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[DECISION] PCM Version for MG 2025 Season
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| SotD |
Posted on 02-04-2025 17:01
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Fabianski wrote:
Qatar results look OK-ish, just don't get why Samolenkov and Van der Lijke did do so well. And I guess Groves needs some Acc training (even though the aforementioned duo did well without).
Could be a coincidence. I'd reckon that if you re-raced 3 times it would mostly be different riders performing well. As long as the top top sprinters perform well then I'm OK with the sort of randomness between similar type riders. Daily form, lucky positioning etc.
It atleast seems to be somewhat worthwhile to have a sprinter in the new version - although it could seem as if the high FL could count a bit more than previous versions. Would be interesting to put eg. Coquard into the mix aswell as he has a relatively low FL compared to Gaviria. Would also make better evidence as to whether making Farantakis 83SPR would actually be beneficial or not 
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| seancoll |
Posted on 02-04-2025 23:22
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TTT results exports have been a mess for the entirety of PCM 24
They moved to 4th rider somewhere in PCM 23 due to some issues with intermediate timing and just never made the switch. Will say this does match current UCI timing where most TTTs are taken on 4th rider now since team size is down to 7 everywhere except GTs. Unclear if the AI has changed at all to reflect this (I don't believe so, but can't address that)
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| MacC |
Posted on 03-04-2025 07:06
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Isn't the real issue with TTTs the fact that the AI doesn't protect GC leaders ? Do we know if that's addressed at all?
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| AbhishekLFC |
Posted on 03-04-2025 07:53
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MacC wrote:
Isn't the real issue with TTTs the fact that the AI doesn't protect GC leaders ? Do we know if that's addressed at all?
TTTs never protected GC leaders if they are not among the top five TT statted riders in the team, except in PCM 20 (and maybe one or two other versions).
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| Fabianski |
Posted on 03-04-2025 08:03
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Don't know if I can agree with that. I think my team sometimes didn't go all-out (finishing quite clearly below the expected position) just to not drop Errazkin who was our 7th or 8th best TTer.
But if a rider is as bad in TTs as e.g. Démare, I guess the AI thinks it's really not worth waiting.
@UU, seancoll
Can you confirm TTT results are always like this? Just to be sure I don't break the tool when trying to parse this format...
And as said before, there's absolutely no way of ensuring the Top 5 riders of the team get the TTT points. I hope everyone can live with that. Shouldn't be an issue for TTT stages, but awarding some big Copenhagen points to the wrong riders might hurt (given that wages are now somehow coupled to points).
But I guess we'll have to swallow that one if we move to PCM24 - or maybe someone could ask Cyanide to fix their stuff ^^ Can't be that hard to get rankings right tbh...
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| redordead |
Posted on 03-04-2025 08:07
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Or maybe we award ranking points to the top 4 riders, if that's how the game is geared.
"I am a cyclist, I may not be the best, but that is what I strive to be. I may never get there, but I will never quit trying." - Tadej Pogačar
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| baseballlover312 |
Posted on 02-09-2025 13:19
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Two questions for those who have experience with PCM 24. I know these have both happened quite a bit in older PCMs but didn't in PCM 20-22.
1) Do poor climbers ever/often finish OTL on mountain stages?
2) Do teams ever/often drop their poor TT GC leaders in TTTs?
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy |
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| jt1109 |
Posted on 02-09-2025 13:28
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baseballlover312 wrote:
Two questions for those who have experience with PCM 24. I know these have both happened quite a bit in older PCMs but didn't in PCM 20-22.
1) Do poor climbers ever/often finish OTL on mountain stages?
2) Do teams ever/often drop their poor TT GC leaders in TTTs?
1) no rarely seen anyone finish OTL that isn't a grand tour
2) inconclusive as not tested enough, other than with 4 riders counting, I have seen teams use and burn their best TT rider that is not a GC rider before the finish
e.g. 77 TT rider being dropped 1-2km to go after using full energy so riders 65-75TT would finish in the first 4
This was a 18km TTT |
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| Ad Bot |
Posted on 05-12-2025 08:06
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| baseballlover312 |
Posted on 02-09-2025 13:45
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jt1109 wrote:
baseballlover312 wrote:
Two questions for those who have experience with PCM 24. I know these have both happened quite a bit in older PCMs but didn't in PCM 20-22.
1) Do poor climbers ever/often finish OTL on mountain stages?
2) Do teams ever/often drop their poor TT GC leaders in TTTs?
