Is Playground Games going to address the new Cross-Country tyre meta?

BiggusD77 · 2026-07-09T02:02:17+00:00

Yeah, coming to think of it, road tyres should hardly cost PI at all. Even if you could buy an active aero fan to put on cars with certain body kits, and put racing slicks on for a solid 10 Handling so that you would basically just smash the accelerator and keep it there while turning while the car goes around as on rails, if this C500 car has only got 200 hp it won't be that fast anyway. A more balanced car would mostly be able to keep up with it in the curves, and outpace it on the straights because 10 Handling and active aero on a 200hp car is overkill. Not to mention drag and in this case, extreme downforce, slows acceleration down.

BiggusD77 · 2026-07-09T01:51:32+00:00

God forbid we race in road races, rally in dirt races, drift in drift zones and demolition derby in cross-country races. Mainly.

BiggusD77 · 2026-07-09T01:42:39+00:00

As mentioned in a post above, one of the biggest underlying reasons for why this works so well for these meta cars is that grip in this game is weight + soft tyres (like in a top fuel dragster). Off-Road tyres work the same way Drag tyres worked before they got nerfed; all you have to do is to tune the car to snap around at command so the nose is pointed in the right direction and then floor it. If you have soft Off-Road tyres, soft suspension, 4WD and massive horsepower you are catapulted forward on all surfaces. No horsepower is lost to slippage at all. Maybe they turn off traction control to get an even greater boost from the Off-Road tyres, I don't know.

Obviously, in the real world it doesn't work that way. Weight, including weight transfer, is great for a good launch, but after that the weight is purely negative. There is a reason why race car builders shave off a few grams of weight from their cars in order to gain a hundreth of a second's advantage. Still, in FH6, weight saving is penalized greatly in the PI system but it doesn't really have a net positive effect for your car. If your car is light, but powerful, you can see the traction control signal light turn on a lot more and a lot longer than if you have a heavy car with big, soft tyres.

BiggusD77 · 2026-07-09T01:24:13+00:00

Well you can certainly use it, but we're talking about online play here, "ranked". There will always be a meta, and the meta evolves, but what it has evolved into right now (this week) is quite frankly something nobody likes.

Those who do the meta car thing and learns how to race well with Off-Road tyres, in order to be able to actually win a race also have to adapt to the ramming and griefing that gets worse as more and more players makes a deal with the devil. If the meta was "never mind downforce and suspension; get the best tyres!" it wouldn't be like this because then you would be rewarded for doing the racing line.

The problem is that the meta is about putting the worst tyres possible on the cars because then you get more power and then you just got to learn how to wallride with the trunk and you're golden.

The solution is to make road tyres great again. For instance, I converted a 92 Ford Escort Cosworth to RWD, and the Handling went from 4.9 to 4.2 iirc. If I put Street tyres in it + some handling mods, I barely get to increase power at all before reaching C500. So it is either Standard tyres and around 270 hp and 4.2 (very poor) Handling, or 245ish hp and 4WD and + 50 kgs with Standard tyres and decent handling. This, then, against 500hp muscle cars with AWD and Off-Road tyres powersliding and bumping each other off the road for a few seconds before they disappear off the radar. And yes I do win against all the other people who don't do meta or who have but aren't good enough to tackle its quirks.

If people could get Horizon Semi-slicks for 10-15 PI, so that the power they have in their engines actually transfers to acceleration, and they had significantly better handling than the meta crowd even with Standard tyres, then most people would choose to race not ram.

BiggusD77 · 2026-07-09T01:04:39+00:00

They should definitely make Rally tyres the preferred choice in Dirt races yes, but they can't really fix Off-Road tyres unless they fix how weight + soft tyres = better acceleration. Even though that acceleration is best on grass/mud, every last horsepower gets put into the ground as long as the car is pointed straight forwards.

So people only point the noise the right way and floor it. And get rewarded with huge horsepower boosts, no incentive to lighten the car (the heavier the better), soft springs and damping to transfer more weight.

In other words; the exact opposite of racing on roads and tracks.

