Research improvements

Ever since I added research to car design to help balance leagues with big level discrepancies between managers, I have been working hard to refine the system. The initial implementation allowed managers to catch their rivals at any level as long as they had a 5-star Chief Designer and Technical Director. The first version achieved this by calculating the overall number of Design Points each team had and awarding a portion of the difference. The new refinements made this week add more depth and realism to research while also opening potential new avenues for further development in future.

The fundamentals are still the same - you will want to sign the best TD and CD possible at your given level. But the way the research is calculated and added to car has changed. The difference is now calculated in each individual area of design and automatically assigned to each area of your car. The research conducted analyses the exact strengths of your rivals and attempts to clone them to your car.

To help clarify these changes, several improvements have been made to the Technical Director's Report mail in-game and to the Research dialog itself. The language used in the TD Report no longer specifies the gains as "Design points" but rather with phrases like "our car has improved by X points", and furthermore (as of this blog post) it will now detail the exact gains on each attribute, for example: "Research gains: Cooling +1 Fuel economy +1 Handling +1".

The main point that needed clarifying during these improvements to the system was that the gains are now automatic from research, and do not come as design points. So, there is no need to be concerned if you see that you gained X points on your car but don't receive them as design points, as they were already applied to the car.