FH5, Series 54, Week 4, The tune of the week

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Turn on, tune in, drop out.

PGG has been posting share codes for tunes for new cars via in-game messages. Not quite sure why they’ve been doing this since while it’s possible to reconstruct how a car was upgraded, it’s not possible to see the precise tuning settings (i.e., as an aid for players wondering about such settings). At least I don’t think it is.

This state of affairs has had the Chief Try-Hard (CTH) on the forums fulminating about how there are better tuners, whose work should be promoted etc.

By and large I’ve never bothered with other people’s tunes. I do my own, which I’d describe as cosy – a pleasant driving experience so long as you aren’t being a Horizon Open try-hard yourself. However, I thought I’d try the tune being promoted for the AMC Rebel, expecting that I was probably going to say to myself, “I wish I could build and tune like that.” Sometimes I’m wrong.

I installed the tune on the new Rebel and took it for a spin round the Horizon Mexico Circuit. I have to confess I have no idea what the car’s purpose is. The tune had dirt tyres and drift springs, it had awful brakes and a lot of horsepower (engine swap). Perhaps it was meant to be for drifting. I survived for five laps, braking about half the circuit away to take the next corner. As I said, I don’t know what the car’s purpose was. Perhaps the tune was better on a controller.

I rebuilt my original Rebel to A 789 (I forgot to add some extra bits) and managed to do Horizon Mexico about a second slower than the first race. I added the missing components to get the car to the top of A class and did five laps of Horizon Mexico four seconds faster than the version of the Rebel with the downloaded tune on it. Handling upgrades matter.

I also rebuilt the new Rebel for dirt racing, keeping the dirt tyres to begin with before switching to off-road race tyres. Understeery and – I blame the supercharger – prone to losing power round corners. I took it out in a selection of dirt races, but still don’t understand why anyone would use muscle cars for dirt racing. Ditto super saloons. I had a more satisfying experience doing road races in my original Rebel.

The seasonals

Again, because there were no Eventlab events, I ended up doing all of the seasonals this week. There’s not much to say about them apart from the dirt one when it got to the Baja California Scramble. I was in my Subaru WRX STi, not anticipating any problems when one of the drivatars zoomed off into the distance in a Jaguar XE-S and was uncatchable. I restarted the race and by pushing it, managed to take 1st place even though the same drivatar did exactly the same thing.

I’m not the only one to have encountered this as I also saw a post on Facebook about the same issue.

I’m partly mentioning this because the irritating-drivatars-thread has been active again, with the CTH averring that it’s not the drivatars that are the problem, but players for not using exploiter tunes. This is bloody nonsense because I’ve been playing FH4 and 5 long enough (c. 8,000 hours; blimey!) to know that I shouldn’t have any issues with the drivatars in the seasonals (but know it does happen); and yet this week, here’s a drivatar in a car that shouldn’t even be in a dirt race, gaining a massive lead that it shouldn’t be able to do.

This has nothing to do with the competence of players and everything to do with the quirky nature of the game. As I’ve said previously, it’s why I never change the level of difficulty of the drivatars.

Admittedly, most of the time in circuit races, I leave the drivatars well behind. In sprint races, the margin can often be a lot less no matter how well I drive.

I suppose the question to which we have no answer yet just is what the drivatars will be like in FH6. In FH4 I set them to Expert, which seems to be roughly equivalent to High Skilled in FH5. Is Expert in FH5 going to be the new Highly Skilled in FH6?

I think the drivatars on Fortune Island may have been drivatars v. 1.5, presaging what they became in FH5, but in neither of the FH5 expansions do the drivatars seem to be noticeably different from the main game. In an earlier post I surmised that the twisty roads in Sierra Nueva were a test to see whether the drivatars could cope with similar roads in the setting for FH6. I predict that at least some of the Japan map is likely to be a repeat screening of the second expansion.

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