Post by lucasfawkes on Sept 23, 2023 3:30:21 GMT 2
Gameplay Summary
F1 Team is a game that initially seems very interesting and inviting, but it's frustrating once you realize that the good looks don't translate into a well-polished game. The game has a lot of content and depth in various technical, financial, and social aspects related to the F1 world, but its execution and simulation are its weak points. What was supposed to be a great game ends up being a repetitive and senseless experience, where the player often finds themselves lost trying to understand exactly where they are going wrong in managing their team, only to invariably conclude that the problem lies more with the game than their mistakes.
In my initial playthrough, I started with Jordan, just like I did in Grand Prix Manager 2. The idea was to begin with a mid-tier team, not as challenging to manage as a weak team, but not as "easy" as stronger teams. In short, in this first gameplay, I tried hard to get good sponsors and suppliers, develop the car, and balance the books. Everything seemed right, but I got bored during the season, not even completing it. Nothing I did seemed to have much effect, whether it was upgrades to the cars or race strategies. The team always seemed irritable with the workload and time allocation. The car and drivers' performance fluctuated in a bizarre manner, and earning points was really hard.
F1 Team is a game that initially seems very interesting and inviting, but it's frustrating once you realize that the good looks don't translate into a well-polished game. The game has a lot of content and depth in various technical, financial, and social aspects related to the F1 world, but its execution and simulation are its weak points. What was supposed to be a great game ends up being a repetitive and senseless experience, where the player often finds themselves lost trying to understand exactly where they are going wrong in managing their team, only to invariably conclude that the problem lies more with the game than their mistakes.
In my initial playthrough, I started with Jordan, just like I did in Grand Prix Manager 2. The idea was to begin with a mid-tier team, not as challenging to manage as a weak team, but not as "easy" as stronger teams. In short, in this first gameplay, I tried hard to get good sponsors and suppliers, develop the car, and balance the books. Everything seemed right, but I got bored during the season, not even completing it. Nothing I did seemed to have much effect, whether it was upgrades to the cars or race strategies. The team always seemed irritable with the workload and time allocation. The car and drivers' performance fluctuated in a bizarre manner, and earning points was really hard.
The same happened with my fictional team, with patterns very similar to those of Jordan, which had much more money and car development, leading me to believe that the game is the root of the problems. For example, I noticed that in the same races, the car simply stalled, completely losing performance and failing to qualify for the GP. The same car that had qualified in 2nd place in the previous GP. At least the organizational challenge was interesting. Playing with my own team, at the game's authentic difficulty level and against opponents, in your first season, you'll have to survive financially. Closing sponsorship deals and taking out a good bank loan might make it possible. My mistake was probably taking out a short-term loan, just 6 months, right in the middle of the season. I did have enough funds to finish the season. The challenge would be to score points because, in doing so, I would earn the FIA prize money, along with sponsor bonuses, allowing me to repay the loan and have more funds to improve operations for 1996. Unfortunately, after repaying the loan, nothing was left for Pegasus F1. Our race setup was quite interesting and, in many ways, inspired by Haas: I bought all parts from other teams, after carefully computing the cost-benefit of each part on a detailed spreadsheet. Moreover, my team worked with zero stock, always repairing the available parts to the maximum, spending as little as possible. It was the best we could do under the circumstances, and on paper, we had a Frankenstein car that would be as good (or better) than the weak teams, maybe flirting with the mid-pack teams. None of this was enough: Fittipaldi and Zanardi, despite being good drivers, couldn't finish any race near the top 6. So far, so good: what really kills any desire to keep playing is seeing FORTI scoring and WINNING regularly with Pedro Paulo Diniz. Seriously, what does Guido Forti do in this game to have such performance? The game just doesn't make sense: it's very common for weak teams to randomly score, even though YOUR weak team is always doomed to failure and bankruptcy.
Appearance/UI/UX
Team F1 has a completely designed aesthetic with occasional animations. The game provides a great immersion into the F1 offices and garages, featuring drawings of the circuit, the GP command tower, as well as inventories, parts trucks, and motorhomes. Everything looks beautiful and vibrant. However, using these settings is not always easy: there's no text indicating where to click, and the player must figure out on their own how to access different parts of the game. Click sensitivity also varies, at least when playing on the current Dosbox, affecting simple yet important things like the number of parts you want to buy. The game also has 6 very '90s electronic music tracks, which I personally liked. There are specific sounds for each part of the game, whether it's the office or the workshops. Overall, the interface works and is eye-catching, but it's not exactly easy for the uninitiated. This might actually be the most successful part of the game.
