- 2,747
- Morgoth_666
Does that even work? I suppose Cape Ring Inside doesn't have too many high-speed stretches so it might be ok. I recently tried one of my favorited low-end cars (can't remember offhand whether it was the Subaru 360 or one of the really old Toyotas) at the Ring and no matter what I did I got a field of cars that could just drive away from me on the straights. It didn't matter if I could gain a bunch on the cars around me in a tight section, they just left me for dead every time it opened up(and of course that track is pretty wide open in those cars). I think I lost around 30 seconds per lap, with no chance of making that up even if I had slapped some Race Softs on to cut my non-flat time down as low as possible.
Completely unrelated long post I've been thinking about making for a while now:
I also recently tried driving the McLaren F1 I never get around to learning(also at the Nordschleife), and encountered something puzzling. I left it stock and just dropped to Comfort Softs which ordinarily would mean if I just kept it clean I'd destroy any car similar to mine and have a half-decent race yet a noticeable advantage with those a bit better, but need to really push just to not lose time to the rabbits. Of course there aren't really any road cars much higher-performance than an F1, so I figured it would be a nice relaxing cruise to possibly catch the leader.
Not so. The rest of the field was about as you'd expect, easy to deal with although my inexperience with the car and tendency to drive slower cars meant I had to at least drive half-decent to catch/outrun the Nardos and Enzos. But the car up front was a monster, which turned out to be another McLaren F1. I had to do some learning to even be able to stay the same distance behind him, despite only being 1 tire grade down.
After some more practice and experimentation I have come to realize that while some of it is explained by the difficulty of controlling so much power, and some is explained by the fact that you need to back off a bit at some of the places where the AI slows down unneccessarily in most cars, and some is my own lack of talent, the bots really just plain seem to be much better at driving that car than most any of the others. I am able to drive the car as fast or often faster through the corners than most other cars(it handles brilliantly when you have it controlled) but in order to keep up with an identical car just 1 tire grade above mine I need to drive much better than I do in virtually any other car.
For a wonderful example of how this works as well as how odd PD's AI really is.... Start up a 1-make race at the Nordschleife using the stock TVR Cerbera Speed 12 with your "standard" balancing adjustments when doing this sort of thing. Even if you just take it super easy and do not do much other than keep the thing on the track, you'll easily annihilate them - I pulled well over 30 seconds in a lap after carefully and patiently working through the field on my first attempt. Then set up an identical race against McLaren F1s. The difference is night and day. Most cars tend to fall somewhere in between these two extremes although generally closer to the "easy" end than the "difficult", even other fairly fast cars that I'm not well accustomed to.
I've spent some time with it and improved my times and consistency a lot, but still I can generally only manage to gain a few tenths in any sector that doesn't have one of their "idiot spots" like braking heavily between Flugplatz and Schwedenkreuz. As a rule, my small mistakes and my good sections balance out and I only gain the amount you get from where they do that sort of thing. They actually slow down less in this car climbing the hill after Bergwerk than they do in cars that can take that corner without even a second thought -- about the same as I do, though they do let me gain some at the very top by backing off too much.
I realize there are people much faster than me, and with a few more hours in the car I may gain more speed, but I have to wonder if I'm the only one who has encountered this or if I'm just somehow far less capable of getting pace out of this car than any other car in the game (including the ones I can barely keep under control). Could this really all be down to their innate computer advantage at throttle modulation(not that that explains the Speed 12)?
At this rate, a McLaren F1 one-make race actually seems a reasonable prospect for an enjoyable, if nerve-wracking, race.
