I may be the odd man out here, but I do think the ai does very well to offer a competitive and engaging offline race experience. My biggest complaint though is that it seems their damage level is not very realistic. I find that they tend not to suffer obvious damage when either crashing on their own, or especially crashing with me. Even when my car gets destroyed, all the ai cars involved in the wreck just back out and drive away. Only occasionally do i ever see ai with a DNF. I recently did a 30 lap formula 1 race around Long Beach and even after several double yellows, not one ai car retired from the race, even though I was hit and completely wrecked beyond repair. Crashes and DNF's in racing are a huge part of the outcome, especially when running a season championship, so it would be great to see it affect the ai more realistically. It us very rare in any formula open wheeler to be able to continue racing after a crash- its usually race over for that car. Is there any way to change this, or am i just not setting it up right?
Which F1 class where you driving? The modern F1 cars are almost bullet proof nowadays so you wont see many retirements from mechanical failures in both modern F1 classes. Make sure to also put time scaled failures on in the options menu to have the failures scale with the race length. I do agree that the physical damage the AI suffers is too low and they can go on their merry way without rear wings and stuff, so there is room for improvement there. But in terms of mechanical failures AMS2 is the best of all the modern sims, you can tweak the failure rates by using a custom AI file as well, there is a thread pinned with info on how to do it.
I agree the mechanical failures are recently accurate but I feel the damage from crashes definitely is not for most all the cars. I have purposely rammed the ai just to try to cause damage and they just literally drive away. Hitting a wall at high speed out crashing into other cars especially on open wheelers almost always results in retiring or at least major pit repair
At low damage, the AI seem completely invulnerable to damage. I got taken out multiple times by the AI so that we both fly head on into a wall, and where my car gets catastrophic damage, the AI just rejoins and goes on to win the race. Or the AI get stuck on top of each other after spinning and spend several laps on the side of the road humping each other, trying to get free but failing miserably. Really terrible immersion. I hope the AI damage/DNF mechanics get revised at some point.
Anyone know if it is possible to remove the retired AI cars? In race, AI with mechanical failures just stop in the driving line, and AI slow down when approaching it each following lap, destroying offline experience. In many sim retired cars just disappear from track: not really realistic, but it doesn't impact with the race.