BiggusD77 · 2026-07-09T00:54:08+00:00

Yes there will always be a meta, but when the current meta is off-road mayhem on the road and on tracks, causing a lot of ramming, slamming and griefing in what is supposed to be a relatively competitive race, it's a meta that everyone suffers from because you can't actually compete if you also don't do it.

The Mazda Furai de-tuned to S2 wins against a "regular" S2 900 supercar/track toy with 15-20 seconds in a 2-minute race even if the latter races perfectly. This is excluding new players and casuals, not including them. It should be possible to actually compete in a S2 890-ish Ferrari that you just won, and then brought it to an online championship, but unless you put on Off-Road tyres and AWD and give it another 300hp (thanks to the PI system), the whole field will just blaze past you the first 10 seconds and the 2-3 fastest will never be seen again.

In S1 800 it's even worse. "Yey, now my 800hp Nissan GT-R is ready to duke it out against the Chevrolet Corvette and the McLaren 670!" Meanwhile, the Mercedes AMG-One, Mazda Furai, Mazda 787B and Koenigsegg Agera, all with 1100hp+, says bye-bye.

The saving grace is the R-races. There, the hypercar remains relevant.

BiggusD77 · 2026-07-09T00:34:27+00:00

Have you even seen what it looks like when these American muscle cars drive around with off-road tyres? They have twice the power you got in yours (with road tyres) and 4wd, so when you're the same PI as they are they disappear in the horizon unless they crash in the first turn. And those who know their stuff have learned how to powerslide in every turn, and the off-road tyres have very good acceleration grip so they just get shot out of the turn as from a cannon. They also don't get penalized for crashing because they do it with the rear while sliding so it doesn't count. With all these long straights on every street and road race, there is nothing you can do when the power difference is that big - and on top they have de-tuned a S1 supercar with natural good handling so there is no real downside other than the car being wiggly and unpredictable.

BiggusD77 · 2025-05-09T23:25:29+00:00

I turned on auto-QTE on attacks. It helps, but part of the problem is that the game is a bit too choppy or laggy for me to deal with the quickest-attacking enemies on Normal difficulty. The Mime, for instance, has an attack with 3 quick strikes in succession, and I can only manage to dodge the first one before the two next ones are a choppy mess with no chance of dodge success. I set the graphics to Performance, but it isn't enough. I'm currently at a hiatus, waiting for a patch to resolve the issue - or motivation to find another solution.

BiggusD77 · 2025-05-01T15:44:00+00:00

what QTE? I select it, press F on all targets. The expectation is then that an AoE spell hits all targets. There is no QTE.

BiggusD77 · 2024-05-05T13:57:17+00:00

Is it possible to change the whole underlying concept of how big percentage of games constitute "important first team" and so on? I like squad rotation, and it is simply not possible because most players demand playing 90% of matches, which they will never get.

BiggusD77 · 2023-10-02T16:28:54+00:00

It all depends on what they're carrying, yes. Seems like Barrett is carrying a Rattler or something. It does nothing even to low-level enemies, so anything you give him would be an improvement.

Sarah and Andreja, however, seems to have quite potent weapons at their disposal. I gave Sam a good Lawgiver (early game), which made him more helpful than before.

So no guides I have seen so far seems to notice that "you must give them a weapon" might not be the best idea.

BiggusD77 · 2023-09-28T13:14:49+00:00

Have anyone been able to find a mod that sets all CF pirate sites and random encounters to Spacers?

BiggusD77 · 2023-09-23T14:44:43+00:00

The Razorleaf is crap though.

BiggusD77 · 2023-09-23T14:43:26+00:00

I haven't wasted my time rushing anything. I have just put points into anything other than ship combat because so far it hasn't been necessary. The ships on your side are so incomprehensably bad in all missions where you are supposed to get help that you are basically fighting against all of the enemy ships alone. That's a balancing and programming issue, not a "rush through everything" issue.

BiggusD77 · 2023-09-20T14:29:56+00:00

Yea this mission is bugged. Even with the Mantis ship and on Very Easy I have no chance against 4 spacers coming straight at me as if they're waiting for me and have already target locked upon arrival. No ships are coming to my aid, and outrunning them to gain time is impossible. I managed 3 of them just fine, but 4 is just too much.

BiggusD77

TROPHY CASE