Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27006659-20160418175659/@comment-26715739-20160418185116

I've definitely found Excel to be really useful in planning things out.

I pretty quickly got to the point where I decided there was too much going on and I needed a planning tool so I also started my own Excel sheet - although I go with manual updates rather than bringing in the info (sounds interesting). I hit 100% for the first time in 4.0.5, so I've lost some of the drive to keep it up to date and explore new concepts since then.

But here is a list of the tabs I have and what I try (tried) to get from them:
 * Summary tab: Stats on cars owned vs total cars + anticipated cost to reach 100%. How many levels I'll have to go up to get that if I assume no discount/20% discount only/previous plus winning of winnable cars/previous + winnable gold; or since I've got a bit of a buffer on 100%: how I'm going with my surplus. Use a fair bit of conditional formatting on this tab to highlight things of importance.
 * cars tab (combined with series): I essentially started off with the car list as it then was, then added the bits I was interested in. I've combined it with putting in data for the series. I use an array function so I can see whether a series can be completed with an R$ upgraded car. Helps me work out overall cost (upgrade/income). I use this sheet to record winnable gold and cost of series so I can have a good idea of "overall cost for completion".
 * A general tab to help me track my progress against anticipated required gold (especially useful to see what's happening with average gold/day over time) Been maintaining this since early October 2015.
 * A general "play" tab which I put some functions in to lets me rank the remaining series to see which is "cheapest" to complete (although I limited it to "top 10" back when I had more than 20 to complete - I've passed 100% a couple of times in previous releases so there's only the Venom related series in there at the moment)
 * I still have a tab with daily bonus stats (haven't updated for April) to help me track when I need to keep manager/agent. Also originally was to help work out how the new system compared to the old.
 * I have an ordered list of bots just as reference data (although only the standard bots) - easier than tracking it down each time when I need to see just where it's trying to start me/how fast speed up/slow down is going.
 * Some tabs to compare best races for returns using my own racing times and some extra working out extra bonuses (eg daily bonus/double fame etc).
 * a tab with a record of the release history for interest - use it for anticipating release dates and patterns and when and what has been added (tracks, number of cars).
 * a tab keeping track of generic "lowest cost for completion" (as opposed to my personal cost for completion which included sales and things like that).

If you're able to suck in the data from the site it would be quite interesting to see how much fame is winnable from race series, ie what's the total size of the gap that has to be churned over.