So in my pro cyclist career I noticed that the tooltip says that the fitness peak bar is activated 8 weeks before the objective. To me that seems a bit ridiculus considering you get 2,3 point per training day and 3 points per race day. If you have just 6 weeks of training and absolutely no races in these 8 weeks, it will trigger reasonably precisely, but almost all the time it will trigger way early. If you are targeting one day races the problem is obviously not that big, but for the 3 weeks tours the fitness peak will be way off.
Is it just me, who's misunderstanding something or does this seem like a design bug?
I know I can work around this, fx I set my objective to be a small race taking place right after Tour de France to actually have my fitness peak starting during the first third of TdF. But then I don't get the objective bonus to my race day condition and so on.
You're not misunderstanding anything, I was baffled the first time I came across that as well. Especially because nothing changed in regular career mode.
I would assume the reasoning behind this was to avoid "exploiting" the fatigue system any more by doing 3 weeks of hard training followed by a rest week, which allows you to stay on about 98% fitness for the entire year without running into fatigue problems.
Especially with the new "reduced training fatigue" skill you can level up, there's now absolutely zero chance of ever getting fatigued during a season.
So I'd say the devs tried to find a way to force you to rest properly after a season goal and start building up fitness from ~80% again because they realized how OP they have made the fitness system.
The problem with that is of course that it becomes nearly impossible to predict exactly on what day you hit a fitness peak.
But, from a realism standpoint, you could surely argue that all this is an improvement now? It's very VERY annoying, but also more realistic now.
I do agree that would be a realistic element if it were hard to exactly plan your fitness peak, but this is not really the case now as you can calculate it down the precise day it will trigger. The only thing is that it will trigger early 95% of the time.
But yeah, I also exploit the +95% fitness for all season thing, so I probably should complain. It just seems like an odd design.
It only triggers early if you keep your fitness way up and race all the time.
If you do what riders do IRL before a race they really want to perform great at (rest, build fitness up slowly, take part in only a handful of warmup races), you'll be fine.
For example if you look at the top 4 of the Tour de France IRL, you can see they all rested up after Tour de Romandie in the beginning of May, then only did either the Dauphiné or the Tour de Suisse as a preparation for the big one.
IMO this is approaching mimicking real life. But the bar filling up and granting constant EPO magic for 4 weeks isn't.
