Talk:Track To Tarmac/@comment-26388545-20171106060312/@comment-27123099-20171106185035

I've got the same feeling about bot management. It's no secret that FM is doing what they can to fight it (hence all the LTS's we see now, 100% elimination of bot management there).

So, in SE's, they are creating goals that have enough restrictions to make it very difficult to complete if you use bot management heavily.

Also, with their changes to the bot AI (and physics), it's far more difficult to really put the top bots at a disadvantage. I find it really funny when I spin out a bot (or send them off-track) and I look at my rear view and see the bot charging back on track (at full speed, well faster than I could ever do) and they bash into the other bots to try to maintain their place. If you've never seen them do this (either in your rear-view or a replay), I highly recommend it, it's quite comical.

I've also seen the other bots slow dramatically to allow that bot to stay ahead of them. In the past, the other bots would just ram through and force the spun-out bot back ever further. Now it seems, unless I try really, really hard, getting the top 5 bots out of the top 5 places is pretty difficult. They fight back pretty hard (using unearthly physics and AI to full advantage).

So, while I think that bot management may make some of the goals easier than they would be otherwise, we're still hampered by the fixed goal races which is where the GC is spent anyhow. If those goals are fixed, then bot management won't matter for those races anyhow (especially if it's a speed or time related goal which has little to do with other bots on the track).

Basically, it's definitely clear that FM has made drastic changes to multiple aspects of SE's in the past year or so, to reduce the advantage that bot management provides. Not that it's 100% useless any longer, but definitely far less so that it used to be (again, for SE's in particular).