AI Has Unfair Advantages Due to Missing Simulation Depth (ERS, Tires, Weather)
There is no question that the AI has improved drastically compared to last year, especially in terms of behavior during duels and making more mistakes. It feels much more realistic and human-like. However, there are aspects of the AI that completely destroy any immersion and leave me mostly frustrated. The big problem with the AI is that it has virtually no simulation depth. It only pretends to have it - but that's just an illusion. And it’s precisely this lack of simulation depth that causes the frustrating situations most of us have long noticed. The AI has no ERS simulation. If you watch the AI steering wheels in a replay, it appears they are using ERS and the percentage is dropping. Unfortunately, that's deception. It has nothing to do with their actual ERS reserves. You can tell because their cars don’t flash once they fall below 10% ERS - unlike the player’s car, which does flash to inform the following driver that the battery is empty. Even with 10% ERS, the AI drives as if they had 100%. They reach the same top speed regardless of whether their wheel display shows full or empty ERS. It is literally just an illusion. So, the AI has unlimited ERS and uses it on the straights constantly, regardless of the percentage shown on their wheel. This leads to a situation where the player can keep up for the first 2-3 laps, but once the player’s ERS is used up and needs recharging, the player is hopelessly inferior on the straights. Because the AI never needs to recharge - it’s simply not simulated. The same applies to tire wear. The AI has no tire wear simulation. The AI gets slightly slower over the course of the race to simulate tire wear. But it’s not actually simulated. It’s just pre-programmed behavior. That’s why it often feels like the AI gets faster as the race goes on - or rather, we get slower. Their programmed pace reduction affects their speed less than the real tire degradation the player experiences. So, the player loses more race pace over the stint than the AI. Now lets talk about tire temperature. To keep it short: the AI does not simulate tire temperature. In dry races, this has no effect 99% of the time. But in wet or changing conditions, it becomes a crucial factor. (And yes, the player can turn off tire temperature simulation.) Now to the topic that’s probably the most controversial: AI on a wet track. The reason the AI is so superhumanly strong in the wet is a combination of the factors mentioned above plus their traction control, which works completely differently from the player’s. If the player has traction control enabled and hits the throttle, it only releases as much power as needed to prevent wheelspin. But it never releases the optimal amount - you're never at the limit of wheelspin. In fact, the traction control releases far less power than what would actually be possible. That’s also why you're always faster without traction control than with it. The AI's traction control works completely differently. It always releases the optimal amount of power at all times. Combined with the lack of simulation depth - which makes them immune to external factors - this makes them unrealistically strong in certain corners, and especially in the wet. They activate ERS right at the apex of a corner and - thanks to their special traction control - blast out of slow corners unrealistically fast. If the player tries the same thing, they lose grip and spin out because the player is subject to simulation-based physics the AI is not. The fact that the AI doesn’t simulate things like physics, aerodynamics, dirt on the tires, etc. only amplifies their superhuman behavior. Anyone who has played a MyTeam/Driver Career over several seasons in past F1 games will have noticed: The more developed the cars become, the stronger the AI gets. To the point where you have to keep lowering the difficulty to keep up. That’s because the AI is free from any simulation or external influences like physics, etc. They get 100% of the power to the track at all times. Whether the physics allow it or not doesn’t matter for the AI. They literally break the laws of nature. And that’s what makes them absurdly strong. The F1 Game series urgently needs a new Game engine that allows AI to be simulated the same way as the player. As long as that isn’t possible, nothing will change. The AI will always have a massive competitive advantage.Ai is broken!
The Ai is completely broken! (Which in career and my team means that the racing is broken). The Ai at race starts are slow, the ai on the corners are extremely slow and then on the straights they are insanely fast. In the wet weather they are far far too fast. This needs sorting ASAP! It’s a racing game and unless you aren’t against Ai you can’t properly race because it’s broken!🤦🏼♀️AI Difficulty Imbalance Between Dry and Wet Conditions – Needs Fixing
The real problem is that the AI is too slow in dry conditions. I can beat it without any setup at 110 difficulty, and even with a margin, while in the wet it’s almost two seconds faster than me. I think the wet difficulty is well balanced. Racing at 110 in the wet can be a good challenge for pro players. The point is that the dry difficulty needs to be increased by at least a second, or even a second and a half, to match the level of challenge in the wet. And let’s not even talk about Monaco, where at 110 the AI is almost two seconds slower than me in dry conditions without a setup. This is a very serious issue and discourages me from starting a career mode — it needs to be fixed immediately.F1 25 2 player career mode driver icons turned on with no option
Me and my friend finished the first season of our 2 player career mode, and a bunch of teams started signing driver icons. There was no setting to turn it off, and we can’t go back on it at all. Basically a waste of an entire season. This is broken and needs a fix asap. Can’t even start another one until I know this won’t happen again
R&D is broken
Something about R&D is fundamentally broken this year. AI teams are often maxing out the development on their cars after only 2/3 seasons. Additionally, regulation changes no longer provide a necessary effect, with only some of the parts needing adapting rather than the whole department. It just seems like AI teams have little-no barriers with regards to maxing out their car far too quickly, even with them having reduced cash/R&D points. This makes results in My Team over several seasons boringly predictable as a result, whereas in previous years the barriers faced by AI teams developing their cars in addition to big regulation changes could see big shake-ups as far as the pecking order is concerned when doing a longer save game.