I've recently picked up the game again and am currently carrying on with an old Team Sky career with a view to purchasing the new 2016 edition.
Brad Wiggins is getting on a bit and his contract is up at the end of the season (Season 1). My plan is to get rid of him and sign a couple of younger riders on less wages to replace him. I've got my sights on Betancur and Pinot who have both got good stats but possibly not grand tour winning stats which is what I want to eventually replace Froome as he gets older.
Anyway, my questions are as follows:
1. How likely are these riders likely to improve in the future. I think they're both about 23/24 yeard old.
2. What can I do to get the most out of my young riders potential.
3. Is there a guide to developing riders in the game
1) Depends how many Stars they've got left. No stars = No progression left. Roughly it's +1-2 per Star.
2) Assign them the proper training schedule and a trainer. Then hope the game's RNG is kind so they develop fast. Not much to do really but wait for them to grow.
3) Not really, but it's so simple it's not needed. There's no experience or anything complex, it's mostly just RNG for speed of development.
It depends on which database you are playing with. I play with JESGD 2015DB V2, and can answer question 1 according to my game, where I'm currently in year 2019.
Pinot is definitely the better among the two. While Betancur is not bad, he's always a couple of stat points lower than Pinot. And no, neither of them will give you Froome level performance I'm afraid.
The other questions have already been answered by matt and TMM...
How many trainers/scouts would you recommend I have? Is the trainers effectiveness lessened the more riders he trains?
Trainers are useless in PCM. Spare your money and invest it on literally anything else
EDIT: Not to talk about scouts... Until they actually finish scouting a rider - someone says no one ever managed to see a scout finishing a report on a talent - another team has probably bought them. It takes like a month to scout a single stat. And the quick reports they send you are in 75% of the case incredibly inaccurate.
Edited by matt17br on 11-02-2016 13:07
This looks wrong, afaik 5 stars is the maximum and having checked with an editor it is purely linear:
1 Star
1-2 points
2 Stars
3-4 points
3 Stars
5-6 points
4 Stars
7-8 points
5 Stars
9+ points
But of course, you can't see that when signing new riders until they join your team. The only way to know the potentials is to use an external editor.
As for training, there are three factors, one of which you cannot control (not without an editor): Training schedule, quality of the trainers (10 in his speciality being the best) and what TheManxMissile calls the game's RNG (random number generator) - at the start of every year the game selects a number between 1 and 5 for every rider and how much they can improve (if they have unused potential, obviously). If you "roll" a 1 you might see no progression at all that season, a 5 and the rider will improve a lot, I had one last season who went from AVG 73 to 80 (with a top trainer)!
I don't believe trainers are useless - I always end up with 7, 10s in every training area. And after a while, money isn't a problem anyway. Scouts are an entirely different matter, I've given up on them. They only scout U23 riders for a start, and only in the regions you send them. They'll discover riders with time and tell you their potential immediately, but you have to spend ages monitoring them individually to find out their current stats. It's little to no use if they have a high potential but terrible current stats. I've seen climbers with a potential of the max 85 in MON - but a current stat of 57! Chances are they'll never reach their potential, or not for 10 years at least.
I'm not sure if that changed with the newer games Ripley, since pcm 14 came out I didn't get further than a year with careers. The test I posted above may well be wrong with the new games as I had it since PCM 13 (or even 12 mind you).
Ripley wrote:
I don't believe trainers are useless - I always end up with 7, 10s in every training area. And after a while, money isn't a problem anyway. Scouts are an entirely different matter, I've given up on them. They only scout U23 riders for a start, and only in the regions you send them. They'll discover riders with time and tell you their potential immediately, but you have to spend ages monitoring them individually to find out their current stats. It's little to no use if they have a high potential but terrible current stats. I've seen climbers with a potential of the max 85 in MON - but a current stat of 57! Chances are they'll never reach their potential, or not for 10 years at least.
But this is different in PCM15 right? I mean the trainers don´t have specializations anymore...is there any point of having a "better" trainer in PCM15?
Sorry, I don't have PCM 15, so I can't answer that.
@Matt: I always assumed that the star system would work along the lines you posted, but for PCM 14 I went and checked my riders' potentials with Lachi's editor and that's what I discovered. May have been different in earlier versions, of course.
*hides face in embarrasment*
