How do you play solo?

[basdav]

Good morning, everyone,

After almost two years of absence from the game, I got back to it yesterday on PS4. The fun is there and the desire to play too, but in the absence of a custom championship mode and given the heaviness / lack of flavor of the career mode, I struggle to find the best way to have a good time offline.

For solo PC2 fans, can you share here what you're doing? Any ideas? etc.

Thanks in advance,

[cluck]

My solo time in pCARS2 has always been confined to two areas:

Time Trial
Screenshots

I started the career once, just to start it. I don't think I even completed the first race

[BabyDriver]

If online doesn’t tempt me (not a huge GT3 fan!) I just do offline races one at a time.

There’s plenty to offer in repeatability over career mode, you can do the same race in different weather and time of day/year conditions, different car classes, and against ever increasing AI strength. You can spend weeks mastering every track. You can spend weeks mastering every car class. You can spend years trying tuning options out on all the cars!

As long as you can step away from a career path spoonfed to you, the sky is the limit in this game! Until you fully know all the tracks and cars and how to deal with weather and less than optimal conditions, a career path is simply someone else telling you what you must do, in what car and under what conditions. And PC2’s career path hasn’t always been a great success. Plus it never varies... take a race again and you always have the same opponents, date and conditions even if you change the AI strength or length of race.

So one race at a time sidesteps all this.

[EmilGlockner]

I usually play private testing sessions on my favourite tracks. Mostly on Nordschleife Combined, though.

[Vstorm07]

Somewhere I saw this online and it makes sense. Works pretty good. Since PC2 unfortunately changes the names of the random drivers each race it complicates everything.

I made a calendar of 25 races. Just pick whatever tracks you want. Set a date for each race. I made a weather calculator spreadsheet for variable weather or you can just Google the location and date you selected and use that if you like. The weather options in PC2 are awesome. Kind of sucks not to use them to some extent.

For drivers this is what I do. I use myself and 25 AI drivers (You can use less if you like but I wouldn't use more). I created a fictional driver for each letter of the alphabet and assigned them a country to represent. My name is Taylor... so I'm the "T"

I then took the 25 fictional drivers and break them into groups of 5 A thru E using on random number generator. I then randomized each group of five to obtain a qualifying order.

Then go to your first scheduled race and run a qualifying session. Always run a qualifying session it puts the fast drivers up front t and the slower one in back before you start racing. After you qualify get a piece of paper and slot yourself and the 25 fictional drivers in order then cross the names PC2 generated from the qualifying session in the correct order. The. Your ready to race.... I found you must have a qualifying session the same day you race if you exit the game in between

Copy the results for the next race I use the finishing position to assign groups A thru E and repeat the process. I use a scoring system based on F1.

I have my info on a numbers spreadsheet (iMac). I can send it to you if you want it. It has the weather generator. I tried to attach some photos but was unable.

[basdav]

I'm not sure I've really got it all figured out yet.

[BabyDriver]

I believe I posted with this basic idea recently to someone upset about no custom championships. But unsurprised the idea has been around a while, it’s pretty much the only workaround.

It at least has the premise that generally, the same drivers irl tend to qualify at the front, so it’s not too far off from reality.

But sooner or later, as long as you aren’t stuck with dialup in Timbuktu, racing the AI can only take you a tiny distance towards a real racing experience. Eventually you have to brave the online world. No AI in any game yet has cracked the code to attack and especially defend like real drivers do. Eventually you have to acknowledge that they are sitting ducks to a determined dive, or a surge up the middle at the start. Until the pack settles down to single file, they have about zero relationship to real drivers.

If I’m stuck doing single player, I tend to set myself at the back of the grid, and drive a whole lap refusing to take advantage of their inability to race well two wide until the pack has largely gone single wide. Sometimes even two laps, however long it takes for them to all get on the racing line. After that, sure, it isn’t hard to take advantage of their baked in lines and unwillingness to defend, but it at least it isn’t making an easy ten places by driving through their idiocy in the first sector of the first lap!

I also do a quick 3 or 4 lapper before the main race or just start the race and retire and skip to the end after 3 or 4 laps to look at overall AI pace comparison to mine. This saves me from wasting a long race finding out I utterly destroy the grid or get left behind badly, depending on AI strength. I can then adjust the AI up or down a bit, depending on track.

But, bottom line, only racing online against humans, learning actual race raft not how to take advantage of preprogrammed behaviors is going to give you a real racing experience. Solo is my last resort!

I am amazed how many videos I watch that blow by an easy ten places at the start, by drivers that should know better! It just makes me feel dirty, beating up on cripples..!

[Hugo Catarino]

The only possible way to simulate a custom championship, is to do it taking into consideration the car liveries. Problem is, this is only possible with categories that dont have many cars/liveries, so the possibilities of them appearing in a race are very high. Specially if those liveries are real world, and not fake ones.

Take the 2016 LMP1 as an example. You can replicate a WEC championship because there is only 4 cars/2 or 3 liveries each so we have around 8-12 different possible combos. These liveries replicate the real ones, you can even see the name of the drivers if you zoom in . With the maximum grid spots filled, all these 8-12 cars cars will always appear. So, you can do a LMP1 WEC 2016 with Neel Jani, Mark Webber, Mike Conway, Andre Lotterer, etc etc... The vintage group A/groupc C cars are a bit similiar to this: the liveries are the real world ones, so it's easy to attribute a driver to them. And some liveries, even if different, have the same driver associated (Derek Bell drove more than one livery Porsche 962). If more than one Derek Bell 962 is on the field, you can "replace" one Derek Bell by another 962 driver that is not present in the field but it is on your campionship list.

The problem is with the more populated classes, like GT3/GTE (even worse because of the fake liveries). Not only there is no guarantee that a certain car (lets say a Aston Martin for the sake of argument) will be present in the grid, but you don't know the livery aswell! In this cases, what you can do is to create a group by colour and attribute a driver to them (lets say all red Astons are driven by A, while the blue ones are driven by B, etc etc). Its far from perfect, and some drivers will skip races if you do,say, a 15 races series, which lead to you most likely winning the championship because of the regularity of being in all races, unless you play around with the points (like doubling points for certain races).

[BabyDriver]

Visual fidelity can’t be done. But that’s just eye candy. The core principle is you have consistent rivals, you know their name (if not their livery at least being consistent) and can decide whether to defend or attack them, and not risk the race and championship by attacking or defending others not involved.

It is a workaround. You have to ignore liveries. You have to learn different names each race as your rival. But you can set up multiple single races any way you want and simulate a proper championship, as long as willing to use the qualy results to rename them.

Push comes to shove, it’s about the only way to connect different races together. The way things are going, SMS may not be around long enough to revisit custom championships in PC4. Doesn’t seem like that’s anything close to the new direction. You don’t get consistency of liveries, you don’t get consistency of names. But at least you CAN set up a short list of driver initials that you know you should fight for position.

That’s going to have to do...

[Driver.RJM.2020]

Hello Everyone ! , especially for those of you who are doing Solo/Career mode. I just finish my 3rd career Season with Verizon Indy car series, contract sign up with Chip G racing(Chevrolet mfr). regarding on V-07 reply, which is a Great response thread. suggestion? if you go to settings, game play, onscreen guides & display, proximity indicator(on) this it will show all the drivers names above their vehicles in the race, no matter what race it is. It's a cool visual affect feature, it may cause some distractions while your racing, but when you save/record or watch replay... its Awesome! try it out. Stay Strong, Keep Health and Faith, Stay Safe Distance ;o)
ps. I just started my 4th career mode Tier 1 Global Endurance Trophy contract with mfr. Chevrolet, C7 Corvette #3