NOT CREATED EQUAL -HYPE-
- Making Career Mod Interesting Again
- Being Released Friday
I must admit, I like this year’s Career Mode. It can be as lengthy as I like, and for the initial seasons, it has a nice RPG performance element in RnD. That being said, there were some flaws and room for improvements. Not Created Equal intends to change this with some rather sever balance tweeks – but before I talk about what my mod alters, let’s first look at how the Vanilla Career Mod plays.
Vanilla.
Starting out, all teams have a set performance. Worst teams have performance stats which simply makes them slower in areas such as Acceleration, Top Speed and Cornerning. The upgrades you put on your car via RnD improve these stats, making your car faster. The AI has these upgrades too, making their car faster. But there is two problems.
::: 1 ::: There is only a slight variability between the upgrades on each car. If each team upgraded their car at the same rate, they will always remain in the same relative performance with each other (the performance gap closes slightly but that is all). See this graph which plots Upgrades Level (1-5, each being a full set of 5 upgrades) against performance in seconds.
This means, once all the teams have their upgrades, there is little chance of variable racing. Sauber and Manor will always be back markers, no matter what the player has done to improve them.
::: 2 ::: The play can out upgrade the AI initially. While in season 1, the AI has one full level of upgrades on their car, the Player can easily get 2-3. Watching Tiametmarduk’s Ultimate AI Career Mode, he is one short of all level 3 upgrades before he ceased RnD for season 1. At his rate, he’ll have maxed out RnD by season 2 while the AI will spend at least 3 more seasons catching up.
As he is playing Manor, what this means for him, is by the end of Season 2, his Manor will be a title contender. But by Season 5-6 his Manor will be a back marker once again.
I dislike this because (a) Should Manor be able to improve over every other car that quickly and reliably? (b) All this hard work gets thrown out in later seasons as the other cars begin to over take him again. Yes, Season 3-5 maybe fun as he struggles to keep the car near the front, but season 6# onwards is going to be a very repetitive event.
These are the areas which Not Created Equal will improve on.
Not Created Equal.
:::Feature 1::: Any Car Can Become a Front Runner!
I adjust each car’s RnD gains so that, every car will have similar performance come the End of Upgrading Everything.
With a gap so close, in this instance, no car will have an outright advantage over another. This solves the initial problem of having your Manor always at the back after all the upgrades are done.
But…
:::Feature 2::: Still Want Tiers?
Not Created Equal comes with a set of files which lets you ALTER the final tier of each car. I have added for each car:
Level 1 RnD – RnD Performance is Not So Good
Level 2 RnD – RnD performance is Average
Level 3 RnD. – RnD performance is Best
So want a Vanilla standings, have your Backmarkers at level 1, midfields at level 2, and front runners at level 3 – and you get this
Bored of the Ferrari, Mercedes, Redbull and Williams always at the front, and want your back markers to end up being better in the end? Mix and Match their RnD Levels so the vanilla front runners are at level 1, and your vanilla backmarkers at at level 3, and you end up with this:
Mix and Match Files, or you give each team their RnD Level at the end of each season, based on their performance during the season itself (i.e., give teams which have higher constructors points, better RnD Levels).
I have taken great care to ensure that the cars are no clones of each other. Red Bull still have amazing downforce, Williams still have the best drag reduction of everyone, etc etc.
So great! We have sorted out what happens once all the upgrades have been gotten. But we still have a predictable raise from the Initial standing, to Season 5. Everyone improves gradually, but no major changes are made… until
::: Feature 3 ::: Not Equal RnD
Firstly, I have altered the RnD such that the First Level of items is really good, the middle three levels only give slight performances while the final level is quite a bit better again.
At first this may seem an odd thing to do, but what this next feature does is “Add Random Variations to each Upgrade”. This creates some chaos, particularly with AI comparisons (let’s put everyone at Level 3 RnD and compare this to the graph in Feature 1):
Each upgrade maybe Average, maybe AMAZING, or may actually give no performance upgrade at all. I like this idea as when the factory makes a new part, we have seen in real f1 race trim that sometimes these new parts just don’t do anything meaningful at all. At the same time, an Rnd Part could be SO amazing, that it simply boosts your performance well above other surrounding teams.
Fear not, there is a limit on variability – you won’t see a back marker become the best car in one upgrade. But it certainly allows interesting things to happen from season 1-5.
Look at Mercedes in the above graph. They’ll start out the best, their first upgrades are a letdown and Red Bull at ahead perforence wise. Merc’s second upgrades get them back on top, but their next two put them in the midfield, but then their final upgrade elevates them again to having just a tiny edge.
Meanwhile, Sauber are constantly last through all 4 initial upgrades, but their final upgrade is an absolute Beast, putting them above everyone (abiet it by less then a tenth).
So now, the upgrades are randomised somewhat – meaning lots of shake ups in the first few seasons. The variation carries onto the last upgrade, meaning that randomly the cars can be in any order once the final upgrades are on the car. At this stage, you can change team’s RnD Levels to create spread amoung the cars, having whichever teams you want on top at the end.
Don’t worry, this graph isn’t what you will definatly end up with. Who knows what you’ll end up with – as I can regenerate the files with different values so your performances may end up like this, this or this:
::: Feature 4 ::: Car Builds.
