Just got the game a few weeks ago, up to level 75 I think. Winning lots of races on single player with some assists and also with the opponent AI set to average, but recently I moved the AI setting up one and am starting to struggle.
Specifically, I am terrible at starts. I get passed by several cars at the start of every race. I end up spinning the tires, but then when I try and be gentle the car just stands there and does nothing for way too long before moving.
You have to find the happy rpm level at which each particular car launches well. Just mashing the throttle generally causes you to spin the tires. If you have trouble with this, just focus on building good handling cars and catching up in the first couple corners. With maybe a few exceptions, you always want to add handling modifications before adding any power to a car. The goal is to be able to carry as much speed through corners as you can.
I’d also suggest trying the manual transmission and turning off ABS if you have it on. The manual gives you much more control and feel over the car. It’ll take a little practice to get the hang of, but once you do it’ll become instinctive almost. Don’t worry about using the manual clutch option, as that is much harder to grasp. Personally I run with the standard(auto clutch) manual and only TCS on and I can run top 100 leaderboard times with a good car.
DD: Average
ABS Off
Normal steering
Traction and Stability OFF
Automatic Shifting
Full Driving line
Cosmetic only damage
Rewind OFF
I was playing with highly skilled DD and did pretty good, but I just bought a nice 2012 Ferrari F12Berlinetta and I’m getting smoked. Switched it down to average and finished 2nd in the next race with the Ferrari.
That car has a lot of power and is RWD. In fact, it has so much power that it may not be a good car for all situations - in fact, it the real world, it can’t get around Mazda Raceway quicker than some cars with a third the power simply because of how it uses it. This also is not the real world, it’s Horizon.
If it’s all about the launch, I’d definitely start by practicing on an easier car. Find a good RPM to launch from and keep on the throttle. As you feel the wheels to give, ease up just a little bit. You don’t even need to be in a race to do this, just come to a complete stop on any road or field and give it a go.
If it’s about the actual races, doing the races or the rivals can help, but I might take a different approach from what the others have said - simply put - I would drive the map. You don’t need to be in a race to experience portions of the map. Drive on road, drive off road, set yourself a destination marker and get there going a new way as fast as you can. This will give you more experience in whichever car you are in, it will show you how the car behaves around the map, and hopefully while you are doing this you are learning things about the world in which you race as well as how the car behaves and what to do to control it.
Then, take it into rivals. Do the events that you are struggling with and try to learn the best line through the course. I would even suggest turning the suggested line off. This isn’t Motorsport, the line can be helpful on the road courses and enclosed circuits, but off road it doesn’t do much for you.
If you don’t want to set up your own cars and want some good ones to use - try the '05 WRX by Big W0rm 80 (those are zeroes, not the letter o) - it wasn’t designed to be off-road but it does really well as an all-around car.
Practice! I started playing in November and I was absolutely horrible. Took me very long to get off assists and easy opponents. I really turned the corner when I got addicted to running rivals.
Running rivals, through trial and error, can get you up to speed quickly. Don’t be afraid to use the Y button (backup) and learn how to negotiate tricky stretches. Do this enough and you will be able to run these hard turns and tough areas without wall bouncing and staying in control. Practice in D class then move up to C and then B etc. and get some cars that really feel comfortable and handle well. I still can’t handle S2’s. I use automatic without assists except ABS and after trying without it I don’t think I will ever not use that one. But I can beat the unbeatable drivatars all the time now, can easily get a top 1% in most rivals and hold my own online against the bumpers and crashers.
Learn to balance between when to drift and when to beat everyone to the finish line. Learn to try and hit the inside portion of the checkpoints. Accelerate out of corners. Look ahead on the mini map to determine what’s next and perhaps start pre-turning. …I’ve been playing racing games since Pole Position in the Arcade in the early 80s. GRID for the 360 taught me a ton of little things to make me a better racer. Am I the best? Heck no, but I can hold my own when it matters.
Drift? The OP is trying to win races with gold medals, not style points.
orzy4, when it comes to the start you should be able to hit the throttle pretty good; even with the optimum vehicle setup, you can expect a bit of tire spin off the line–it’s how quick you gain traction by modulating the throttle that matters. Likewise, you are always bound to be passed up at the start of the race by a couple of vehicles; but, with the entire track ahead of you, some refined driving through the turns and finesse in areas where the Drivatars struggle is what is going to get you the victory.
If you find that your issue in beating the opponents is that you simply do not know the track well enough, run the events in Rivals mode to get familiarized with the layout. This can really help you gain an understanding of tracks and can show you how to take advantage of the environment so as to increase your efficiency through different segments.
Either way, racing games like Forza are all about practice. Keep at it and you’ll be finding yourself increasing the Drivatar difficulty once again and becoming more competitive against actual gamers online.
Start with cars with less power or AWD, should make it easier to begin with.
Moving to more powerful 2WD cars, there are a couple of factors that make answering this question not so straight forward.
Understand that this is a balancing act, which is why being too far in either direction results in you not going anywhere.
You first of all need to get comfortable with the full travel of the trigger (assuming you use a controller) and be able to at least do light, med-light, medium, medium-strong and strong/full throttle trigger holds. It’s better if you can get more granular than that, but to start it might be enough.
You’ll then need to have a good understanding of the power/grip ratio of the car you’re in. The lower, the more throttle you can apply on start.
