I was wondering if anyone has any experience with improvement of the two parts of the scouting section in each country, more specifically the improvement of "training structures" and "popularity of cycling"? They do improve a lot with other teams, but it seems to be more difficult/impossible to improve these with your own riders?
One of them is based on wins in certain categories, I do not know which leven requires what, but it is like this. What I know about the other is that at the end of the season, if the requirements are met, from the list of countries some are chosen to ‘level up’. More I don’t know I’m afraid, would love to learn
Popularity of cycling is guaranteed to increase with wins in certain categories.
From the top of my head, a .HC stage or overall win bumps it up to 3, a low-level WT win (like Guangxi) to 4, a regular WT win to 5, a Giro/Vuelta win to 6 and a TdF win to the max of 7. These can all happen successively during a single season, and I believe some classics give increases for podium spots too (possibly only monuments).
Training structures have a good superprestige rank for an individual rider of said nation at the end of a season as the requirement for improving by one point. There are no obvious indications which minimum rank is required for each increase (although it's obvious 1->2 is much easier to achieve than 7->8) and the increase is not guaranteed going into the next season.
My advice to you would be to fully focus on maximizing the points potential of the best suited rider of the nation you want to improve through smart race subscriptions and racing for the training structure increase (you want at least 4 points in that to get a chance of superstar regens), and if you're down for a little bit of cheating the system, you can make a copy of your save on December 31st and retry simulating to January 1st a handful of times to see if your desired country is among the potential increases to eliminate the lottery aspect.
This will have to be repeated every season as you can only gain one point per season.
To improve the popularity, identify the highest category race(s) you feel confident your rider can at least take a stage win in, and make that/those his season objective(s).
You do not have to go through each rank like with the training structures, theoretically it should be possible to go from 1 to 7 immediately with a single TdF stage win.
I'm happy to answer more detailed questions on this topic, as it has been my main focus of the past year!
Now I am wondering if popularity and training structure levels are ever lost? If not, won't this system just lead to every region eventually maxing out?
Theoretically yes, there's a snowball system in place where an obscure nation's rider randomly gets a big potential boost and then creates a big regen pool through a breakthrough result, which over time has a much bigger chance of again randomly (if training structures are still ~1-3) or intentionally (if ~4+) creating a true star rider who maxes out the structures over time.
From experience, I'd say that only happens to 1-2 truly obscure nations over a couple of decades, since such a rider needs to max out first and then training structures need consistent top results over 8-10 years to rise that far with the lottery system of increases.
Countries like Kazakhstan (Lutsenko) or Eritrea (Girmay) are obviously much more likely to join the upper ranks rather quickly.
But in general, there is an issue of more and more high-potential riders getting created every season through the training structure increases.