Looking back at our Sauber with worst then average RnD at the initial levels. It’s not always fun to have the worst car, despite your best efforts. So at the start of each season, you can select the build for your car. Each level has a few builds, though I have only created two for initial release:
Level 1 RnD – Poor and Troubled
Level 2 RnD – Average and Experimental
Level 3 RnD – Solid and Exploitational
The Poor, Average and Solid builds are much like the graphs above. But Troubled, Experimental and Exploitational are alterative builds you can select for each car instead. These have their variance increased more then their counterparts. This means, if you are sick of your back of the pack Sauber Poor Build, try the Troubled Build – you May end up with a car that jumps over the local optision and puts you in the midfield – in which case your gamble has paid off. Or, it might be even more of a dog of a car – and put you even further behind! Sure, the gamble didn’t pay off, and you’ll have one season of hell – but at least you get the option to try something different – and that option isn’t perminant. This is much like McLaren’s gamble to use the Honda Engine instead of a safer option – it could have been amazing, but it turns out that it wasn’t.
As more time goes, I want to release more Builds per RnD level, so we can keep experimenting, finding the ‘best’ build for our car possible, for any given stage of the career.
::: Feature 5 ::: Challenge Mode:
Having have an alternative to overcome the flaws I saw in career mode to create a more dynamic field, there is one left. The Player can outpace the AI’s performance.
Once answer to this has been – remove the Practice sessions UI’s. No Flags in acclimatisation, no meter in tyre wear test, no deltas for qualifying performance. This makes them harder, and thus, you get less resource points and you are more on par with AI. Or maybe you skip practice. Or maybe you really struggle with those practice programs anyway (especially if you are playing on a difficulty slightly above your level – If these apply to you, then great! This feature is unneeded. But I thought about one more alternative for those whose resource points spiral out of control, and you burn through all the upgrades by season 2/3.
Challenge Mode:
Let’s say, you drive McLaren – by default a Level 2 RnD Average Car.
Normally, you’d get lots of resource points, have your first 15 upgrades by the time the AI has just about got 5. By the time you have all the upgrades, you’re stocking up resource points for… no reason whatsoever. Challenge mod changes this:
Using an Excel sheet (supplied with the mod) At the start of the season you tell it how many Resource points you have, how many updates you have and what RnD Level you have.
It then tells you, ‘if you want a Level 3 RnD car – you MUST have (for example) 10,000 resource points at the end of the season’. Or ‘If you only have (for examples) 3,000 resource points at the end of the season, you must move your RnD Level down to 1! Where you finish in the constructors championship will give you a modifier to your resource points (overachive, get +2000, underchiave, -3000).
This creastes Resource Management of these resource points. You must plan how to use the ones you get this season. Use too many upgrading every component, you’ll suffer next season with a car that’s slower. Don’t use any, you’ll fall behind everyone else component wise, but you maybe better set for next season – or because you’ve not kept pace, you under achieve in the constructors championship and you’ve got a worse car again.
This make the first 5 seasons a balancing act of upgrading your car vs keeping enough resource points investing in next years car, ensuring it doesn’t lag behind the competition.
At the end of the 5 seasons, once all upgrades are done (ish) it becomes important to get each resource point available in order to move your car upto the next level.
Just to keep things balance, the Excel sheet also recommends the builds of all the other cars on the grid based on their constructors points (unfortunately – we cannot see what they’re doing with resource points, if indeed they get them at all and just don’t randomly generate how they upgrade)
::: Additional Half Feature ::: Rule Changes
Season 5-10 are still going to be a little less dynamic then maybe you would like. So whenever you want, you can have a wildcard season!
Simulating major F1 rule changes, the grid becomes far more jumbled then it has previous years. To simulate this, the above Excel sheet allows for a wildcard season, picking random(ish) RnD levels and builds for each car. Its recommended to do this once the game as become a little stale, around Season 6-8. By which time, this random change means that you may have to rebuild your team once more (by ascending RnD levels) to have one last claim to glory before the end of Season 10.
This is all on the ‘honour’ system of course. How you setup your game world is entirely upto you. But if you want to play the game, and have a ‘tied hands’ approach to how the game world creates itself, then Challenge Mode and Rule Changes are for you.
Final
Between this and all the above features, I think there is enough Dynamic in Career mode again for me to keep playing for at least several years, instead of starting over once things get stale – which is what I would do by season 5 in vanilla.
This will also work with existing seasons, however expect some major performance shake-ups if you do install in an existing save. Its always best to do it at the end of a season and immerse yourself by saying that the next season involves this ‘Rule change’.
I intend to release more builds and update the performances after testing – but as this is a mod which sees changes based on the AI’s upgrade schedule, it requires a lot of time invested to truly test everything – So this mod will sit in the ‘to be continually updated and patched over the next few months’. But each update will be compatible with current Save Games, so don’t feel that a new release means you need to restart your career.
Baring no major testing issues, this should be released Friday. But there is still time for you to give me some final ideas, requests, and suggestions before release. My hands are tied in a few areas (I would rather upgrades were universally more expensive for the player but Challenge Mode is the best I can do).
Well, Initial testing is going well. At the very least, it's not breaking the game, tonight I'll do some longer term career testing just to confirm that things are near to what they should be.
I don't suppose anyone has a 5-year in game career mode Save File handy? That would save me spending hours summing through the mode.
While I have simulated all these changes, there's no guarantee my simulation is 100% accurate. So when this is released, feel free to report back what's going on in your games, what files your running and what your experiences have been.
In my experience, even when cars are perfectly equal, Driver AI is not. This means, on equal footing, Hamilton will still beat Errickson. I've concentrated a lot on Team Performance so far, so if anyone has experiences editing the AI (I have noticed each track has an AI file) then please share - as it's probably the next thing I look into once this mod is settled.
Also, Each Build (for all 11 cars) now only takes a 20 minutes to simulate, convert to Xml and convert to Erp. So if anyone has some cool ideas on how 'one set of equal-ish cars' can be separated differently from another set of Equal-ish cars', feel free to suggest ideas (I have been content simply by adding balanced random variables)
F1 2010 was the last game I modded too 
