Happy New Year Update

In this update, we've added full customization to design research and addressed the remaining outlier scenarios in balancing. This update also acts as an initial step towards adding the friendly/casual race system, due later in 2017.

New: Custom Research

Research was added shortly after launch to improve the racing between teams of all levels within a league. It has been a resounding success and achieved its aim, but it didn’t offer customization or strategy, until now.

Now you can select which areas you want to research, with the impacts increasing or decreasing based on the number of simultaneous research projects. For example, if you only research one area you will get a huge gain in that area, but if you spread research across all areas then the gains will be divided among them. This allows for total customization of design progress and returns full control over how the car is designed to you.

New: Ballast system

After many engaging discussions on the forum about balancing promotion and relegation scenarios, we settled on a straightforward weight ballast system. This is something which is used in every real motorsport category from touring cars to Formula 1. In the real world, the essence of this system is that when a team exceeds the regulatory limits of performance (e.g. a car is too light, too fast or has some exploitative technology) then an appropriate amount of weight ballast is applied, bringing the car within the boundaries of performance defined in the regulations.

The way we’ve applied this in iGP Manager is that when a team exceeds the level cap for any given tier in the game (8 in Rookie, and now 14 in Pro after this update) they will be given a weight ballast proportional to how much they exceed the level cap. For example, if a level 20 Elite team relegates to Rookie: they will keep their level 20 team and all drivers and staff, but receive 12 levels worth of weight ballast, to bring their performance roughly in line with a level 8 team in Rookie.

A major advantage of this system is that it allows everybody to keep their team of drivers and staff at whatever level they are at. There needn’t be any artificial level restrictions, and it can be displayed clearly as one value, even on race results. It will be clear who had ballast, and how much they were carrying even looking at historical race data.

Manufacturing HQ changes

With this update, the number of parts required to repair a car now increases with each additional Design HQ level. More sophisticated and cleverly designed cars tend to be built up of a greater number of connected parts, so this is a phenomenon that happens in the real world too.

The Manufacturing HQ also has a new “storage capacity” attribute. It won’t be possible to accumulate more parts than this with manufacturing. You can see your output and storage limits by opening the Manufacturing dialog on the Headquarters page.

In case you are wondering what will happen to the excess parts you have already... Everyone will be allowed to keep their existing parts stock, but if it exceeds the storage capacity of the Manufacturing HQ then no new parts will be produced until it is under the limit. That is how the new system works.

In summary, Manufacturing HQ output will be more important now. Each level upgrade will improve both the rate of parts production and increase storage space for parts.

We hope you all enjoy this update, a lot of work has gone in to it. Happy New Year! :)