On 1, perhaps it could have to do with the new feature in the AI:
In real life, a lots of riders could hang for longer in the mountains than they actually do, however this is the first thing you learn when you're a non-climber neo-pro: do not waste your energy to make a top-40, save it for later when your sprinter or your leader needs you.
On 4, the riders do indeed attack several times for very short distances very frequently sometimes. It doesn't mean that they're in their limit (and it's pretty ridiculous imo). Perhaps it was an attempt to add some emotion to the mountain stages (if this is intentional), but it completely failed then. It's just crap that you're following an attack and your heart rate is 170.
As for 5, it happens sometimes to me, the best mountain riders don't spend most of their energy so when it comes to the sprint they completely destroy the others. Specially in PCM12, where it seems to me that as the red bar gets lower, your rider loses anything he could possibly have in the legs. In earlier games it was possible to win a flat sprint starting from 1.3 or 1.5 kms left. Now if I do that most times my rider runs out of energy with 500 m to go and goes from leading position to outside of Top 10. But the speed of Schleck in that case seems ridiculous indeed.
Gees what a horor stories, surely hope i will never encounter them.
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In my Career atm every stage is unbelievebly realistic. In one stage i even saw three trains of the 3 top sprinter fighting it out in the last km's just like in real life. It was beautifull to watch.
I have recently played 1 vuelta a españa (KAT) and 1 tour de france (SKY) with PCM2012. First of all, I got impressed by the grandiosity of TDF, the flat stages were very fun to play (as opossed to watching them in real life). The peloton normally wont let any breakaway to get the stage win, specially in the early weeks of a GT, even if you dont chase yourself with your own team. The velocity in these flat stages is something to take care about, as well as the wind. These and other aspects, began to make the race very tactical and fun for me. I managed to win with my first train via Mark Cavendish (Rogers-Flecha-Boasson Hagen train) but couldnt repeat it with other trains that were used by other sprinters to beat Cavendish. Won a couple of breakways
with Uran and Rogers I believe, so I was doing pretty well but finally burnt the team in the Pyrenees and dropped it. Now I'm doing La Vuelta with Froome as team leader (same team as in TDF but Siutsou instead of Wiggins), have just won a sprint in Ancares (stage 14) to Contador after following his attack and sprinting in the last .3km of the climb. General: 1.Contador; 2.Froome 1'37''; 3.Anton 3'35''; 4.Meurtime 3'36''; 5.Valverde 4'17''.
Most important thing I have learned is "save as much energy as you can" always cause it influences the recovery for the later stages. The more green bar is left after the stage the better.
Edited by dieguito on 19-09-2012 10:47
After some testing, I can tell that have the passive AI in multiplayer enable or disable is the same thing.
As it can be see on the photos the results are a disaster.
Tour de France 1st season (2012), stage 6 - Hard - Career --PCM.daily database
A normal flat stage where I only wanted to protect my cyclyst, so I put then all in the front. The stage has one breakway that is was canceled around 10 km to the final.
The teans mount they sprint trains and everything is normal.
1,5 km to the end I look back to see what was happening and what I saw was more than half the peloton not sprint and riding at 30 km/s.
In photo nr 1 is the top 18 of the final classification
In photo nr 2, the 62nd rider has 2,09 minutes to the winner
here we can see the the shlecks brothers, bollema, szmyd, basso , menchov, and kreuziger lost time, and it was not in the picture but anton and nibali lost time elso.
In photo nr 3 is the bottom classification.
So in conclusion, I am going to win the tour, not because my cyclist is the best at the mountain or is a good TT but because the favourites for GC are losing time in... Flat stages... here they lost 2.09 minutes in the final 1,5 km...
On 1, perhaps it could have to do with the new feature in the AI:
In real life, a lots of riders could hang for longer in the mountains than they actually do, however this is the first thing you learn when you're a non-climber neo-pro: do not waste your energy to make a top-40, save it for later when your sprinter or your leader needs you.
On 4, the riders do indeed attack several times for very short distances very frequently sometimes. It doesn't mean that they're in their limit (and it's pretty ridiculous imo). Perhaps it was an attempt to add some emotion to the mountain stages (if this is intentional), but it completely failed then. It's just crap that you're following an attack and your heart rate is 170.
As for 5, it happens sometimes to me, the best mountain riders don't spend most of their energy so when it comes to the sprint they completely destroy the others. Specially in PCM12, where it seems to me that as the red bar gets lower, your rider loses anything he could possibly have in the legs. In earlier games it was possible to win a flat sprint starting from 1.3 or 1.5 kms left. Now if I do that most times my rider runs out of energy with 500 m to go and goes from leading position to outside of Top 10. But the speed of Schleck in that case seems ridiculous indeed.
Thanks for even reading my unattractive big post
On 1: This is probably the reason for this, but still ridicolous. Its one thing don't push yourself to the limit on the climbs as you want so save some energy. But as regarding flat parts of the course, I don't think so.
On 4: Yeah, I agree. This completely failed.
On 5: Yes, maybe I did some mistakes. Never got really warm with the new game, at least not yet. But good to know that I have to rethink my strategy concerning the last km's.
bigggassi wrote:
On 1: This is probably the reason for this, but still ridicolous. Its one thing don't push yourself to the limit on the climbs as you want so save some energy. But as regarding flat parts of the course, I don't think so.
Yeah, I meant that Cyanide implemented that in the AI but not correctly. Wait, Cyanide adding something to the game and it not working right? No way, not possible and never happened, discard this possibility
bigggassi wrote:
On 1: This is probably the reason for this, but still ridicolous. Its one thing don't push yourself to the limit on the climbs as you want so save some energy. But as regarding flat parts of the course, I don't think so.
