jztemple2 wrote: Thu Jul 27, 2023 2:49 pm
I picked up F1® Manager 2023, got it on pre-order through GMG which gave me a discount. I got the Deluxe version that has extra content and released four days early, so I'm playing it today.
I had last year's version, which was a disappointment, but it was the first year Frontier was doing a game like this and I'm hoping that they've learned a bit and this one will be better. However, I'm back on JA3
so I might not get to F1® Manager 2023 till later on.
Since I assume I'm pretty much the only person that's going to play this I won't bother with a dedicated thread
Put in four hours on this. To start my first career run-through I picked the Aston Martin team. I didn't bother with the car design and parts building for the first time period before the first race weekend, which was Bahrain. The tutorial recommended I left the game auto-sim the three practice sessions so I did that, but I did play out the qualifying. I managed to get Stroll fifth and Alonso nineth, about what we saw compared to the early season performance of the real team, although with Alonso ahead of Stroll.
In the race Stroll and Sainz had a good battle for the first part of the race, but Sainz eventually stayed ahead of Stroll before the first pit stop. After that Stroll had an uneventful race, finishing fifth. Alonso on the other hand got more and more frustrated which effected his performance (that's something new in the game this year, a driver's mood will affect his driving). Since I figured Alonso just needed me to turn him loose I did that, telling him to be aggressive on the overtakes and push his tyres. Turns out to be not such a good idea. He managed to hit
both Mercedes, earning him two five second penalties in separate instances and necessitating the change of the front wing. And then he rammed an Alfa Romeo which cause major damage to his floor, not to mention getting him a third penalty
. Since he had no chance of getting points I retired his car. No doubt the ride home on the jet will be
very interesting.
Overall Frontier has fixed and tweaked a lot of the issues with last year's edition. The dialog clips are more varied, the race graphics look better, the cars are following the actual racing lines and the overtakes look very good. As I said I didn't do the practice sessions, but the qualifying sessions felt very real, with legitimate decisions over tyres, fuel loads, cool down laps, etc.
The player control over the race was also much better than last year. There are more options to give to the driver, such as staying off kerbs and trying to keep in clean air to prevent overheating. The settings for driving style (push, conserve, etc) are still finite settings rather than a true analog adjustment, but the choices are pretty good. As before, there is a lot of data available to view to make informed decisions but it is presented a bit better this time. There were a better variety of random events such as bad pitstops. In this one race there wasn't a Safety Car period or VSC, but supposedly both those contingencies are in the game this year.
It's still early days, I haven't explored design and manufacturing, staff management, facilities building and maintenance, etc. But I'll check those out in the next few hours of gameplay. Again, if there are folks interested I'll start a dedicated thread, but otherwise I'll just drop some comments here.
are going to feel comfortable fairly quickly. This isn't a slam against the game, quite the contrary, it shows how well the game does at modeling Formula One. Obviously the financial and design/manufacturing parts of it are vastly simplified, but to do well at race team management during, for instance, a Monaco weekend will greatly benefit from some real world F1 knowledge. 
