Difficulty

[PJTierney 4,908]

19 minutes ago, TL77 said:

If I understood correctly those times are set by Red Bull 2010 car and you need to quali laps with a Red Bull 2010 and compare.

Sounds about right, as the creator found my forum post from 2018 which used the RB6 at the time.

[marioho 686]

It's been pretty much covered already, but it won't hurt to emphasize.

• Use qualy to assess the difficulty level, not the race. Mistakes happen in the race, cars need to divert from their racing line to defend or overtake. These are applicable to drivers and AI alike, from minor lockups to hitting the walls. And stars aligning to give you an unbelievable race happen. I'm quite the OCD guy, but I liked finishing races on 15th and on 3rd in the same season as long as they all felt deserved and qualy results were reasonable. 
• We all have strong and weak circuits. Yes, the AI seems to not be equally balanced through the whole calendar, I can attest to that specially when trying to perform against what the game expects me to achieve on the practice programmes. But just as in real life, we all have different quirks and different driving styles that will turn us into freaks of nature in some tracks and a freight cart pulled by two snapping donkeys in others. Red Bull Ring, Spa and Interlagos I feel like the second coming of Christ, all clean apexes and finely tuned setups I wouldn't change a single click. In Singapore I'd wager I couldn't do a lap on foot without tripping. Again, as long as qualy times are reasonable, come in race day and I expect to be driver of the day cutting my way through the field like Vader did with Luke's merry friend. 

If you play on My Team, forget your teammate. As long as you plan for it, it's possible to end your first season with Vettel or Raghunathan as you teammate. Are you seriously expecting to tune the AI level to stay within the same gap in both of these cases? Don't do that. On My Team, you should be assessing your performance against the drivers in the teams closest to you in the performance table, both above and below. If you have two teams at practically the same performance level on the chart, use all their drivers as parameters, don't lock yourself against just one or two. After qualy is done, take note of your best time and the fastest time of the best positioned AI driver among those teams.

And just to both endorse and attest to what I said on my second bullet point, let's say I have Alpha Tauri above me with virtually identical performance and Haas below. There are qualy sessions where Mag was had the best time of the bunch, sessions where I was in the lead and sessions where Kvyat or Gasly finished further forward in the grid. This is good, this is fabulous, this is God's Will. Please don't fret about it, as long as the gap is reasonable. I wouldn't touch the AI slider before cleaning up the slate above them all with a decisive 0.3+ gap in qualy.

That's it, finished my rambling, get on with your life. If you want to though, I'll leave my tale of my season 1 last round on My Team in Interlagos, when for the first time ever I did a 50% race. I play on AI 100 and no assists except for ABS on a PS4 controller:

Quote

Interlagos was my last race of the 16 season. I went all-in in it, full qualy and all. Made my way to Q3 and even snatched a surprising 6th position – all that playing on AI 100 as I've been for a while now.

Race day comes and I jumped on my seat when they announce that I'm the pole sitter! Just happens that every freaking body got a grid penalty for component change. Yeah, that's last GP of the season for you. 

It had been so long, so so long since I last pole positioned a race that I found it the hardest thing in the world to have a good start. Turns out I've been relying too much on the cars in front and around me to get a sense if it is throttle party time or not.

The race was wicked, got Mercedes, RBR, Ferrari and Renault pestering me the whole time and even Alpha Tauri after my stop – that went S>H by the way. Even managed to get a breathing at the last quarter of the with like 2 seconds of a gap to my name but then my hards started to give in on me and I had to go easy specially on Mergulho at the end of Sector 2 or I would lose my right side. 

The podium was the best one I could ever have hoped for. Verstappen 2nd and Ricciardo 3rd, my faves!

Haha I even managed a handful of switcheroos on Senna S! Given that I obviously didn't have the car to drag race the top teams, I often moved to the outside to let them have Turn 1 just to overtake them back on the inside of T2. The first time it was as golden as it gets: they managed to stay ahead until the DRS detection zone, so when I got pole back at the end of T2 it was just speed bonanza with clear air ahead and a free DRS and overtake on!

I love this game, honestly.