Yeah, I meant that Cyanide implemented that in the AI but not correctly. Wait, Cyanide adding something to the game and it not working right? No way, not possible and never happened, discard this possibility
The teans mount they sprint trains and everything is normal.
1,5 km to the end I look back to see what was happening and what I saw was more than half the peloton not sprint and riding at 30 km/s.
This stuff is getting interesting...
I had sort of the same situation only then vise versa =>
(same db 1.3) 2013 Tirreno - Adriatico / stage 1
On the first mountain that comes immidiatly after the start of the race, the peleton breaks on the top. 60 riders take about 5'00 lead in no time because in that second peleton the riders (75) of the teams just refused to ride.
The other riders (with numerous favorites ammong them) were lucky! Because my guys started in the back of the peleton, almost my whole team (i had v.Efimkin as best rider, not a favorite i would say) was in that second peleton, but luckly for the others i will ride! and bring that group back, no problem, i got some extra spare riders.
It took me 30 seconds to realize it, but by that time the front of this second peleton closed up and it took me another 15km or so to get to the front and then another 25km or so to close that 5'00 gap with the first peleton.
ah well, it was good training for my rookies Edited by KayZeroX on 20-09-2012 01:06
Old thread, but it adresses a lot of my issues with the game. I've just played PCM12 for about a month, and I keep getting annoyed at unbelievable gameplay bugs. How could it detoriate this much from PCM11, which was generally very good?
This long post by bigggassi basically described the Zoncolan stage I just played, which ended in a bunch sprint among 20ish riders. My 81MO Simoni was crushed in the final km by 77MO Gadret. I had played it cool for the whole Giro so far, planning on delivering a deadly blow to the others on Zoncolan, but now I can probably forget about winning the Giro, at least if these results continue. Anybody got any tactics that will hide this bug?
I'm also very annoyed by the sprint problems. I have no sprinters in the Giro that I'm currently playing so it doesn't affect me directly, but it is sad to see Petacchi, who's by far the best sprinter in the race, start his sprint 1.5km out, and therefore never finish higher than 4th, because he always gets overtaken by a bunch of lesser sprinters.
The "slow down before the sprint" bug has been in the game since earlier editions, and doesn't bother me much, as it doesn't happen too often.
With all this said, there are lots of great thing about PCM12 as well, but these bugs overshadow most of the positives.
As far as I can understand, there won't be any more patches for this game. But how can Cyanide be allowed to go on like this? Shouldn't they be showered with complaints?
Squire wrote:
I'm also very annoyed by the sprint problems. I have no sprinters in the Giro that I'm currently playing so it doesn't affect me directly, but it is sad to see Petacchi, who's by far the best sprinter in the race, start his sprint 1.5km out, and therefore never finish higher than 4th, because he always gets overtaken by a bunch of lesser sprinters.
This part gets even worse when you're playing in a lower competitive field, f.e. where the best sprinter has got SP and ACC 70~73. They still go out from 1, 1.5 kms out, but since they haven't good good ACC they fade out in the last 500 meters. Then it's very easy to win with any decent sprinter simply by just following wheels and then accelerating with 600 meters to go (because when a rider runs out of red bar in the sprint, he loses tremendous speed, it's quite ridiculous as well). A sort of fix would be to increase everybody's ACC until the best riders have got 85, and then do it proportionally for the rest of the riders, but that's not really a very good solution (it'll still happen at lower-lower levels, mess up averages a bit, which messes up salaries and so on).
As for how Cyanide goes on: they simply announce a patch, a month later say there's no more patch, and another month later release a patch which main focus are fixes for Armada.
Squire wrote:
I'm also very annoyed by the sprint problems. I have no sprinters in the Giro that I'm currently playing so it doesn't affect me directly, but it is sad to see Petacchi, who's by far the best sprinter in the race, start his sprint 1.5km out, and therefore never finish higher than 4th, because he always gets overtaken by a bunch of lesser sprinters.
This part gets even worse when you're playing in a lower competitive field, f.e. where the best sprinter has got SP and ACC 70~73. They still go out from 1, 1.5 kms out, but since they haven't good good ACC they fade out in the last 500 meters. Then it's very easy to win with any decent sprinter simply by just following wheels and then accelerating with 600 meters to go (because when a rider runs out of red bar in the sprint, he loses tremendous speed, it's quite ridiculous as well). A sort of fix would be to increase everybody's ACC until the best riders have got 85, and then do it proportionally for the rest of the riders, but that's not really a very good solution (it'll still happen at lower-lower levels, mess up averages a bit, which messes up salaries and so on).
As for how Cyanide goes on: they simply announce a patch, a month later say there's no more patch, and another month later release a patch which main focus are fixes for Armada.
I guess it won't solve the problems at top level either, as Petacchi has the best ACC among the sprinters he's competing against (83 vs <81, I think).
I've only fully noticed this problem now, but I see that it explains some odd results that I've had earlier. Early in the season, I couldn't buy a win with Ventoso and his sprint train while doing things my normal (and usually successful) way. But when he entered a race without a sprint train, where I just followed wheels, he suddenly destroyed everyone in the last 500m.
It looks like the only solution to the problem would be for me to convert the upcoming PCM.daily 2013 DB for PCM11
This whole, stopping because the peloton doesnt care anymore, needs to be scrapped for PCM13.
I experience it one way or another on every stage. I think its just to counter-act another bug in their AI where its very hard to outride the peloton on climbs, but now all leaders attack at the same time in a big 20-30 rider move at one time. Also before sprints in the last 10km, the peloton just stops riding for some reason.
here they lost 2.09 minutes in the final 1,5 km...
