It is impossible to finish 1st at this event on unbeatable, even when you post a faster lap time. The trucks block too much and they never give you a passing lane. The track is extremely narrow and openings at a premium. You you hit the final time around on the 3rd lap, you still need at least one & half more laps to win! It’s an extremely frustrating experience!
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I seriously cannot believe catch up/rubberband/slot car AI is still a thing in Forza games, I bought them for casual arcade fun and it’s driving me up the wall when I post top 1% or quicker times in leaderboards and barely win by tenths against unbeatable AI as you watch them rocket launch with 10 trillion horsepower and enough torque to spin the Earth to make up deficits or cut entire sectors.
Even though the Crew games may have set path AI, you can at least notice your individual improvement when you post quicker times as they will fall further and further behind. I enjoy everything but the racing in this racing game, forsenCD Horizon 4.
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I have played constantly on Unbeatable for a few months now. I don’t typically do Dirt Racing, Street is my scene, but I know Ambleside Scramble via weekly Playlist and it’s indeed very difficult race. I managed to win it on current Playlist championship vs. Unbeatable but only because Drivatar had Hyundai and I had truck.
If you are racing it to complete championship on weekly playlist, drop difficulty to Pro or whatever down to Highly Skilled if needed. I haven’t tried but Ambleside Scramble might be good for off-road bugs on lower classes. For Dirt it’s has too much elevation changes and turns to make it work with FWD Hot Hatches and too little room to maneuver on bigger car, which is about anything.
The Ai don’t skid much on this track. It might be a good idea to find out which is the best car for the track if anyone has any suggestions?
VW Baja Bug 1600 stock. Has insane lateral G’s and low speed uphill sections may work with its torque curve and gearing.
For actual rally car, Lancia Fulvia for RWD’s. Subaru Subaru Legacy RS stock for AWD’s.
AWD swapped Mini with Dirt tyres might be interesting what comes to tuned cars.
Would you say average payout is better on Unbeatable even if you don’t always win? Because if that’s the case I’ll just switch to Unbeatable instead of playing on Expert/Pro to ensure wins.
Difficult to say as I haven’t paid much attention to it. I would think finding right cars for every racing category you can drive stock. My gut feeling is, that payout increase on higher difficulties doesn’t as much to net income, as it costs upgrade cars if needed. I so I mean net income as (possibly) price of car + (possibly) price of upgrades - winnings.
Also Race Type matters and Perks. I did one race on the Goliath and one the Marathon today with same car and if I didn’t looked it wrong, Marathon paid about the same, if not even a bit better, despite being shorter race. Traffic helps a lot to keep your skill chain going (Near Miss Skills) and Skills grant credit bonus too.
So I would say Expert but practice driving them stock, find cars you can constantly win, then Pro and after that it’s perhaps more of a matter of taste rather than any meaningful gains in income. Also, via this way you get feeling for cars, which ironically makes tuning easier, so you can always have a war chest funds for events requiring tuning, say the Trial and Playground Games on Playlist and MP in general and then you don’t need so much trial and error to get your upgrades right, which helps a lot with economy.
There are couple of things to watch out.
- Game isn’t always very good at telling you why you didn’t get the result you aimed for. FH4 rubber band AI is very good IMO, but not perfect. For example you take some stock or well made custom route on Pro / Unbeatable with very few technical sections but lot’s of that’s relatively straight. Straights mean power comes more decisive and despite getting about perfect lap with some nice car like stock Acura Integra Type-R yet on second lap tiniest mistake and you are left in the dust. It’s that just then Drivatars starts fully using their vehicles advantages and whatever boost rubber band gives to them. What matters in this scenario is that sometimes it’s not easy to figure out why final position was 2nd or 3rd or something like that instead of win. The answer is, sometimes it is certain car on certain route on certain difficulty creates that situation. So it’s not a one thing like Drivatars being outright unfair on Road / Street races but combination of things and players are left to figure out what went wrong.
So it’s important to try different cars instead of giving up.
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Fatigue. Limited time budget for gaming. Having a life is a good thing IMO LOL. But as there are some confusing elements in game and it has quite wide feature list, I can understand need to rush things, make lots of credits by grinding to get whatever dream cars player wishes for, but just playing it for credits to reach the end of the rainbow may lead to situations where dream car actually isn’t that special after all and repeating that may just make the whole experience bit jarring.
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Below S2 it’s possible to win most races constantly in Street Scene and I suspect also Road Races on Unbeatable in RWD vs. Drivatar AWD scenario stock Unbeatable, but I don’t recommend higher S1+ stock RWD for Street Scene. Expert / Pro might be way more fun. Road Scene is much easier as there aren’t random elements and possibility to wall ride as last resort.
For Dirt Racing winning RWD vs whatever Drivatars have on Unbeatable is much tougher challenge. I would recommend Expert / Pro for that sort of experiments or some upgrades. I don’t have that good grasp for Cross Country but I think it may be even more difficult.
I know it may sound totally cliché, but having fun is IMO important. For me it used to be custom blueprints, Spotify and figuring out the cars in their stock form, it took a while for me to understand myself that common element for these things was exploration. Not like finding a barn find, but maybe a little LOL. For my experience, as car classes go upper S1+ is where I couldn’t really listen to stuff anymore while driving stock and keeping on mostly winning on Unbeatable (Street Scene) started to get draining.
