Well, I'm having some problems with custom schedules. Sometimes, I want to get a fitness schedules for some specific races, which could be a sponsor goal race, and so on, and there simply isnt any schedule for that. In fact, the combinations of possible races are so many that it would be impossible to have a game designed schedule for every combination. For an example: I have a sponsor goal in Paris-Nice and Vuelta al Pais Vasco. I have to win paris-nice and get top 5 in vuelta al pais vasco. So I get my 2nd or 3rd better stage racer, but I also want him to go to the Vuelta help my leader. I would say he goes to his maximum fitness on paris-nice, then a short fall in fitness and grow up to 92,93 in vuelta al pais vasco. then he rests the entire tour de france and so on, to get the fatigue low again to grow his fitness for the vuelta.
There isnt a schedule exactly how I thought, so I get a schedule near what I thought, write it on a paper and copy it as custom schedule 1. Then, I do my modifications and there I go with my custom schedule.
Because of these schedules and calendars I try planning, my 3 best stage race riders have custom schedules. The problem is I'm not sure if the game will follow this schedule and calculate the competitions he should be in. For example, the rider from the custom schedule above. He should get fitness level 6 on paris nice, aproximately march 10th. But I got in February 20th and he wasn't with a good fitness and wasnt in the start lists for the competitions.. I had to manually put him in some competitions so he would get a good fitness for paris-nice. That happened after all, but I had to manually put him.
I'm writting here because I don't want to trust the game and get my leader to the TdF with bad fitness, or with a different fitness than what the calendar showed, and I also don't want to not trust the game and mess myself the training, the fatigue, the fitness and the TdF, the Vuelta, basically the funniest and most important competitions in the year. And it takes a long time to get to those =)
I tried downloading PCM Planner, but you have to adjust the races manually, I thought it maybe could be a race calculator, but it isn't =P
So here are my questions: 1. The game calculates the races for custom schedules? 2. If no, is there a calculator I could use?
Also, should I trust the custom schedules 'evaluation' thing for fatigue? because I think I followed the calendar right but the fatigue is in about 50% when it should be in 15,20% according to the evaluation thing in the custom calendar.
sry for long post, sry for bad english, im brazilian, thx for the attention and i appreciate if you could help me
I'm not sure about most of the other stuff, but I always thought you still had to race a few races to get into form. I didn't think the schedules did all the work, to get a rider into shape.
I've never used any of the season-planning tools, but the built-in fitness schedule tool affects the 80 points of training fitness. I always manually select my team for each race based on who's fit to be competitive and who needs to be fit for upcoming races.
Paris-Nice is tough because it's so early and you may not be able to spare the race-days on less important races in February, but some of those small stage races and cobbled classics late in the month are your only shot.
I've never felt the need to plan a season so deliberately, but you sort of learn to ballpark it pretty well. ("OK, I need Schleck to peak around this date, so I'll set his training like this and put him in that other race."
I'm sure everyone has their own method. If things get really tight, I might handjam a list for each race. Remember that you want to peak race and training fitness together for important races. It's not that complicated.