If you get it right there is minimal wheelspin on start and you can roll into full throttle and launch. You can often balance on the threshold of wheelspin / grip from the start and just hold the throttle in position until you hit a good speed for your first gear change.
If you get wheelspin on start you need to be quick to gauge how severe the wheelspin is. The more severe, the more you likely need to drop down throttle levels to bring the grip and forward movement back. Once you’ve got the grip back, then you need to roll towards full throttle again.
In general, while learning you want to get a little bit of wheelspin as an indicator that you’ve just passed the threshold of grip so you can be as close to 100% grip with as much throttle as possible.
A potential way of practising your throttle control is free roaming with a powerful RWD car and taking corners one gear higher than your instinct tells you to take them. The car will probably still be able to break traction on full throttle but being one gear higher means you can play with the power band at a slower pace than you normally would have to deal with.
Hope that helps. Shadow posted while I was typing and I definitely agree, often the Drivatars will launch better than I do but I’ll go after them during the race.
Thanks for all the advice. I’ll definitely be practicing the tips I got here.
How important is tuning and upgrading? Someone told me that it wasn’t necessary and just ate up your CR. So far I haven’t upgraded any cars or done any tuning.
For the record, I’m not trying to get good at the game…I’m just trying to get better. I know I’ll never be “good”, just trying to improve enough so I can handle all the cars and bump the difficulty back up and still win races. I don’t have a Live membership so I only play single player.
Against other people, tuning and upgrading are huge. In my experience against the CPU, they match whatever limits you have set on your car. Therefore if you are doing say, Modern Muscle and only have an A Class car out, the CPU won’t load your races up with S1 and S2 cars to intentionally make you lose. They WILL keep the cars closely tuned to what yours is. Driving then becomes key as you don’t have the power to just outrun everyone. Then there’s the rubberband effect…LOL we won’t talk about that right now.
BIGGEST TIP I FORGOT FROM YESTERDAY: DON’T USE THE WALLS TO BRAKE OR TURN. BE A GROWN UP!
-Steering: Simulation - Yeah, you gotta get used to it but it definitely helps IMO.
-Braking: ABS ON - It is much better than the assisted and it will get you more money and help you practice
-Stability Control: OFF - Its useless unless you are going 200MPH in a range rover up a mountain.
-Traction Control: For me, off - It’s very hard to get used to, I personally like it because of the rewards. I have had it off since Forza 3 and now I don’t even remember that its off. If you need help with launches, keep it on.
-Transmission: Auto/Manual - For me, launches are better in manual and all you need to know is the RPM to shift up/down, and remember that it’s on.
-The rest if up to you.
These are my settings, which I find work really well.
I am not a car genius and starting at 5000 - 5500RPM works pretty well in most cars.
I might also suggest spending time in Rivals. The presence of drivatars can result in some very poor driving habits (I can’t help but use them as braking cushions myself, particularly after they’ve been ramming me).
Don’t worry so much about setting a super quick time, just advance slowly, those leaderboards aren’t going anywhere (well except for Monthlys).
Use standard cars while you are learning in Rivals as you can often upgrade and tune out your own bad driving habits. Consider this - if you can set a good time in a slow standard car, think about the times you will eventually set in a fast, upgraded and tuned car
Using standard cars and racing the same track repeatedly in Rivals with no other cars on the track with you should give you more time to get a feel for how different car setups will behave in different conditions. Start at the bottom of the PI ladder for the class, think about where the car you were driving is deficient and go from there. It will point you towards certain upgrades or perhaps a different car altogether.
Use standard cars until you hit a figurative wall in getting faster times, then you’ll know what to do to conquer a track.
When you go back to racing drivatars you’ll find yourself amping up the difficulty as they typically won’t be able to out drive you if you’ve matched your car correctly to the course.
Ok, here’s a really dumb question. What is Rivals? Are you talking about after a race when you can challenge a rival ghost drivater on the same track you just raced? And if you win you take on a different rival? Or are you talking about something different?
After you finish a race, you do get the chance to do the race again in Rivals mode.
However, you can go straight to Rivals mode from the pause menu.
Tab over to the Rivals tab and you should be able to choose “Festival Routes” and then select any of the courses and choose which car class you want to try.
This is a great way to practice driving, particularly since there are no other cars on the road with you.
If you’re practicing, don’t feel pressured into beating your rival, you can go after the ghost any time later when you’re ready to go for it
I build all of my cars for online racing. That means I try to make them equally good at cross-country, gravel, and tarmac, but not really excel at anything. Sort of jack-of-all-trade cars. Because I race almost exclusively online, it also means I think launch is the most important component of my car build so I can pass 5-6 cars on the start and hopefully squeak through the first corner unscathed. To do this I normally convert my cars to AWD, adjust the gear ratios to get the fastest 0-60 and 0-100 times, and install rally or sport tires. It can get a little more complicated, but that’s basically it. I’ve started to really like rally tires because they seem to be significantly better at cross country without much of a hit to traction on tarmac. I don’t play single player, but maybe this approach would help. Maybe not. Definitely not the approach you’d want to take for moving up the Rivals leaderboard.
also little hint: once you are racing 5,000 and 10,000 rivals your money will mount up really quickly
also for super GT you want an 8C with racing tires, weight reduction and AWD
