Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-27728287-20160301172039/@comment-26249703-20160302172051

RR3SeanR wrote:

RomGuyony wrote: I still stand by my theory that there are at least two variables involved (distance and performance of the cars), whether it's an automatic calculation or FM set the numbers themselves. There's more to it, but it's hypothetical and not worth going into. Yep, every time I try to play with the numbers to draw out some "underlying truth" I end up throwing in the towel.

I've pretty much decided that someone at FM has come up with same painfully complex formula -of which they're no doubt inordinately proud - which involves lots of different variables (career stage, bonus/career series modifier, maximum car PR for the race, required PR, per lap baseline value for the track) used in multi-part calculations which are mixed with severe rounding/truncation (to 10s or 100s) at several points such that most of the complexity of the calculation is actually lost in that rounding (most of the time). As you say, not really worth trying to second guess how they do it.

But I guess this discussion is about spit-balling ways they could do it better... Possibly :P There again, though, I find it hard to believe they'd go through that much trouble.

I definitely agree that there is rounding involved (different R$ rewards for the same Fame rewards, as well as more significant figures in Time Trials point to that), which means all but the simplest of calculations (Main R$ reward to CRB) are difficult to ascertain and be reverse-engineered. Even then, how long did it take us (or Michael) to figure that one out? And that's just a factor of 4.

The best way for me to rationalise it is to sort it in "groups", where each group has its own set of rewards depending on the event run. Who knows how many? At least 10, but probably more. I say 10 because of an event like Speed Snap, the lowest reward for that event type at a quick glance in is RCI, for R$900. The highest is in CSF, for R$1,900. But rounding could be involved, so maybe there are more.

Even if that was a valid way of doing it, it still doesn't say which races fall into which group, until they are run. I thought I was close to a breakthrough when I considered the rewards for unlocking a tier as the difference, but NASCAR Talent Tour disproved that (it only had R$2,000 and R$3,000 rewards, IIRC, but I got the lower of two possible rewards in a tier worth R$3,000). As rewards tend to go up every few tiers in a series, I don't want to completely ignore them, still. Maybe it has something to do with percentage completion? IE correlation of rewards based on 25, 50, 75 and 100% rewards, separated in 4 groups? Eliminations in CSF seem to go against that, though.

As I said, it's purely hypothetical, it's like trying to solve simultaneous equations without even knowing how many unknown variables there are :P