| Hiku said: I was surprised with the choice of music in the presentation. It was mainly slow/classical music, and I don't know if that is effective when your aim is to make a new generation of players interested in cars. The Cafe Mode seems to be the main feature aimed at new players. I think introducing new modes that focus on gameplay may be a better way to get a broader audience interested.
I still remember in GT 3 I managed to improve my time a lot in an endurance race by driving with completely worn out tires for a number of laps before doing pit stops. |
The trick is to find the balance with the other players in the room.
A lot of races in GT Sport require you to use two compounds during the race, enforcing a pit stop. (Before they allowed no stop races where it was all about conserving fuel to make it, but the focus shifted to tire choice and pit strategy)
When you start at the back it's better to start on the slower compound and use slipstream to keep up. Then switch to the faster compound while the car is already lighter (less fuel) to make optimum use of them with less weight wearing them out.
However if you start at the front you want to stay at the front, so start on the faster compound, take smooth lines, avoid the rear breaking out, avoid spinning the wheels, avoid kerbs where possible to minimize tire wear and get them to last as long as possible.
Some people are really good at managing tires (easier with a wheel) and in some races the fastest players only do 1 lap on the slower (more durable) compound and either pit in lap 1 or right before the last lap. I don't use a wheel but can still do more laps on the less durable faster compound than the hard tires. It's a simple calculation in the end, switch when your lap times match what you can achieve with the other compound in their most worn out state.
No stop fuel saving races were a lot of fun too btw. Conserve fuel either by leaning the fuel mixture or by short shifting and coasting into corners. Shifting early saves a lot of fuel, keep the rpms down and some cars like the Corvette actually have better torque at lower rpms, so it's actually faster to shift earlier.
None of this is mentioned anywhere in GT Sport. The fuel lean mixture in race menu isn't even explained anywhere. Nor is the brake balance you can change on the fly which you can use to optimize corner entry, but also to spread tire wear evenly. If the front tires wear faster in a certain car, put the brake balance to the rear to put more pressure and wear on them during braking. However that changes the balance of the car entering the corner and you might have more understeer going into a corner.
The real pros change the brake balance on the fly, like shifting gears. Too much for me, I leave brake balance on neutral most of the time, rarely change it, and only to even out tire wear. Yet the fastest players will figure out the best brake balance for every corner!
Anyway I was surprised at the choice of music and presenters as well. Maybe this was more focused on getting the old crowd back. It's not that targeted at me either, the whole history of cars, seen it many times now, never was that interested. Racing school, racing techniques is what I'm interested in.
This is my racing 'bible'
https://f1metrics.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/the-rules-of-racing/
Those are the rules I race by in GT Sport, problem is, many people have a different interpretation of what racing should look like.
And I'll carry those rules over to GT7 as again I didn't see anything about collision physics. GT Sport always claimed to be a non contact sport, so it makes sense collision are an after thought. However they happen all the time now without a penalty system and with lag you get weird comedy physics.
This is draft bumping with lag (a player disconnected causing a little lag spike)
And this was with me and the car behind having a good connection. Imagine lag in corners with 2 cars rubbing, it just doesn't work in today's internet environment.
Hopefully GT7 also improved on the net code, lag detection and better smoothing / prediction. Sometimes you have cars jumping all over the track or moving stop motion style or wobbling sideways back and forth. Very distracting and big cause of accidents.
