I played some PCM 11 last night to jog my memory, and I'd say it's still one of my favorites AI wise, but definitely flawed.
Sprints could be organized and top speed really mattered, unlike in modern PCM's. Hills offered chances for both attacks and reduced sprints and I felt yielded realistic results. Cobbles were fine and pretty balanced, and TT's seemed to have realistic results, where you'd have to experiment with energy distributions a bit.
The only real issue was the mountains. I think the way the peloton reduced over the course of the stage was pretty good. You don't have the 13-15 problem where every leader just attacks from the bottom of the final climb at once. But in the end, attacking, especially as the user, just didn't work whatsoever, and that kind of ruins it (though it's not always unrealistic). You end up with either a mountain sprint, or everyone just dot 84's to the finish because they know they can make up for any gaps in the final km. Plus, stage makers back then really relied on the narrowest roads for climbs. Without any ability to move your rider, the blocking is just insane, though that was in issue for every PCM until 14. A lot of the selection and gaps happened just from blocking rather than true attrition.
But I love PCM 11, and I'm definitely biased since it was my first one. It's biggest problems were in an are Cyanide have always struggled with. So I gave it a 9 when it might have deserved a 7 or 8 cause of the mountain problems. Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
baseballlover312,
an interesting observation with mountain stages! For me there are some other troubles in PCM 2011.
Firstly you can easily win hilly TTs (in PCM 2010 too) because AI is not very good calculating effort in these races. And that was more balanced in early PCMs.
Secondly I noticed quite a bit of successful breakaways in one-day races (especially hilly ones).
So in my personal rating PCM 2011 takes a confident 3-rd place with 8 points after 2006 & 2008 editions.
Let's save the history of PCM together!
Just write me a PM if you have something for old PCM Editions (from 2005 to 2014) - databases, stages, shirts etc. and we'll share it.
