Rubber band AI?

Does this game have rubber band AI? I feel like it does and it’s pretty noticeable. I think the other ones did, too, but not this strong.

I always have one AI opponent that’s always on my ass or slightly ahead of me… when I’m like a full minute ahead of and lapping the other racers.

I was doing a goliath race the other day to test this. I had damage turned on and after a couple laps my max speed was only around 150 (down from like 210 in the car I was driving). I was a few minutes ahead of the pack, but they were slowly catching up… oh - all except that one guy who was with me the entire way. So I slowed down… and he slowed down. So I got passed by a couple people… then they all slowed down. I was able to blow past them at my low high speed, then they’d catch up and be on me again… so I’d pull over, let them get a few seconds ahead and again, they slow waaaay down, so I blow past them again.

I feel like this is a newer occurrence. The older Forza games didn’t do this. I could just set it to easy and be minutes ahead of everybody and not worry, but now there’s a constant 1v1 battle for first place… which makes it more interesting, but it also defeats the purpose of easier difficulties when I want to just chill and drive.

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I agree 150 percent. It’s like the difficulty levels have no bearing on the actual difficulty of the race. There’s always one or two with you no matter what the lap times of the rest of the pack. If you catches and passes you, another will come up somehow someway. Also, if you look at the mini-map during the race, the AI drivers many times will not have to slow down for abrupt corners as they should in order to rubberband and catch you. It goes both ways though, which is odd because if they pass you, they will never get that far ahead.

-k

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I agree with everything else, but this isn’t true. I routinely have one drivatar shoot off at the beginning of a race never to be seen again. Often I have lost a 4 lap race race by 20 seconds or more to one rogue drivatar with the entire rest of the field roughly that far behind me.

I’m sure they put it in to make the races more exciting - like a constant 1v1 battle for first place… but then why put in a difficulty option at all?

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M. Rossi.

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Drivatars/AI/rubber-banding is one of the most biggest issues I have with this game. The idea behind the drivatars is good, but the implementation is ***** Is it so wrong to ask fair fight in the races, where the same physics applies to me and also to AI? The best cure for those rogue drivatars that drive off at the beginning is to use the perk that lets you start at the front of the grid and try to hold that car behind you. I don’t know, why nowadays racing games doesn’t offer qualification before every race, so that you don’t have to start at the end of the grid every single time and then try to make your way past the Skynet machines that try to take you out as a group.

I currently started to play old Forza titles (that I have and haven’t played before) and I must say Forza 3 AI > FH3 drivatars.

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I agree that it’s probably relevant on quite a few difficulty levels but compared to how multiplayer races go I see no difference in terms of it staying a pack race with one guy shooting off.

I get passed on Goliath when I am driving with a car with lower top speed by a Berlinetta that I know has has high top speed. It would be good to consider how much power your car has and the types of vehicles you are getting passed by.

If you want truly terrible rubber-banding take one passing glance at NFS 2015.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive but I rarely ever lose to AI

When the expansion first came out, I was getting passed in deep snow by Mustangs and Lamborghinis while I was driving extreme offroad trucks. Drivatars simply do not use the same physics. Strictly speaking, this has existed in some form at least since Forza 4, when they started races with more optimal tire heat than the player, but it has evolved far past that at this point with AI cars taking turns at impossible speeds and not reacting to impediments to surface friction at all.

I set my difficulty all the way down to beginner or whatever the lowest setting is today and still managed to lose a 2 minute 22 second sprint race by 6 seconds to a drivatar that zoomed off at the beginning and was uncatchable the whole way through. When these threads pop up over and over again, people pointing out these absurd flaws in the system, something is very clearly wrong with how it works.

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Try using stock builds for your A.I races. For some reason that seems to be the difficulty multiplier. The crazier I go with a build, the more nitrous the drivatars tend to have.

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ikr, sometimes i notice that if you play on unbeatable, the AI will re-spawn behind you only a couple feet if you go too far ahead.

If it were rubberband AI, it would happen consistently to everybody. If one created a tame on road race with 25 laps and restricted it to the Isetta, then took an A Class Isetta into the event and ended up racing an entire pack of C Class AI (eliminating a number of potential variables other than the actual AI)… in a game with rubberband AI everyone who ran such a race would see the AI doing improbable things to keep up. Having done it myself and observed the pack staying relatively close to each other in a well behaved group as I lapped them repeatedly, I can say that whatever the problem is, lazily mislabeling it as rubberband AI is the least likely way to pin it down…

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Preach it.

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It’s a little condescending to say that we are all imagining this. This seems to only happen in this particular Forza title. I have all of the other Forza games with the exception of FM5 and it doesn’t happen in any of the others. I’ve thought that maybe it’s one reason why the game doesn’t give a distance to next car and car behind. You can even see them on the mini map taking 90 degree corners behind you without slowing down.

-k

It would have been if that’s what I said. I’m not denying that people are encountering a variety of issues with the AI, however. I’m just saying that the cause of those issues is not rubberband AI.

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It is rubberbanding but if you are way too good or way too bad the rubber band breaks.

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Or… all you proved is that the game take in consideration class differences and will only use some ‘catch-up’ logic when you race against same class. I too can beat the AI, typically run at Expert or Pro, but I have to admit I have observed strange behavior and things that would seem unfair. Definitely, if the AI hit stuff or get on a different surface they do not seem to be as affected as the player. What I experience a lot, regardless of AI level, is if you pass all of them early and do not make too many mistake they will not catch up. But if you let one escape, then the reverse happen and it becomes hard to catch up.

If you have less experience as a racer, obviously having a sense of unfairness get quite frustrating.

Zak

it may not happen EVERY race, but it happens pretty frequently to me

Is it rubber banding or simply the legendary randomness of the drivatards? They even get special tunes for their cars I notice now. Last goliath I did the drivatard that finished second was in an Audi Quatto rally car running a S2 994 tune? Fastest lap time 5 seconds quicker than mine set in a Huracan S2 998!?

Another recent example of drivatards being random was I set up a 50 lap race on one of my favourite circuits. In Byron Bay which includes most of the drift zone. I had lapped the rear 10 drivatards several times on the 2nd highest difficulty yet the second placed drivatard I hadn’t and they finished about 20 seconds behind me. Which on a race lasting a good 40 odd minutes just seems like rubber banding?

It most certainly is a form of rubberband ai and this system started in forza 6 with the runaway drivatars. They have tried to do some sort of dynamic difficulty that just doesn’t always work the way they want it to. The “drivatars” are not the same ones they had in forza 5, these are straight up programmed opponents.

The pi system is to blame because it doesnt really calculate performance properly. This is why theres a huge divide between cars that are rated the same way in the same class. There are cars that can be rated a 7 in speed but are really a 9. Imo this kind of stuff shouldnt be happening anymore 11 years into the franchise.

So instead of properly researching and rating the cars the right way they have chosen to go the need for speed route. Many racing games have had rubberbanding, its a way of giving players a challenge but when its as noticable as it is in this game it just comes off as corny and frankly a bit lazy on the developers part. All i know is that im getting more competitive ai in Ride 2 than i am in forza and its sad because milestone are a bunch of hacks.

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