rec.autos.simulators

Hi there,

When playing the 40-year mode of GPM, after the first year and getting the sponsorship
deals fixed up, my team keeps on making a $million bucks a race. I just can't figure out
what you can do with all that cash. Already, I've got all facilities, a humongous
engineering staff and go round stealing bits from other teams (Benetton) before every
race. But the money keeps on coming in. It all seems to be getting rather pointless.
After 3.5 seasons, I think there's about $40million in the bank. Any of you vetrans out
there know if things can possibly take a turn for the worse?

Another problem : what do you do with all those `trick' parts you steal from other
teams. If you use all those goodies, the engineer tells you your car is overweight. From
my experience; in my third season, it would seem that running the car with all the basic
bits and no aids would reduce lap times by a couple of secs. Those bits help in the
first season or so though. What gives? And though the car's equipment is steadily
improving, on-track performance seems to deteriorate with improving spec. level

I haven't seem much discussion of GPM in either this or the pc.games.sports group. Has
this game been condemned to all your trash bins. I hope somebody can contribute some
input on introducing an element of challenge into this sim. It was great for the FI
novelty factor earlier on, but it seems to be developing into a yawn now. Like
everybody, I'm playing this while anticipating GPII.

By the way, I remember reading some time back that another publisher had plans for a GP
manager game. This was at the time of GPM's release. It was to have on-track racing
views etc. Any news on it?

Hope to hear from somebody,

Stanley Chan

I got tired of playing F1 on GPM, so I converted it to a "Indycar Manager"
game.  Same diference though, I recently started a two player 40 season
sim with a friend of mine, The first season, neither of us finished better
than 5th, starting the second season I won 45 out of 48 races with my Greg
Moore/Michael Andrettie Newman Haas Team, but towards the end of the 4th
season, I had won all twelve races during the season, and had the drivers
and constructors championship locked up, all my sponsors stopped resigning
with me.  I never decreased the percentage of time I was spending on any
of them, but ended dropping from 3.2 million in sponsorship to about 30
thousand.  I would think that a team that *** would be able to sign
any sponsor they wanted.  Also strange, my friend had the exact same parts
that I had, but he won only 1 race over the first four seasons and was
constantly finishing third or fourth in the constructors.  My last
complaint is about manufacturing in-house parts.  The manual says that F1
teams build up to 80% of their cars in-house, I had 150 engineers spending
93 % of their time on in-house parts, and could only build 2 parts per
season.  Hardly 80% of what I upgraded that season.  Anybody know how to
manufacture more?  I ended up firing 120 of them since 30 people can do
the same job.  I'ts hard not to throw this game out the window.

Yes.
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