Simulation can be dodgy indeed, but when something weird happens, you have your weekly saves to rescue you.
I just finished a thrilling Vuelta yesterday evening, where Nibali initially took the lead, but a strong Contador took over. In the end, the gap between leader Contador and Nibali was only 5 seconds with just the Angliru stage to go. The two battled it out among themselves, with Nibali just taking the edge and having more energy left in the final kilometer to claim the stage victory and the GC. Because of this, he also won the tough battle for the points and mountain classification from Contador by a very small margin. The winner takes it all
Tonight I hope to finish the season and get to the planning for 2014. Nibali will go for the Tour de France after winning Giro & Vuelta this year, that's for sure.
I started my Topsport Vlaanderen + 1 talent carreer. The talent was a bit of a joke, I gave him a 73 starting stat for hill, and he won't improve any further on that account. He might turn out to be a good cobbler though
Racing started well, got a few top 10's and then I won Omloop with Preben Van Hecke after a breakaway with a lot of wheelsucking from his part. He narrowly beat Van Avermeat who started his sprint way too soon. The next day in Kuurne I got my talent in Boonen's wheel and he held on to claim 4th place. We won Classica Almeria as well that day with Michael Van Staeyen having a great day and won the sprint launched by Kevin Pauwels (figured I'd sign him as well to get a bigger roster).
It's looking good in the CT so far, though we are really bad in stage races. One of our sponsor goals is to get a good GC in Criterium International, that's never going to happen. And yeah, we missed all WT wildcards so far. But it's fun, when I buy PCM 13 I might do a story with it.
I didn't survive economical with that team for the two first years, but then I signed a contract with a very rich sponsor so I can affort it, but nothing more. I can give screenshots of the contracts. Even some are really cheap, it has not been edited
Epic fail at the World Championships: Nibali crashed twice and Iglinskiy, who was leaving Astana, got the rainbow jersey. Then we ended the season with a 2nd place in Lombardia (Nibali) and third in Beijing (Fuglsang).
New season kicked off amazingly though! Sagan taking Tour Down Under & Tirreno-Adriatico, while Nibali won Paris-Nice and Milan-Sanremo. Maybe I should do the early season on extreme from now on, it's clearly too easy on hard.
A team like that would certainly demotivate me, too strong...
Frustrating situation: after winning Dwars door Vlaanderen, E3 Prijs, Gent-Wevelgem and De Panne with Sagan, I managed to not pay enough attention in the Ronde van Vlaanderen, getting Sagan isolated for the last 125 km. He held up quite strongly, but I guess the lack of support tired him too much and he had to drop out of the lead group in the end, finishing 6th. Boonen won, before Cancellara, Pozzato, Langeveld and Haussler.
Ridiculous OPQS team to battle, by the way: Boonen, Cancellara, Chavanel, Vansummeren, Vandenbergh, Stybar, Steegmans & Trentin.
For next season, I hope to take Stybar from them, should be a good match with Sagan.
Decided to move from PCM11 to PCM12, to get new challenges. I want to start a new solid and long career, with a UCI team or a custom team. Don't know what team to choose though. I'll be using the 2013DB, with some stats changed by me. Here are the options:
1- Custom team focusing on the GT's and have solid youngsters to develop;
2- Movistar. Quintana and Costa are two of my favorite riders;
3- Sky. Continue the great 2012 they have and become Froome the cyclist with more GT's win's;
4- Astana. Nibali, Fuglsang, Brajkovic and other guys makes this one of the most desirable teams to play with. The solid climber that Aru can be is also an extra factor of motivation;
5- Saxo-Tinkoff. I grew up, in the post Armstrong era, seeing Contador the best stage racer of his time. The super strong team they have this year is also a good bonus;
6- Omega. Make Cavendish the king of Sprinters again! Kwiatkowski, Velits, Martin, etc are also good riders to play with.
So, tell me about your thoughts and opinions. I'll post here my progress and how I manage to get on in my save. Don't do a story because I don't have a PC with nice graphics attributes
Well, I can obviously recommend Astana. It's a lot of fun to win with Nibali and see Aru, Guardini & Lutsenko develop. Downside is that it may be hard to find talent in Kazachstan, but you can always switch to an Italian sponsor after your contract runs out.
My problem right now is that I really wanted to keep Astana as sponsor, but they decided to make me a much lower offer (from 5.8 to 5.1 million). I guess that's because they were unhappy with the lack of riders from Kazachstan (10) and Iglinskiy leaving, which left me without a local superstar, as Lutsenko is not quite there yet.
MacC wrote:
Well, AG2R career still going strong and still not simming (except a couple with computer problems)
Apprioaching Vuelta now and 12th in UCI,.
Had a frustrating but very fun tour.
Betancur was overtaken in the few metres on Mont Ventoux while Gadret missed out on KOM by a few points.
Peraud finished 16th and Betancur 20th
Still scoring consistently and Bagodaonas is one of my surprise stars!
Heading to Vueltawith a fairly tired Pozzovivo -maybe get a stage with a fresh Appolono.
Nocentini is backafter a great early season and will hopefully rack up more points in the august/september classics
Rolland and Demare signed for next year!
Finished the Tour simulating most as my computer got slower and slower. dont know if it is coincidence taht it got worst as the season went on.... any thoughts?
Anyway Nocentini was bcak and super strong winning the WC and China....he finished 3rd in CQ. He had 80 days by the end but obviously the AI had more...
MacC wrote:
Finished the Tour simulating most as my computer got slower and slower. dont know if it is coincidence taht it got worst as the season went on.... any thoughts?
