Analysis of Progression and Gameplay

Overview

This guide for Version 1.0.4.8 from 26. Apr. 2020 mainly focuses on the ‘Event’ and ‘Coin’ modes of gameplay and provides information on the best car choices and racing categories to progress quickly and earn good money along the way. It provides information on prize money and car costs, as well as the number of races per category so you can decide which events and vehicles to best choose next. Does it pay off to buy the most expensive car all the time or can you go with a cheap car for some events and save the money for later on?Unexplained gameplay fundamentals, such as the effect of the car’s speed and acceleration stats as well as the turbo will also be touched upon.The final chapter deals with getting the achievements in-game.

Introduction

Ultimate Racing 2D is at times a remarkably difficult top-down racing game, but in addition to navigating the racing tracks, it also features a financial aspect that can be used for faster and lasting success.

Although there is a chapter on driving tips, I feel that there is no shortcut to mastering the cars than just practicing with them. For this reason, much of this guide is focused on information that can be relayed by writing, which means there will be lots of graphs regarding the financial progression within the game.

Little is known about the technical aspects of the cars, but what little I have analysed, I have included. This mostly encompasses the top speed, acceleration and turbo stats of the cars, as well as some information on the effect of tyre wear.

For the Event mode, there is a quick reference table so you can see what events are upcoming.

As for achievements, initially I didn’t think I would succeed in obtaining them all, but it turned out to be easier than expected, so I included a simple guide as final chapter.

Career Events

In the Event mode you can can choose between buying cars of your own choice, each having slightly different specifications (more on that later) but highly variable prices, or use an unchanging car. If you choose to buy your cars, quality certainly commands a premium, as some cars will cost you several millions! If you use a fixed car, the team will be determined for you, in some events you will be assigned a good car, in other events a less good car. This difference is the reason why the expected finish position to pass to the next category depends on the mode (buy or fixed).

A better car will make it easier to win the event and thus earn more prize money, but not all events are equal. It is best to save ones money to buy only those expensive high quality cars where you have a high payout in relation to your investment in the car.

If you invest in a good car, these high-payout events will be easier to win, so that you can redo them a few times to build up your money reserves and buy more good cars lateron, so everything becomes easier in the end, or vice versa, you can increase the difficulty level.

This next chart shows you the prize money, again for an assumed difficulty setting of 50%, on the y-axis versus the cost of the best car in the category on the x-axis. The chart is double-logarithmic, so the underlying curve is exponential in nature!

The red broken line from the bottom left to the upper right corner connects points where the prize money is equal to the best car cost, so any events above this red line are highly beneficial to you and in events below this line the cost of the best car may not be worth it compared to the payout.

The graph shows that after the update v1.0.4.7 the events are balanced. So, if you are confident you can win, it is ok to buy the best car or at least a good one.

In order to give an estimate of the complexity of an event, the next graph displays the number of races in an event. Most have only 2-3 races, though there are outliers with 6 or even 8 races. The number of laps per race or lap duration is not factored into this graph.

To see how many laps each race has, as well as other stats, use the table in the Quick Reference chapter.

The prize money depends on the difficulty setting in a roughly linear fashion as shown in the next graph. The graph is scaled such that a difficulty of 100 gives you 100% of the prize money. Consequently, a difficulty of 50 will still give you 78% of the prize money and a difficulty of 0 yields 61%. Increasing the difficulty to the max of 120 gives you 110% of the prize money you would get at a difficulty of 100.

Quick Reference

The following table summarizes all events as a quick reference:

Coin Mode

In the Coin mode you use money to unlock categories, so unlike in event-mode, you can skip categories if you like as long as you can pay for the new class. In order to advance quickly, in general it is best to choose the highest class you can afford and rough it out until you have accumulated enough money to advance again. It may pay off to come 4th a few times in a high class than 1st in a lower class.

To finetune your advancement through the classes, the next graph shows the prize money awarded to you if you win (at an assumed difficulty rating of 50) and the race consists of a single lap (more on the formula how to calculate the prize money as function of laps follows).

The graph yields no big surprises, the transition is more or less smooth, there is no clear preference for any class, so just jump to the highest one you can afford in order to get the highest prize money payout.

The graph also indicates that on average you might need two to three races to recoup the unlock fee, so it is prudent to switch to the next class once you have regained enough money from the event to break even and a little beyond.

As for buying a better car, or even the best one, I present the next graph, which correlates prize money with the combined unlock fee and the cost for the best car. In my opinion the price is just too steep to justify investing in the best car, since you might need around 10 races to recoup your investment. If anything, go with a cheaper car than the very best.

Finally, here is the log-log overview graph for the coin mode. As you can see, overall it is very balanced with no clear outlier to exploit.

