Inconsistent AI Difficult

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
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This week I am having really big problems with 2 of the weekly championships.

I have been doing ALL my racing against “EXPERT” AI cars. Do all my tuning against “EXPERT” AI cars and constantly win all my races. It’s got to the point where it keeps asking me to go up to “PRO”, but I say no.

This week, even though I set up and race against expert, my cars are really really struggling to even keep up with the weekly “Highly Skilled” AI with expert winning cars. For gods sake, highly skilled is easier than expert so if i am totally wooping Expert, why the hell am i now struggling to beat only “highly skilled”???

Game Developers, sort out your game and make the difficulty like advertised.

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For real bro.

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Yes for real… bro. It doesn’t happen every week but at least in one championship, once a month.

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Also did anyone notice that on the race challenge in hot wheels we started the races last even though I was on Highly Skilled?

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Yes, quite standard practice in the HW expansion. There are a few occasions when you don’t start right at the back, but I assume that it’s to counteract the OP behaviour of the drivatars in some races.

I would’ve (and should’ve) raised the level of difficulty of the drivatars long ago if I thought the experience would be consistent.

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The AI is always very fast in Cross country, faster than in most road and dirt championships.
Add the very limited grip you as a player have in cross country, vs the AI who has superglued tyres, you can imagine that cross country championships are among the hardest to win sadly.

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Actually… it was the off road I was having trouble with this week.

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The extensive AI cheating is more common in offroad. The rally monsters and different buggies and offroads are some of the classes where the AI really seem to disregard anything concerning any grip, top speed and acceleration limits a player would have at the same PI.

Apparently that goes for rare classics as well. I tried to win the Colossus in a Miura. That was a really stupid idea. The winning AI set a time that would have landed it on #267 on the B class rivals board. Me? I obviously can’t drive even if my life depended on it, as I could barely manage fifth place. I did an abysmal 18.13.336 (would be #358). Obviously an embarrassingly bad time. Now I’ll put on my dunce cone hat and go sit in the corner of shame for the stupid kids, and think long and hard before doing something so completely daft as trying to beat the AI again.

The AI plays by a completely different ruleset than you, and the robots can disregard any limitations that a car (or a tuning upgrade) has. Each robot gets a set performance value, which is not reflected by what they seem to be driving. They can have extreme acceleration and top speed, while still having more cornering grip than you, but only in some corners. It’s impossible to make a tune that even gets close to what the robots’ cars can do in some cases, though people have tried, to make a point. In FH4 you could easily beat the AI on unbeatable (with some exceptions) if you could do top 1% rivals times, but in FH5 the AI cheating is next level.

Be prepared to be able to casually set top 100 rivals times (in a car that is not considered a meta car) if you want to beat the AI at the higher difficulties.

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The AI flat out cheats. Ignoring vehicle selection and lack of adherence to the laws of physics- they will simply respawn behind the player vehicle if you develop a large enough lead.

I have create several “AI Proof” races where the path that the AI follows has no exit (up a ramp and into a “cage” of very tall barriers, halfpipe that leads to the bottom of a bridge- with multiple instances of both) and at the end of the race they are always 3 seconds behind me- despite there being no possible way to complete the course.

Turn 10/ Playground games seem to be incapable of producing AI capable of driving competitively without the band-aid of cheaty physics or respawning/ rubberbanding.

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This has always been a problem, but got a lot worse starting in FH3 with the ridiculous cross country tracks with all the unnecessary jumps and bumps and wreckage that requires the AI to cheat to be competitive, and unfortunately they often cheat too much as has been mentioned already with their unfair handicaps.

Honestly I could do without cross country races entirely, just replace them all with actual dirt races (not the rallycross masquerading as dirt we have now) and pathfinder point to point timed challenges.

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Most of what I see I would call a combination of a few things, and the most egregious behavior is what I might describe as a bug. (I play the game on Highly-Skilled AI, so this isn’t just a problem with levels above that…)

The Bug: Runaway AI. (you know the ones)
Most obvious examples: Wilds and some Baja Races, can happen in street and sprints, not to often in circuits due to pathing.