[Matty5792 15]

5 hours ago, marioho said:

It's been pretty much covered already, but it won't hurt to emphasize.

• Use qualy to assess the difficulty level, not the race. Mistakes happen in the race, cars need to divert from their racing line to defend or overtake. These are applicable to drivers and AI alike, from minor lockups to hitting the walls. And stars aligning to give you an unbelievable race happen. I'm quite the OCD guy, but I liked finishing races on 15th and on 3rd in the same season as long as they all felt deserved and qualy results were reasonable. 
• We all have strong and weak circuits. Yes, the AI seems to not be equally balanced through the whole calendar, I can attest to that specially when trying to perform against what the game expects me to achieve on the practice programmes. But just as in real life, we all have different quirks and different driving styles that will turn us into freaks of nature in some tracks and a freight cart pulled by two snapping donkeys in others. Red Bull Ring, Spa and Interlagos I feel like the second coming of Christ, all clean apexes and finely tuned setups I wouldn't change a single click. In Singapore I'd wager I couldn't do a lap on foot without tripping. Again, as long as qualy times are reasonable, come in race day and I expect to be driver of the day cutting my way through the field like Vader did with Luke's merry friend. 

If you play on My Team, forget your teammate. As long as you plan for it, it's possible to end your first season with Vettel or Raghunathan as you teammate. Are you seriously expecting to tune the AI level to stay within the same gap in both of these cases? Don't do that. On My Team, you should be assessing your performance against the drivers in the teams closest to you in the performance table, both above and below. If you have two teams at practically the same performance level on the chart, use all their drivers as parameters, don't lock yourself against just one or two. After qualy is done, take note of your best time and the fastest time of the best positioned AI driver among those teams.

And just to both endorse and attest to what I said on my second bullet point, let's say I have Alpha Tauri above me with virtually identical performance and Haas below. There are qualy sessions where Mag was had the best time of the bunch, sessions where I was in the lead and sessions where Kvyat or Gasly finished further forward in the grid. This is good, this is fabulous, this is God's Will. Please don't fret about it, as long as the gap is reasonable. I wouldn't touch the AI slider before cleaning up the slate above them all with a decisive 0.3+ gap in qualy.

That's it, finished my rambling, get on with your life. If you want to though, I'll leave my tale of my season 1 last round on My Team in Interlagos, when for the first time ever I did a 50% race. I play on AI 100 and no assists except for ABS on a PS4 controller:

I love this game, honestly.

Well I think I’m inbetween Mercedes and Ferrari on the performance table so I guess they’re my benchmark. 

[Matty5792 15]

I put difficulty up to 80 for Austria gp. Usually it’s at 63. That is a track I absolutely love. Didn’t expect to get pole by less than a tenth from Bottas with a 1:03.4 which for me is pretty damn good. 

[Mintona 26]

On 7/25/2020 at 7:56 AM, Mintona said:

Canada is actually one of my weaker circuits so I might not need to worry there. I’m always bemused when I see people say how the AI is weak there, I always seems to struggle!

I’ve just done the Chinese GP weekend and I was looking pretty pacey in practice (2nd overall in FP3 after doing the quali sim run). So I raised the AI to 92 for qualifying and managed to get 7th, which still seemed a bit high. A changeable race weather wise and managing to be on the right tyres at the right time (and a DNF for Hamilton) promoted me to P6 by the end of the race. However Giovinazzi was 3rd and Kvyat 4th after starting in the bottom six so it was a bit of a crazy one all round really, and not really a good one to compare AI difficulty with.

I’ll start the Dutch GP weekend on 92 now. I don’t really want to lower it again, I upgraded my rig when the new game was released so it could just be getting more used to it, as well as the new car handling, and therefore a bit faster in the game. Maybe I’ll be on of those playing on 100 AI soon. Hopefully!

Just to continue my own findings - I started the Dutch GP weekend still on 92 and I was miles off the pace in FP1. I went and put in lap after lap on the hard tyres for pretty much all of FP1 and eventually found myself in about the right sort of place. By the end of FP3 I was fourth on the timing screens so upped AI again to 93. Managed to qualify in tenth, scraped through to Q3 due to getting an early lap in before it rained whilst others left it too late. But the ones who did get through were miles faster than me in Q3 on the inters (around 2-4 seconds a lap).
 