Management Features
Team F1 has a completely designed aesthetic with occasional animations. The game provides a great immersion into the F1 offices and garages, featuring drawings of the circuit, the GP command tower, as well as inventories, parts trucks, and motorhomes. Everything looks beautiful and vibrant. However, using these settings is not always easy: there's no text indicating where to click, and the player must figure out on their own how to access different parts of the game. Click sensitivity also varies, at least when playing on the current Dosbox, affecting simple yet important things like the number of parts you want to buy. The game also has 6 very '90s electronic music tracks, which I personally liked. There are specific sounds for each part of the game, whether it's the office or the workshops. Overall, the interface works and is eye-catching, but it's not exactly easy for the uninitiated. This might actually be the most successful part of the game.
Management Features
Team F1 is quite comprehensive in terms of management, daring to simulate things that other games overlook. You can do everything you usually expect, such as hiring drivers, staff, and closing deals with suppliers and sponsors. The negotiation isn't very complex but can be frustrating if you overdo it. However, it's not clear how to proceed. In the case of sponsors, I preferred to use a good broker to secure more generous contracts, even if that broker required a larger portion of the contract he negotiated for me. Interestingly, there's no performance data for the drivers except for their previous results in F1. This leaves you wondering who the best drivers in the game really are and if there's a significant difference among them. I say this because the game randomly changes drivers in rival teams, so it wasn't uncommon to see fictional drivers beating Schumacher and company. As for suppliers, it's confusing: in this game, you always buy the parts, never manufacture them in-house, unlike real-life F1. Furthermore, you can buy parts from any team on the parts market, creating a true Frankenstein car. Yes, you can have a Williams with all Ferrari parts and engine: there's no conflict of interest! The only impediment is your performance in the championship, and this becomes very clear if you play with your own team: at least in the first season, no supplier wanted to make a contract with me, so I could only buy individual (and thus more expensive) and less updated parts. You can also negotiate a lot with the various banks in the game, including driver insurance, loans, and even invest a portion of your team's money in the financial market for future returns. But perhaps the weirdest and most bizarre aspect of the game is managing the team's morale. It seemingly depends on the number of days and hours worked, how these hours are allocated in the team's daily routine, and, obviously, the results on the track. You can choose to leave the overall number of employees and management of the team in the hands of your personnel manager, but whether you do this or handle it manually, it's hard to keep the teams happy. Drivers and mechanics always complain, either that they're training too much or that they can't stand doing publicity events with sponsors anymore. You can also deal with merchandising and choose to increase the size of your headquarters to accommodate more employees if there's demand and need for it. The drivers and staff get sick quite frequently, impacting the number of people working in daily operations. In summary, on paper, everything is very interesting, but in practice, it's frustrating and incomprehensible.
Gameplay Features
The part that matters, the races themselves and car handling, is also quite interesting... until you notice the flaws and loopholes. The main point to consider is that, in common with F1 Manager 96 and its success, in this game, time runs freely, i.e., it's not a turn-based game. All of this makes it challenging but quickly descends into a stressful situation where you find yourself with no time to plan what to do with your team. Of course, at the beginning of the game, it seems easy when it's January, and the first race is in March, but as soon as the calendar starts and the races begin, you'll see how ten days is too little time to assemble and disassemble the cars for the next race. Car assembly takes time, and you will probably get lost trying to assemble it yourself until you discover that you can ask your head mechanic to do a complete revision at once. However, you can repair or add new parts, leaving it up to you to decide the best strategy. Moreover, you can test the car on a test track, in the wind tunnel, and the engines on the dynamometer, with the option to adjust the air-fuel mixture. What's the practical effect of these measures? It's never clear, besides the fact that you apparently can only train at Monza, a track not very interesting to assess the overall behavior of the car as it's an outlier due to its extremely high speeds. Besides the head mechanic, there's also the race engineer, who suggests the best setup for the car (in which you can only adjust the gear ratio and the angle of the front and rear wings), as well as the optimal pit stop strategy and the recommended tire type. Every time I tried to make my setups according to real F1 experience (e.g., using a very short gear ratio and a lot of aerodynamic load in Monaco), the lap times were worse than the recommended ones, until I simply gave up testing. This brings us to race weekends. In these, the battle against time continues, even if you have 30 mechanics. Just like in real life, you take part in the practices and the race (if you qualify). However, it's suggested to test the cars and see how the setup recommendation changes throughout the weekend. You can also try your own tire and fuel strategy, but it usually doesn't work as expected. It's vital that your cars have most of the parts in perfect condition for the race, or they will break down. Some things stand out at this point: you can clearly cheat and modify some parts of your car to make them better/faster (and outside the regulations). Of course, this comes with a big risk of being discovered by the FIA. You can also report other teams that are supposedly cheating over the weekend. But how do you know? There's no evidence. The way the on-track action is presented is very poor: despite having extensive real-time telemetry data for your cars, you can't know which other cars are on the track, nor can you give team orders, and worst of all, you can't pause the game. Well, you can pause, but only if you keep the pause button pressed. The race can be viewed on a map or in 3D, which is quite interesting but flawed. In my experience, to avoid watching the entire race slowly on the track, I opted for a middle option, where the game alternates between map view and race view. In this race view, you can indeed give team orders, but again, it's not clear if they take effect, since you can't know the lap times and whether the car in front of you is a direct competitor or a lapped car. After the races, you review all the results, which are quite detailed. Furthermore, you can develop parts of your car given your budget, and even develop projects obtained through espionage or partnership with other teams. So, after completing the research process, you'll receive the updated new parts from the suppliers. For example, engines can gain more horsepower and a higher RPM range than in their original version. How much of an effect does this have? We don't know. Maybe the other teams are evolving too fast. In summary, at the end of the gameplay, I realized that most of the time, the game means managing inventory and changing parts against the clock, your biggest enemy. In other words, despite a range of functions and possibilities, the game doesn't allow you to understand what's going on and change things in the heat of the moment. And as mentioned earlier, everything becomes more frustrating when you lose to FORTI.
