After failed attempt at racing this race in LFM with a horrible lobby full of crashers. I decided to replicate the GT1 at Spa93 for 30mins with AI. Max Aggression 120 skill as usual Added x3 mistakes for some fun and it does work. I'm starting last etc. 30min +1lap. However in high speed corners the AI is bump drafting my car, and nudging the car, sometimes even accelerating into me when their car is already touching my car making me spin on purpose. Max aggression used to be fun, ofc nothing too crazy, the AI are not better at finding lines or overtaking, they are just trying to crash me by ignoring my presence in front of them. I've tried this race 200x times. I have the world record fastest lap, I have my race setup w fuel etc for 30 mins with a decent 2.07 lap time. I get the fastest lap of the race many times. The AI also has got some artificial rubber banding effect. Sometimes I struggle to avoid crashing into the cars in front, there is a train of cars and the pack is close and I am faster but I have to choose the right moment to overtake (since the AI might not yield and then the next corner I might get spun out of track) But while I try to follow the AI car in front, the AI car behind is bumping into my car and almost making me spin many times, making me have to brake earlier or force me into a strange line in order to make them react defensively and actually mess up their own line. So that I can survive certain corners without getting bumped and spun of the track. By that time I'm losing a bit of time vs the AI in front but later I can still gain it. But every time I overtake any car and a car is behind me I'm always at risk of getting randomly spun. The rubber banding feels weird as if the cars behind me are always faster than the cars in front (but only after I overtake them they become faster lol) I've managed to do the whole race once but I lacked 2liters of fuel. 1 week trying to do this race every day I attempt it 30 times and I get crashed at random moments. I've tried to make a race setup to match the AIs performance. They seem to acknowledge each other's presence much better than they acknowledge me as the player. As if sometimes they ignore my presence on the track. Maybe I'm pushing too much but I've always used max agression 120 skill AI before it was always fun but ofc not "that bad". While this AI seems more competitive and competent regarding raw speed, the experience seems much worse due to the crashing factor and coupled with pretty obvious rubber banding instead of a more "natural pace" split between all the cars. Has anyone noticed this or is it just me trying this car track combo with the new AI improvements? I urge anyone to beat it in these conditions starting in last.
I was getting bumped off the track a lot with 120 and Max aggression. I was reasonably sure that some car / track combinations the AI was way too fast in 1.5 but figured it might have been me being slow. The difficult thing is in assessing your own consistency. e.g I would have claimed that the AI isn't consistent - that, just in simple 'how fast can it do a lap' terms it's trivial to beat the AI in some car / track combinations and impossible in others. Of course, the easy solution is simply to play with the difficulty slider - but you'd kind of hope the AI would be more consistent across all the cars and tracks. But, how do I assess my own consistency across all the cars and tracks to determine whether the AI is consistent or not? And that's why I didn't really fret about it. Another foible is, I think the game states that above a certain difficulty the AI uses setup changes? Which I never really do so maybe that would explain some of the differences. Not having played for around a year when 1.6 appeared, I assumed the same again - that it was just me being out of practise and slow, and so I just lowered the AI a bit and dropped the aggression to Med. Now I'm 2-3 seconds a lap ahead of AI on some car / track combinations, e.g GT4 / Silverstone national - and I don't think my lap time was particularly fast. But whatever I was racing the day before, possibly caterham at same track I was qualifying first but only by a tenth. It just seems like a huge difference for it to be explained by improvement, although the GT4 has ABS so maybe that's how much the DFGT brake pedal sucks. But yeah the AI "hitting the back corner of your car so you spin" thing went out of fashion very quickly for me. Occasionally I do an instant replay and perhaps I've turned across the front of the AI player, but there was definitely some cases where the AI is overtaking you and it seems like it just nudges your car because it can not because of a lack of room to overtake. As for rubberbanding I don't believe that is the case. You have to understand that the physics for the AI isn't the same as the player so the cars won't move and behave in the same way - as, if, e.g when you're chasing a ghost in TT you can tell they have the same car. In theory they should have the same grip etc, but the dynamics of their cars aren't being calculated to same degree and that's clear in the way their cars move around (or don't) The old engines that did this faux physics basically just had numbers 0-1 how much of the grip would the AI use, how much of the available braking power etc and when that didn't work (i.e the AI was still slow) they gave the AI 120% grip - which is the origin of the 120. Whether the AI work in the same way may not be the case now, of course, but that's why rather than having 0-100 it has 120. If the AI worked in all these games / game engines that originated from the same place, it should be impossible to beat on 120. I guess the bottom line is : AI not real - it's not even real in the sense that if you raced me we'd have the same physics and game. So I would just use settings that work. When I race the AI I basically just do a qualifying session that's more about getting used to the car but go into a race starting from last place and work my way to the front - which is not really realistic in any sense - it's like Herbie goes to Monte Carlo movie - in some sense I need to dominate the AI to make this a reasonable achievement. But I would just use whatever settings you have to use to have a fun 30 minutes or whatever. The only cases where it's "broken", perhaps would be where you have it on Max and 120 and the AI are so slow you beat them trivially - because we can't make them drive faster only slower. If they are too good we can just dial them down until they're not and maybe explore the possibility that we can use setup / improve our driving. As the TT boards fill with more times it might be clearer where the AI lap times are too far ahead and worth reporting these. I don't have the level of confidence to say that it's not me yet.
