I posted this 5 months ago but I will post it again (regarding the AC ai) because it's interesting.
When you build a season around just one or two base cars (and use like 10 team skins) you will get superior AI. Always. That's why 2002 (1 base car), 1998 (2 base cars), 1990 (1 base car) 2004 (1 base car), 2005+2007 VRC (2 base cars) drive so well and the season is so stable and realistic (result wise).
Whenever you add base cars (like have a full grid of all teams) you get much more variables and potential issues of the race / season stability. That is just a fact.
ASR 1991, 1992 and 1993 are so high quality that you don't get many issues. But generally this is the case. I've noticed this because I tinkered these seasons for years.
I understand the attraction of having full grid of individual cars but when you play the season you only control one car anyway. And with careful driver aggression/AI skill adjustments you get the best season results and the exact same "genuine season feel". You have the correct helmets, car skins, gloves, etc. What does it matter if the AI controlled cars are based on the same car as yours?
I never got much success with Content Manager grid presets. They reset randomly and will not give consistent results in the full season (at least I never got them working).Using championship JSON files gives
perfect and consistent results (well as perfect as AC allows them to be).
Overall I'm quite surprised how little attraction there is to play the authentic season modes (generally). I think most people just hotlap or play individual single races. I only play seasons. I never understood why people want "as realistic grid as possible" and then they play career mode with Joe Blow which is total fantasy stuff.
So once again, if you forget the blue flag / QF outlap issue, the ai
CAN be very good.
This is a repost from my actual 2002 season that I finished. I drove with Montoya against Rubens and Schumi at Monza (ai 97 and 100).
This is not to say "Look I made this ai so good with my great settings". I didn't do SQUAT. Just made the 2002 Eurosport graphics and gave these drivers and cars correct values so that they respond as realistically and consistently as possible. Watch these laps and tell me, can you see the positives.of the ai behavior and get my point? And could this be the result of Content Manager AI tweaks too, because the AI is actually very good. Not as good as F125 which actually has utterly superior AI but I wouldn't call this "bad ai" by any means. Sure the ugly blue flag issue comes up when you have full length races but it works great with 20 lap settings because you won't get many backmarkers if the driver values are properly set up.
PS: My 2002 season ended like this
1. Schumacher
2. Barrichello
3. Montoya
4. Ralf
5. Kimi
I would say it was pretty realistic outcome.
More details in the video description.
And last: Some of my seasons have over 10.000 downloads but I rarely hear any feedback of them. If you have played them, what kind of experiences you've had? Yes I know the SD based seasons aren't that great but we don't have other 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1988 cars available. But I would say even they are playable and semi-decent after making radical changes to the crap SD cars.
