Nevada, USAWe've got a discord for the community now if you want to join it. Its on the homepage. I also sent you a friend request on discord as well but wouldn't be surprised if you ignore it. We've got a few guys running the Baja 1000 trying to get it under 2 hours. Im considering doing this New Game run as well once we get the sub 2 hour run accomplished.
The king takes his place on the throne...I kneel
Hey all,
I've just competed another WR for the Baja 1000 run, so I figured I'd upload a few thoughts here to give an update to anybody poking their head in from time to time. Most gonna talk about optimal strategies and room for improvement (there are very few runners for this game so LOTS of room for improvement to say the least). If you haven't joined the discord yet, please consider it. I'm mostly in there rambling but theres some fun to be had, I think.
Class 1 - I have a new theory that the Class 1 vehicles might be a better option than the Trophy Truck vehicles for a lot of the tracks. While the Trucks do have the engine power advantage, they are also one of the most unstable, hard to control classes in the game, making any sort of consistency hard to pull off. You'll be cruising just fine on straightaways, easily outpacing anything else, but the minute you come to a bumpy turn the fun times are over and lots of momentum is lost. This is where Class 1 excels. Class 1 vehicles are a bit slower than the trucks but they easily make up for it with the ability to stay on all four wheels during those moments the Trophy truck feels useless. I call all of this the Class 1 theory, because I'm still not entirely sure that the best Class 1 player could beat the best Trophy player, but do notice that the WR I just set was with Class 1 and beat out every record prior that was set by a Trophy Truck. The Desert Doc is the Class 1 car I specifically put the most praise towards. The wheels are far apart and the suspension seems to do a good job at keeping the bottom of the car from sending the player off of random bumps.
Cutting - I think the biggest optimization that could be made right now is learning what turns you can cut and which turns you cant. There are so many time saving instances where you can basically skip full sections of the track by jumping in and out of bounds. The problem is that the game has some pretty random, inconsistent decision making behind the logic for determining cuts, so the playerbase would be best off by going through each turn one by one and determining if it can be skipped or will have to be fully passed through. If you watch my Baja 1000 run, you'll see tons of instances of me skipping a bunch of the track and tons of instances where the game teleports me backwards for skipping the tiniest little section imaginable.
Campaign Upgrades - Another thing that literally anybody trying to get the WR for the Baja 1000 could do is play through the campaign in order to get upgrades for you car. If you do so, you can transfer the car over to the time trials mode and have a significant advantage over the vanilla cast. I'm too lazy and unmotivated to play through that slog of a campaign right now, but if somebody wants to get a free speed boost, this is an option. Apparently there is a cheatcode that does this for you but I haven't been able to make it work for my setup soooooo IDK.
Manual Gearbox and Clutch Boosting - The most essential tech for this game that determines if you'll be going fast or not is whether or not you understand how to clutch boost while using the manual gearbox. It would take many paragraphs to properly describe how it all works, but to keep it simple, you can trick the game into thinking your car is at full power in third gear while going around turns you'd normally have to approach and exit in second gear. Essentially what you want to be doing is coming at a turn in fourth, dropping into third gear just as your starting to turn, tapping the clutch button once every second until you've exited the turn, then going back to fourth. The setup changes if you are going up hill or going into another turn, where you will want to stay in third instead of going to fourth. By tapping the clutch button you trick the game into forcing your RPMs upwards instead of rapidly dropping like they normally would if you were to go into a turn in third gear. What happens in game is that you'll be in a turn at 30 mph then come out of it at 80 mph without having to do much besides hold the gas down.
Thats all I have for now. I'll add more comments if anything comes to mind.
I just joined but nobody plays this game so I doubt much will be going on lol
Look in game settings I believe its under controls
Good luck my friend.
LMAO good shit man, but nobody else is really running this right now. If you do a time trial for the Baja 1000 and beat my time I will gladly contest with you but otherwise I'm not racing lololol.
Bro this is sick af congrats on being the first. Glad you figured out clutchkicking, it is essential for keeping speed around turns lol.
Nice run, added a new category for this. If you do a lot of them we can get more specific and add a different format where its more descriptive of which league you ran.
I say we just leave the amount at the default 5 laps for circuit.
I'm also very doubtful we'll have anybody doing free roam speedruns since finding everything is a pain in the ass the first time through and it will consume too much time.
I leave it all up to you for categorizing. I only care about the Score 1000 race since its the most challenging race in the game, and maybe the other score type races that are super long. I probably won't run anything else.
