This is the idea: I'm planning on creating a small tool where you can load your savegame once every season (after the generating young cyclists day has passed) and it automatically recalculates and edit cyclists to avoid having to many world class cyclists in the future and saves your savegame again with one click.
but before doing this, I want to understand what the problem really is. (haven't played a long career yet since I only bought PCM14 yesterday)
- Do to many existing cyclists have a to high potential?
- Is this an issue with the existing cyclists, the new cyclists, or a combination?
- Does the game generates to many young cyclists with high potential every year?
- Does the game generates to many young cyclists in general (regardless their potential)
what else are the main reasons?
I've also been thinking about some features the tool can possibly have:
- Offcourse I would also want this tool to remember what cyclists have already been "recalibrated". so the same cyclists doesn't have a different potential every season and scouting results are still useful.
- Maybe the number of potential world class cyclists generated can vary every year based on how many are already in the same generation timespan (last xx year)
Edited by TiemenD on 14-01-2015 13:18
What causes stat inflation? Well there are a number of factors:
1) Lots of talented young riders. And i don't mean high potential riders like Herklotz, Mohoric or Ewan. I mean riders U25 with good stats and even a mediocre potential like 4-5. All of these riders grow consistently and will not decline for at least 5 years, more like 7-10 before the decline really starts taking affect.
2) A lack of talented old riders. By which i mean ridesr 30+ who are top level. There's some but they are massively out numbered by those under 30. These guys will decline, but it still takes 2-4 years to happen by which point the young talents have grown into replacements at something like 3:1 or more.
3) Because PCM is not designed for long 5+ year careers the development rates are just kind of high. Turn the evolution down to 0.1 and you can solve an amount of the problem for a really long career but because it's a game not built for long careers the development rates will always be faster than real life.
Basically it just takes too long for the real riders to decline. They all grow as the newgens come through as well. After the real riders start to decline stat inflation decreases somewhat it just takes far too long for this to occur.
Lowering their potential won't sort the problem because of how potential and limits work. Drop their potentials down and the game can't really handle it and they get the same sort of limits.
Lowering the age of decline would be a simple solution, just depends how much realism you want.
The best thing would just be a simple programme to knock something like 2points off every stat of real riders every couple of years until the newgens have taken over
The current situation with stat inflation is generally a result of youth riders. Quintana types show up rather too commonly, and their stat cap is placed as an unbound or 8X, so you get very many terrain specialists that have only competition with each other.
"America. Show a nipple on television and the whole country goes ape-shit." -DubbelDekker
This are the most amazing news I have ever heard about the stat inflation. I'm glad that someone finally really takes care of this. Congrats in advance.
So:
1. Actually, PCM 14 potential system is totally f*ked up. Even if you wisely give high potentials (as in the EP, where only 2 riders have got an 8 potentials, and 7 is reserved to the talents and riders with high stats), the game somehow recalculates itself the potentials and you'll find 25 guys with 8 potential! Eyolfur said that Cyanide crew fixed this, and hopefully in PCM 15 this will be changed, but still. This therefore is the main cause of the stat inflation. Already in 2016 it may happen that 20+ more riders (tested with 0.3 and 0.5 progression) already have 80+ in mountain, while originally it is reserved to very few riders.
2. Yes, the problem is the same for both existing cyclists and regens.
3. That is not the problem actually, and it can be edited (and it was ofc) by editor, in sta_region, where you can regulate how many talents a specific country produces. From my tests turns out that the amount of riders with high potentials among regens is more or less ok.
4. Nah, that has always been ok as well.
As I said above what I think to be the main reason is this:
The game somehow recalculates itself the potentials and you'll find 25 guys with 8 potential!
, i'm not sure there is a way to fix this without touching the "game" itself, thing that only cyanide's guys can do i guess. Perhaps a solution would be somehow resetting the potentials at the start of the season using the original ones, that can be found in the db you are using for that career, even though it can be done manually too, but tbh I'm not sure if it would work.
