So..

I've been slacking the last couple days enjoying watching the tour stages a little too much and not getting any of the content I wanted done sorted, but fear not I will be back on it over the next few days. I'm going to be doing a little bit of some random *tactics* that I use post. These may not be amazing but they work for me and it is a starting point for people to develop their own methods.

If anyone would like me to make a post on anything specific be it TT/TTT or anything else I can look into working something through, just feel free to request :)

PCM 2011 The Basics part 4

Ok in the last post I talked about the "right click on opponent" type feature for countering attacks and follow sprinting, this looks like:

Now in this icon you can see the counter attack and the follow sprint icons but we can also see one other icon, this magnifying glass is the observe rider icon. This feature allows us to observe an opposition rider in the stage to check out how he's feeling. This can prove to be a long time consuming affair however as their are 5 stages of observation.

Here you can see three separate stages of observation as said this figure does go all the way upto 5. I'm not sure about how the randomness works as if a rider will observes facts or not but below is a level 3 observation of vino.

Not sure why its so horrible to read but yeah this is a stage 3 observation. As you can see you can check his overall energy bar his current feelings in the "3 phases" I talked about in the last post. These observations will eventually indicate the exact feelings be it +5 or even -5 etc.

A stage 5 observation of Brajokvic:

The disadvantages of observing is that while doing so your rider is unable to perform attacks (at least this is what I think if I am wrong feel free to correct :D). Unfortunately the observing feature is a little underpowered in my opinion. It doesn't really provide you with information that is all that useful. Overall this is more of a "nice feature" than that of a practical one.

PCM 2011 The Basics part 3

OK so we should now be fairly familiar with each riders little information panel (in a normal stage at least) so what next, I guess next up I will do a quick coverage of the different icons that we can use on each rider:

• The top of this image we see the "effort slider" this will allow you to change the effort a rider is currently using ranging from 0-100.
• Top left icon - Attack: This will make the rider you have targeted expend his red energy bar rapidly in an attempt to attack away from the group he is in
• Next along is the Counter Attack: This will allow you to expend your red energy bar at a slower rate to counter another riders attack. Generally to do this you would select the rider you wish to counter with, right click on the attacking rider and select this icon (or at least that's how I would do it :D)
• The greyed out S is the sprint icon: It will only become active 3km from a sprint point on a flat stage or 1km from the finish on a mountain stage, it will use the riders red energy bar to give the rider an extra burst.
• The arrow with the S is the follow sprint icon: This is used using the same method as the counter attack icon (right click etc.) this allows you to setup your sprint train or latch on to another teams sprinter
• The shield icon that is greyed out is the protect icon: It works in a similar manner to the counter attack/follow sprint icon. It allows you to protect a rider this protection means that riders being protected will have reduced energy consumption. However the riders doing the protecting will have their energy consumptions increased.
• The large shield icon is a second method of giving protection, its fairly self explanatory so I wont be talking about it.
• The bottom left icon is the maintain position icon: This icon is used to hold a rider within the peloton or the group he has joined.
• The next icon is the individual effort icon: This icon allows for micromanagement of a rider, it will make the rider expend the exact amount of effort you have assigned for him in the effort bar. Generally I would use this icon to head the sprint train and allow myself to fine tune the effort outside of the 3km sprinting zone. There are other uses and I'm sure I will cover them in future posts.
• The 3 dot and arrow icon is the short relay icon: This will have your rider expend the amount of effort set in his meter to head to the front of his group and attempt to join the relay to pull the group along, you must be careful with the amount of effort you wish to expend as if you set this too high you will find no other riders take the relay from you and you will set at the front consuming energy with no recovery.
• The next icon is the infinite relay icon: This icon is used to head the group and attempt not to allow others ahead, if their are team mates in the relay they will not go passed this riders effort level even if they are set to relay at a higher level of effort they will respect the fact he is the lead relay and not try to overtake, however other teams will make their own decisions as to take over the rider as they have their own goals in a race.
• The final greyed out bottle icon is the feed icon: this is used to send a rider to the back of the group to pick up food for his team mates.
• The icon with 3 people returns you to the main icon display if you are in the protect rider mode display

The effort bar does not effect all actions you can do; Attack, Counter Attack, Sprint, Follow Sprint, Protect and Feed are not affected. Meaning the rider will use as much effort as he requires. The maintain position icon is also *sort of* not affected by the effort bar in the sense that the maximum effort the rider will use to maintain his position is set by the effort but the rider will not always require to use this effort amount.