I've just become the moderator of this community, and as far as I can tell there is a very small amount of people interested in running this game. That said, I am more than open to ideas if anybody wants to suggest things or get custom categories added. The previous moderator added the main score runs but if you want to do a specific track and get the best lap time or the best overall time just let me know and I will add it. I am going to start running the other tracks besides the Score 1000 and compete with TFisher.
Just some general thoughts from me from the start:
The arcade physics are much easier to handle in comparison to the realistic setting and I believe it would be really fun to divide the runs into two separate categories between arcade/realistic for those who want to try both. If the game grows in popularity this will definitely happen but for now, when we only have two runners, it doesn't seem necessary.
While the repair system is a fun idea and makes racing more interesting, it is hard for me to want to add it as a category due to the rather finicky helicopter that often fails to consistently arrive when it is requested to. Anybody who has done the Score 1000 with repair enabled can understand the frustration that comes from pulling up to the helicopter only to have it fly away before doing anything OR when you request it to land and the AI just bugs out and keeps flying away from you. If somebody we're to run this, there would be too much RNG in the helicopter AI to make it worthwhile.
If you can remember to do it, try to include the menu settings in your recording before the run starts, to make sure I can verify your physics settings if that becomes something worth considering down the line.
Your final time should be from the in game timer which displays after you've completed the track/track setlist to the right of your vehicle and name display.
My final thought is about the manual gearbox, which may or may not be faster than the automatic. This is something I've been experimenting with for a while and can't seem to get some positivity behind my results. That said, I am starting to believe that the manual gearbox has much faster acceleration than the automatic if you understand the RPM amounts that are needed between each shift. Somebody else should look into it and give their thoughts some day.
I like this suggestion outside of it removing the previous record holders. If you're currently the first place holder for the runs then I would say who cares but otherwise you'd have to ask the other holders what they think.
As long as you did all the tasks it really shouldn't matter since tasks+ only gives an advantage in the regard that the player can choose which tasks they can accomplish first, and gives them access to nearby tasks quicker since you can just jump right into whatever. Doodletones does make a good point though, your run would be very poorly optimized in comparison to an individual who took the time to figure out what is the fastest way to get it done. I'd say just get a tracker where you can simply click when you're done with something, it can easily be done on a smartphone with the timer apps installed on default, at least on android.
If you do manage to beat the best record for the task+ runs with a normal run I would be impressed, but I am doubtful it would stay up when somebody took advantage of the category rules, making the submission somewhat obsolete.
Honestly the rules can be pretty loosey goosey. There's only like 4 of us here anyways, and I think for the most part we all know what runs we're most interested in haha. I'm only gonna focus on career any% and career %100 so for all I care you guys can throw any ideas forward for those freestyle runs. I really just want more people to join in if it's possible and the more clarity we can provide for everything the easier that will be. I used to make shitty meme videos for the Need For Speed Underground 2 subreddit and that got a lot of new people on board and I'd be more than willing to do the same for this game if it seems like something that will actually garner attention.
Also I meant the career %100 run in my second reply just now that includes all races and freestyle events my bad. Thats gonna be like a 10 hour ordeal lmfao.
We could just call it freestyle %100 with the rules being that you have to finish every event in every freestyle map, but the player can start in any order if they'd like. There could also be freestyle %100+ with every event unlocked from the start which would enable runners to plan a little more on which events they want to tackle first.
I think the only new run we really need right now is all freestyle maps completion which could easily be accomplished through the campaign menu. Whether or not that would include the point purchase ability I mentioned earlier, I don't know. Seeing that @SLPN is doing the most runs in that mode I'd say we leave that up to him. I only demand its availability for the %100 run when I inevitably do it.
Shrimp, you're thinking of Nationals (outdoors) and Supercross (indoors). The issue here is that not all of the tracks in game are included in the campaign, because I know of at least one nationals track that I didn't play in my most recent run through. So we'd have to decide if we're doing all national and Supercross tracks featured in the career mode (which would be easier to setup and verify per run) or all national and Supercross tracks in the entire game (which would require either a save file with everything unlocked or the input of the unlock everything cheat code beforehand).
edit: oh my god Im retarded didn't even read the rest of your post before replying lmao. But like I said, a simple entry of the unlockall cheat would solve the issue.
The rules don't say that they aren't allowed and its what I did on my run of career any%.