Normally, this kind of thing shouldn't happen. However, if your RAM is on the low side, this might make sense, as the .cdb file being used for your career is growing larger over time. That's just an educated guess though. Restarting the game or your computer might help.
In the meanwhile, I've been looking for sponsors and should've taken the really good deal offered by Sberbank. Unfortunately, I chose to stay with Astana, who decided to reduce my budget drastically, despite of fairly good results. Guess I should've paid more attention to the sponsor goals, but it would still have been hard without a Kazachstanian star and not too many Kazachstanian riders, as it's pretty hard to find some decent talents there and I don't want to weaken the team a lot.
Then the Tour de France: I started pretty badly, applying the same tactics that made Nibali win the Giro by 9 minutes last year. Apparently, in the Tour this leads to being crushed by Froome & Contador. So I tweaked the tactics a bit and could at least keep up with them later on, keeping the damage at 2 minutes to Contador and 30 seconds to Froome. Then Nibali won a hilly stage in the end, but the 60 km time trial was awful. Froome took 3'30 to Contador and 4'30 to Nibali, who barely managed to fend off Van Garderen for the podium. So, the podium was Froome - Contador - Nibali, followed by the RadioShack trio Van Garderen - A. Schleck - Hesjedal. They must feel bad
In the meanwhile, Fuglsang won the Tour of Poland, where Brajkovic crashed out to miss the Vuelta
Next targets will be a bunch of WT one day races with Sagan (from San Sebastian to Montreal), Vuelta with Fuglsang and Worlds/Lombardia with Nibali & Gasparotto.
Just had first stage giro and we could with a decent amount of tt be able to get top10 with cataldo, really looking forward to next year probably with quintana and a big colombian youngster, jes i looked at his potential stats . (i will show him in young talents thread.)
I've just started the tour with sky (eventhough i hate them ) and ist going REALLY easy. Coming into Montpellier i've got EBH in green with two stage wins and henao top of the KoM.
Edited by Dippofix on 24-07-2013 14:25
Sometimes, I really hate PCM. Started a career with IAM Cycling and kicked off the season decently with a beautiful victory of Haussler in the last stage of the Tour of Oman as our highlight so far. But then the cobblestones came...
In Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Haussler started his sprint too early and only ended 11th. Disappointing and my own fault, but we have Kuurne for revenge, right? Not quite, as Haussler got stuck behind some slowpoke from the early breakaway in the final sprint, refused to move around him and ended 30th
Just finished my first year with my Topsport Vlaanderen + 1 talent. The talent (Rudy Verboven) has developed quite well, and a few guys from the team along him. We grabbed a surprise win in GP La Marseillaise, which set the tone for the rest of the season. Riders like Van Hecke, Van Asbroeck and Vandousselaere performed really well, and we got a few more suprise wins.
In general, you could say adding Rudy Verboven changed the team's mentality. We're no lnoger racing for TV time, but for good results. My team killed themselves trying to get enough boni seconds for a Qatar top 10. The first big win we had was Kuurne, where the sprinters stranded in Van Asbroeck's wheel. Later one, Van Hecke won Dwars Door Vlaanderen from a breakaway.
Rudy himself remained in the peloton mostly, but was susualy unable to answer when the big names went. Nevertheless, he got his first win in the Driedaagse van West-Vlaanderen. He would get a few top 10's in the classics as well.
We got most of the races we applied for in the continental tour, but in the World Tour we got refused until the cobbled classics. We have showed something, Rudy got 7th in Ronde, so we really deserved those wild cards.
No wild card for Roubaix though, so on to the hills. Rudy was starting to develop and it showed, he won in Köhl and got his first major win by winnen Brabantse Pijl. We really dominated that race, forcing a split with all our guys on the right side. We caught quite a few favourites unaware and they never came back. In the end, Serry and Kevin Pauwels (I signed him as well) led out Rudy perfectly. We'd got wildcard for the 3 major hill classics, and again Rudy got some top 10's, showing he was worth it.
In the rankings, Rudy was 1st in the CT, just above Hoste and Scheirlinckx. Similarly, tema was first, closely followed by Accent Jobs, Saur Sojasun and Argos. It would be a close call.
We applied for a Giro wildcard and somehow got it, but it was a disaster. Both our sprinter and GC rider, Jacobs and Van Staeyen, crashed out. Cornu did his best to get a top 25 spot though. De Vreese also got a podium from a breakaway at some point.
Big suprise when making the selection in the morning, Gilbert was injured! Van Avermaet was in pretty bad shape, Vanendert couldn't win a sprint and Meersman lacked depth for this one. I decided to go crazy and went for the guy with the best form: Rudy Verboven.
The team was really strong, breaking up the race and giving the Columbian and Spanish favourites a lot of trouble. In the end, Voeckler got away, and an exhausted Verboven held on to Nibali's wheel for very nice 3rd place.
Now his form was declining rapidly, so it would be just Tours and Lombardia for Rudy, but Tours didn't go that we didn't get a wildcard for Lombardia, so his season was pretty much over. Van Staeyen did made up his crashes by going to Beijing with good form and getting us some extra WT points late in the season.
Rudy Verboven won the CT, narrowly beating Kittel. Argos and us promoted, with PDJ and AG2R dropping. For next season, we kept the team together, got in 3 youngsters and expanded our climbing squad. We managed to sign Bart De Clercq and Francis De Greef!
when you played a carrer mode,are you played exstreme,hard or easy...a think a gameplay 3-d stages,thanks..i play on hard,only vuelta i play on extreme,and you?
) and ist going REALLY easy. Coming into Montpellier i've got EBH in green with two stage wins and henao top of the KoM.