The prize money in coin mode is predominantly calculated from:

• Number of Laps
• Difficulty
• (Number of cars if lower than 10)

The baseline I use here is 1 lap and 50 difficulty because it is easy to calculate the prize money for other combinations from the following table. As you move to the right of the table, the difficulty increases, and as you go down, the lapnumber increases. The value at the intersection of row and column is the multiplier that you can apply to the log-log graph shown above.

So, if you get 110000 $ for winning a 1-lap race at 50 % difficulty with the Combine, you would get 220000 for a 11-lap race at the same difficulty or 330000 for a 6-lap race at 100 % difficulty.

Car Technical Data

The menu in which you can choose the cars displays 4 stats of the cars:

• Speed
• Acceleration
• Turbo
• Grip

The bars representing these values suggest a large disparity between the cars, such that the cheapest option (top left) would be much slower than the most expensive option (bottom right).

My non-exhaustive testing with 3 different classes (Go-Kart, Vintage Cabriolet and Formula A, in order to have a slow, a medium fast and a very fast datapoint in every category) indicates that the variation in top speed between the cheapest car within a category (blue) and the fastest car in the same category (red) is only in the range of 8% as shown in the next graph. This is the same for all tested categories. 8% is certainly noticeable, but far from the suggested differences in the car menu.

The data was generated on the long straight of Bahrain with a tyre wear setting of 0 and clear weather conditions in qualifying mode without other cars (to avoid the slipstream effect) within Coin mode. The time to pass structures at the start and end of the pitlane was measured via recorded video and frame-by-frame analysis.

Using the turbo gives a speed boost of roughly 30%.

Using the same ideal conditions as before, the car was accelerated from a standstill at the last grid position and driven to the finish line in a straight line. The elapsed time upon crossing each of the 10 gridlines along the way with the front and rear tyres was recorded, which together with the driven distance (converted to pixels) resulted in 20 datapoints for distance over time.

This procedure was repeated three times with the same car (Formula A – Red Fury) in championship mode, so that the acceleration value could be changed independently of the other values as shown in the next graph. The values are denoted 0, 5 and 10, which correspond to the minimum, medium and maximum acceleration value on the slider.

This resulted in the following distance-time graph:
The datapoints along the curves are from the front and rear tyres crossing the painted gridlines on the starting straight. The absolute values of the quadratic fit are not important, but if one assigns the largest value 100% and scales the other values accordingly, you get the next graph which shows relative acceleration values depending on the car’s acceleration stat.

From it, it follows that the highest value accelerates 10% faster than the lowest value.
This may not sound much, but corresponds to 0.2 s alone from this relatively short acceleration stretch down the starting grid, so over a whole lap with lots of acceleration it can be quite significant.

Similar testing as for determining the top speed of the cars was performed for the turbo.
When the driver uses the turbo, the car accelerates especially fast and reaches a higher top speed. Assumptions were that the more expensive car would either be able to use the turbo for longer time, or that it propels the car to faster top speeds.

Testing, however, revealed that the top speed of the cheapest and the most expensive car were identical when the turbo was used!

Also, the duration was independent of the car and measured at 5 seconds.

My temporary conclusion is that differences in the turbo stats are yet to be implemented in future patches.

While subjectively I can feel a noticeable difference in grip between the cheapest and the most expensive car, I don’t know yet how to quantify it with experiments. Again, if you have an idea, please let me know in the comments.

Ideally, it would be a long curve (180 or even 360 degrees) of a constant radius and measure the maximum sustainable speed, or the smallest sustainable radius of the car’s trajectory, but I haven’t found a good place for such a test yet.

Currently (v1.0.4.8) the tyre wear is independent of the driving style, so there is no way to degrade tyres slower through careful driving- they will always degrade according to the tyre wear setting depending on the driven distance. However, the developer has expressed plans to change this behaviour in future updates, so this might change at a later stage.

Driving tips

Here is a small collection of findings in my playthrough that might be useful:

