Mandatory pit stops and AI pit stop logic

Just finished my 1st full length race against the AI in the F1 Classic Gen3s, INSANELY fun, but while roughly a third of the field stopped 3 times as I did, about a dozen of them stopped 5 or 6 times!! While I am not expecting perfect strategies throughout, this seems a bit extreme? Could this be because I had mandatory stops turned on? Would having mandatory stops off change this at all?
FYI, it was a dry-wet-dry race, and all damage was turned off, so it's not like they were stopping for repairs.

Thanks in advance!

 

Would the car have had the ability to complete the race with a full tank?

we should be allowed to give the Ai an amount of fuel to start with. The other sim I use the Ai to practice for races, it allows fuel % but doesn’t give the user the option to have them change tires or not. That messes up the race. Not a big problem for me as I’m using it as a tool to run a full race, fuel, tire deg. Racing on off line championship that would suck

 

From what I understand, and I have no idea if this was ever fixed or not, but if you use mandatory pit stops, the AI will drive till the fuel tank is empty or the 2nd to last lap of the race to pit. Tires did not factor into the equation at all, as the AI can drive for much longer than the player on the same set of tires.

Same thing goes for damange. At 50% damage the car becomes undriveable for us, for the AI, it loses a second or 2 a lap. The Advanced damage model fixes this a little bit, as the more damage a AI car takes the more likely it will get some sort of random failure and therefore have to pit.

Honestly though, that was a couple versions ago, and we've yet to get any explanation of how it works? Hopeful a dev can fill us in.

 

In my experience with AI half distance grand prix unless weather change they'll pit close to the middle whether they need to refuel or not

 

I've run into that before just doing a 45 minute wet->dry->wet GTE race with no wear/fuel acceleration. So, should have been two stops to go to wets and then back to dry.

I think the AI don't "know" what the weather forecast is, so some of them will switch tires early, decide they shouldn't have, switch back, and then end up switching again. Hence, the 2 extra stops.

 

If we use real weather we do not know what the weather is either, unless we research it. I would like to see a weather forecast built in so we can plan our pitstops better.