Wilds/Dirt is the place I personally have experienced this sort of AI behavior the most.
I think it’s a bug because I typically just have to restart the race a few times and
suddenly the AI becomes docile and I pass them easily in the same car when before
I couldn’t get to the back of P3 and was barely staying ahead of P5.

I might also say I am not prone to try and “win the race in the fist corner” like seems to be how most people play when I am online. I tend to climb up and know where the AI path strangely and where I can take advantage of it to make my passes. With the the number of AI races I’ve done, when the AI are tweaked out like this it’s obvious. It doesn’t happen every single time though.

Now, they say that the AI learn from us, but I’m not certain I would call it “learning”.
I think it is just a system clever enough to pace us based on (metrics) to not be like most AI is, and how this AI is in about 95% of my experience with them - easy to take advantage of their pathing by having better lines, or using the full racing area, and/or learning where they brake oddly when you don’t really have too.

I have truly seen the AI do some physics defying things - including being able to counter act the game gravity while in air. Try to line up a mid air collision some time and see what happens to you.

The AI will duck and weave if they think you’re going to ram them or run corners wide on them… braking while turning in ways that are simply not even possible for us, they recover from things that would send us spinning into the weeds. On the other hand I have witnessed how using rewind can cause them to totally blow an apex, or how running straight into a 90 degree turn will humorously bring the entire pack behind you into the same fate. I’ve seen that same AI run straight into 90’s trying to out brake me just to stay ahead of me.

note: It should also be understood that about a month before Motorsport dropped, they added certain features from their AI to this game. (in an attempt i think to beta them out and see how they behaved in a community notorious for ramming things and corner bombing.)

So to some degree how we tune, how aggressive that tune is, how we drive, and behave ourselves does have a direct impact on how the AI behave. It’s that additional subtlety to the AI that I think is where most of this odd behavior comes from.

Test it: Next time you’re next to an AI car aggressively steer towards them as if you intend to make contact (but don’t) and watch them actively try to avoid it.

Once you learn the secrets you can bully the AI off line heading into corners by just swerving at them and coming to near complete stops in most sharper corners. This is also consequently how you block AI in trials if you’re losing - and that predicament is also a great marker of how the player in your lobby with the meta tune actually pulls the AI away from everyone else and if they would just slow down and let p2 AI catch back up they would slow down the AI pull on the rest of the team.

If it’s a trial where you cannot get beyond P3 yourself and you’re the lead human again, slow down till the rest of the pack catches back up - pushing only pushes the AI faster and you lose the trial.
You don’t even have to really block - just drive a little slow - be a little over geared - all of it can manipulate how the AI behave and help them be manageable.

In solo though - if they are tweaked - not much you can do about it but restart the race some times.

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Great write-up. After all these years I still get a kick out of sending it on the AI at those spots where they inevitably stand on the brakes when they don’t need to. They did it in FH3, they did it in FH4, and they do it just as much if not even more in FH5. Besides the inhuman grip and ability to ghost through breakable obstacles, I think the main reason why a lot of cross-country races are so difficult to win is because most of them have big sweeping turns and are run flat-out almost the whole way, so there isn’t a chance to make gains on the AI in those places.

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FH5 AI inherits a lot from FH4. AFAIK Horizon AI is tuned using simulated bots, which in principle is really good solution but there’s some issues that also appeared in Horizon 4.

Understanding Drivatars, this is a bit wild ride because how we players see tracks and Drivatars may not match how Drivater AI see track, themselves, etc. The most noticeable example of this in FH4 I think was one small Dirt Racing circuit. Drivater times were based on taking advantage shortcut, even players never saw Drivatars taking advantage of that shortcut. Visually it never happened to players.

In Horizon 5 based on 141 cars raced in stock confirmation over all Street Scene races versus Unbeatable AI there are couple of problematic races. Horizon Callejera and Granjas de Tapalpas. For Callejere race I suspect Drivatars can take advantage of handbrake turn in certain hairpin, even we never see that happen, which may result for player experiencing Drivatars having just insane torque and acceleration during last two straights in race.

Granjas de Tapalpa I can’t say for sure. They probably can calculate taking their racing line partially intersecting inside of traffic island, but that alone doesn’t explain their results, so next suspect is another handbrake turn, which again we don’t see, but is calculated towards possible time bracket for Drivatars.

Issue in both cases is about that Drivatar AI see achievable times on those routes, not practically achievable for human players in performance bracket. Performance bracket is about dynamics between player car PI and Drivatar PI.

Cross Country is good example of how weird things can get. In extreme cases in FH4 (witnessed and read about back then) and I have read that has happened in FH5 too, Drivatars can fly after jump right to next checkpoint when they catch up.

Overall underlying recipe for AI used is very good and what they are doing with what they have in FH5, they adjusted it so that in Street Scene skillful driving with stock cars can still win races even vs. Unbeatable, but tuning is required in other racing categories. I hope it stays this way in next Horizon games too as while I liked the way it was in FH4 (where every race excluding Cross Country races was winnable with most stock vehicles vs. Drivatars) as current implementation allows all the fun and learning with Street Scene races, which player then can take to Road Races and such and include tuning. This creates better synergy between single player and multiplayer aspects of game.

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Amen to this. I like Cross Country in theory, but the way its implemented in Horizon is just extremely poor. Bad track design, way too easy to farm skill points, and, worst of all, the aforementioned cheating AI.

If they gave us real cross country where we’re not tearing up private properties and jumping from 200 hundred foot cliffs as well as had us raced against the clock instead of a full grid, then we’d be talking.

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Yup. I actually took a screenshot of an AI vehicle ahead of me physically phasing through a guardrail like the Flash that would’ve slowed me down had I smashed through it. But, of course, to the AI, there may as well have not been a guardrail there at all.

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Definitely a big reason why I dislike a lot of the level design in Cross Country events. Bonus points for jumps that are dead drops and bring your vehicle to a complete halt upon landing, killing any momentum you’ve built up during the race. Ironically, the more zany these games have become, the more flaws with the physics system have been exposed.

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I was doing a Horizon tour event, and witnessed the AI “changing lanes” mid air- as in they were following a player car through the air, steered (in mid air), and went around the player- all before landing. They will also accelerate in mid air, teleport, completely miss checkpoints and the aforementioned phasing through objects.

If you ever want a visual on exactly how ridiculous the AI can be, run “cult cars” off road. You WILL get passed at least once by a three wheeled vehicle in the mud.

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Proof.
Track- “AI Cheat Check”
Share Code: 772-441-922

Player takes first exit ramp onto highway.
Indicated route leads to fenced in area and ramp directly into bottom of bridge- no possible path though without backing up considerably.
respawn locations (on highway or on ramp) are both blocked with obstacles- no path through if AI cars are respawned.

When player progresses to the turnaround point (stay to the left of the “penalty box”), The AI will teleport and be 3-5 seconds behind you (s2, so probably closer for slower classes)- despite there being no possible path for them to get there.

Try it for yourself.

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agreed, i was using the absolute best tune possible for an event against “highly skilled” and yet i could easily tell the AI bots were set to “unbeatable”. they really need to either what it says for difficulty or make the difficulty what they said, come on it feels bad to be able to beat other events on the same difficulty but get absolutely destroyed in a weekly of the same difficulty

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Disagree totally. Driving off road is a lot of fun and doesn’t take away from the game specially in Mexico where there are many dirt roads mixed with all sort of other surfaces . Suggesting they do way with off-road racing because someone doesn’t like it seems a bit selfish in my humble opinion and like anything if one does not like something they should be free to avoid it but not at the cost of others who enjoy it.