Due to seeing a lot of people complaining about losing riders out the back of the peloton a quick hint for these people is to increase the effort of your rider to an amount say for example around 80% effort at the start of the race and they will require less micromanagement regarding maintaining position within the groups. This is not ideal however as your rider may exert energy you don't feel he should be exerting to try and hold in a group he is not really capable of maintaining position within.

PCM 2011 The Basics part 2

In the previous post I said I would be looking at the arrow "condition" indicator. As I have said the initial arrow is the first phase of said indications. This initial arrow can point in 3 directions:

As you can see in this shot the directions are up down and central, these basically equate to "feeling good", "feeling bad" and "feeling so so". These are just the initial indications of how a riders feeling at this point in the stage and is not in fact a perfect guide as to how a rider is actually going to feel during phase 2.

This screen was taken from the same race and as you can see at this point Zaballa is in fact now feeling slightly down on what he felt in phase 1 while Cesaro is now a +5 and feels quite good indeed. Rocchetti is also feeling up at +3, these numbers are not exact numbers but still just feelings of how the rider feels at this point. In phase 3 we have more definite feelings from the riders, when a rider enters phase 3 we get a coloured box behind the number which looks like this:

As I was trying to quickly do this in a race I put Cesaro on the attack and possibly knocked him down to a +3 this is why as I said the numbers the rider give is not a definite until it has a coloured background. At -5 this colour is bright red while at +5 it is bright green. The more a rider is used the quicker it will become evident how he is feeling that day.

Sometimes when you go on the attack you will see your riders name flash green like this:

This means the rider feels good about the attack and that he feels he could do something with this, however I do find sometimes riders will feel good even in a hopeless situation so take this with a pinch of salt :P.

PCM 2011 The Basics part 1

Personally I struggled to read the manual for the game so I may cover some things that are in fact in the manual but ah well...I'm presuming the manual was about as much help as a chocolate fire guard if you are looking here for hints and tips :)

Where to begin...I guess I will begin with the bits I personally consider most important in the game the actual 3D races (I tend not to sim races unless I honestly don't care..).

OK so here on the left is an image I have just ripped from a stage race I just set up for the purpose of this post. In the picture we see the basic information available to us regarding a riders current situation in a race.

• The long dark green bar is the riders overall energy for the race. This will slowly deplete throughout the race.
• The yellow bar is used up when the rider is pushing it at fairly high speeds, this bar will regenerate slowly when the rider takes his foot off the gas and settles to a speed he feels more comfortable with.
• The red bar is what I would call the riders "explosion" bar, this bar is used for anything that requires the rider to be explosive. This may be creating an attack, sprinting or following an attack. This bar rapidly decreases under these moments of high exertion and will like the yellow bar previously slowly regenerate when these moments of exertion have passed. If your riders red bar is depleted when someone around you attacks you will not be able to follow them and as such you should take care of your riders explosiveness. A simple tactic to reduce the use of your riders explosiveness is to wait for an attack to commence and chase this reduces the amount of red bar your rider will consume.
• The large number in the picture is the maximum amount of effort you are allowing a rider to use. Note the fact I say maximum, this does not mean that if you tell the rider to maintain his position he will permanently use 80% effort to do this. It means that the rider will exert up to a maximum of 80% effort to stay in the position. When the rider begins to struggle to hold the position at his maximum allowed effort you will see the number flash red. You must then decide if you wish for the rider to be allowed to increase his effort or not.
• The two bottles indicate the riders available food/drink and will decrease through out the race. Your riders do not start with enough to last a full race and as such you will need to send a rider to replenish these for your team. I *believe* that you cannot collect water after the last 20km of a race, So make sure to have done this at some point before then. If a rider runs out of feed the water flashes a blue colour this means he needs to urgently be supplied, if it gets to flashing red then the rider is suffering and will give lower levels of performance.
• The green battery like bar is the energy gel the rider is carrying. This gel can be used as a supplement to assist in a riders attack it provides a small boost for a small period and may only be used once throughout the race
• The heartrate is a fairly obvious measure of how difficult your rider is finding the current exertion on his body
• Finally, the arrow pictured in the picture is the first phase of a three stage indication of how a rider is feeling about his efforts in the race. As this is fairly complex I will discuss this more in my next post.

The first post...

Basically the plan of this "blog" is just a general area to hold my thoughts on various games be this...how to's or my experiences playing something. The first real post I will be making will be based around Pro Cycling Manager 2011.

I've played this game now for the past 4 years and with the new version I appear to be seeing more people coming along asking questions about the game. I'm not an expert at all and as such I will be learning as I go too. But I do have an "OK" understanding of the game and how to get things done.

I guess I should probably get started with my next post then :)