So Expert/Pro/Unbeatable I would advice you to experiment and keep doing what you find fun, interesting and rewarding and over time you can up the difficulty.
Not perhaps the answer you were looking for but the best I can do. Happy racing 
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Use a Raptor of your own, then. The event was balanced so that the 1st track favors the Veloster, the 2nd one (which is this route) the Raptor and the 3rd one is 50/50.
Ambleside Scramble is one of the best routes in the game and the only one that’s pure dirt. However, because it’s cramped, it’s difficult to do any actual racing in it. Take a “rubbin’ is racin’” approach in this one, otherwise you’ll lose.
Video demonstration that it’s winnable (Retro Rally though).
I’ve done it on unbeatable but the AI on this track is broken, agreed. I was doing the Veloster vs Raptor returns championship and the AI was leaving me in dust no matter what I did.
The Veloster was absolutely unusable, after a few tries I managed to win with a Raptor. The tracks favored one kind of vehicle over the other but making it unwinnable with the Veloster was a d… move.
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Double post, delete me.
Every race is essentially all road blocks and 1 cheating AI F1 blasting off into the literal horizon, I’ve simply started rewind spamming for the quickest line around every corner and dive bombing plus wall riding when necessary to bully my way into first place. If you’re not 2nd or 3rd 25% into the race it’s impossible to catch up unless the cheater AI decides to slow down for you. I’ve saved screenshots where I’m over 4 seconds faster per lap yet win by only tenths or thousandths, absolutely revolting.
Jump in a tuned overpowered car for each category and you can sometimes win by over 10 seconds versus unbeatable when the AI follows the set path so strictly they brake even on straights, don’t even feel guilty when the developers consciously decided to implement cheating racers. Definitely not purchasing the next entries if this is how Horizon and Motorsport handle their gameplay.
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I have a couple screenshots showing me in first, then the cheating AI in second close to me, then from 3rd backwards everyone is far behind. It’s completely silly when you think of it.
It was even worse in FH2 when the AI attached to you like a magnet and would do illegal things to stay close. Two games later and not much has changed despite claims that there would be no more rubberbanding… Sometimes you even want to play on New Racer to test stuff and the leading AI with stick close to you the same way it does on Unbeatable.
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From Difficulty, Assists and Drivatars. on the support forums
Drivatars are mean’t to be a lot more sophisticated than the retarded morons we have right now. Interesting that when they deliberately knock be out the track at waypoints, its behaviour they picked up from their namesake player probably.
Whatever, in way too many races now, i’ve noticed a pattern where if a player is not in the lead by the 2nd corner, then the leading 2-3 Drivatars will develop rails, and basically remain a fixed distance in front of the leading player. The only way to deal with them in some of the tight city maps is to resort to bombing the corners, rewinding as necessary, bouncing off the Drivatar cars to reduce velocity and get a good line out the corner and make up places. Once in the lead, or at least actively fighting for first place, the race seems to become fair.
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That quote claims that drivatars are based on learned data from real players, but is it actually true? Perhaps it was true when that was written, but is it still? I ask because it seems to me all the AI behave in the same sort of ways, no matter whose name is nominally associated with it. And suspiciously, when you change drivatar difficulty and it tells you it is downloading new ones, it does this in an absolute flash, very rapidly, which suggests to me it isn’t actually downloading anything at all. Far quicker than it downloads any tune or paint. Perhaps the data really is tiny. Perhaps there genuinely is saved data for the driving characteristics of millions of real players stored on Forza’s servers. But I suspect there isn’t and the AI we get now is purely synthetic, and the real player names are just for show.
I mean, I have some players I am following to race their ghosts in trials, some of the best players in the world, and if you would believe the above, they are prone to braking really early for corners, braking in the middle of straights, all the usual stupid stuff we see drivatars do. No I don’t think so. And really the best players should only be associated with the high difficulty drivatars. Casual players should be the medium difficulty and complete novices should be the ‘new racer’ ones. But no matter what difficulty you select, you get the same names. Does that make sense… no of course it doesn’t.
Rubber banding in programming means many different things on the internet. Some people describe it as teleporting without the cars actually driving the full distance of the track. personally I would just call that teleporting. Other people say that rubber banding means that the cars don’t pull away too far into the distance. Being a programmer of video games I remember the real meaning of rubber banding…
…Rubber banding originally meant that cars stretched an invisible field around themselves like a magnet. Cars could catch up with each other using acceleration increasing by distance…
… Distance/Speed = Acceleration factor
So if your distance is 100, then divided by 50 = 2
If your distance is 10 then divided by 50 = 0.2
So 2 is much bigger than 0.2, and that acceleration is the increased tension in a rubber band, and it helps the cars to keep up with each other.
That is the true meaning of rubber banding which has been lost over the years.
^More than I hoped for! Thanks.
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I just gave this a try, and even with cars that have done great in past Trials, I was getting slaughtered by the AI. So I looked at the rivals leaderboard for B 700, and the Meyers Manx was the best car. So I just downloaded a random B 700 tune for it, tried again, and won first time.