Hey hey! Been a hot minute since I stopped by here
Soon I'm finally gonna get that 2nd monitor upgrade and I thought it'd be cool to get back to some Cycling Manager on the side. It's been years since I played though, so I thought I had better ask the experts over at PCM.Daily what the play is.
What edition (combined with which lovely PCM.Daily database) do you recommend? Is 22 a good Cycling Manager year, or do I go back a few years? I'm mostly interested in a manager career (not be a pro), and definitely interested in real names and variations in routes throughout the career.
I really enjoy PCM22 as far as AI and gameplay goes. Nothing is ever perfect, you can still take advantage of AI here and there and sometimes you shake your head at AI behavior, but that's rare imo and in general, it's been good. When I get around to playing, I'm currently in a be a pro career with a puncheur/cobbles hybrid, so mainly classics focused, and those have been fun. Can't speak too much on mountain gameplay, though.
As for the management aspect, imo the biggest difference is the fitness planning for riders. Not sure when you last played, but in PCM20 and the couple of editions before, you could only assign goals to your Top 5 riders by avg, and then assign helpers to them, but you could still manage each rider's week to week intensity to micromanage their fitness. In 21 and 22, you can assign each rider goals again, but then the game creates a fitness plan around it and you don't micromanage the weeks anymore. You can still tinker with it a bit, like assigning high fitness periods outside of the main goals and adding breaks if you feel like they're needed, but it's less detailed. That said, if the goal races are reasonably spaced, the game does pretty well to get your riders in good shape for them.
There's also the added feature of fitness peaks, a three week (or so) window where your rider gets +2 daily form bonus. I think that also got added around PCM21, not 100% sure, but it's in the newer versions at least. You have to fill a meter with training and race days to trigger the peak at the right time. It takes some getting used to, especially with how you plan your goals (if two goal races are too close together, say Paris-Roubaix and Giro, you won't be able to trigger a second peak in time etc), but also works decently well, I'd say. Arguably slightly overpowered, but the AI gets them, too, at least.
So, slightly less micromanag-y in recent versions, but also allows for relatively quick planning and works generally okay.
Now, on the database front, I might be a bit biased, but I think all of our recent releases have turned out really well. For PCM22, we've added a big chunk of real equipment, if that interests you (there's a version without it, too). As always, lots of variants, and we also added NCs for pretty much every nation recently. Our 2023 DB isn't too far away, either.
Hope this helps and that you'll enjoy your return to PCM
One thing to add is that PCM22 for the first time ever I think has the option to regulate the impact of daily form. If you want, you can turn random daily form off entirely, leaving you only with the static buffs/nerfs like +-1 for weather, +1 for favorite race, the fitness peak mentioned above etc., or you can limit it to any number between +-1 and the standard +-5. So if you've ever been annoyed that your main season goal could be torpedoed by a random -4 or -5 day, there's your cure.
I really enjoy PCM22 as far as AI and gameplay goes. Nothing is ever perfect, you can still take advantage of AI here and there and sometimes you shake your head at AI behavior, but that's rare imo and in general, it's been good. When I get around to playing, I'm currently in a be a pro career with a puncheur/cobbles hybrid, so mainly classics focused, and those have been fun. Can't speak too much on mountain gameplay, though.
As for the management aspect, imo the biggest difference is the fitness planning for riders. Not sure when you last played, but in PCM20 and the couple of editions before, you could only assign goals to your Top 5 riders by avg, and then assign helpers to them, but you could still manage each rider's week to week intensity to micromanage their fitness. In 21 and 22, you can assign each rider goals again, but then the game creates a fitness plan around it and you don't micromanage the weeks anymore. You can still tinker with it a bit, like assigning high fitness periods outside of the main goals and adding breaks if you feel like they're needed, but it's less detailed. That said, if the goal races are reasonably spaced, the game does pretty well to get your riders in good shape for them.
