WilliamK wrote:I wouldn't say it's less "In Depth". After all you can build your own cars based on points and such. It is a little more random due to variants in gears and collisions and engine rolls, but it's still alot fo strategy with things like gear placement and corner movement, and when to risk overshooting.
Yeah. I agree. Up front, I don't have much experience with CFR (yet!), but I do have a fair bit of play under my belt for Formula D.
A lot of people mistake Formula D for a complete luck-fest. I think this is wrong. Make no mistake - In the end, the better player in Formula D will win more often than not. However, the planning is more tilted in the realms of risk management/push your luck, and analysing probabilties.
I feel that Formula D has a lot of risk management and push your luck elements. When you assign points, you can go heavy on some of the "disposables" like tires/brakes that you'll use throughout the race, but it comes at the expense of safety buffer points in items like "body" and "handling", which takes you out of the race should you run out of them. So push your luck starts with your build. (to some degree it happens in CFR too, with wears and skill points, but not to the same extent).
Similarly, when you're racing, you've got to plan for mitigating poor dice rolls. There's usually a cautious/measured gear you can select versus something more radical/push your luck. When you choose poorly, or a dice roll punishes you, you've got to use those build points in brakes/tires/gear to pull yourself out of the fire, but those are a limited resource. Then after you're out of those, you should drive more cautiously, or... well, pushing your luck can end your race.
I think CFR will be different in that your planning begins as a static notion of where you're capable of going, given the parameters of your car and the track. But then you've got to take it deeper into the real meat of your planning that is based on a different dimension - and this gets us to the main difference between the games. I think the key difference between the games is that one has sequential turn selection (gear) and the other has nearly simultaneous turns (speed reveal). And because of this particular element, simultaneous turns in CFR/SC, your deeper planning is based on the anticipation of what other players are going to do - because they are going to mess up your basic plan. There's luck you can elect to take in CFR (and skill to mitigate it), but overall, if you go the luck route, it seems to be far more harsh and unforgiving than Formula D.
That's my take for now, and I'll gladly reformulate as a I get a better feel for CFR over the coming months. Feel free to criticize/clarify/disagree.