I understand that above 115 AI strength the skill attribute gets compressed. So more AI drivers have max skill, and the spread is less. My problem with the AI, which you also identify, is that the car behind you drives like Max Verstappen having road rage! Attacks relentlessly, makes impossible time up if you force them off closing a 1-2 second gap in a few of corners. All other cars drive normally! Allow the AI car to pass, it slows and drives normally again. The new AI car behind becomes the crazed killer. As soon as you pass another car in front, that obviously becomes the one behind, and it goes into rage mode! High aggression appears be the culprit of this rage mode of the AI behind, it will transcend it's skill level (tested with custom AI) and drive seconds faster than it ever has before in the race, just because it's the car behind the player. I find this behaviour very irritating. As you describe they have no self preservation, no respect for the player, and attempt to pass relentlessly in inappropriate places with no concept of race craft. The end result is typically a crash. It's like the worst online lobby imaginable, but only ever the car directly behind the player. I have yet to find the trigger level for this behaviour with the custom AI aggression attribute, I will continue to persevere to see if I can tune this behaviour out. I have not played with 1.6 yet, it's still a couple of weeks before I get home from work and get to experiment again!
ChasteWand "The new AI car behind becomes the crazed killer." This is exactly it. Not even Max verstappen matches this level of aggression. It's like Rickard Rydell, Alain Menu, David Leslie and Anthony Reid are duking it out like in the 90s, gloves off no rules applied. These guys were something else. I noticed that. The fastest lap from P1 car was a 2.07.8 and I did a 2.07.2 as the fastest lap. Suddenly the driver behind me that was 2+ secs behind and was easy to overtake and obviously slower now the car behind me sets a new fastest lap of 2.07.1 and I'm kinda like wtf. I'm already pretty sure I'm pushing the limits of the car pretty well. In more "tame" cars like the Brasilian P1 category and the GT3s I used to beat max aggression 120 skill AI by a long shot, in longer races even lapping them due to AI random mistakes. OFC I welcome more competitive AI, but because the AI seem to be ghosts of a parallel physics universe and not related to what's happening with me on track, it completely brakes the experience. AC ai is awful in many regards, but the way they race in most of the cars I've raced is realistic and the pace and performance are in general more realistic. Ok they don't touch their setups, so I must use same setup for an even match. But then if I have 4x tire wear and my tires are dead, the AI tires are also dead. If I have lower grip now and my pace drops, the AI also has lower grip and the pace drops. We are all in the same race. Right now AMS2 AI seems to be in quantum universe driving, not in my universe. It's very immersion braking because many of the things that happen in the race don't make any sense. The race doesn't make sense. It's like it's unplayable. It feels the same as playing some random thing like need for speed, just with better driving experience for myself.