Anyway, I finished the race 5th. Even better than China. Helped by both Mercedes cars needing new front wings, Leclerc doing a weird unnecessary two stop strategy and Albon retiring, but still. I’ll take it. Now I’m wondering if I should put the AI up to 95 for Spain. I probably should, because I shouldn’t really be able to run this high just yet (five races into Season 1 on MyTeam).
 

But my main point is practicing. If I hadn’t put the laps in in FP1 I’d have been miles away from where I eventually managed to start and finish the race. So I’m not sure if the AI is weaker or stronger or we just get better through practice.

[Matty5792 15]

18 minutes ago, Mintona said:

Just to continue my own findings - I started the Dutch GP weekend still on 92 and I was miles off the pace in FP1. I went and put in lap after lap on the hard tyres for pretty much all of FP1 and eventually found myself in about the right sort of place. By the end of FP3 I was fourth on the timing screens so upped AI again to 93. Managed to qualify in tenth, scraped through to Q3 due to getting an early lap in before it rained whilst others left it too late. But the ones who did get through were miles faster than me in Q3 on the inters (around 2-4 seconds a lap).
 

Anyway, I finished the race 5th. Even better than China. Helped by both Mercedes cars needing new front wings, Leclerc doing a weird unnecessary two stop strategy and Albon retiring, but still. I’ll take it. Now I’m wondering if I should put the AI up to 95 for Spain. I probably should, because I shouldn’t really be able to run this high just yet (five races into Season 1 on MyTeam).
 

But my main point is practicing. If I hadn’t put the laps in in FP1 I’d have been miles away from where I eventually managed to start and finish the race. So I’m not sure if the AI is weaker or stronger or we just get better through practice.

It’s difficult to judge. I know if I keep mine at 80 for Silverstone same as in Austria where I finished 2nd I’ll get hammered. I like to use FP to base where I want the difficulty but the ai don’t do their fast laps until quali. In Austria they were doing 1:06in FP but come quali time they were in 1:03s so whatever time I do in FP I need to knock about 2secs off their times. 

[AdamFreeman 224]

I thought id demolisj my team mate yet Jake Aitken with his inferior manor is mixing it up with the lower midfield while I perform to the cars performance (dead last by a decent chunk) focuses on reliabilitiy for the 1st 10 race covid season.

Why ishe so damn fast lol

[AdamFreeman 224]

3 hours ago, Matty5792 said:

It’s difficult to judge. I know if I keep mine at 80 for Silverstone same as in Austria where I finished 2nd I’ll get hammered. I like to use FP to base where I want the difficulty but the ai don’t do their fast laps until quali. In Austria they were doing 1:06in FP but come quali time they were in 1:03s so whatever time I do in FP I need to knock about 2secs off their times. 

They dont use medium ers in practice and obviously you cant use hotlap in practice sessions. The qualy program should put you in the ballpark but i find them practice imbalanced.

We need long runs in practice for ai

[Matty5792 15]

3 minutes ago, AdamFreeman said:

They dont use medium ers in practice and obviously you cant use hotlap in practice sessions. The qualy program should put you in the ballpark but i find them practice imbalanced.

We need long runs in practice for ai

You can use hotlap mode in practice. I’ve used it to give me some idea what my pace will be in quali. 

[nothingEvil 0]

18 hours ago, marioho said:

And just to both endorse and attest to what I said on my second bullet point, let's say I have Alpha Tauri above me with virtually identical performance and Haas below. There are qualy sessions where Mag was had the best time of the bunch, sessions where I was in the lead and sessions where Kvyat or Gasly finished further forward in the grid. This is good, this is fabulous, this is God's Will. Please don't fret about it, as long as the gap is reasonable. I wouldn't touch the AI slider before cleaning up the slate above them all with a decisive 0.3+ gap in qualy.

I‘m sorry, but there are tracks where I qualify in the top 3 with over a second gap to my real (car performance wise) competitors and others where I trail the entire field by 2 seconds or more. All on the same difficulty. There are also tracks where I qualify easily in the top 10 but come race everyone is a second a lap faster than me. Things like that don’t really happen to that extent in real life. Stop defending the games AI programming when it’s clearly faulty. As I said I just want to set my AI difficulty once, maybe adjust a bit as I get better and be done with it. Not do some stupid gameplay flow breaking „tweaking“ all the time

[marioho 686]

15 minutes ago, nothingEvil said:

I‘m sorry, but there are tracks where I qualify in the top 3 with over a second gap to my real (car performance wise) competitors and others where I trail the entire field by 2 seconds or more. All on the same difficulty. There are also tracks where I qualify easily in the top 10 but come race everyone is a second a lap faster than me. Things like that don’t really happen to that extent in real life. Stop defending the games AI programming when it’s clearly faulty. As I said I just want to set my AI difficulty once, maybe adjust a bit as I get better and be done with it. Not do some stupid gameplay flow breaking „tweaking“ all the time

Not what I said, mate. Constant adjustment of the AI is a real thing, I'm not negating that. All I said is we need to review our parameters when correcting the AI level, as those discrepancies to some degree are a real thing.

Key word on my quoted text: as long as the gap is reasonable. Meaning if it is not, you do need to adjust your AI level. The "over a second gap" scenario you talk about is way way waaaay off the "I'm content with the occasional 0.3 gap" I was referring to.

[AdamFreeman 224]

Is all cause of corner speeds on certain corners like last corner at signapore for example first at china that makes huge differences you can match your team mate on 90% of corners and gain or lose loafs of time on a few corners ai is pants in terms of balance and its a right pain.

Having weaker tracks where you might be even half a second or so off fair enough the gaps Ive had have are between me being upto a second faster or 1.8 seconds slower.

Maybe I am just that inconsistant?

[viniciusrsouza 30]

Guys, since F2 cars have the exact same performance, why they are never mentioned in these difficulty level balance findings?

It's because they are slower/easier to drive?

I'm doing a 100% laps full F2 career, while waiting for the liveries/performance updates. Don't know if it's because all AI drivers do their races with unnecessary more than 8 extra laps of fuel, while our car have just +0.50 more fuel load, but practice and qualify are tough, but races are so easy!

I'm using the AI level as 100. In F1 this is extremely difficult for me. But in F2 it's not!

Raced in Bahrein, Azerbaijan and Spain. Podium and victories in almost all featured and sprint races.

What are your thoughts about F2 cars and difficulty level? 

[AdamFreeman 224]

Dint play the F2 cars so cant judge I would have raced with them if they had meaning to career which they dont.

[PJTierney 4,908]

1 hour ago, viniciusrsouza said:

Guys, since F2 cars have the exact same performance, why they are never mentioned in these difficulty level balance findings?

 

F2 is a good test since all the cars are identical.

Back when I came up with the "Spanish Qualifying Test" in 2018 they weren't in the games, so I used a Red Bull RB6 instead.

Essentially, you want to try your best and barely get pole position in F2. That ensures that if you drive well you should win in races.

[Hennes8 14]

Codemasters is trying to blame a problem on the users, nobody is stupid enough not to find the right ki for themselves, the problem is simply that the AI at Codemasters has been strong on various tracks for years.

And the qualifying times are scripted when you skip

[Madmaz116 111]

ok so what am I doing wrong ? Went to GP mode selected Bottas and the Spainsh circuit , did short qualifying , was within 2 tenths of hamilton on Ai 50, I thought thats looks way to low for the Ai , so I ran with it , went and started My Team. First race i qualified 8th , i thought then this is wrong , so had a bad race a couple of crashes finished 18th. So went to 2nd Race got Pole and absolutely smashed that race , came first with about 15 seconds between me and the Ai in 2nd. So i cant work out that test at all. What did i do wrong ?

