Official General AI Comments & Discussion Topic

Well, today, I did another race with them, driving the Nissan. 1h10min around Hockenheim 2001, 3x fuel and tyres. Not really looking to test anything, just for fun, but found some interesting things. Once again, every AI in each car went for the same strategy, except for the Nissans, and, considering the leading cars were mostly them, I had a blast racing with them and a few Mercs (the Nissan is by far the quickest car at Hockenheim), and, due to the slight variation of strategies, I never really knew for sure where I'd come out, which was always one of the things I always loved about there races, the unpredictability.

I could go for 8 laps per stint, and, like last time, the race would have ended 1 lap after the end of my last stint (33 laps in total), but this time I realized it earlier, and shortened my final two stints to make a more cohesive strategy. A lot of the Nissans had done that from the start of the race (most of them alternated between 7 and 8 lap stints, a few only did 7 laps, but no one did only 8 lap stints), which was actually really good behavior.

But the interesting part is this. With about 20 minutes remaining, the Porsches did their 3rd pitstop, and I was thinking that they'd probably manage to go to the end, but then I remembered that they could also only do 8 laps, so I thought that they'd run out of fuel like the McLarens and Mercs there, but no. They all pitted on the final lap, put on a single lap of fuel and no tyres, and finished the race. With that much shorter stop, the leading Porsche actually came back in the lead. Before, the first Porsche was well outside the top 10.

If only the Porsches had done like the Nissans, and shortened their earlier stops, this would have been pretty much perfection. The fastest among them would probably be in contention for victory anyway, or at least a top 5, taking slightly shorter stops than everyone else and slowly gaining time through every round of stops until they ended up in the first few places. It would have been a lot more natural. They didn't win (the leading Nissan and me passed the Porsche on the last lap, because it's so much slower) but on the end results, 5 of the 7 Porsches in the field were in the top 10, when not a single one of them had ever ran there before the final lap.