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Aug 31, 2022 23:36
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Well it's appropriate at least because that all sounds like an absolute car crash.
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Aug 31, 2022 23:51
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Is Ranch Simulator considered a management game? I've been watching Neebs gaming playing it and it looks like a lot of fun. I saw Tavern Keeper is on sale, I wonder if its worth the tenner (12bux CDN) twistedmentat fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Sep 1, 2022 |
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Sep 1, 2022 03:54
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VelociBacon posted:
Is someone going to write a Blues Brothers mod?
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Sep 1, 2022 08:57
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Ah yes that reminds me, add "no chances of any mod support ever" to the pile.
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Sep 1, 2022 09:49
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I thought MM was a bit too shallow to be enjoyable long term and this new game just sounds like the same game with Brand attached. Had hopes for an much improved sequel, shame.
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Sep 1, 2022 12:12
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twistedmentat posted:Is Ranch Simulator considered a management game? I've been watching Neebs gaming playing it and it looks like a lot of fun. I tried it pretty early on in EA, and it was pretty barebones. Definitely looked like it had potential to be a good fuckaround in a group game. Specifically, seems like maybe a less grindy (less simulator?) version of Farming Simulator, which we bounced off of.
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Sep 1, 2022 13:45
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I decided to jump on Tavern Keeper, since it was on sale. I tried the demo first, and while it was shallow (duh it's a demo) it felt like there was some potential there. Picked up the full game and it looks like the demo is built off an older version, because there's a lot of changes to items and the interface. I don't think I'm going to end up with thousands of hours into it, but I felt like I'd get my  out of it.
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Sep 1, 2022 14:24
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Synthbuttrange posted:Trying out the Deadwater Saloon demo and it seems neat enough, might keep an eye on it when it releases. Thanks for this. The demo was fun. Not sure how long/many playthroughs until you have seen all the events, but the game should be fun enough to try at launch. I tried an upright establishment (just booze and gambling) and let a wandering priest settle in the town. Compared to a previous try that sported 2 ladies and mad opium supplies, I found it impossible to make enough money as the town leaned too godly to spend money on fine drink and food. Thus I couldn't hire enough bouncers.
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Sep 1, 2022 14:45
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Humble Bundle has a bundle of Dungeons 1-3 with all the DLCs for ~$10. It's a passable enough Dungeon Keeper clone, good with podcasts.
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Sep 1, 2022 15:00
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FISHMANPET posted:I decided to jump on Tavern Keeper, since it was on sale. I tried the demo first, and while it was shallow (duh it's a demo) it felt like there was some potential there. Picked up the full game and it looks like the demo is built off an older version, because there's a lot of changes to items and the interface. I don't think I'm going to end up with thousands of hours into it, but I felt like I'd get my Excellent thanks for the info.
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Sep 1, 2022 20:03
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FISHMANPET posted:I decided to jump on Tavern Keeper, since it was on sale. I tried the demo first, and while it was shallow (duh it's a demo) it felt like there was some potential there. Picked up the full game and it looks like the demo is built off an older version, because there's a lot of changes to items and the interface. I don't think I'm going to end up with thousands of hours into it, but I felt like I'd get my Are you speaking of Tavern Master as Tavern Keeper looks to be a game in dev with no release yet?
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Sep 1, 2022 20:16
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Harminoff posted:Are you speaking of Tavern Master as Tavern Keeper looks to be a game in dev with no release yet? I assumed so since Tavern Master is still on sale from yesterday. I just picked it up because I have no impulse control.
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Sep 1, 2022 20:21
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Yup, whoops, Tavern Master, no idea where the "Keeper" came from, surprised that it actually happens to be a real game!
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Sep 1, 2022 20:32
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Blowjob Overtime posted:I tried it pretty early on in EA, and it was pretty barebones. Definitely looked like it had potential to be a good fuckaround in a group game. Specifically, seems like maybe a less grindy (less simulator?) version of Farming Simulator, which we bounced off of. These idiots make it look pretty fun https://youtu.be/wag8b_XX0Qo Of course the first thing they buy with their loan is a giant pickup, they really are living the rural life. But yea it looks like a fun gently caress around Sim. I'll have to grab the tavern game, sounds like fun. I am itching to try more Sims lately since going medieval. The crew are back from.their vacation so I hope there's a new patch soon.
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Sep 1, 2022 22:28
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Squiggle posted:I was trying to find the right thread to ask about it! I just started getting into Motorsport Manager, and also recently into F1 (but just long enough to conclude that Lewis Hamilton seems like a lovely person and form otherwise no attachment to any one team or driver) so have been unsure if I should jump into it or just stick with MM. I do like the GT series in MM, but the presentation for F1 Manager 22 is frankly bananas. I just can't tell if the commentary/voiceover will get old really fast. Could always turn it off, I guess! But I do like the fantasy element of MM too, so...this is a ramble. But tell me more about how much you do or do not like F1 Manager Ok, so I'm 100 hours in, but that's fairly standard for me, and most of it has been dissecting and ripping the game apart mechanically to see how it works, and regardless of how seriously or not you take F1, racing, or management games, this has no longevity. While you have no idea what you are doing or what is optimal/better to do, it's ok and fun for a season or two. But once you start understanding how the various pieces work, it gets incredible stale very quickly. It has nearly all of the pieces it needs, but it's so completely shallow on how it uses those that in general, unless you are flat out playing poorly, intentionally or not, you will rapidly surpass all challenge and settle into the exact same routine regardless of team. I'll do the same as the other poster did and spoiler things, because they brought up a lot of accurate points, but I have others to add and can go deeper into more precisely what the problems are and why some of them aren't going to be fixable for at least a fair while -Everything outside of the race is very lacking. I don't think I've seen a management sim where I've ever spent remotely near this disproportionate amount of time in the "event" of whatever vs in the office. It has all the things you'd need and expect, parts development, driver contracts, sponsor negotiation, facility development, staffing, and money tracking and management. But any one of those things when they need attention require not even minutes of your time. And often you'll not need to do or look at anything and you just straight fast forward from the end of one race to the start of the next. But diving into how they work makes the issues more glaring than just the shallowness of it. --Drivers: Progression is real bad. Main drivers, with max facilities, can only gain 1-2 overall rating in a year. Which is functional for all the starting drivers and some of the F2 drivers, who are all 65+ to start with, you can turn them all into high 80, around 90 legends, some drivers are young enough and start out high enough that you could definitely get them to at/near max stats as well. That's kind of a problem because after 7ish years, there are many drivers who are high stats, and you absolutely need to have 2 high stat drivers as the time gain from just 3-4 overall points can lose you multiple positions. But the newgen drivers, and drivers that don't get picked up won't develop enough to become all that useful since they start so low, which means several more years after you have a whole field of gods and legends, now you have half a field of legends, and half a field of puny worshipers who are almost a full second slower on skill level alone. And then there are the contracts and salaries which are all over the place. Top drivers demand top pay, drivers who have won championships demand more pay for their success, older drivers demand more pay because they're retiring soon. These all can stack on each other and essentially price someone out so badly that even the AI won't pick them up because it's just too much money. I had at one point the 4 top drivers who all had seen success, just sitting as free agents, because they wanted $40 million a year, plus another 4 million per race bonus (there are 22 races, do the math). Also, for all negotiations, there is no indication of how much they want to be paid, it's a game of higher and lower. And you can't type in a number either, salary starts at 100k. Want a top rated driver? Sit a rock on your keyboard for a few minutes to get in his price range, then keep it handy to move the number up or down depending on what the arrow says. --Staff: Progression is even more disgusting here, as staff are just a mess of inconsistency. They all gain points at the same rate, but because they have a different number of stats to allocate them into, the rate they overall improve is nonsensical. Race engineers, one of the most important team side aspects to a driver in a race, have 3 stats, and 2 of those are basically useless. They can gather feedback during practice faster for setups (semi-useful, but we'll get there), They can make friends with the driver faster (which does nothing of any real function), and they can speed up pit stops, which is the only thing of actual value. But they gain overall rating 3 times faster than your Head of Aero with their 9 skill areas, which all are related to car development, Tech chiefs have 6 areas to grow, which all relate to car development. That's it, that's all there is to staff. Ok you can go look at your scouting and engineer department, but they consist of "please choice how many of these nameless folks you would like", and pit crew which you can chose to balance their training or train one area in particular. Every year, you lose a year of balanced training worth of pit crew skill, which means if you chose anything but balanced you will continue to lose pit crew skill as years pass, so just never touch this. --Sponsors: You don't pick sponsors, you just have them and they give you money. This is all licensed so I get it, and actually I'm ok with this over like MM style where I don't care what the sponsors are, just tell me your terms for money. This lets you negotiate what incentives and sponsor promises you want to make for a little extra cash. It's a good concept, except it is the exact same set of incentives race after race and year after year and you only have to put about as much thought into it as the developers did. If you're a bottom team, it is a bit important since the extra 30-70 million from them can do a fair bit, but you figure out where you are on the grid, and just chose that over and over again. --Facilities: I don't really have too much gripe over this, facilities are standard enough in any management game that it's pretty known how they function. You have your "do car improvements better", "do people improvements better", "do front office and money better". The main issue here is that half the buildings boost your "team attractiveness" and not really anything else. "Team attractiveness" in theory makes drivers/staff more willing to join your team when they are higher rated. It does do this, but only if the driver/staff is already hired by someone else, free agents will always talk to you. And even for those already on a team, the increase in the rate that it makes people willing to negotiate is so minute it may as well be a rounding error. --Money: Saving the best two for last. Money is a big factor in management games. You always have to carefully and selectively decide where you're going to spend your money and what areas you prioritize. Management games have been doing this for years, and you know if you take a bottom rated team, you're going to have bottom rate money. HAH, you fool! This game shits money out of every orifice at you. That 30-70 million in extra money from incentives? That's on top of the 100 million you get from sponsors as BASE money, 80 million if you're a bottom ranked team. The board also throws all the cash at you, you get less if expectations are lower, but "we want you to finish 2nd to last, here's 50 million". And then you have the prize money which is another 35-80 million. That means, if you are the worst team on the grid, just showing up to get a paycheck, not tickling the sponsors at all, you are getting a MINIMUM of nearly 200 million a year. There is a cost cap, you can only spend x amount directly on the team for car dev/parts/staff/facility upkeep, etc. If you have the best staff, the best facilities, and you are constantly running car development at the highest cost possible...you won't hit the cap, it is actually impossible unless regulations change to lower it. The extra 60 mil? You'll drop a couple 10s to keep facilities renovated, and then you have the entire rest of the budget for drivers. If you have the #1 team and put in half an effort to hit incentive targets, you'll break 300 mil/year and just have gently caress all to spend it on except extravagant drivers, or you could just have a gently caress around and hire 2 new drivers for every race of the year until the game breaks. The only bit of thought you ever have to do with money is early with facilities, and even then only for the car upgrade facilities, everything else is so cheap to upgrade if you just knock out all of them you can do it in a year and just upgrade car buildings every time they become available to upgrade again. --Car parts: Oh boy, saving the best for last. There has been much MUCH consternation over the balance of car development. There are these sliders you can set to "focus" development on certain areas of certain parts. This has no cap. You can max focus every aspect of every part and get pretty decent bonus stats out of them for the year. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this and initially it was definitely unbalanced since you could make top of field parts from any team in one go. It's more balanced now so that's good, maybe using it as intended will come into vogue and things will be fair. You know where I'm going. Using the focus system, as it was seemingly intended to be used (there are preset values you can set from a drop down menu), where you actually focus on particular areas you want to improve, and decrease focus on others, breaks your long term development so badly that it's almost impossible to not intentionally break progression by making enormous leaps and bounds. There's a stat called expertise that makes up the bulk of your car part stats, the higher this is, the better the base stat of the part. You gain this by of course, doing car part dev. When you focus a stat and put priority on it, you gain more expertise in it...as a multiplier for how much higher it is than the lowest focus. As in, if you do not focus at all, whether by leaving the sliders alone, or by turning them all max, you will gain like 5% exp gain (out of 100%). If you turn focus up on that area, and down in another, you gain now...20%. This is the difference between the worst team and the top team. In one.single.design you know are as good at that thing (it's downforce, you want downforce and to corner as well as them) as the best team in the field. You do this once for each part, and suddenly you can build the best car on the grid. In less than a year. What the gently caress is progression? -Okay, but the racing is good, right? Tell me the racing is good? --Okay, I can't stress this enough, the racing presentation is gorgeous to look at. Not so much to listen to, but that's a more a "Crofty, shut the gently caress up" problem. Multiple camera views including cockpit cams are just perfection. The look and feel of the way the racing is presented to you is a golden palace. Please do not enter this palace, it is filled to the brim with feces. Well, I'm already inside, so allow me to show you around the place as we go through race weekend --Practice! On the face of it, practice is...fine. Your objective is to accumulate track time and adjust to new parts on the car and work on a setup. It follows actual F1 procedure, so there are 3 practice sessions of one hour long, but you can spend the time you need to do what you need to then fast forward the rest, or just simulate it entirely. But it's pretty easy to max out your track knowledge and others have gone over the setup minigame, which I can argue either way on but I find it mostly ok. If you really don't like it, you can save before practice, simulate the session, then take your final setup, reload, and put that setup in the car, simulate practice again, and repeat until happy with the results. They will get 90% or more in 3 cycles of doing this and it takes like 2 minutes. We will need to reference back to practice a few times, so we'll put a pin in it for now. --Qualifying! Unlike MM, you're locked into 3 Q sessions, so that sucks, here you get to apply your experience from practice, it will gain you a whole second off your lap time if you nailed everything, so practice is valuable at least. All the cars do qual at the same time and head out when they feel like it, so you have to watch out for trying to do a clean laptime on clear track. No, you really have to watch out, because the cars on their outlap and inlap which are significantly slower, do not move over and will decimate your lap frequently and readily. But also, all of them head out of the pits at the last moments to get a lap in and you can just follow them out at a safe distance and get an easy free clean lap. Repeat for Q2 and Q3 as appropriate and grid is now set. ---Raceday! Ok, time to pull the pin on the practice grenade. All that work on setup and knowledge gathering? Throw it in the trash, it does absolutely nothing for your laptimes. At a high speed track? The game cares not if you are running high or low angle wing, it doesn't care if the driver finds this the best setup they've ever had or literally Hitler to drive, they will do the exact same laptimes (no really, exact same if you don't change anything else, I have tested this and lap after lap is identical). ---Ok, well this is still a strategy game, and tyres are an enormous deal in F1 so surely...nope. The difference between the soft tire, and the hard tire, is that the hard tire will run much longer, and will be about a tenth slower. Ok, there's tire wear, so of course more wear weakens your time? Nah, not really, the effect is almost nothing, until you hit 30% life remaining and suddenly they lose a second a lap. It's not all "lol, nothing matters" though, while tires don't slow down as they degrade you can push or save them to change how much that % drops, but oh, it's not quite so thought provoking as to how much you should push or save. ---Like others said, it doesn't matter what pace you're running at, they're almost equally likely to make a mistake, and pushing doesn't just help your laptimes a bit, oh no. It's worth up to a second a lap. This is significant, and over the course of a race can save over a minute on the cars in front, or can get your slow car easily up to the back bumper of a fast car for free DRS benefit (oh...we'll get there!). The AI has not been coded to do this, at all. They will not push their tires, they will not save their tires, they will leave their pace solidly in neutral regardless of anything else. Being pressured for position? Falling back to the car ahead? Have 70% life remaining on the tires and 5 laps to go? Have 27% life remaining on the tires and 15 to go? They care not, they will run an average pace for the whole race --Then we have the fuel management. Or we don't. There's a fuel delta that tells you how much over or underfueled you are for the current point of the race. Except it doesn't. I will quote: "The Fuel Delta number you see in races is not the amount of fuel you have in the car at that time. The number is a projection of how much fuel you will have, at the end of race, if the conditions your car is currently running in remain the same." You know how races are, you get into a certain position and circumstance and that will persist for the course of the entire rest of the race with nothing ever changing. Are you dumb or don't understand racing, let me explain the effect that has. You're early to mid in a race and in a pack of cars, your fuel delta is telling you "hey, you got like, 5 extra laps of fuel here". You aren't an idiot, you know you don't need that much extra fuel, lets kick it up a notch and blow by these folks. So you turn up your fuel and after several laps do so, alright, lets back it down now and go back to normal fuel while we're not fighting anymore. Fast forward, there are now 10 laps left. "hey boss, we're short like a whole lap of fuel now". So you kick on saving mode, which states it saves you .1 lap of fuel per lap. 5 laps later "hey we're most of a lap short on fuel". 3 laps later "still about half a lap shy". And then you run out midway through the final lap. Because you burned extra fuel and by the time the Delta averaged itself out to correctly adjust for how much you had remaining, it was too late to do anything about it, you needed to start saving at least 10 laps earlier than you did. It is frankly boggling to me in a game where so much is so shallow and not completely thought out, that they broke out the galaxy brain idea to do fuel delta like this and not "at normal pace you have x laps of fuel remaining from this point" with simple math so people didn't burn 3-4 extra laps fuel, all the while your primary indicator of fuel level telling you "all good, fam". And as before, the AI never pushes, they never save, average all the way. --ERS is a system F1 has that will harvest power under braking and can be released for significant power boost in the straightaways. It's a good system, it's hugely beneficial for making fast laps and overtaking. Unlike fuel and pace settings where you tell the driver to use the talent they have to go faster or slower, with ERS, you hang off the nosecone of the car and turn it on and off to use more or less power. To be clear, you don't HAVE to do this. Pace and Fuel push modes are more than strong enough to just leave this on neutral and maintain power. Which overall is the better strategy, as you have to lose 2 seconds recharging the thing in order to gain 1-1.5 seconds of usage if you handle it normally. Or, if you want to be optimal with how you recharge it and use it. You will need to change the settings on it 5-9 times every lap to carefully ensure you are losing the least amount of time while still gaining charge to lead another attack on a car in front. I did this precisely once, and it was on an easier track where I only had to change it 4 times every lap. And holy poo poo, never again, I understand why the people who try to be optimal with this are absolutely furious, but it's 100% necessary if you only want to lose a little time, and not all the time recovering energy. Because if you're fighting a faster car, if you don't do this, you'll likely fall too far behind to make an attack on them anyway. I don't even have to say it anymore, you know what the AI does here. --DRS is another system F1 has because passing is a gently caress. It makes you accelerate faster in defined straight sections of track if you're tailing another car so you can get by them. This system provides about a 10-15% increase in acceleration and 15 or so kmh of speed in a straight, so it's strong. But that's the real life system. In the game, the system can't handle cars being as close together as real life, so when you come out of corners on the tail of a car, that 20% increase and bit of boost in speed is never going to be enough to complete the pass because you're so much further behind than you should be. But the devs have a solution for that! How about instead of 15%, we made the cars accelerate nearly 70% faster! It'll be like 2Fast2Furious Nitrous, just push the button and zooooom. This is so utterly broken that if you get your 2 second a lap slower shitbox behind a leader (because they pitted and you didn't yet), you can keep up with them for as long as you can stay out. And the longer you do, the more ground you put on the cars that are also faster than you but not as fast as the leader as you run top car laptimes, or even fastest lap, because you can gain up to 3 seconds with DRS at some tracks, at a couple tracks, because the straights are so long, you can get going SO fast, that when you hit the braking zone, the simulation breaks along with your car as it tries to slow you down, can't do it properly, and you phase entirely through the car you were chasing. FURTHERMORE (yes, there's more), because it's so overpowered, if you have two or more fairly even cars close together, they will (not intentionally, just as a matter of game physics) work together slingshoting each other forward back and forth and gaining gobs of laptime until they catch up to a car too much quicker for them to shoot by. So you might have 6th and 7th do this until they catch up to 5th and get a bit stuck, but 8th-10th were all doing this also so now they caught 7th, and 11th-15th were doing it too, so now they're up to 10th. And now you have the most ridiculous looking snake of 11 cars all lined up behind each other, all giving each other DRS speed boosts and completing more passes in a race than in a game of soccer. -Why did I go over all those mechanics in such detail? Because they sound simple enough to fix for the most part. Tyres are bad and not different enough from each other, ok, tweak the values. Fuel delta is useless to the player and not indicative of actual fuel levels. Ok, change the calculations. Practice results don't help for the race at all? Just apply the qual math to the race speed calculations. ERS is either irrelevant or a nightmare? Well that one isn't a simple thing. DRS is way too strong? Ok, just weaken the power of it. It should be that easy, everyone is maintaining hope that it's going to be that easy. Sorry, my foreshadowing is too obvious, I know. Enterprising modders have found a way to extract things from the games databases, and lo and behold, they have found most of these values! And they can change them! And they have! And....the AI abso-loving-lutely will not stand for this. Put realistic values for tire variance and tire degradation, and the AI doesn't know what to do about their tyres. They'll put on terrible tyres, they'll run tyres long beyond their functional life, they'll run a tire until it's flat. Make the tyres have differences, but not so "extreme" as real difference, minor improvements, but it makes what little challenge there could be worse. They tried adjusting DRS, but because of the previously mentioned issues with how close the cars run, weakening DRS more than about 10% means it may as well be removed for all the good it does. Initially, my reaction to the game was "It's not awful, it's just shallow and will get boring very quick, but it's fixable", the more people actually get down into the code and try to improve aspects, the more they find out that many of the more difficult to change aspects are irredeemably broken without major rework. And since they are planning to release a new one of these every year, not one they will have the time to undertake. Maybe they will get some stuff right for next year, but also this is Frontier, and they are the absolute Masters of taking lots of action, while having an absolute shotgun blast of where they bother to really think about their actions. This game perfectly encapsulates that. The presentation is excellent, the skeleton of the concept is excellent, they put some decent muscles on the arms and legs, they put a diseased heart in the groin (what?), they chopped up some lungs and shoved them in the head (but that's wrong?), they found a squirrel and bolted it onto the arm (why?), etc. Racing manager games are few and far between, so expectations are never all that lofty, a racing sim with some management, some thought required, and a reasonable amount of strategy, that's all they had to do, they had exactly what they needed ready and just botched the execution in nearly every way. Sorry for the brevity, there was more I wanted to get into, because some of the details are just incredible, but would take far more explanation
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Sep 1, 2022 23:02
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you wrote nearly 4400 words, but sure, brevity was the first thing that came to my mind also lmao
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Sep 1, 2022 23:10
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I know nothing about formula one or sport management games but I enjoyed reading it.
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Sep 1, 2022 23:20
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That post accurately sums up how mad I am at how badly this game has been fumbled
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Sep 1, 2022 23:24
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That was a fun post. But not by any means too brief.
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Sep 2, 2022 00:28
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 11:06 |
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OwlFancier posted:I know nothing about formula one or sport management games but I enjoyed reading it. I feel like the giant spoiler box conveyed more than words ever could.
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Sep 2, 2022 02:53
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