[Akkan74 259]

20 minutes ago, Madmaz116 said:

ok so what am I doing wrong ? Went to GP mode selected Bottas and the Spainsh circuit , did short qualifying , was within 2 tenths of hamilton on Ai 50, I thought thats looks way to low for the Ai , so I ran with it , went and started My Team. First race i qualified 8th , i thought then this is wrong , so had a bad race a couple of crashes finished 18th. So went to 2nd Race got Pole and absolutely smashed that race , came first with about 15 seconds between me and the Ai in 2nd. So i cant work out that test at all. What did i do wrong ?

Can't really say what went wrong, but it could be that Spain is a weak track for you. So you had to lower the AI way more than it should be. I would also try Bahrain and Silverstone. These are also strong AI tracks.

[Madmaz116 111]

22 minutes ago, Akkan74 said:

Can't really say what went wrong, but it could be that Spain is a weak track for you. So you had to lower the AI way more than it should be. I would also try Bahrain and Silverstone. These are also strong AI tracks.

ok thanks will do

[Matty5792 15]

41 minutes ago, Madmaz116 said:

ok so what am I doing wrong ? Went to GP mode selected Bottas and the Spainsh circuit , did short qualifying , was within 2 tenths of hamilton on Ai 50, I thought thats looks way to low for the Ai , so I ran with it , went and started My Team. First race i qualified 8th , i thought then this is wrong , so had a bad race a couple of crashes finished 18th. So went to 2nd Race got Pole and absolutely smashed that race , came first with about 15 seconds between me and the Ai in 2nd. So i cant work out that test at all. What did i do wrong ?

It can definitely be how strong you are on certain tracks. Ai in my team is usually 63 but on Austria I put it up to 80 got pole with my fastest ever lap 1:03 but by a tenth and finished 2nd behind Bottas in the race. Should have won but made a mistake. Silverstone was next and if I’d kept it on 80 I’d have got hammered so ended up putting it down to 56 and even then I was a few tenths off pole. Finished 9th in the race. I’m 2nd on the performance chart so I expect to be close to Mercedes. 

[Madmaz116 111]

1 minute ago, Matty5792 said:

It can definitely be how strong you are on certain tracks. Ai in my team is usually 63 but on Austria I put it up to 80 got pole with my fastest ever lap 1:03 but by a tenth and finished 2nd behind Bottas in the race. Should have won but made a mistake. Silverstone was next and if I’d kept it on 80 I’d have got hammered so ended up putting it down to 56 and even then I was a few tenths off pole. Finished 9th in the race. I’m 2nd on the performance chart so I expect to be close to Mercedes. 

Man , this is what i want to avoid , keep putting Ai up and down

[Matty5792 15]

3 minutes ago, Madmaz116 said:

Man , this is what i want to avoid , keep putting Ai up and down

Tell me about it. It’s a pain. Having to jot down what it is for each track. I’ve Singapore next so what’s lowest it goes to because I suck on that track plus I’m not a big fan although the backdrop is spectacular. 

[Akkan74 259]

8 minutes ago, Madmaz116 said:

Man , this is what i want to avoid , keep putting Ai up and down

This absolutely depends on what you prefer. I never did it in the past. After i found my difficulty i let it locked. Means i had some tracks where i could made a unexpected good result compared to my car performance, where on others i was way behind. For me it was something i had to deal with.

The only reason i adjust the difficulty over a season is, if i get better over time (e.g. way less lockups, because i got used to trail breaking).

[Madmaz116 111]

2 hours ago, PJTierney said:

F2 is a good test since all the cars are identical.

Back when I came up with the "Spanish Qualifying Test" in 2018 they weren't in the games, so I used a Red Bull RB6 instead.

Essentially, you want to try your best and barely get pole position in F2. That ensures that if you drive well you should win in races.

ok so your saying run an F2 race , and do the Qualiy test ? then use that as the basis for the F1 experiance ? if so on what track ?

Edited July 27 by Madmaz116

[Madmaz116 111]

59 minutes ago, Akkan74 said:

Can't really say what went wrong, but it could be that Spain is a weak track for you. So you had to lower the AI way more than it should be. I would also try Bahrain and Silverstone. These are also strong AI tracks.

Thing is if Spain is a weak track for me Hamilton should have hammered me , Man Im so confused as to what to do now lol

Edited July 27 by Madmaz116