We are proud to announce that we just released the 2017 PCM.daily Expansion Pack: the most complete Expansion Pack that we've ever released!

Even if we've been a bit late, I'm sure the entire community will be thrilled to know that the Database team behind the immense work on the Expansion Pack is still very much alive and kicking. The database contains just as many features as the 2017 Expansion Pack, as well as a lot of quality additions that will deeply enhance your experience while playing Pro Cycling Manager 2017. If you want to take a look at the features in more detail, and find out why we think this is our best effort yet, click "read more".

The 2017 Expansion Pack is a standalone database, which means you don't need to have anything else installed besides your 2017 edition of the PCM saga. As you may imagine, we've been working really hard on this release for the past months, so we hope you'll enjoy it! A full features list can be found here, as well as an extensive installation guide.

If you have any kind of problems, make sure you check the FAQ and any potential reported bugs in the support thread, and if you don't find a solution, well, any questions can be asked in the same place!

You can download the PCM.daily 2017 Expansion Pack in the download center.
Additionally, you can download the Variants DLC in the download center as well.

It has taken a while, admittedly, and we're sorry for that. We can't hide that the team has been the first to look forward to the EP release date, and we couldn't wait to see the release day arrive. But we're glad to announce that the 2017 Expansion Pack is finally upon us!

The most complete Expansion Pack we've ever released
This year's Expansion Pack, without any shadow of a doubt, is the one that we poured the most hours on in the history of the PCM.daily DBs. Quality might have taken a lot more time than anticipated, but whether it's been worth it or not will have to be your call - because we certainly think it has.

I am not going to bore you with raw soulless data of just how much stuff we fitted in the EP archive you'll be downloading - if you'd like to delve deeper into that kind of things you can take a look at the features thread anyways - but if I had to name a few of the facts that stand out about this release, I'd certainly mention that this has the most teams out of any other EP. 135 of them to be exact. We've been fierce supporters of the 'quality' stance when it comes to the perennial battle between quantity and quality, but in the last few editions of the EP we've tried to expand the offer of teams on our very own DB menu, whilst retaining the quality control on statmaking, graphics and calendar fitting that makes our db stand out from the crowd, and we think it's a win-win really.

Thanks to our wonderful statmaking team, stats have never been so realistic and continuously updated for every rider in the db, whether they're riding for an established WorldTour team, don't have a contract, or are riding for one of our 10 U23 teams. We've even re-done favourite races for 400 riders that we thought deserved one of those! But there's more to this: we've gone out of our way to try and improve pretty much every aspect we could potentially try to influence. It's been a long work, but we've even re-done from the bottom up the regen names of the newly generated riders in career mode for every single country, thanks to the help of fjhoekie, and we've continued our everlasting fight in order to improve the development of riders as years go by in career mode, as is tradition.

And after all, you know, the Expansion Pack is about the little things. Just like the last edition, you'll be able to tweak the game's difficulty to your liking a bit better, thanks to the addition of 3 new difficulties. We've finally re-added doping injuries after a few years they've been missing from the DB, and of course you'll be able to choose whether you want to play with the National and World Champions of 2016 or 2017 with 2 different databases.

We didn't overlook any kind of graphics
The Expansion Pack, just like every year, aims to enhance your gameplay by providing you with an insane amount of real kits - one for every team in the DB, as well as several National Champions jerseys for most of them to make sure you're able to conduct a realistic career mode for as long as possible, leader jerseys - with real 2017 ones for a large portion of the races in the db, accessories for all the real teams in the db, close to 1000 sponsors packs from all over the world to choose for a custom career, as well as real equipment, so real frames, wheels, helmets, groupsets and glasses of 127 brands, which is the limit enforced by the game. We wish we could fit more of them in the db, but that's how it is!

Another feature we deem very important is the addition of the Jacky Durand's sponsorkits, an immense amount of graphics that makes sure a lot of the races are surrounded by real banners, start and finish lines and so on. A total of almost 100 races, including every single World Tour event, the World Championships, the HC races, and all events organised by ASO will have them included, whilst in all the others a nice generic sponsorkit will be shown. But that's not it either, if you consider that we had to leave out around 350 of his race sponsorkits for the minor races. You can in fact download his full sponsorkits in the download section, the EP will just give you a taste of them!