1) no rarely seen anyone finish OTL that isn't a grand tour
2) inconclusive as not tested enough, other than with 4 riders counting, I have seen teams use and burn their best TT rider that is not a GC rider before the finish
e.g. 77 TT rider being dropped 1-2km to go after using full energy so riders 65-75TT would finish in the first 4
This was a 18km TTT
Thank you! So would you say OTL does happen to a noticeable degree in GTs? I ask because it felt like even that was pretty rare in 22. I sent poor climbing sprinters to GTs and never got an important OTL. That was very different from PCM 15 era where every mountain stage was a risk. |
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| jt1109 |
Posted on 02-09-2025 13:50
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baseballlover312 wrote:
jt1109 wrote:
baseballlover312 wrote:
Two questions for those who have experience with PCM 24. I know these have both happened quite a bit in older PCMs but didn't in PCM 20-22.
1) Do poor climbers ever/often finish OTL on mountain stages?
2) Do teams ever/often drop their poor TT GC leaders in TTTs?
1) no rarely seen anyone finish OTL that isn't a grand tour
2) inconclusive as not tested enough, other than with 4 riders counting, I have seen teams use and burn their best TT rider that is not a GC rider before the finish
e.g. 77 TT rider being dropped 1-2km to go after using full energy so riders 65-75TT would finish in the first 4
This was a 18km TTT
Thank you! So would you say OTL does happen to a noticeable degree in GTs? I ask because it felt like even that was pretty rare in 22. I sent poor climbing sprinters to GTs and never got an important OTL. That was very different from PCM 15 era where every mountain stage was a risk.
It's pretty much non-existent, but I have actually seen it this time around so it can happen |
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| KaiserAdler |
Posted on 02-09-2025 16:03
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For future reference however. In comparison with 25 ,testing showed a very hard climbing last week resulted in testing with several dozen riders going OTL. But thats primarily because of the new sliders. 24 is alot friendlier in that matter with riders who come in even with the timer having run out being counted inside the limit. What we did occasionally see was one or two GC leaders getting stuck behind a lesser TT piece in a TTT and as a result losing alot of time. So I guess that’s something to be aware of.
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| KaiserAdler |
Posted on 02-09-2025 16:05
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For future reference however. In comparison with 25 ,testing showed a very hard climbing last week resulted in testing with several dozen riders going OTL. But thats primarily because of the new sliders. 24 is alot friendlier in that matter with riders who come in even with the timer having run out being counted inside the limit. What we did occasionally see was one or two GC leaders getting stuck behind a lesser TT piece in a TTT and as a result losing alot of time. So I guess that’s something to be aware of.
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| Fabianski |
Posted on 19-09-2025 23:16
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I definitely should have done testing far earlier - at least before deciding to send El Chapu (61 TT) to Lithuania...
In my tests, yes, it does happen. I used last year's startlists in Lithuania (11km TTT). And according to my experience, it's quite a lot worse than in the previous version actually. The distance is now 3km less than in 2024, but the gapped riders lose far more time. As an example (only have the screenshots of one of the tests, as the TTT exports unfortunately are a huge mess with PCM24), Tryg lost 26" - Demare lost 1'57". I'm pretty sure he wouldn't lose as much if it was an 11km ITT when he could pace himself...
And of course, things are even worse then the team's best TTers are even better - my team (here I took my 2025 lineup, hence the presence of Chapulin) lost 6", Chapulin lost 2'27". That's 2'21" lost on his teammates - 11km, mind you. Completely insane stuff. And in this example, both Demare and Chapulin were high up (and the best placed riders of their team) in the GC after stage 3...
If you want to make it completely ridiculous, look at Stallaert - obviously an absolutely horrible TTer - losing 3'25" in this stage - still just 11km - whereas he lost 1'30" last year in a stage that was 3km longer. So that's almost 2 mins more than last year, and more than the double...
What you can see from this is that if your GC leader is a weak TTer, you better send a team of weak TTers with him (or at least no more than 3 decent TTers), and he'll lose far, far less time than if you give him a great TTT team that just won't care about him and drop him a couple of kms into the race.
Of course, Lithuania's TTT has a slight uphill section at the end (still far easier than Romandie I would guess), but still, those gaps are insane.
For me - as one of the few managers caring about TTs/TTTs - that definitely means doing my own testing when we do the next version change. I'm just glad I didn't waste 4 of Schmid's RDs there (actually because of the 250km+ stage, not the TTT initially) - even though he's clearly better in TTs than Chapulin, he'd also get dropped by his teammates. And once that happens, you can count 20" per kilometer in this specific TTT...
