DRT-Apophis

I'm pretty new to modding, but does that mean what we did were just modding their base line performances, but eventually they reaches the same maximum potential that the game originally intended, unless we mod the Upgrade section of the file as well?

Does the patch only affect their starting point or actually their maximum potential too?

I wonder how significant the differences were? Especially between the actual Ferrari PU & player's Ferrari PU.

That's very weird, did you try to apply the new one yet? May be it's a bug.

Mostly likely it's some players never noticed the last driver's stat update and just left the mail there until now.

Singapore is heavily affected by how you drive. I noticed if you resist to drop to 2nd gear in slower turns your lap time will gets major improvement. Even at 110% I find the AI there to be too slow.

Does anyone has a full Ferrari engine R&D tree from Driver's Career so I can confirm a few things I wonder? Before the update, I remember the engine R&D progression of Ferrari and their customer teams are identical to your MyTeam's Ferrari engine if you have both Ignition System & Spark Plug applied when you first started the career. If you start a new career as a Ferrari driver (or their customer teams), you'll notice two things: They also already have all 4 major manufacturer upgrades from the start like MyTeam. But their engine R&D tree is different from the MyTeam's tree (This was already the case before the patch). I believe that's because they already have the 2 minor upgrades from the tree pre-applied to their engine so they adjusted the look of the tree by not showing those upgrades. But their engine are still identical as the MyTeam's Ferrari PU when both sides are maxed out (so technically the trees are still the same, except they started a little ahead of you if you don't get the upgrades from the interview). Though, after the patch, their tree in Driver's Career still remain the same as before, with 4 major manufacturer upgrades (like MyTeam's PU). The interesting part is, even though they're still using the Driver's Career tree (that means the 2 minor upgrades are probably still pre-applied), yet their performance are identical to the one in MyTeam if you don't have the 2 minor upgrades benefit from the first interview. This not only means they no longer started slightly ahead of you in progression, they probably got a hard perma-nerf with less maximum potential than your Ferrari PU in MyTeam because they're missing two minor upgrades in their tree. But I'm not sure if this is the actual case without seeing the full Ferrari R&D tree.

It seems engine power plays a much bigger role on acceleration than top speed.

I assume the color codes are probably given by the actual race teams themselves but it just happens to look the way it is now under the graphic engine we have. They probably could still do some tweaking, but might have to go through all the procedures to get agreements from the official parties since the game is licensed by a separate entity (F1). If you play on PC you could try to mod them though.

Didn't really paid too much attention to the lap time differences, but I could say the effect of dirty air is quite significant, Spain is definitely the best example just like in real life.

Just by comparing our current AI with the ones in F1 2010...that was the last F1 game I played and thought it was decent based on my memories, but I recently watched some video of it and just....WOW, never thought it was so bad.

Do we get an option to either apply the Ferrari PU stat update to our current MyTeam saves or not? Like the driver stats' patch from last time. I haven't update the game yet because I fear it would ruin my current save with the Ferrari PU since it's unfair to only nerf the Ai and not us...

So does the patch gives you an option to either apply the update to existing saves or not like the drivers' stat patch? If not then that's quite disappointing, not exactly what I feared but probably even worse. I mean...seriously? The patch was meant to make things more accurately reflecting real life, Ferrari screwed themselves alongside with all their customers, that should include us, but it didn't for the sake of not being unfair to the players...? Right now it's the exact opposite...it made us looking like we're cheating 😫

I've tried similar method as well as taking other players' recommended settings for each track as references. Can't say it's perfect now but I've been refining my difficulty list from going through 7 full seasons (50% distance) across different saves with different progressions. AI get progressively stronger the further you're into the career, the grippier car benefited by their R&D progression amplified their advantage of very consistent throttle control off traction corners. I'll probably release my list sometime in the close future once I'm really satisfy with it.

I do understand why some having frustrations with the AI, their performance from track to track & from season to season can be quite drastically different which made finding the right difficulty setting quite tricky. Though after so many years in racing games, I think this is the one where I think is closest to racing actual humans. When you get the difficulty settings right, the kind of close wheel-to-wheel racing you get is almost impossible to replicate even with racing against experienced human players. The more you're able to perform in close battles, the more they repay you with the same. The AI here are not only very competitive in terms of pace (which is already very rare in sim/simcade racers), but they actually defend or attack and respect your space while giving you a proper fight if you do the same to them, it's bloody great.