Well I used to beat AI in most conditions I remember but mainly Brasilian P1 and GT3 I was able to even lap them if the race was long enough. I used to time trial and I've set many top records over the years which got cleaned over and over. And right now I've set the WR for this car and track combo quite easily without much fuss over the setup. I'm just waiting to see what someone else do with the leaderboard and then ill hit it again with the new improved race setup that I've used for this specific AI race I've been complaining about. The agression is like the AI ignore that the player is blocking their way and they still try to push through, making the rear tires lose grip or just keep barely touching to the point where I feel a nudge in the FFB and my car stops turning normally because it's "stuck" by the AI. The pace is not a problem, I can still beat 120 skill with the GT1 easily even though the rubber banding is bad in a sense where it breaks the immersion and makes racing this AI as realistic as playing need for speed. While other AIs that are grounded on more realistic terms will behave in a more predictable and expectable way. As it happens in other sims. Usually the aggression is what gets me. I've actually finished 1 race but needed 2liters of fuel and DNF on last lap, otherwise I would've finished 3rd. The reason I finished 3rd was because I had way slower laps trying to avoid getting crashed every time an AI car was somehow close to me. Also, the AI used to break up a bit more in "packs of cars" fighting each in their own pace. Right now that doesn't happen as much and all the cars behind instead of breaking up in their own pace actually start rubber banding speeding up and it's insanely unrealistic and the opposite of any race I've ever seen, and the opposite of my experience with most AIs in most sims. Even if I can't beat them I don't expect all the cars behind me to be in a straight forward train after 20 mins of racing. While my main complain is about this mindless aggression and I do admit that maybe having "AI mistakes x3" will also increase the chance of something strange happening, and sometimes I do see AI getting a bit stuck in each other. Basically you're telling - AI runs on other physics so it will never be meant to be realistic - that will 100% invalidate the proposition of playing AMS2 single player and expecting a simulation. I always thought that was one of the core strengths of this sim. Disclaimer: I've been trying so hard on this race I haven't even tested the other races I used to do with GTs and P1 etc. Maybe these problems won't happen, maybe they will. IDK. I think it's better for me to actually complain and share my experience and more people actually share the problems they find with the AI in order to find ways of fixing it. It's like that Blizzard developer that said "to make a challenge for you guys we just doubled all the values". lolol The reason I'm confident in rubber banding is because the AI only starts posting really quick lap times when it's behind me. If you drive max skill long enough you will notice the cars behind are always faster than the cars in front. very immersion braking and unrealistic. specially when that rubber banding happens consistently across 200 race attempts... And your driving becomes adapted to expect those rubber banding effects. Basically I have to drive vs AI completely different that I drive VS "clean" humans We all have same pace (me , Ai , people ) and in some sims if these 3 things produce around similar lap times some overtaking lines might be different but overall the driving isn't completely different, while here I must drive in a very uncanny way to avoid certain accidents and in some cases I much rather let some odd car that sneaks up on me through because once he is in front of me he becomes much slower and I easily overtake him into the next corners and if I can survive a bit with enough distance he wont take me out. I might try with less aggression and see if that affects the overall feel of the race at least I'll be able to race without fear of an incident at every single corner entry when a car is behind. But I hope the rubber banding doesn't spoil it too much. I'm not used to get that rubber banding feeling in other sims and usually the longer the race the more the field spreads out and the cars behind are usually slower and the cars in front are usually faster which is what makes sense.
High agression is agressive already; Max is mindless. Wish we had a roster of drivers with individual characteristics.
I've tried High aggression and I can attest to your reply. High made things much better but still pretty dodgy but just less insane.
Well I wouldn't go that far. Similarly with the 'rubber banding' thing. The point here is, on my old PC I could run about 5 or 6 AI in assetto corsa (where the AI use the same physics engine) in AMS2 I could have a field of cars - and all of the difficulties in getting CPU players to drive and race still existed in AC. That one idea or feature didn't fix everything and it added a heap of problems of its own. If anything the AI were objectively worse in AC and most of the time Stefano plugged away trying to improve the AI he was just trying to get them to drive around all of the tracks. Most sims are doing a similar thing and have done forever - because 32+ copies of the full physics engine running isn't feasible.