There still seems to be one exception, though: If the team has the GC leader (has to be the leader, Top 5 or so doesn't help), then they do indeed adapt their speed to not drop him. I saw that with multiple riders, inlcuding Eriksson (Tafjord, 61TT), Areruya (Xero, 65TT) - and actually even with Schmid (68TT), which makes me somewhat regret my planning now 
I didn't really observe the teams' outcomes in the other cases, but when Schmid had the GC lead, Jura lost 25", whereas in all other cases they lost less than 10" - so it really looks like the GC leader has some kind of protection now. But yeah, betting on that might still be fairly risky ^^
I'm not going to do more testing on that for now, the season will surely give us more hints about TTT handling - but what I've seen so far isn't too much to my liking ^^
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| baseballlover312 |
Posted on 20-09-2025 14:34
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Fabianski wrote:
I definitely should have done testing far earlier - at least before deciding to send El Chapu (61 TT) to Lithuania...
In my tests, yes, it does happen. I used last year's startlists in Lithuania (11km TTT). And according to my experience, it's quite a lot worse than in the previous version actually. The distance is now 3km less than in 2024, but the gapped riders lose far more time. As an example (only have the screenshots of one of the tests, as the TTT exports unfortunately are a huge mess with PCM24), Tryg lost 26" - Demare lost 1'57". I'm pretty sure he wouldn't lose as much if it was an 11km ITT when he could pace himself...
And of course, things are even worse then the team's best TTers are even better - my team (here I took my 2025 lineup, hence the presence of Chapulin) lost 6", Chapulin lost 2'27". That's 2'21" lost on his teammates - 11km, mind you. Completely insane stuff. And in this example, both Demare and Chapulin were high up (and the best placed riders of their team) in the GC after stage 3...
If you want to make it completely ridiculous, look at Stallaert - obviously an absolutely horrible TTer - losing 3'25" in this stage - still just 11km - whereas he lost 1'30" last year in a stage that was 3km longer. So that's almost 2 mins more than last year, and more than the double...
What you can see from this is that if your GC leader is a weak TTer, you better send a team of weak TTers with him (or at least no more than 3 decent TTers), and he'll lose far, far less time than if you give him a great TTT team that just won't care about him and drop him a couple of kms into the race.
Of course, Lithuania's TTT has a slight uphill section at the end (still far easier than Romandie I would guess), but still, those gaps are insane.
For me - as one of the few managers caring about TTs/TTTs - that definitely means doing my own testing when we do the next version change. I'm just glad I didn't waste 4 of Schmid's RDs there (actually because of the 250km+ stage, not the TTT initially) - even though he's clearly better in TTs than Chapulin, he'd also get dropped by his teammates. And once that happens, you can count 20" per kilometer in this specific TTT...
There still seems to be one exception, though: If the team has the GC leader (has to be the leader, Top 5 or so doesn't help), then they do indeed adapt their speed to not drop him. I saw that with multiple riders, inlcuding Eriksson (Tafjord, 61TT), Areruya (Xero, 65TT) - and actually even with Schmid (68TT), which makes me somewhat regret my planning now
I didn't really observe the teams' outcomes in the other cases, but when Schmid had the GC lead, Jura lost 25", whereas in all other cases they lost less than 10" - so it really looks like the GC leader has some kind of protection now. But yeah, betting on that might still be fairly risky ^^
I'm not going to do more testing on that for now, the season will surely give us more hints about TTT handling - but what I've seen so far isn't too much to my liking ^^
Damn, guess I should have planned Skjelmose and Carthy quite a bit differently then. Quite a shame. But thanks for the info.
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy |
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| baseballlover312 |
Posted on 31-10-2025 12:46
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I really need an explanation for what happened in Paris-Nice with Skjelmose dropping outside the top 150 because he and my entire team waited for Rodenberg (or otherwise completely gave up for no reason) despite the latter being minutes behind and having no GC possibilities, as jt's discord testing on Discord shows. If this is what happened, and I can't think of another explanation, this is a gamebreaking bug, and it is crazy to me that this was somehow not noticed and flagged in testing before we switched to this version. It happened with my team waiting for AKA in Tasmania too and there have been other examples on other teams, but this was just bizarre.
This is so much worse than a stat having more or less value, or sprint trains working slightly differently. If the game can react this way just because it views your sprinter as higher quality than your GC guy, even in hilly or mountainous stage races, that is a game breaking, and we were given no opportunity to plan for it. I sent a sprinter to almost every GC race this year on the assumption that wouldn't happen, because it has never happened in any version of PCM before and makes no sense as a game mechanic. This doesn't just make my GC guy useless, it literally put every single one of my riders outside the top 150 cause they waited.
Is there a reason this was missed or not communicated?
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy |
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| AbhishekLFC |
Posted on 31-10-2025 14:06
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I can remember this happening to Benoot in a race like Benelux where the team waited for Van Asbroeck, as he was higher in the GC and probably designated team leader despite it being a cobbled (or hilly, can't remember exactly) stage. Don't think this is new to PCM 24.
I can go back and share the stage if you want.
Edit: 2022 Benelux Stage 3.