It is, but the 3 questions that actually affect your car performance doesn't buff/nerf your R&D progression very far off from around Alfa & Haas. If you want to get the worst outcome you skipped the first 2 questions and pick reliability on the final one. With this you will only get 2 reliability upgrades (ICE & Turbo), and put you either right below or about the same as Haas depends on your PU choice. If you give answers that're all beneficial, at most it pushes you right above Alfa. My opinion is, the game would earn quite significant re-play values if you're given more freedom at the beginning of the season, be it having more room of adjustment to your starting progression, or being able to adjust other teams' performances.

1.) If what you meant is starting an entirely new save in Driver's Career mode, your new career will be separated from your first, that means you can have both Career 1 & 2 (or more) to choose. 2.) MyTeam Career is separated from Driver's Career mode entirely, and the saves work exactly like Career mode, that means you can have multiple careers in you game simultaneously. Hope this helps mate 😁

Exactly, what they should do is implementing a system where player could choose where they wanna be in the grid when starting a new team, doesn't matter if it's just a simple slider or an extensive system. If they want they could keep it locked until you finished your first season as a reward of completion (then you can use this feature on the next save or something).

Ferrari's issue is that their whole package is just a mess, they lost the most performance out of all 3 Ferrari powered teams (even both Alfa & Haas could put up a fight against them). If they're actually gonna nerf Ferrari to reflect real life it can't be just the engine alone.

Well, yes, it's still a nerf indeed. I just have a feeling that a lot of people probably think it's a perma-nerf without knowing all the engines are actually equal in their stock & ultimate-form, so I wanted to point it out.

I don't think it should be called a nerf, they probably will just remove a few pre-installed manufacturer upgrades at the first season, but will eventually get them all back down the line and that means it won't affect any season after the first.

Based on my understanding, in MyTeam mode, all 4 engines are actually identical in terms of performance when they're brand new (no manufacturer upgrade) and maxed out (all manufacturer upgrades applied). When you first starts out a new season, they already have some manufacturer upgrades pre-applied to them (probably to reflect how the real life engine rules haven't got any major change for a few years now, so they're all well-developed by this point). The reason why their performances differs is because they have different presets of manufacturer upgrades, for example: Honda has 6 minor & 2 major upgrades, while Ferrari has 4 major & 2 minor upgrades, what these meant is that: For Honda, it's +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +2 +2 = 10 For Ferrari, it's +2 +2 +2 +2 +1 +1 = 10 All upgrade does is they affect the pace of their development down the line, some starts out improving faster but take longer time to develop between upgrade or lacks momentum at the end, while others take some time to warmup but will eventually catch up with others. But they all leads to the same outcome, unless the final upgrades are not available for that season, which is a randomized mechanic and they get completely reset every time when there's engine rule change. In the current new game Ferrari is already at +6 (4 major upgrades), that's why they have the best engine at the beginning of the first season. In order to make it more true to life, all they need to do is removing (some of) those pre-installed upgrades. However, after that it's all randomized by the game mechanic, they could still become the best engine at the end of the season before the next rule change, or ended up lacking a few final upgrades and drop behind the pack.

The thing is, Ai is Ai, unless the technology as a whole evolve or else they'll never behave exactly like humans. I used Extreme Damage Mod so I know the AI are especially stupid when they run into stationary cars, but that's pretty much about it. To be honest, the game wasn't designed and didn't intend to expect you to just stop your car in the middle of the track anyways. Though, I hardly ever had any issue with AI overtaking me. To me, it seems more like you didn't leave them enough space like you would when against human (I used to be like that too). I have more problem with them not being aggressive enough, they were too nice and just back out when I was barely squeezing them when defending. Sometime they overshot their braking too, so I anticipate them like human and adjust my line accordingly which worked very well. Speaking of straight line speed: Were you using a Honda engine? In your first season? How far were you in your engine R&D? Were you actively playing with fuel-mix like you're suppose to? Was your engine overheating? Components wore-out? KERS running out? or didn't get a good corner exit? Too much fuel to weight your car down? Chassis too heavy? Didn't upgrade drag reduction? Running too much downforce? There're so many things that could affect this. I had these problems too when I first started out the game, but I figured it's heavily impacted by you R&D and your familiarity of the system, because the issue eventually just disappeared when my progression actually caught up with them.

Seems like we're playing a completely different game...or may be you need to lower the difficulty a little.

Speaking of scraping the ground, I've been thinking that the visual damages caused by driving on some of the curbs (not even particularly thick) are a bit much. Such as the outside curb of Albert Park's turn 12, or Zandvoort's turn 9 & 14. If you just ran a little deep on those curbs (like halfway to the middle), you frontwing, side pod, and floor will all get major visual damages, and it happens even when you're just in season 1 with very little downforce, and setting the ride height & suspension doesn't seems to help. Your frontwing also receive tons of chip damage just driving through the lowest point of Eau Rouge (without touching any curb).