What do you guys think is the best way to plan your season, I have no problem with selecting reaces for my calendar or assigning leaders and teammates. What I think is complicated is the fitness management, for me, this process takes hours depending on the amount of riders in my team. Also, I find it most annoying to spend hours doing that, and have to do the same two or three times through the season because even though I managed fitness perfectly, riders still get too much tiredness after a few weeks.
What do you guys think is the best way to plan your season, I have no problem with selecting reaces for my calendar or assigning leaders and teammates. What I think is complicated is the fitness management, for me, this process takes hours depending on the amount of riders in my team. Also, I find it most annoying to spend hours doing that, and have to do the same two or three times through the season because even though I managed fitness perfectly, riders still get too much tiredness after a few weeks.
That is why pro cyclist mode is much more fun to me. Not only are we racing the races ourselves and managing our own career, we only need to focus on ourselves. In career mode it is a task instead of being fun. To try and reduce this i mainly manage the program for my leaders and maybe some luxury team mates and let the rest untouched if possible.
Beginning of every season i set all my riders pre-season fitness to "high". I do that because then i can just copy my leaders schedule and weekly training effort into other riders that support my leader. It dosn't make sense to copy a riders schedule with "very high" pre-season into a rider with "low" pre-season since they will have different peaks. I set all riders to "high" because im lazy and don't know which rider is going to support my leaders yet.
Next i look at sponsers and make sure i have a leader for every race. I then plan the whole season for my leaders which is usually 4-5 riders depending on which team you start with. For good Domestique's you just copy paste your leaders schedule and training into his schedule.
When you plan weekly training for your riders you almost always use 3 stars (+++) or zero.
Weeks with (+++) means your rider can race as many races as he want without getting tired. On weeks with zero training your rider should not race any races. (There is ofcause exceptions, you can play around with it in the "planner" )
It takes me around 15 min to plan a full season for 5 leaders and 5 domestiques. When i play i just have to make sure my riders dosn't ride any races when their weekly training is zero, this is easily done by checking the planner as you go.
With this method i almost always hit 100% fitness and fitness peak for all my objectives.
It is time consuming no matter how you do it. I kind of like the control, but I wish it were a bit easier to do. I find the copy plan doesn't really work for me, because outside of maybe the cobble and hill guys, riders don't all the same races etc, and even the cobble and hill guys do other races etc. (In other words I have 6-7 cobble guys, yes they race all the cobble races together, but some of them may race in Tour down under, some in Paris Nice, a couple in this race and a couple in that race. They don't all race the same races and can't take the same weeks for rest etc. If you do the copy paste and think you are good, they race on a planned rest week and get no rest, and next thing you know you are at E3, GV, or god forbid PR!) and the guy has 60 fatigue and worthless and you don't understand what happened.)
Also I really like jack of all trades type of riders. Guys who can run cobble and small tours or even be a flat chase down guy in GT's or guys who can race hills and tours etc.
I even have one guy who races cobbles, hills and tours at a pretty high level. (Madouas)
I just try to break it down into doable chunks. I do up to PR (end of cobbles) for the first chunk. Later I do up to Giro but also the TDF riders because if I wait until after the giro is over there might not be enough time to get it all dialed in. After the TDF I do up through Vuelta and then during the Vuelta I do the rest of season.
Towards the end I am still putting riders in appropriate races for their skill, but with a strong lean towards who is green at that time and who needs more races. I try to get everyone at least 70 races w/o injury. Most get in the 80's.
ETA - In the older version I used to play a lot (I am thinking maybe 2008 or so) you could make a training plan - say early cobble plan. Save it. And then every year slap it on the guys in the cobble program (took 5 seconds to do) etc. I would do this for every quarter (Spring classic hills, giro, TDF, Vualta, fall hills, etc.) and after the initial time consumption of making the plans in season 1 everything was so easy from there on out. But of course they got rid of that. There was also quite a few stock plans that they provided TDF1, TDF2, Giro 1, Cobble classics1, etc. That could be used in a pinch.
Edited by Morgan63 on 28-09-2019 21:37
There was also quite a few stock plans that they provided TDF1, TDF2, Giro 1, Cobble classics1, etc. That could be used in a pinch.
