QFC14 - Attitude in the Alps

I think ya’ll just need to come to the terms that tech pool is now a thing in game. It be foolish to not use it. Is it a tad janky? Yes. But that’s never stopped challenges before. The community got by just fine with how poorly turbos used to be before 4.1 after all. Could it be used to find “meta” builds? Sure, but how are we to ever find out what’s truly min-maxy and what’s alright if we don’t try building stuff with it and finding suitable limits? I think this will do as a good test bed for seeing how tech pool can be integrated into challenges and to see what can be possible in game.

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@NormanVauxhall
I have a good basic car, the 1974 Primus RT320, but it could need assistance by Znopresk. Are you interessed?

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I can’t agree and I might have to make a video explaining the issue.

There’s not a lot of bodies that are useable for this challenge.

I think there are plenty. I can think of at least 8 body families that could be used and another 5 or so that can be unlocked with a few body tech points.

How about capping tech pool points per category somehow? E.g., you can have max 10 in one category, max 9 in two, the rest as you see fit.

As techpool roughly represents how many years the company is ahead of a guy in a shed, this would basically create a company profile how they specialized while limiting the most extreme minmaxing.

Since people are concerned about the use of techpool, but I don’t want to force people into even TP spreads, my prospective change is to greatly reduce the total amount of techpoints available from 48 to 16. Since ET is unimportant and pricing is relative to the competition, the increase in cost and ET this will induce compared to the original prompt is unimportant since it would affect all entrants.

I agree with this proposal, with one modification: you should impose a maximum of 5 tech pool points in any category, to avoid abuse.

I mean, it’d change my build a fair bit. Maybe 16 on top of a “floor” of 2-3 TP per category?

Why? What is it about capping the maximum allowable tech in any given category that people want?

Cost is a major factor and using tech to dive far into the future still comes at a cost of both $ and reliability. If someone wants to pump up one factor in particular they can do so, but based on my testing it’s not going to be advantageous unless I missed something. I didn’t want to say that part out loud at this stage because now I feel I’m discouraging people from building this way if they wanted to but it seems that I need to address it.

Worse case scenario, I did miss something, but it’s QFC, it’ll be over in a week, and we can walk away having leaned things about techpool that we didn’t know before.

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All salient points, I like the idea of 16 points to spread around and I like the ability to learn from this so we can get better. I would have liked to use techpool in QFC13 but my trust is low (now.)

OK, so one thing I want to ask: Techpool is like this measurement of research “points” toward a particular category. So it feels like each one is a year’s progress in that category, and I’m just saying that based on how things change when used, like body and new item unlocks. That’s why I think a much smaller pool is smarter, because what company can afford to be so many years ahead of another? A change of two or three years seems like the best any company could do, right?

I mean, not really. Lincoln and Toyota had antilock brakes around 15 years before they unlock in Automation.

My 2 cents: I think having a competition that allows (or even encourages) minmax every once in a while is a good idea. It’s a great way to push the system, to see how it works and where the exploits are; plus, it’s a bit different, and can be fun.

So I say the unlimited-use 48 (or even just the 16) points is the way to go, especially since the host likes it. Let’s just run wild for a week; IMO it could be a lot of fun to see what happens.

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I’ll be happy to give it a try. Send the car via PM.

Oh so that’s why it enabled me to use like 5 more years of body… Let’s see what we can do with techpool. :wink:

You know what? I’d rather see @donutsnail follow the original vision for the competition. Most of the suggestions for change have come out of a pretty overblown fear of techpool, and have not taken into account the fact that QFC is ideal for novel challenge ideas due to its short-run format. Besides, the lack of many hard limits makes it harder to come up with a single solution for the techpool problem - heck, I think it would be fun to discover several cars minmaxxed in the entirely wrong direction.

So for what it’s worth, the “48 techpool, no hard price/ET ceilings” idea now has my full support. It’ll be fun.

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I have grabbed into the toilet in the previous contest, however, others did it right so it IS possible to use it.
I personally prefer using the default game settings, but I’d never tell the host what to do. It’s a load of work and whoever gives his time to run it to our joy, should be in the position to decide how it’s done.

Given the default settings currently use 75 points of techpool, the simplest way of doing this challenge is just to remove techpool from six sections, but of course make your car for this challenge as you see fit

And 48 TP isn’t even a lot considering that it equals +3 in everything (with default being +5) and that we are after all talking about supercars that are supposed to be technologically advanced, so yeah, I agree with every word you say. Especially that QFC is the perfect challenge to try out ideas about TP in. If QFC fails completely, well, who cares, the next one is soon on the way anyhow.

The more y’all gonna discuss about techpool, the more this gets delayed and sooner or later it will be like a CSR round… Let’s leave it to the host to decide and let’s get on with it.