The part that matters, the races themselves and car handling, is also quite interesting... until you notice the flaws and loopholes. The main point to consider is that, in common with F1 Manager 96 and its success, in this game, time runs freely, i.e., it's not a turn-based game. All of this makes it challenging but quickly descends into a stressful situation where you find yourself with no time to plan what to do with your team. Of course, at the beginning of the game, it seems easy when it's January, and the first race is in March, but as soon as the calendar starts and the races begin, you'll see how ten days is too little time to assemble and disassemble the cars for the next race. Car assembly takes time, and you will probably get lost trying to assemble it yourself until you discover that you can ask your head mechanic to do a complete revision at once. However, you can repair or add new parts, leaving it up to you to decide the best strategy. Moreover, you can test the car on a test track, in the wind tunnel, and the engines on the dynamometer, with the option to adjust the air-fuel mixture. What's the practical effect of these measures? It's never clear, besides the fact that you apparently can only train at Monza, a track not very interesting to assess the overall behavior of the car as it's an outlier due to its extremely high speeds. Besides the head mechanic, there's also the race engineer, who suggests the best setup for the car (in which you can only adjust the gear ratio and the angle of the front and rear wings), as well as the optimal pit stop strategy and the recommended tire type. Every time I tried to make my setups according to real F1 experience (e.g., using a very short gear ratio and a lot of aerodynamic load in Monaco), the lap times were worse than the recommended ones, until I simply gave up testing. This brings us to race weekends. In these, the battle against time continues, even if you have 30 mechanics. Just like in real life, you take part in the practices and the race (if you qualify). However, it's suggested to test the cars and see how the setup recommendation changes throughout the weekend. You can also try your own tire and fuel strategy, but it usually doesn't work as expected. It's vital that your cars have most of the parts in perfect condition for the race, or they will break down. Some things stand out at this point: you can clearly cheat and modify some parts of your car to make them better/faster (and outside the regulations). Of course, this comes with a big risk of being discovered by the FIA. You can also report other teams that are supposedly cheating over the weekend. But how do you know? There's no evidence. The way the on-track action is presented is very poor: despite having extensive real-time telemetry data for your cars, you can't know which other cars are on the track, nor can you give team orders, and worst of all, you can't pause the game. Well, you can pause, but only if you keep the pause button pressed. The race can be viewed on a map or in 3D, which is quite interesting but flawed. In my experience, to avoid watching the entire race slowly on the track, I opted for a middle option, where the game alternates between map view and race view. In this race view, you can indeed give team orders, but again, it's not clear if they take effect, since you can't know the lap times and whether the car in front of you is a direct competitor or a lapped car. After the races, you review all the results, which are quite detailed. Furthermore, you can develop parts of your car given your budget, and even develop projects obtained through espionage or partnership with other teams. So, after completing the research process, you'll receive the updated new parts from the suppliers. For example, engines can gain more horsepower and a higher RPM range than in their original version. How much of an effect does this have? We don't know. Maybe the other teams are evolving too fast. In summary, at the end of the gameplay, I realized that most of the time, the game means managing inventory and changing parts against the clock, your biggest enemy. In other words, despite a range of functions and possibilities, the game doesn't allow you to understand what's going on and change things in the heat of the moment. And as mentioned earlier, everything becomes more frustrating when you lose to FORTI.
Anyway, I conclude this post with the design of my fictional team, which survived half a season. Maybe I should have taken that yearly loan, but even if I survived financially, I don't think I'll return to this game anytime soon... What about you all? Have you played this game? Was your experience as weird and bad as mine?
