Holy crap, Ace, nice! My wife is training for a Mount Whitney hike in less than a month...73 miles sounds mind-blowing. Major props.
And Don--the only recommendation I'd make is not so much stages, but maybe distance variations. We consistently had a "Long" stage on 1 and 2, then a bunch of sprints on 3-6. It'd be cool to start with a sprint, then a long, another couple sprints, etc. I don't care about the number of stages (and I'm thoroughly against restarts, as well).
I don't really care about engineers or setups as I never touch a setup anyway...until I can get every ounce of speed out of a stock setup, trying to adjust it is pointless for me. And I routinely botch 25 corners per stage, so I'm well off the need for any setup stuff.
The lotto and random team/car would be interesting.
I would REALLY like to see a full season of one car before moving to the next, though. I think with a game this difficult, guys will see the most improvement going from rally to rally and having a predictable handling model as they move forward. I know it takes me several runs in a car to even begin to feel like I'm coming to grips with it, so changing cars every week is really stunting learning and that sense of accomplishment, IMO.
Dirt Rally is the Dark Souls of racing games. The more consistent we can get in attacking a particular car/course, the better we get. But when we go from a heavy, low horsepower slug to a fast and heavy slug to a 4WD B class car to a 00's speed machine, it's going to be tough to really come to grips with what's going on under the hood. I can totally see what you were aiming for, starting slow and going fast, but some of the "middle ground" cars at least offer some speed with some ability to get loose with it, without having to relearn everything a week later.
I think this is the perfect DSP racing game. It doesn't require a massive time commitment, we can run them as we can, and it's really just about seat time and learning. I think varying the stage setup would really help to add some variety into it. And as far as engineers go, I have no idea--but if that means dudes who have done a bunch of career racing and have a better team can end up doing better than casual guys who just hop on and mash the gas, I would be against that. I like the fixed setup options.
If nothing else, choosing sort of a fixed "vehicle" might make it cool, but that's harder to do. Everybody has a car that they'd prefer, and other than the Peugeot, where it was the lightest AND highest HP car, there weren't any standouts that seemed head and shoulders better than the other ones, so far.
Thanks again for putting this together, as I hadn't touched Dirt Rally hardly at all on PC, but once this started it feels like it's just about all I do now