• Tyre wear is brutal. It is nigh impossible to drive on worn out tyres. Make sure to change them before they reach the final third. I often preferred hard tyres over soft, just to give me more constant behaviour over time.
• The time lost from worn tyres (or wrong tyres for the weather conditions) in curves is significant and usually the time lost during a pitstop to get fresh tyres is well worth it.
• You can change the tyres for the pitstop at any time during the race. Also, you can perform late changes directly during the pitstop too if you are quick.
• The traditional racing line (approach from the outside, touch the inner apex, let the car move towards the outside of the track again) is the fastest, as is to be expected. But if due to traffic you have the choice between the inner and the outer line, the inner line of the curve is advantageous more often than not over the outer line because it is the shorter line and because you can ‘lean’ on other cars so that you remain on your line but they are pushed to the outside and possibly even into the grass or gravel.
• In general the penalty of driving on grass or gravel is harsh and not worth it, even if you cut the track, but there are a few corners where the impact is low, so you can try experimenting.
• On oval tracks definitely try to get as close to the inner boundary as possible, it is the fastest.
• Also, especially on ovals, don’t be afraid to use pretty large slip angles, especially at the exit of the curve to avoid hitting the wall. The grip at these large drift angles is still excellent.
• Brakes are very weak by default. I strongly suggest using the Options/Controls/Calibration menus to set the brake rate to the maximum of 100 (see screenshot below). This helps me tremendously in driving in a controlled manner! (Thank you Applimazing for the comment on that in the discussion forums)
  
• I find it stabilizes the car at corner entry if you apply them in advance and trail brake into the curve a bit. An interesting method that I found during writing of this guide was that you can apply full brake and throttle at the same time and the car will still drive, but in a very controlled manner. Try it if you have troubles going too fast into curves and sliding off the track too often.
• Slipstreaming works. You gain speed if you drive close behind another car. It isn’t huge, but clearly noticeable and helps you overtake on straights. It can also be used against you, so you might want to swerve to avoid giving the car behind you a draft.
• Try to keep an eye on the weather slider during a race. It provides you with a general tendency and can determine whether you can gamble and stay out or prepare for the next pitstop with a different tyre set.
• There is a weather report for light rain and heavy rain. With light rain you can gamble and stay a while on slicks (soft or hard), especially if you have only one more lap to go for example.
• If you are at the start of the race and are given the choice of tyres and you notice that everyone else is on wet tyres although it is sunny with no cloud in sight, take wets, they know something you don’t most of the time. It will rain shortly. 🙂
• Also, while there is a bit of water on the track you can stay out on wets just fine even if it is sunny. There is an indicator for water on the track right next to the weather indicator on top of the screen (vertical blue bar as shown in the screenshot below) and you can see water spray behind the cars if the track is wet.
  
• If the race is turbo-enabled, don’t forget to use it, especially down the straights. It gives a significant boost in speed (roughly 30%, depending on the class).
• Investing the time to turn on qualifying (e.g. 1 lap) to place yourself a few positions further ahead than last can have a large impact on how well your race goes and on your finishing position, since having to plow through the whole field otherwise will cost you valuable time.

Achievements

Most achievements are self-explanatory here, so I will focus almost exclusively on those that involve ultimate difficulty and the one that requires 1,000,000,000 $.

All those achievements that require you win a pole position, a race or a championship in ultimate difficulty can in my opinion be done easiest on a short oval track, preferably dirt ovals or even ice. Put the difficulty slider to 100, pick one of the dirt ovals (perhaps Czechoslovakia or Finland, New Zealand is also good), and do 1 lap of qualifying until you are first. Maintain a very tight line through the long curves and if needed, push any followers to the side to maintain your lead. Do that a few times in the race as well and you should win a race. Then do that for all races in the event and even if you don’t win them all, you have a good shot at winning the championship.

The car I chose for this was the Monster Truck, since I had bought the best car there and the payout was very high as well, so win-win, but I am confident any (red) car will do well.

For the 1 billion $ achievement just use the analysis in the Coin mode chapter to get to the Formula A category as fast as possible and then do a few runs. Thanks to the large prize sums in this class, a billion will be yours in no time. There is no need to buy the best car, I suggest just lowering the difficulty and going with the cheapest car (blue).

For the season achievement, you can turn off qualifying and load a simple track, like one of the dirt ovals as many times as you can into the season roster (e.g. Czech Republic x 12). Pick the car of your choice and try to reach the stated goal. Even if you don’t meet it, you can keep trying with one of the other cars that remain open to you. Within minutes you should get the achievement of 10 seasons and if you set the difficulty to 100 for one race (I suggest turning qualifying on for this), the ultimate difficulty season one as well.

Changelog

13. Apr. 2020

• First version of this guide, based on game version 1.0.4.6

18. Apr. 2020

• Updated prize money chart in the event mode to reflect the changes made in v1.0.4.7
• Added chapter on acceleration.
• Added comment on brake rate setting.

14. May 2020

• Modified the paragraph on tyre wear paragraph to reflect the changes from v1.0.4.8 where the tyre wear level no longer affects top speed.
• Included tip to turn on qualifying to give yourself a better starting position.
• Rescaled the payout graph function to 100% for a difficulty of 100.

15. May 2020

• Added car icons to quick reference table.
• Added ‘fixed car’ event mode finishing positions.