I've modded for AC and it was and sort of is my fall back go to sim for a ton of reasons. I do get tired of configuring so many things, but I also enjoy the freedom to select individual skins, skill levels, driver names and save those grids, save any race weekend config, etc Quality of content can vary a lot, since it's so old, and while some original kunos stuff isn't that bad, other things are a bit dated, and some mods can be horrible. I've dedicated myself to creating mods for myself, since I'm kinda "new" to simracing and I'm far from a pro modder I never released anything. After trying the Praga R1t in AMS1 and RRRE and the slower protos of AMS2 and after watching the Praga Cup, I ended up enjoying a lot of online races with the kunos Praga R1 but the mods to "update" it were completely lalaland and unacceptable. So I created my own version, which I would never claim to be the most realistic since I lack the data, but my aproximation of what I personally think it should be. The AI became a problem. So few lines of code to program AI behavior on how it will interpret the track guidelines. There are also only 2 lines meaning a 3 car side by side will be ignored by AC ai, this is common in many sims and it is a bit of a problem. Other than that, after I figured out the values that work for my physics, the AI drive extremely well. I haven't been testing any further, but I was doing 1h endurance races with 300% tyre and fuel at Road America, and it was a lot of fun. The ai drove similar and better than many humans. And I dont quite remember if I figured out how to keep up with them. I know the AI in AC still uses some "extra grip" hacks like almost every AI uses. but somehow it felt very realistic. I could just stream full on AI races and they would look like real life human races. The ai will also do mistakes, they will also spread up a bit. I got them to push the car hard enough that some of them can screw up while most of them will be doing very competitive laptimes. Another thing about AC is that AI can't change the setup, so I had to have a middle ground but working setup for the car versatile enough but that I can go race on "fixed" or "default" setup vs the AI and the car drives well and we are all on an even playing field. That's the biggest take away from me, it feels we're all doing the same inputs. And contrary to AMS2 in AC I can use tons of UI HUD features to actually measure AI performance and inputs tyre wear and fuel consumption. Even though AC ai is so bad like everyone says it is, my best single player AI experiences have been precisely with that "horrible" ai. I've never fully recorded a race because I struggled to beat it. But I had moments of watching 3 cars up to 4 cars side by side in the main straight. I've also had a ton of trouble with a racecar version of the F40 where I took inspiration from F40 LM and F40 competizione but I wanted it to perform better like the F40s performed in the 90s against F50s and other "more advanced" cars. I even tried to track down which and all competitions the F40 was in. It was after again, trying out AMS1 F40 and noticing that it was a much better racecar than anything else I had seen in AC physics wise. Once again I took it upon myself to make an enjoyable version of it. While getting a full grid of cars with a nice BoP is hard specially with mods, not only laptimes but cornering speeds top speeds tyre wear and fuel consumption so that the cars will not be too radically different, I ended up creating my own F40 championship with a ton of liveries and it looked and felt amazing to race. I didn't remove the turbo lag or the snappy characteristics of the car but I changed it a bit because many times in AC i see people going overboard and exaggerate too much and then some mods feel extremely unnatural compared to most content. Once again I had to figure out an AI and it was a huge WIP for a long time, this time I tested a lot at Sebring because the really slow corner out of S1 was very tricky and sometimes they would go off. Again after I tweaked this car for weeks the AI became one of my best racing experiences ever. Aggressive enough, pushing hard, nothing too crazy, still prone to some errors. I see the faults in ACs AI and ofc it's always limited by the track files and some people make better AI lines for tracks but I think many times the car AI instructions themselves can make a huge difference. Now I get it, it is heavy, so run less cars. For me there is no point in running 30 or 40 cars if the driving experience is subpar. If something is ****ty, adding numbers to it only adds more ****ty stuff. I think in most sim racers we want quality above all else. That is the point of simulation, otherwise any arcade game with feeling of racing would do. I do think Reiza have been trying to improve their AI physics over time and the cars are getting a bit more "in line". TBH , after following max skill AI a lot and noticing where I'm faster and where I'm slower, I can cook up a setup that will try to fix my cars deficiencies and make it more similar to what they are driving. Now the kicker, after I reduce from Max aggression to High Aggression the cars are spreading out a bit more, not pushing as crazy and insanely hard as before. The bumping still happens but to a much lesser extent, and I don't get "dive bombed" by the AI. Maybe Reiza have changed a bit their concept about AI aggression and really bumped it all up. because before the AI was very respectful and tame, and I quite liked it. Maybe I'm a huge outliar but I hate when ppl are overly aggressive on the sim, because in real life in most cases nobody drives like that. sometimes the AI will go for a suicidal move through a place like eau rouge and kill themselves on high and max aggression. I still notice after 30+ mins of racing that the cars behind seem the be getting closer to me faster than I am getting closer to the car in front, and in many cases, I'm almost bumping or even locking from panic braking into the car in front ( i have no room ) and the car in line behind me is still bumping into me like he wants me to go even faster but I have the line blocked, and we're all at the edge of grip on the limit of the perfect line meaning any big deviations will make me lose time and the car behind will get an advantage. But then I kinda have to to an extremely aggressive move that forces the car in front off the line and then the car behind overtakes him. At least High aggression makes things more bearable. I've even improved my setup further and RN my race setup with 14 laps of fuel gives me a 2.06.2 fastest laptime in SPA93.
IDK if it's bad to post a link to a yt video or if it is allowed, here is how one of my closest to ideal laps during the race looks like:
