Let's start with the info about my playthrough. I always used Alfa Romeo.
In the first playthrough, I went in completely ignorant of the mechanics (total noob). At the end of the 4th season, I had all facility maxed and 2 Rookie pilots I grew at 81/82 (doohan+Pourchair) - I couldn't fire Bottas right away too expensive to break the contract, so I kept him for the first two seasons sadly. By season 4, I was battling for the championship with a 20% chance of winning it; my car was the best one of the season (even if I didn't get min/max), but the rookie pilots kept it challenging; they crashed often.
On the second playthrough, I checked all the guides about research/development and setup, and I won the championship second season with Bottas before I could even fire him to use my second lovely Rookies (Doohan+Bearman). I then fired him after he won the championship, and I won the year after again with a rookie (Doohan); my car was much better, even with a decent number of crashes. I was unstoppable
Things that, in my opinion, break the game
1) Too much money - You start with too much money; you get too much money during the season, and you can continually develop everything while upgrading all buildings and paying crazy bonuses to fancy drivers if, like me, you fire the fancy driver and use a rookie you have more money than you can spend, all the time! It's game-breaking.
2) Due to the amount of money, research and development are forever-ongoing activities at the maximum cost (still problem one). R&D is already a little unbalanced as we can do much more than the AI. Obviously is a relative thing per se; if AI could R&D as crazy as a player can, it wouldn't probably be so unbalanced, but I would say AI does 1/3 of what a clueless player can do in one year, and if the player is min/max even 1/10! (and there is no chance that a research/dev fails or comes out not so good! that should be addressed with a minigame connected with the practice see point 5)
3) Contract needs to be revised to make more sense; you should be able to hire for next season or right away with a different cost, and hiring a fancy driver should break your bank (still problem one), especially with a not top team cost double or triple than a team battling for the championship. You would want to make it maybe more interactive, more like a minigame (like the setup); the closer you balance the various money reward bonus, the higher chance you have to hire while striving to keep it as low as possible (graphically, I mean more like the setup with a range in color). It should depend on the stats of your team and fame how broad those areas would be and where in the range should be placed. (while scouting and special building could help minimize the range or move it down)
BTW that's just me, but there should ONLY be autosave. I hate when people cheat; most games are ruined and called too easy because people save before hiring someone, and then if they miss it, they reload and try again, then they say the Game is easy! f**king cheaters.
4) Advertisement is shrunk down to a few options at the beginning of the year, and some silly race-based options that give barely any money compared to how much you get anyway. They are a pretty useless waste of time since money is no problem; Instead, it should be what makes the difference between going red and staying afloat! (if money were balanced, problem 1). You should be able to sell space on the car for ads; each contract should have a different option and weird clauses, some be attached to some lame pilot, maybe more variety.
5) Setup stuff is okey the effect of your setup (extra point per pilot stats) is the easy way out; it works for me, but the range is too small; we know AI gets between 60-70% human without cheating 80/90% and cheating 100% all the time (so the real difference what factor in is just a bunch of points like +/-5 at best). The problem I see here is that the player with the guide on setups will always get 100% unless lazy, so widening the range would work well theoretically only with an honest player who tries to deal with it without cheating. Still, even so, it's hard not to get 80-90%, so you don't get very much variance anyway. At this point, it probably makes little sense; I would keep it automatic!
Add a stat in the pilot, "ability to set the car" and make them pilot-dependent. At the same time, you can train that ability with points or facilities that, in the way, we will not all go with a 100% setup because we all use cheats (and if the morale is low, give him a chance to it up). This will make the practice useless, but we are "Managers." I don't think the practice shouldn't be a big part of what we "manage," really. (unless you connect the practice to some development chance of success with some minigame)
6) Qualification, on the other hand, is pointless to manage right now! In automatic, you probably get better results as the AI can better avoid traffic (in my second replay I made them always automatic never played once), while it would be cool if we could influence them more. And I don't mean the problem most players have with blue flag slow down and other semi-broken little things. If you want to do a minigame, here during the lap is where you should pull out something that the player can interact with. Skill & Reflex, the player could help the driver achieve a +/- .3 sec per lap, so you will force the player to follow the fast lap while clicking or interacting during breaks or curves to influence the pilot to break-point/trajectory/acceleration and achieve the best result. (I was thinking something similar to the golf game where you have to hit a bar in the right spot or something)
7) the race is fine. There are tweaks to do at tire and DRS, but even if everybody is crazy mad about it, those are values that are easily fixable as long as the core concept is correct. I don't have much to say yellow car, red flag blue car one lap behind all details quite insignificant in my gameplay. I hope they fix it, but they never broke any of my eight seasons.
8) Building is so static it shows you didn't have much time to finish the game. Each building per se should open a new screen with tons of options that grow exponentially as you develop the building more things for the morale (while making morale much more influencing the race effectiveness of pilots), more stuff about training with more focus on whatever you think is worth it maybe more interaction with the board where (once we fix point one) you can ask for more money or change contract requirement or goal and so on. You can get wild with options in those buildings! (some could even fix the advertisement lameness)
9) Last but not least, design of the car (mostly color and small detail) customization always make the game longer, especially if you make those changes cost money; it can sink some of the money and can make the player have fun with colors and design maybe make it building dependent and make it that it takes one year to build so nothing can be changed in season 2022 and you don't break the realism/contract with the license.
In the first playthrough, I went in completely ignorant of the mechanics (total noob). At the end of the 4th season, I had all facility maxed and 2 Rookie pilots I grew at 81/82 (doohan+Pourchair) - I couldn't fire Bottas right away too expensive to break the contract, so I kept him for the first two seasons sadly. By season 4, I was battling for the championship with a 20% chance of winning it; my car was the best one of the season (even if I didn't get min/max), but the rookie pilots kept it challenging; they crashed often.
On the second playthrough, I checked all the guides about research/development and setup, and I won the championship second season with Bottas before I could even fire him to use my second lovely Rookies (Doohan+Bearman). I then fired him after he won the championship, and I won the year after again with a rookie (Doohan); my car was much better, even with a decent number of crashes. I was unstoppable
Things that, in my opinion, break the game
1) Too much money - You start with too much money; you get too much money during the season, and you can continually develop everything while upgrading all buildings and paying crazy bonuses to fancy drivers if, like me, you fire the fancy driver and use a rookie you have more money than you can spend, all the time! It's game-breaking.
2) Due to the amount of money, research and development are forever-ongoing activities at the maximum cost (still problem one). R&D is already a little unbalanced as we can do much more than the AI. Obviously is a relative thing per se; if AI could R&D as crazy as a player can, it wouldn't probably be so unbalanced, but I would say AI does 1/3 of what a clueless player can do in one year, and if the player is min/max even 1/10! (and there is no chance that a research/dev fails or comes out not so good! that should be addressed with a minigame connected with the practice see point 5)
3) Contract needs to be revised to make more sense; you should be able to hire for next season or right away with a different cost, and hiring a fancy driver should break your bank (still problem one), especially with a not top team cost double or triple than a team battling for the championship. You would want to make it maybe more interactive, more like a minigame (like the setup); the closer you balance the various money reward bonus, the higher chance you have to hire while striving to keep it as low as possible (graphically, I mean more like the setup with a range in color). It should depend on the stats of your team and fame how broad those areas would be and where in the range should be placed. (while scouting and special building could help minimize the range or move it down)
BTW that's just me, but there should ONLY be autosave. I hate when people cheat; most games are ruined and called too easy because people save before hiring someone, and then if they miss it, they reload and try again, then they say the Game is easy! f**king cheaters.
4) Advertisement is shrunk down to a few options at the beginning of the year, and some silly race-based options that give barely any money compared to how much you get anyway. They are a pretty useless waste of time since money is no problem; Instead, it should be what makes the difference between going red and staying afloat! (if money were balanced, problem 1). You should be able to sell space on the car for ads; each contract should have a different option and weird clauses, some be attached to some lame pilot, maybe more variety.
5) Setup stuff is okey the effect of your setup (extra point per pilot stats) is the easy way out; it works for me, but the range is too small; we know AI gets between 60-70% human without cheating 80/90% and cheating 100% all the time (so the real difference what factor in is just a bunch of points like +/-5 at best). The problem I see here is that the player with the guide on setups will always get 100% unless lazy, so widening the range would work well theoretically only with an honest player who tries to deal with it without cheating. Still, even so, it's hard not to get 80-90%, so you don't get very much variance anyway. At this point, it probably makes little sense; I would keep it automatic!
Add a stat in the pilot, "ability to set the car" and make them pilot-dependent. At the same time, you can train that ability with points or facilities that, in the way, we will not all go with a 100% setup because we all use cheats (and if the morale is low, give him a chance to it up). This will make the practice useless, but we are "Managers." I don't think the practice shouldn't be a big part of what we "manage," really. (unless you connect the practice to some development chance of success with some minigame)
6) Qualification, on the other hand, is pointless to manage right now! In automatic, you probably get better results as the AI can better avoid traffic (in my second replay I made them always automatic never played once), while it would be cool if we could influence them more. And I don't mean the problem most players have with blue flag slow down and other semi-broken little things. If you want to do a minigame, here during the lap is where you should pull out something that the player can interact with. Skill & Reflex, the player could help the driver achieve a +/- .3 sec per lap, so you will force the player to follow the fast lap while clicking or interacting during breaks or curves to influence the pilot to break-point/trajectory/acceleration and achieve the best result. (I was thinking something similar to the golf game where you have to hit a bar in the right spot or something)
7) the race is fine. There are tweaks to do at tire and DRS, but even if everybody is crazy mad about it, those are values that are easily fixable as long as the core concept is correct. I don't have much to say yellow car, red flag blue car one lap behind all details quite insignificant in my gameplay. I hope they fix it, but they never broke any of my eight seasons.
8) Building is so static it shows you didn't have much time to finish the game. Each building per se should open a new screen with tons of options that grow exponentially as you develop the building more things for the morale (while making morale much more influencing the race effectiveness of pilots), more stuff about training with more focus on whatever you think is worth it maybe more interaction with the board where (once we fix point one) you can ask for more money or change contract requirement or goal and so on. You can get wild with options in those buildings! (some could even fix the advertisement lameness)
9) Last but not least, design of the car (mostly color and small detail) customization always make the game longer, especially if you make those changes cost money; it can sink some of the money and can make the player have fun with colors and design maybe make it building dependent and make it that it takes one year to build so nothing can be changed in season 2022 and you don't break the realism/contract with the license.
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