I just want to give you my oppinion: I think the goal of the balancing is not to make the classes EQUAL at all!!!! Its about to bring them as near as possible with the easiest way: the weight!

Think of the whole thing. There will always be advantages for one or onother car on specific tracks, but thats the way its ment to be. If all cars would have the exactly same speed what intention would you have to drive one of the classes cars?

Quote from geeman1 :

You missed the point of global handicapping.. It's purpose is to keep the cars balanced before those things can be fixed. Global handicaps are just quick fixes to keep cars balanced untill the real fixes are made.
Some things need fixing and no doubt they will be fixed eventually, but why shouldn't we have equal cars in the meantime?

Actually I do get the intention of global hansicaps, though honestly I have a hard time belieiving that extensive testing has already been done by the top regular LFS drivers for every track and car already in the limited time that patch W9 is out. If we had, all this could be nullified by the next significant physics upgrade, and it's all back to square one.

And? No, there was no extensive testing - it's not even supposed to be a perfect balance, but a quick thing to fix the neverending moaning of the community. A physics update will come out which will remove the global handicaps so all our testing is going to waste. Well, all the setups and world records go to waste too, so compared to that I don't think it's a big loss at all

Jamexing, I think you and some others are overrating our perception of the importance and detail of the balancing required at the moment. We are not looking for extremely detailed and thorough work on finding the ideal balance, which, as you say, would be a waste of time. And you are underestimating the length of time to the physically incompatible version, it's not just around the corner, work has not started on my side of it yet (though of course Eric has done quite a lot for it). I won't answer any questions about that, it includes track updates and car interiors.

The situation is the physically incompatible version is several weeks away (much too far away to give an estimate) so between now and then we just want roughly balanced classes. It seems to be very good in the TBO class now, FXO is just not storming ahead leaving all other cars miles behind in the dust. The GTR class balancing is, so far, a little less refined and if we happen to hear back from several good drivers that the balancing is not working and we have just made another car the best instead of the FZR, then we can change it. I can change balancing for one car with one line of text. I won't rush into it though and that was my point earlier in the thread, we are waiting to hear back from some people, after some time.

Talk about other means of balancing and other elements of physical modelling that need improving is quite irrelevant, as that can't be done until the physically incompatible patch.

Quote from nRcToretto :

There will always be advantages for one or onother car on specific tracks, but thats the way its ment to be. If all cars would have the exactly same speed what intention would you have to drive one of the classes cars?

I don't think anyone is confused about that.

Now that Scawen has made it more clear how the balancing is going to work, it makes a bit more sense. I suppose this means there will be the big, incompatible patch and then probably one more patch after that which reworks the car balance, assuming the physics changes make the cars unequal again. Sounds like a solid plan. Hopefully it won't have too much negative impact on leagues, but that really can't be helped, I guess.

personally i agree with the post above.. in real life, lets say.. ohh.. lemans or something. Not all the cars have the same specs, nor do they drive the same, or have the same speed. It mostly depends on the driver (as long as they are driving a car of the same class). In Formula 1, in the past, often the Ferraris have dominated, but there are places where it has issues. Maybe even farther in the future they could make certain brands of tires have issues... but... that belongs in the improvements section, and is just minor.

All im saying is that there will be that one car that is just awesome. The people who like the other cars will just have to use them when they know they can win... like... said before about RB4 having major tire wear... well, during a long race that is sure to hurt them. Its all about strategy..

I´ve tested all the GTRs on Ky GP Long Rev and going straight to the point to give my opinion:

XRR with 25kg added and %2 of engine power restriction. The power-weight is the same as now (50kg added) but i think it´s better balanced with FXR.
FZR should have 50kg, and %1 of engine power restriction. The point is that the FZR has great aerodynamics, so in the same track where the XRR has 11 of rear wing (and the FXR has only 3!), the FZR uses 17 and is still faster on the straights. A reduction of power will force it to lower the wings to keep the speed on straights and reducing the downforce/grip on turns... just an opinion... hope is useful to you...

Laptimes:
FXR, 2.13.5, R2-R2 racing set(not hotlap), 15% fuel (5 laps stint)
XRR, 2.13.3, R2-R2 racing set(not hotlap), 15% fuel (5 laps stint)
FZR, 2.13.7, R2-R2 racing set(not hotlap), 20% fuel (5 laps stint)

While I'm not complaining at all: Isn't car balancing something the beta team should be doing? I always assume they're among the fastest and most experienced drivers we've got, so they should be best-suited to determining how well-balanced things are.

Good points from Bob about the importance of sorting the turbos out though.

beta team??

this shit is ALPHA man, that much was clear when you signed up

But there's usually a small group of people who have access to new features before major patches get released - these people are beta testing the alpha patches (of course they don't test the test patches, just the ones with incompatible version features).

Quote from Burnzoire :

beta team??

this shit is ALPHA man, that much was clear when you signed up

They are called beta testers, whatever the test.

I think adding weight, changine tyre size is the worst u can do, that changes the way the car handles, personally I think just power increase would be better, as the cars "personality" will be better kept then making it handle worse

Probably the change of tyres is only meant to reduce the grip, not the balance of the car. And I think that doesn't "worsen" the handling, it's only making it slower, increasing the braking way and slowing it in turns.

i meantioed this in the w10 thread but ill remention it here,

how about making the other cars slightly faster than original instead of making the fxo slower.

for instance,

fxo leave alone, xrt add 10hp and the rb4 take some weight off it.

just a suggestion i dont know if it would really work.