Edited by AbhishekLFC on 31-10-2025 14:12
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| SotD |
Posted on 31-10-2025 14:29
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Happened to me in Tasmania aswell because Farantakis did reasonably well in the opening sprint. Given how Ioannidis and Kiriakidis performs so far in Paris-Nice and the general results, I suspect they would have done something similar there.
Farantakis did so poorly in Paris-Nice that it seems to be a non-issue there. I guess it will bring some random (and poor) results for me through the season. I hope we will survive, so We Can use this knowledge for future seasons.
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| Ulrich Ulriksen |
Posted on 31-10-2025 23:33
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A few thoughts on this and the skype discussion.
I did not notice this in the testing, but as JT said it is very hard to notice and evaluate for every situation in testing. Even this short way into the season we have run about 50 stages. That is a lot for a single individual in testing terms. I probably ran about the same number in testing but it was entirely two races (California and Qatar) as you have to run multiple test to be sure of patterns and also the PCM24 version was changing as we tested, so that made it more difficult. So to run every stage type and combination sufficiently to evaluate patterns isn't realistic.
Hilly stages in stage races have always been challenging and often result in weird winners. I think PCM22 was one of the best versions in these terms but obviously it had other issues. And unfortunately Cyanide invariably mange's to break things in each version.
Positioning is vitally important in hilly stages. that has always been true, it is important to have a leader the AI likes.
In fairness to the AI the game has to make some decisions about who to prioritize as you can't have 24 teams with 2 or 3 riders each in preferential position. IRL there probably aren't 24 teams with reasonable leaders but in the mangame it can happen so very small erosion in stats can lead to a very big difference in outcomes. And when the game also thinks it might need to protect sprinters this problem gets bigger.
And it has always been true that the least favored teams can just drop off the back.
I think JT's testing was inconclusive about the influence of having a sprinter on Skjelmose's outcomes but either way I think his marginal hill hurts him - if he was considered a true GC candidate he wouldn't have dropped back.
I think from a race design perspective we need to make sure hilly stages are hard. This was a problem in 22 because they would turn into races that favored the MT guys but mabye with MM this will be better.
I also think that on of the evidence from PN and T-A MM really matters, so players need to focus on that.
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| baseballlover312 |
Posted on 01-11-2025 17:49
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I know logically there's no point in dwelling on this as my panning is already done, and it will either sink my season or not. But I still think this is something that can be catastrophic for a season if it continues but could have been planned around if it was flagged, which makes it especially frustrating. If Skjelmose drops back to help Rodenberg in the TDF I may actually rage quit.
Ulrich Ulriksen wrote:
Positioning is vitally important in hilly stages. that has always been true, it is important to have a leader the AI likes.
Obviously I agree and understood this going in. He's not a puncheur. And I obviously knew it was a risk Skjelmose would get caught behind a split and finish a couple of groups back from where he should. But that is a lot different than a whole team sitting up entirely, especially when pure flat TT guys who were much worse contenders stayed alert.
In fairness to the AI the game has to make some decisions about who to prioritize as you can't have 24 teams with 2 or 3 riders each in preferential position. IRL there probably aren't 24 teams with reasonable leaders but in the mangame it can happen so very small erosion in stats can lead to a very big difference in outcomes. And when the game also thinks it might need to protect sprinters this problem gets bigger.
But why does the game think it needs to protect sprinters when they have no shot at GC? IMO that is a bug, plain and simple. It would be easier to account for in positioning AI if that wasn't a feature.
And it has always been true that the least favored teams can just drop off the back.
I guess it's just never happened to me like this until this version then. An entire team dropping off without any larger splits, punctures, or effort expended, and then just sitting up entirely the whole stage, is new to me.
I think JT's testing was inconclusive about the influence of having a sprinter on Skjelmose's outcomes but either way I think his marginal hill hurts him - if he was considered a true GC candidate he wouldn't have dropped back.
His sample sizes were small obviously, so in that sense, sure, anything would be inconclusive. But I think the fact that it happened each time in both in the real race, and in JT's initial testing, but then didn't happen in JT's tests after he removed Rodenberg, is pretty telling to me. Only one variable changed, and the entire AI posture changed with it.
I think from a race design perspective we need to make sure hilly stages are hard. This was a problem in 22 because they would turn into races that favored the MT guys but mabye with MM this will be better.
I also think that on of the evidence from PN and T-A MM really matters, so players need to focus on that.
Skjelmose has 77 MM, so clearly it doesn't matter that much.
Edited by baseballlover312 on 01-11-2025 17:54
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy |
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| quadsas |
Posted on 01-11-2025 20:09
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Yeah it's definitely not new. Welcome to the club big dawg, guess you've been getting the luck this whole time. I guess I am simply not one to piss my pants and starting blaming the game instead of my own planning
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