There's also the added feature of fitness peaks, a three week (or so) window where your rider gets +2 daily form bonus. I think that also got added around PCM21, not 100% sure, but it's in the newer versions at least. You have to fill a meter with training and race days to trigger the peak at the right time. It takes some getting used to, especially with how you plan your goals (if two goal races are too close together, say Paris-Roubaix and Giro, you won't be able to trigger a second peak in time etc), but also works decently well, I'd say. Arguably slightly overpowered, but the AI gets them, too, at least.
So, slightly less micromanag-y in recent versions, but also allows for relatively quick planning and works generally okay.
Now, on the database front, I might be a bit biased, but I think all of our recent releases have turned out really well. For PCM22, we've added a big chunk of real equipment, if that interests you (there's a version without it, too). As always, lots of variants, and we also added NCs for pretty much every nation recently. Our 2023 DB isn't too far away, either.
Hope this helps and that you'll enjoy your return to PCM
Consider me sold on 22! Of course, you guys always have the best database, so I'll see what I can find when I get my new computer. I can implement the database with steam, right?
Less micro-management sounds right up my alley, and regulating daily form is a cool extra indeed.
Love to see you still around, Ian! Good memories return whenever you do.
I fully agree with cunego (when is there ever a reason not to), but I want to add one major factor that got me hooked on 22 and I would assume it's right up your alley too.
For anyone with a passion for junior racing IRL and talent development ingame, there's simply no other option at this point than 22.
You get a completely revamped scouting system that is actually worth the money.
With any good DB, you now get the full set of real-life juniors of both 16yo and 17yo age groups to scout over time, with regens getting created by the game two full years earlier than in the past for you to get excited about.
And beyond that being a significant improvement in itself, scouts now get sent to up to three (even more if you can live with reduced efficiency) countries/regions at once and return 5-15 rider reports every two weeks, with report accuracy using a 10-step level system from just a few stats to fullstats&overall potential to individual stat potential over time.
Beyond these random rider updates you get through that system that usually increase accuracy by one step, you get to pick one rider per two-week frame to scout more thoroughly, usually resulting in a 2-3 step accuracy increase.
This means you get to fully scout 5-6 riders per scout per season and get a sufficient idea whether about 20 more riders are worth signing.
And it gets even better: every scoutable country in the game has two assigned 1-10 values now: training structures and popularity of cycling. The former is vital to spawn high-potential regens at all, while the latter decides how many regens are created and therefore how big your chances are to actually cash in on the probability for stars the former sets.
So Belgium might have 7 training and 10 popularity, while Ukraine might have to do with 2-3.
What makes this system so fun is that these values can be improved by rider success!
The training structure value can increase by one per year if the nation has a rider in the top echelons of the superprestige ranking, while the popularity can be increased by a rider from that nation excelling in individual races (looks like you can immediately jump to 3 popularity with a .HC (stage) win and 5 in a traditional WT race for example).
This is an amazing thing for road-to-glory careers as you no longer are limited to bringing a low-level team to the top, but you can now try to turn an entirely obscure country into a big player churning out good talents every year within half a decade Slovenia-style.
I'm currently trying to get Laos (1 training, 1 popularity, a single 69mo rider to give yourself half a chance at the start) as far up the ranks as possible, and it's the most fun I've had in PCM in a long time.
(It might not be super realistic to jumpstart a random country towards delivering GT-winning prospects like that, but man is it enjoyable! You might be able to tell by how long this description of one single game feature has become...)
Wow, that scouting system actually sounds really cool. So would I be right in assuming a country like the USA would have a higher training value than popularity? As in, it produces fewer cyclists, but a relatively high portion of them are strong?
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
baseballlover312 wrote:
Wow, that scouting system actually sounds really cool. So would I be right in assuming a country like the USA would have a higher training value than popularity? As in, it produces fewer cyclists, but a relatively high portion of them are strong?
Indeed!
It's fully customizable by DB makers, in the one I'm using the US are at 5 training structures and 6 popularity.
That is actually pretty far into the direction you insinuated, usually popularity far exceeds the training structures.
Japan and China at 1/8 are the most obvious examples with lots of regens but zero chance to get beyond mediocre potential, Italy stands at 5/10, and only eight countries in total outscore the US training structures.