Quote from seinfeld :

I think adding weight, changine tyre size is the worst u can do, that changes the way the car handles, personally I think just power increase would be better, as the cars "personality" will be better kept then making it handle worse

Well, ballast and intake restrictions ARE the cheapest and easiest ways to get cars balanced fast. Judging by what Scawen said, the current global handicaps are just arbitrarily set based on some logic that only he knows. Things should change quite a bit when physics issues get addressed (eventually).

I think the reason for narrowing the tires on the fxo is that they are too wide compared to what would actually be realistic to fit in real life. There was a thread once discussing the tiresizes (cant find it with search) but they concluded that the fxo was running 245's front and back while the xrt was running 205 and 215 I think it was.

and like LRB_Aly says, narrower tires will increase brakedistance and corner speed, not the overall balance of the car.

Just a note from playing around with balancing for a slower class in my own server.

Maybe add a class list in the info tab, so the cars be be limited for different classes and classified accordingly.

For instance a class ive been toying with is GT300

each of the GTR's has been limited with the current ballast + an intake restrictor. The racing has become very very very competitive.

the total restrictions are:
FXR 36% intake restrictor, no ballast
XRR 36% intake restrictor, 50KG ballast (master server assigned minimum)
FZR 29% intake restrictor, 100KG ballast (master server assigned minimum)

racing is close and frenzied, cars gaining and losing in various sections, but no car with an obvious advantage over the others in short races.

Even if you managed to get the cars behaving closely, with those sorts of severe restrictions you're going to be looking at much slower GTRs. Any idea how much the lap times have fallen off? It would have to be a lot, I'd imagine.

the laptimes HAVE dropped a lot in testing, but the racing is more competitive.

It's a bit of a trade off really i suppose. When the next patch goes official i want to run a league with the 2 classes, the GTR's and thier limited counterparts (much like the JGTC has GT500 and GT300). With the ballast system we played with the racing got even more intense, with the success ballast handicapping the faster drivers.

In the end you end up with just another racing class, slower, but very very competitive.

Quote from KeiichiRX7 :

In the end you end up with just another racing class, slower, but very very competitive.

Understandable. However, I think you're going to have a hard time convincing most of the GTR lovers to trade in their cars for one with 40% less power.

You seem to have slowed all three cars substantially. It would seem like you should be able to remove ~30% of the intake restriction from all three cars and have them still run very even (29% is the least restricted of the three), without slowing them too significantly.

Errr, I think he's trying to make a separate GTR class for his league(?). I don't think the values he posted were seriously meant for balancing the GTR class we currently have.

AndroidXP's hit the nail on the head. In reality there re in fact several different classes of GT cars. with the restrictions i've introduced, these 3 cars have been placed in a lower class, and could potentially be run alongside thier unrestricted counterparts in a dual class GT series.

A quick little list of sellectable classes in the setup menu would be quite nice for quickly changing a car between spec sets, and classifying them correctly. For instance to apply the correct restrictors and ballast for the GT300 class ive devised you woudl simply swith the class from GTR to GT300 in the same way you take the top off in a UF1

when balancing out the classes we can only balance them out for a certain amount of laps. either short pickup races without pitstop or long distance races. if we level them out for short pickup races, the fzr will have a huge disadvantage on long distance racing because of the fact it uses 1/3 more fuel. so it always runs with more fuel compared to fxr and xrr (=> higher weight) AND also has to pit in more often.

i am not sure how the balancing between xrr and fzr is at the moment, but as far as i can see by now, the FZR is the big loser. i am also interested in this things because i am running a league (btw. the dates are out now) with xrr only but i might use fxr/fzr as well in it...

ok i made some tests today to send some input for balancing.

i was testing full throttle abilities of the GTRs as i only have good oval setups and not enough good setups for different cirucuit tracks. so this testing is about oval. but also some information can be seen with circuit racing i think.

i was testing with my favorite setups and the AI (so i did not have to do it all by myself) which were before the patch like FZR about 1/10 to 2/10 faster then XRR and about 1 sec. faster then FXR.

first i did about 250 laps just to get the AI used to the setups. then i made some tests with 30% fuel.

The outcome was like this:
XRR: 39s11 0.9%/lap fuel
FZR: 39s13 1.2%/lap fuel
FXR: 38s80 0.9%/lap fuel

the FXR laptime is what i was used to have with this setup (maybe a bit faster but thats the AI) XRR and FZR are much slower. i had about 39.75 to 39.85 before the balancing, the ai was a bit slower. but and this is new, both cars are almost the same. the xrr is even a bit faster.

the fzr needs about 30% more fuel. so in a longer race this really can matter. in short pickup races i think (at least on the oval) XRR and FZR are balanced. xrr has a turbo, fzr has better traction so ...
the only thing that lacks is the FXR imo. give this car more HP or make it lighter and then it equals on top speed. however it is likely that the FXR is faster on some circuit tracks AND it is MUCH easier to handle due to 4wd.

this were my results.

i dont understand how the AI can help in balancing the cars. the AI is the most undeveloped part of lfs and its performance is very weak.

even if the AI is faster in one car, its still far away from the limit. the only thing such tests prove is that the particular AI that is used (it is known that each AI has a different performance on each track/car combo) is faster with one car and slower with the other one.

imho, the AI cannot be a benchmark for anything.

its like testing the performance of sportcars with jeremy clarkson on the wheel. thank god we have the stig.