A nice addition would be allowing the user to decide how many x number potentials he wants and randomize them according to something which i don't really know though.
I want to bring here a little light in the dark apparently. You can certainly change everything but what many here still remains unaddressed. How many driver generates the game is as mentioned on STA_Region, there weight. 0 = 0 driver, driver 1 = 4, 2 = 8 new drivers, etc. Australia is 50. So 4 x 50 = 200 new drivers every year. A bit much.
Then to the potential or the high stats. This is because each region (country) that got the same values of cyanide. There what made, and these values adjusted to the individual regions (countries). Also with the number of new driving that produces each year. I changed the values under gene_f_chance_pot0 to gene_f_chance_pot7 for each region. And behold no driver has more so exaggerated high values (depending on the region of max. 73 of the top cycling Nations up to 60-66 for the small Nations), and there are very very few drivers produced with Pot7 and Pot6.
Of course, there are young drivers with high values in a category. But they're not more than a handful that have values from 76-77. I think these are just the major talents of tomorrow. And the problem is I think also you can see the values of the young rider already. That was before better, because you could only Max display 15. Now, it takes the best from every nation and you have a top team.
@Lachi, I've created some small tools for previous PCM versions (2007 and 2011) in c# to fix annoying things during my career. I think i still have the code somewhere to export a cdb to xml and read it in my program, so I guess it won't take long to get back on track with this
I'll play the devil's advocate here and say I don't know what people are complaining about. matt for example says, 20+ riders with 80+ mountains is too much. I disagree. If there were only, say, 5 riders with 80+ mountains, you'd basically always know who's going to win the next grand tour. Plus I believe every point counts, especially in climbing. An 84 climber is noticably better than an 82 climber - not on every stage, but over the course of a grand tour certainly. And there are other abilities to take into account as well, TT, hills, stamina, downhill, etc.
Also, I want tough competition when playing the game. If there are only 5 riders with 80+ mountains I probably couldn't stop myself from hiring them all if my budget allows it, so I'd totally dominate the game. Realism is nice until it starts to negatively affect the gaming experience.
I'm not worried that there'll be too many strong riders in the long run, I actually fear the opposite after my 20+ year career with the 2009 version. The game only at first generated young riders with a lot of potential, but it went downhill after a while. In 2031 there are only three aging riders with 81 in mountains, everybody else has 78 at best.
But there is one young rider with a potential of 84 (plus one with 81, one with 80, the rest again 78 at best) - well, that 84 climber will one day dominate if I kept on playing. And the same goes for other stats, too:
- Cobbles: One rider with a potential of 85, 2 with 82, 1 with 80.
- TT: One with 85, one with 82, one with 81.
- Hills: One with 84, one with 82, one with 81, one with 80.
So I hope Cyanide has changed the formula to create more, not less good riders in the long run.
TiemenD wrote:
@Lachi, I've created some small tools for previous PCM versions (2007 and 2011) in c# to fix annoying things during my career. I think i still have the code somewhere to export a cdb to xml and read it in my program, so I guess it won't take long to get back on track with this
OK, if you don't find the code, you can have the one from my editor, which is in C# also.
A brief look at my career in May 2022, standard progression of 0.5. The only stat which really feels too inflated in my game is sprinting. Was I just lucky/unlucky that only one category seems so "overused"? Here is a summary of all riders with a stat of at least 80 (current, not potential):
Sprint: 5 riders with 85, 8x84, 3x83, 15x82, 12x81, 31x80. Total 80+: 74!
Hills: 3x85 2x84, 1x83, 5x82, 6x81, 10x80. Total 80+: 27
Mountains: 0x85, 2x84, 3x83, 5x82, 5x81, 8x80. Total 80+: 23
Flat: 0x85, 0x84, 2x83, 2x82, 4x81, 6x80. Total 80+: 14
Cobbles: 0x85, 1x84, 3x83, 0x82, 2x81, 4x80. Total 80+: 10
Timetrial: 0x85, 1x84, 4x83, 1x82, 1x81, 1x80. Total 80+: 8