We've obviously also took a look at less noticeable details such as race logos for pretty much every race in the database, cyclist photos for 99% of riders in a team and for the vast majority of free agents, new flags, custom newspapers for all countries and races, strips for more countries than in the base game, and a lot of other fantastic additions!

Stages are back, and so are variants!
Stages have, unfortunately, been the biggest reason as to why the release has been delayed as much as it has. Needing to re-convert every single stage in the DB for the second consecutive year, after we needed to do the same in PCM 16, has most certainly taken a toll on the db release times, especially as the amount of stages included in the DB only grew in the last couple of years.

But that's all behind us at this point, as pretty much every single race that was present in the 2016 Expansion Pack was converted for PCM 17. The races count for the new DB is therefore as high as 422, enough for you to enjoy close to the entireness of the international calendar down to the .1 category, a big chunk of the European and North American .2 races, and a few of the Asian ones, too, whilst obviously retaining the balance between each race and the amount of teams taking part to them - all of this adding to the realism of the Expansion Pack career mode experience.

Speaking about realism, we've made sure that playing those races in all the game modes is more stimulating, namely adding real teams' lists for all the WT races that have announced their wild cards so far, as well as making very realistic custom teams lists for the rest of the races. For instance, you'll be able to play a race like Volta a Portugal with all the Portuguese teams in the database, by default. Moreover, clamel has been working hard to provide a huge amount of custom classification files. And guess what, we have implemented all of them! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll explain it briefly: these files simply make sure that even races like Tour of Norway have the correct bonifications for the sprint checkpoints, or correct points for the different King-of-Mountain categories. As he says, this "little thing" is vital because one single second can change the fate of a General Classification!

Variants for years - literally
Of course it's also extremely important to have a talk about the variants included in the DB. And there's no need to be worried that needing to convert so many of those races would hurt the final amount of variants included in the DB, as the Expansion Pack and the Variants DLC offer you a wide range of alternative routes for all of your favourite races. Variants will be, as always, very present in the Expansion Pack, as we're offering at least 3 variants for each Grand Tour - 6 for Le Tour, 4 for La Vuelta and 3 for Il Giro - in the basic pack, as well as at least a variant for every classic and 1 or 2 for the other main stage races.

That doesn't seem to be too much, does it? Well that's where the Variant DLC comes into play. You will find 8 TDF variants in there, which means you'll be able to take advantage of 16 variants of the most famous race in the world, including the 2 default ones and the 6 of them that come with the 2017 EP. The Giro has also got 8 additional variants and the Vuelta has got 4 of them. Obviously, all the other WT stage races have got variants as well, Criterium du Dauphiné is an example, having got 10 of them, or Il Lombardia with its 7 variants.

You may be wondering why we even chose to release a separate Variant DLC when we could have just squeezed them all in the main download. That's easy, because we don't want the standalone db to become too heavy. The current download will weigh almost 11 GB already (nearly 21 GB when unpacked), if we included the variants dlc as well, that would have come to a historic unpacked 28 GB. We thought that the users that were most interested in more variants would download the pack anyway, just like they'd probably want to download the Jacky Durand's Sponsorkits.

Miscellaneous
We’ve named many, many features, but there’s even more to be explored in the DB: apart from all these things, there are a lot of little details we took care of that will enhance your gaming experience even more. Some of the additions we've made are hard to notice, think about the more countries, the real trainers, physicians and scouts that have been updated, or a few translations' mistakes have been spotted and fixed in a few languages such as Danish, Dutch and Italian, not to mention the new logos for race categories that reflect real life's, or the extended palmares records compared to the original DB.

This year, more than usual, all the work that has been quietly completed behind the scenes made it extra-hard to keep track of all the features and little tweaks we've made. For this reason, as always, a huge thank you goes to the community for providing graphics, stages and other little but fundamental tweaks - and a special shout out to the database team: aldrofj (stats), Croatia14 (stats), haasje33 (graphics, organisation), Kentaurus (excel wizardry), kodman (stats), krisa (graphics, stats), Maddrengen (graphics), matt17br (organisation and db team lead, db work, other stuff), Selwink (organisation, stages), sgdanny (graphics), SpartacusCancellara (graphics), Tafiolmo (stats), togo95 (organisation, stages, db work), the_hoyle (graphics), trekbmc (stages), Willemaerts (graphics). You can find out more about who's been involved in the project by taking a look at the credits list in the features thread. Have a nice game!