Is this open wheel or GT?
European series open wheel.
I read this innTseam comments under a guide, and is what I’m dealing with now (I can’t figure out how to do a quote via my iPad so text is quite below)
"You talk about avoiding development in areas where you lag behind - If you don’t, though, how will you get ahead and start reducing lap penalties?
I started a new Custom team with a “3-Star” car, and my ratings are rock bottom across all categories. I’m lucky to place 15th, and that requires an opposition car or two crashing.
I fired my Mechanics and Designer and hired a set of people with great skills and potential, working towards parts & people over facilities as my first year goal. I just don’t have cash for all of it."
Are you struggling with finishing? Or with keeping pace with the other teams with part development?
Do you still have spec wings, front and rear? Any other parts now spec due to rule changes?
The only building I would say is worth the money in division three is the one that doubles your factory staff to 20, so that you can have many more working on development or reliability. I think it costs $8,000,000.
Early in the season you should be trying to get all your car parts to over 65% reliability, even at the expense of improving the actual quality of the existing part. I split my engineers so only one is on development and everyone else is on reliability until I get all parts to the point where I can manage them to a race finish.
Once you have everything over 65%, go back through the cycle again and try to get them to over 85%. At that point you can spend much more of the race pushing the car without hitting the red zone for component life.
Part development is trickier, and I would suggest you look at the race calendar at the start of the season and note down which parts are listed as critical for each race. Then find the part that’s critical most often that isn’t the engine and focus on building that up as high as you can.
Usage of this part is going to be very fluid as you build new versions, meaning you shouldn’t spend too much time buffing its reliability. It might do one race on your lead car, one race on your backup car and then never race again because you have new parts that have overtaken it, so you have a balancing act going on. The aim though is to have one part of your car that’s in the top five for quality by season end.
At the end of the season the game takes your two top-rated parts in any section and generates next season’s starting parts at a point somewhere between those two. So ideally you want two really good brake systems, as an example, with a small gap in quality so the quality of next year’s starting brake system is predictable.
This is also ripe for end of season experiments, where you build a super high quality part that is also illegal and then never put it on the car. That way you can’t get it confiscated by the organising body, but it still counts toward next year’s starting part rating. Rule-breaking parts are generally much higher quality and you don’t need to work on its reliability as it’s never going on the race car.
Apparently I started in the lowest tier with one of the worst teams. Was trying to make it easier on myself with weak expectations. I didn’t really think that through. I am doing ok though. My youngest driver is quickly improving and my car is slowing getting up there to average (6 races into the 1st season). I seem to be able to place 5th or 6th in most races.
Finances aren’t great though. I have about $1.5 million to spend after each race and I have been designing parts. I can’t even dream about buildings at this point. On performance, everything has been improved to max, but I am still building reliability up on everything.
I really don’t know what I am doing in races, so I finally just read some guides. Hopefully that helps me. I wasn’t paying as much attention to tire temperature as I should have been and I have a little better idea on how to tune the car now. One thing one of the guides said to do is to stop spending mid season so I can save money for next season. I guess that means I should stop designing parts, but I still need many improvements still.
Really enjoying this game so far. I dropped it fairly quickly on iOS, I don’t think I gave it a fair shake at the time.
Sounds to me like you’re doing a bit too much on part designing and way too much on performance improvement. As Bismarck says, reliability is far and away the most important thing early on. The time you lose replacing a part mid-race, or worse yet failing to finish, will more than wipe out any performance gains. The goal is to be able to reliably finish a race without replacement ASAP.
In my create-a-team GT team I stopped spending after race four in the first season. I had changed the budget to give the max amount to next year’s car, so I was still losing a lot of money, but I had told the boss I expected to finish 10th meaning there was no pressure, and when I finished 9th everyone was happy.
In season two I still haven’t built any buildings and the car is better, but still comfortably the worst on the grid. Only gaming the hybrid recovery systems, (not an option on open wheelers), is giving me results.
I did pretty much the same in my open wheel game where I took over ZRT, which I think are the second worst team available, except there I did go into the red to buy the factory upgrade to get to 20 staff.
There are some clever options you can combine to really help with results, (that aren’t as obviously over-powered as the GT hybrid systems).
Firstly, you can sign a pair of pay drivers who have high marketability and just rake in the cash regardless of where you finish. The drivers won’t be great, but if they’re both paying you 250,000 a race to drive for you and both are bringing in sponsors also, then you can build up an excellent infrastructure and then switch to actually talented drivers a season or two later.
Another direction, (the one I took with ZRT open wheel racing), was to embrace the very high “smoothness” rating of my lead driver and pair him with a race mechanic whose first unlock was to make soft tyres last much longer. When refueling was banned in season two I could use practice to get 10% performance increase on soft tyres, then combine my driver’s natural ability with his mechanic’s unlock and I could sometimes almost run the entire race without a pitstop and still have ~28% tyre life left at the end. If the race is 30 laps then avoiding stopping just made your car maybe a second a lap faster.
Because refueling was banned there was no point where anyone else was running a much lighter fuel load, so they couldn’t sneak that time back on me.
Also, if you are going to pit, think about doing it significantly out of sequence. I had success with a driver that couldn’t overtake by pitting him super early. This meant he came back out of the pits into totally clear air with no cars around so he could go as fast as his potential allowed (seconds faster than in traffic), and by the time he was closing up on the field they were starting to do their pitstops, so he just cruised by without having to overtake anyone on the track.
