Formula Universalis Season 6 features an
improved car and driver development system! It disentangles the progression of car from driver and should hopefully provide much more opportunity for strategy and drama! It also aims to allow the fair establishment of new teams, with a way for teams that are behind in development to catch up.
DriversPreviously, you had to balance the development of your car, which gets reset every season, with drivers who keep their skills permanently. This led to some teams neglecting their drivers, especially those who were not #1 on their team. The progression of car and driver has now been completely separated. Beginning in season 6, drivers will now automatically progress. Every three races (the typical update cycle in previous seasons),
a random driver on your team will improve a random skill by 1 point. It won't be completely random though, because you can choose a
skill preference to encourage the development of a particular skill for each driver, which will make that skill have a 75% chance of improvement. (Every other skill will take up the remaining 25% chance.) There will also be a
skill-based progression: Drivers who finish well will have an increased chance each race to develop one skill point. This is
based on the amount of points a driver is awarded in the race, so that the winner (which gets 25 pts) will have a 25% chance of upgrading. Second place will have an 18%, third 15%, etc.,. These upgrades will also be affected by your skill preference for the driver.
Before now, you also had to create a new driver with only 15 points every time one of your drivers retired. Starting this season there will be a
driver pool you can make offers to. This season this consists of
36 pre-generated drivers who you can sign to your team. Drivers will choose to accept an offer based on your team's
Negotiating Power, which is
based on your past and current performance. This will be particularly important when multiple teams offer a seat to the same driver.
Negotiating Power is determined by:
Legacy - 1 NP for holding at least one championship title (as a team)
Team standings - 1, 2, or 3 NP based on your placing in last season's team standings (3 NP for 1st, 2 NP for 2nd, 1 NP for everyone else)
Car - 1, 2, or 3 NP based on your car's current stats (3 NP for the team with the best car, 2 NP for second best, 1 NP for everyone else)
Nationality - 2 NP for drivers from your team's country
Persuasion - 3 extra NP which you can spread among your offers to influence them to sign with you
Each team's base Negotiating Power (Legacy + Team standings + Car):
This means that if Dotruga Formula Racing and Team Vincent both make offers on the same driver, Dotruga will have 6 NP and Team Vincent will have 2 NP. If this driver was from Dotruga, Dotruga would gain 2 extra NP for their nationality, giving them 8 NP. Team Vincent could then spend their extra 3 Persuasion NP on this offer if they really wanted this driver to increase their chances, raising their NP to 5. The driver would then randomly decide what team to join based on these weights, such that their chance of signing with a team is the NP that team has divided by total NP of all teams that have submitted offers, with an option to choose to sign to neither team (with 1 NP per team that offers) like so:
(Dotruga Formula Racing has a 53% chance of signing this driver because 8+5+2 = 15, 8/15 = 53%)
CarsSeason 6 car development is also significantly different than in seasons past, however it still uses the same points and rating system. Instead of adding points to your car progressively throughout the season, cars are now made of
parts. There are four parts your car is made of: the
chassis, the
aero kit, the
brakes & KERS (kinetic energy recovery system), and the
engine, and all parts must be present on your car for it to be eligible to race! Every part contributes to
only some specific car stats, aside from the chassis which contributes to all four. Each part contributes to the stats shown in green in the following table:
Parts can be created with the point system that has been used previously, but instead of getting two points and upgrading every three races,
your team will get two points every race. At the beginning of the season, you will have the same amount of points to spend on your car construction as you would normally, but instead of assigning them to each stat, you have to make your car out of the four parts. Here is an example car construction:
Throughout the season as you accumulate development points (2 per race, typically), you will be able to develop new parts to improve on your car or create alternate car setups. Instead of instantly using these to upgrade your car, you collect them until you have enough points to spend on the development of a part. The amount of points necessary to develop a part is
equal to the amount of points the part attributes to your car. However, when you go to make the part, it will not always come out exactly as the engineer drew it up. Usually, it will fall short, but every once in a while it can actually end up better. This depends on a new stat your drivers have, called
Testing. The Testing stat basically indicates how good each driver is at communicating to the engineers their feedback on part development. If your drivers are good at this, you will have a better chance of making parts as you specify and will be more consistent. If they're bad, your parts will vary wildly in quality. As a guideline, if the sum of your drivers' Testing stats is 3 (the minimum) your parts will average about 60% the quality you planned on. With the maximum in Testing (30) it is more like 90%.
A bonus development point will also be awarded to the team whose driver wins the race. Half a development point will be awarded to the team of the highest placing driver not on the team of the winning driver (in effect, the second best). This will reward the best teams and allow them to progress faster. But there is hope if your team is not doing well! Every team has the opportunity to research and
copy parts that other teams have driven on the track at least once (in any session: practice, qualifying, or the race). Producing
a copied part will cost the same as producing a new part but will have a better success rate (averaging 75% for minimum Testing skill and 95% for maximum), allowing teams with worse cars to catch up to those with the best car designs.
Parts also take time to develop during the course of the season, and this is based on the cost of the part. Every 6 development points spent creating a part will increase development time by 1 race. Parts cheaper than 6 points will be developed by the next race weekend. (So 6-11 point parts take two races, 12-17 take three, etc.,) This, however, does not apply pre-season. Parts will develop "instantly" regardless of cost, cause pre-season is long.
The choice of allocating points between parts and stats is up to you, but keep in mind a few caveats:
- A part may develop with 0 in a given stat, this is more likely the lower the skill you give a part. For example, if you try to develop an engine with 1 Top Speed, you may end up with an engine with 0 Top Speed. This is very likely when trying to produce parts with individual stats in the 1-2 range. It still means you developed the part and it will work on your car, it just won't make your car any better than it was!
This does not apply to the chassis however, which will always have a minimum of 1 in every stat. - You may be tempted to focus all your development points on one part so that you can quickly and cheaply upgrade your terrible parts throughout the season to improve your car, but keep in mind that this means other teams can quickly develop a copy of your best part and deploy it to catch up to you.
- Development points reset each season, so you can't bank them to carry into the next season.
- You can copy your own parts. This will rarely result in a better part, so why might you want to do that... ?
This new part development mechanic should allow for a more dynamic season with narratives and drama unfolding as teams compete to develop the best cars to take their drivers to the top of the podium and win the championship!
Minor changes-
Relations were removed as they did not really add much to the game and were a hassle to keep track of.
- The
Pitting car stat has been removed as well as it doesn't really work with the parts mechanic and the uselessness overall. There are plans for it to be reintegrated in a future update as some sort of strategy stat.
With that, I believe I have described the majority of the changes to Formula Universalis for season 6. That means that driver signing and car construction is now open.
If you need any help, just ask. I can walk you through it if something is unclear.
The 36 drivers you can choose to sign to your team are as follows:
You do not need to sign anyone if you wish to keep your current drivers.
To make an offer, just state which drivers you want to make an offer to and whether you want to use any Persuasion NP (you have up to 3 you can distribute however you want).
You can also post your car constructions by listing the parts you want to fabricate. The quality of the parts you get are dependent on your drivers' Testing skill so I won't run the part generation until you confirm your driver lineup.
Development points each team has for car constructions:
Peregrine Solea 24
Dotruga Formula Racing 26
Cows Go Moo Racing 25
BONGATAR 23
Team V.V. Imperial 21
Team Diigikwk Racers 28
Team Vincent 16
