I'm having a problem where, even if they haven't raced for a few days, riders I want to use are turning up exhausted, at Average or worse freshness. How can I ensure the riders I want are fresh for a race? I use the Schedule screen to pick riders in advance for particular races, trying not to over-race them, but it doesn't seem to make any difference - I get sprinters with Bad freshness when my race strategy was planned around them.
In 'Be A Pro' mode you tweak your training level to manage this, but I can't find anything like that in Career mode.
I think rider objectives are a simplified version of the training system in Be A Pro.
If you put a race as an objective for a rider, he'll train in the weeks before the race and rest a day before the race, hence the good fitness and freshness. But the same doesn't apply for races that are not part of his objectives and that's why freshness is unpredictable for these races.
I think good fitness improves the chances of getting good freshness, but I might be wrong there.
What kind of objectives do you give your riders? Do they have rest periods so they don`t have good fitness throughout the entire year? If you have too many peak fitness moments, they will burn up faster than they should.
In the objectives page you can see how the fitness for your riders is planned. Do they have green bars (higher -> better fitness) for the races you want them to have peak form? And is there enough red/yellow (meaning rest, or low/mediocre training) throughout the season? They do need their rest
How many race days do your riders have? In your team screen you can see that number. If they exceed the, say, 80 days or something around that number, they probably start to get tired.
And if nothing else helps ... try the Career Planning tool (or something) somewhere in the download section. It helps you in planning races and preparing your riders for these particular highlights.
Don`t underestimate the objectives screen as this plans the training intensity for each rider. It also shows you when tiredness accumulates, so you can adjust the schedule to avoid that. You can only set this at the start of the season, so you need to plan ahead. The Career Planning tool helps with that, although a mere excel sheet in combination with your objective screen should do the trick as well.
I only have PCM 14 and don't know how much has changed but we had the discussion there and it turns out that in the weeks leading up to an objective the rider will have bad freshness, like Martjin explained.
But I realised that after the last objective has passed, freshness is always excellent, unless you race too much. So I've gotten used to choosing the earliest possible objectives for my riders, they are done by April sometimes. A puncher can get the objectives Paris-Nice, Milan-San Remo, GP E3, Gent-Wevelgem, Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. Even though I actually want him in good form for the Ardennes races, San Sebastian, the Canadian races, Il Lombardia and the World Champs.
However, that means after selecting the objectives I have to manually set the training intensity for the whole season. Bad freshness is a nuisance but low fitness is worse.
That`s quite some silly bug in PCM 14 then. I don`t recall encountering it in that version, but I only recently realized that in PCM 15 you can still manually adjust those bars for training intensity. Didn`t occur that I could still do that
It's probably not a bug, but a feature. And I guess it's still the same with PCM 15. Note that for your example my "trick" is unnecessary, stage racers do fine with Cyanide's system. Problems only arise for riders you want to be in top form in lots of one-day races, which is probably what Mothbones stumbled over.
What do you mean by 50%, 70%, 80%? Are you referring to the position of the bars on a rider's 'Season' bar chart?
I'm managing a CT team with 11 riders (Leopard), so my top riders are mostly set to peak for the Tour of Luxembourg, which is about a month away in game. So I suppose they're training hard for that, hence the lack of freshness. This system makes sense but is somewhat opaque. Thanks for all the replies.
On the objectives screen you can pick an objective and the planner gives you green bars to show you how much fitness (intensity) your riders have at that objective and the preparation before that. After having set all your objectives for a particular rider, you can actually click on those same bars to make them go up (from orange to green and such) to manually adjust the training schedule. Rightmouse decreases them - but keep in mind that upping an orange bar to green means it influences the previous weeks as well.
But hey - just play with it for a bit and it`ll show itself. It`s easy to understand, really.
The percentages I mention are equivalents of the color bars. Say, yellow is 50%, then orange is 60% and so forth. I`m honestly not entirely sure why I`ve used them, perhaps it`s a legacy of older PCMs where that has been used or something I believe 80% was the highest you could go because the last 20% is race fitness/rhythm to get to peak form. And yeah, that means my example above was crap as there is no 85% then
Still, I think you get my drift.
@MothBones, did you use PCM14 or 15, btw? I suspect 15, seeing you talk about Be a Pro.
Edited by Gentleman on 01-05-2016 19:43
Ah, Leopard Development Team - one of the teams I led from the CT to dominating the WT. Well, basically, for CT teams forget freshness. Or try a variation of my trick, set just early races in February and March as objectives.
Certainly I recommend adjusting the training intensity. The game will go overboard with the intensity and your riders will be tired for most of the season. Check out the following, here I'm discussing the problem with somebody playing with a weak and small CT team.
@MothBones, did you use PCM14 or 15, btw? I suspect 15, seeing you talk about Be a Pro.
Yes, and I posted in the PCM15 forum
These posts have given me a much better idea of how the system works, so I'm happy with it now.
Well, basically, for CT teams forget freshness
Yes, I've worked this out! Leopard have some good young sprinters though, so we're looking set fair for promotion with the starting squad (playing on Hard). A GC victory in a 2.1 helps a lot at this level.
@MothBones - I`m asking it because Ripley said it was a thing in PCM14. And there are plenty of people posting here asking things about older versions as well, so better safe than sorry