I shouldn’t have read the guides, I just had my worst race of the season.
Got the car to 95%, had decent practice times and started in 7th and 17th (no qualifying). One of the guides said if you start mid pack, go on the harder compound, and then always start the race on full out tire/fuel consumption until it settles down. Something I usually don’t do, but I never start well and figured that was why.
Start the race and both my guys fall to 19/20th by the end of lap 1. No idea why. My better driver sort of recovered through speed and pitstops, but never got to where he needed to be. I spent a lot more time managing my tire heat and that helped.
That’s the odd thing, all my stuff is to at least 80% reliable. I almost never have reliability problems anymore. With 3 races left, my engineers have almost nothing left to do other than getting my parts to the final 100%.
OK here’s my plan for create-a-team Euro Race series:
- Choose the financial background
- Choose banker that gives medium dollars and good marketability
- Fire drivers and get ones who pay to drive with good marketability
- Hire new mechanics? or maybe stick with $1,000 per race mechanics for first season to save 1,000,000?
- Hire new designer or stick with $1,000 per race default to save $1,000,000?
- Design new parts focusing on engine and gearing.
Year 2 - do the same as year 1 while upgrading HQ buildings and hire rookie driver with good marketability, new mechanics if didn’t get them already and new designer.
Year 3 - go crazy upgrading again.
Do upgraded parts retain their performance stats with a new Chassis? or are they reset and tossed out? I know you lose them from different racing series, but not sure between chassis in same series.
If you’re going open wheel I wouldn’t pour money into the engine, simply because it’s hideously expensive. If you get two pay drivers you might be able to cover it, but you’re spending seven figures every time you bring out a new version.
Instead I’d abstain from every council vote until Spec Engines come up and then push all my chips in there. You can see the voting topics in advance and if spec engines is on there then that’s 100% the way I’d go. Alternatively, if you choose the political background for your dude then you can raise one vote every year, so you might be able to put spec engines up for vote in year one and then an even spread of prize money in year two.
I would fire the car designer, because when the game takes your top two parts to calculate the starting value of that part next season your designer’s ability is weighted in. But I would probably leave the race engineers alone and just ride bad ones for a season to save money.
Drivers would stay so I can avoid their contract break fee, unless I could find pay drivers.
Maybe you could give us updates of how it’s going in the thread. I’d certainly read them.
Think I figured out why I was starting bad. I was tweaking the cars after practice, just a little bit, but I think that goes in as an unknown car so they were having to get used to it again. I started the last race with both drivers on set ups I used in practice and they both had a great start.
The setup won’t be bad just because it’s different, so you should feel free to tweak between practice and the race. It’ll show as a 0% feedback, because that’s what you’ve got, but as far as I can tell there’s no reset-to-zero effect if you give them one notch more wing angle or something.
You can make the setup worse by tinkering, but you can’t blank it to “unknown.”
Hmm, I didn’t get it then, I have been having good starts ever since I stopped making minor tweaks after practice. Probably all in my head.
I was doing better before reading the guides though, and now I do far better with car setup than before.
19 hours in 2 days. I might like this game. I do play slowly though, rarely speeding up races.
Still, I can’t help but wish for a more complicated/realistic version of the game. I understand why each year the track requirements change, and your car does change each year as well, but it’s a bit silly that a track requires top speed one year and doesn’t the next. I really enjoy the car set up each race, but it seems like you should know a baseline from season 1 and can adjust to it in future races. There are guides posting car set up stats, do people play one season and post a guide with car stats?
Every wet race drives me nuts because it’s a downpour, but everyone is still out on there on super-softs for a couple of laps anyway and there are no spin outs or crashes. Again, I understand it for playability, but I would love to see a bit more realism.
Maybe it’s just my luck, but for the last half dozen races we get a pace care on lap 2 or 3 every time. It’s getting to the point where I figure I might as well just start planning really low levels of fuel at the start.
Really enjoying it, would just like to see a bit more realism to it.
I was hoping that was one of the things that had changed with the patches. I guess not.
Out of 40 races I’ve done in various seasons I’ve only had that happen ~4x. Ironically 3 happened in one season and I believe it’s because one or more of the other drivers had a temporary trait that made them crash more often. I had a guy who had a strained neck near the end of the season and he crashed 2 out of 4 races near the end of the race. He’d never crashed before that.
BTW I’ve been doing some testing to prepare for my new season which I thought I’d post here as @Mr_Bismarck said he’d like to read and I thought it would be fun myself. But to prepare for it I did a quick season test and got a bunch of upgrades to brakes etc with illegal parts but didn’t use them. When season 2 arrived all the traits disappeared. I had assumed the special brake traits would carry over but without the illegalness. So now I’m confused why people say to go ahead and make lots of illegal parts. It seems too risky to use them unless you have a nullifier so why do I then? Do the special traits carry over and are not listed? Like deceleration rate? Or is the only thing that carries over is the performance number?
Because the illegal parts are almost always better than legal parts, so you get higher stats to feed into your new car.
Ahhh I see. Well things are slowly making sense. Thanks!
Yeah this is good. Thanks for pushing me into it. Gives me the Football Manager vibe but is much faster to play with different problems to solve. Very good!
Anyone know of a good guide, or even a streamer? I want to understand more of how the game works, and while the Steam guides I read have been helpful, I want a bit more nuts and bolts info.