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I've recently started playing this game and now got my first 1CC with a time of 0:31:59 (the timing of this game could be up for discussion, so give or take a few seconds). www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YgKf59N3UU

My current procurement strategy goes like this:
- After race 1, buy the red motor
- After race 2, buy the skinny tires
- After race 4, buy the silver motor
- After race 8, buy the scoopers tires (the best tires)
- After race 21, buy the mega motor (the best motor)

I'm currently not seeing a lot of potential room for improvement with the purchases, so I don't expect this to change much (or at all).

It usually takes a few tries before I get an attempt started because of fairly strict money requirements to buy the silver motor. Then I need to worry about the letters to get a new car. I'd like to get the first upgrade after race 9 (the case in the video above), but ideally this is done already after race 7 (or even race 6). It's so rare to get an early upgrade, that I'm not sure I'll be able to get it once I get a run I'm otherwise happy with though. The second upgrade is hopefully achieved by the end of race 14 (race 13 in the video above). If I don't get the car upgraded by race 14 or 15, it often becomes a bit tricky to collect the last letter(s), since the game seems to mostly throw out the late letters (I etc), which are unlikely to be needed at that point.

Finally, I've put down the information I have gathered about speedrunning this game in the knowledge base and will try to keep it updated:
https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/R.C._Pro-Am_II
Thread title:  
Highly Evolved
You find anything about the opponent's AI?  The original has them react to what you do. 
The only thing I was aware of  in the first game was that the opponents speed up if they get hit. In #2, it looks like the other cars get their speed depending on how far behind/in front of you they are. I'm guessing it's also somehow dependent on the track, because the cars are usually in the same order for a given track. And on some tracks, they're much more difficult to catch up with (e.g. 32 and 35) than on other tracks. The car speeds are in addresses 05C2, 05C3, 05C4 and 05C5 if there is anything in particular you want to look at.

Other than that, I think I only have two minor observations:
- The other cars often align behind you on straights. This can be useful for getting them bombed (either by you or by the planes).
- On some tracks, one of the cars always go for a certain item. E.g. on track 13/35, the yellow car always go for the nitro at the start (although not always successfully), on 34, the green car always go for the roll-cage before the straight with the airplane.

Or was it something completely different you were referring to?
Highly Evolved
All right, got a 33:38 with one rerace. So had I not retried, would have been around 50 seconds behind Ktow's current time of 31:59.

One thing I found is that you can grab both 250 money on the first lap if you're on the right line, so if you do that, you don't have to immediately reset for blue car being second in line from the top. 

I'm currently buying freeze before 32 just to complete runs.  Now that I think of it, I don't want to use it as a crutch.  It's only about 6 seconds to get it, so it's not a big deal right now.

I don't have all the courses memorized.  I lose time because of this.

Keeping track of how many nitros I have is incredibly important.
Highly Evolved
Quote from ktwo:
The only thing I was aware of  in the first game was that the opponents speed up if they get hit. In #2, it looks like the other cars get their speed depending on how far behind/in front of you they are. I'm guessing it's also somehow dependent on the track, because the cars are usually in the same order for a given track. And on some tracks, they're much more difficult to catch up with (e.g. 32 and 35) than on other tracks. The car speeds are in addresses 05C2, 05C3, 05C4 and 05C5 if there is anything in particular you want to look at.

Other than that, I think I only have two minor observations:
- The other cars often align behind you on straights. This can be useful for getting them bombed (either by you or by the planes).
- On some tracks, one of the cars always go for a certain item. E.g. on track 13/35, the yellow car always go for the nitro at the start (although not always successfully), on 34, the green car always go for the roll-cage before the straight with the airplane.

Or was it something completely different you were referring to?



Is their speed and traction fixed to every stage?  Does it matter how much money they pick up?  I know it's not true for letters, since I have a memory of an AI not getting the third car on rare occasions.
Glad to hear you're improving your times.

I'm aware of the the possibility of collecting two items in one go. There is very little room for error (or maybe none? possibly pixel-perfect?) though, so I prefer resetting if the blue car is in the wrong spot on race 1. If I enter race 4 with 4700/5200, I usually continue and hope for a "double pick-up" (or being extremely lucky with the other cars leaving an additional star in the U-turn for lap 2) though.

I looked into the upgrades some more. The motor types are stored in 0700-0703 and the tyre types in 0704-0707. Money is stored in 075B-075E (small, multiply by 10) and 075F-0762 (big, multiply by 2560). I haven't seen any cases of the cpus cheating with the money. However, they have individual purchase strategies (not based on a big test sample, so no guarantees that there are no exceptions):
- The blue car buys red, silver, skinny, gold, mega
- The green car buys skinny, silver, gold, dynafit, hyper (,mega)
- The yellow car buys black, skinny, silver, mega

The cpus buy the equipment as soon as they have the money. The rules are more complicated than this. For example, if you give the cpus a ton of money early on, they will still not buy their final equipment. However, during normal gameplay, this should not be relevant.

Due to the different cpu strategies, the blue car will be right on the limit for buying the mega motor before race 32, while the other cars will comfortably have their final upgrades by then (except for the green never being able to buy the mega motor before the game is over). So I guess you could technically try to pick up as many items as possible even after you're fully upgraded in the hope of preventing the blue car from buying mega before race 32. In practice, I don't see this as particularly important though and probably just a way to introduce small time losses all over the place by going out of the way. The cpu stats depend on other, to me unknown, factors than the equipment. The top speed will vary from race to race. Race 32 will be difficult even if the blue car can't buy mega and it's still going to be very feasible to pass even if it buys mega.

I have updated the guide in the kb with these and some other RAM-addresses.

I haven't figured out how the letters are stored in memory. It would be awesome if there were a way of seeing the letters in the memory before the race starts. There are patterns to the letters in some races, so it's definitely not completely random. For example, 'I' is uncommon in the first couple of races (and often the reason for not upgrading after race 6 or 7), while it's the most common letter in some of the later races. If you come over any information about this, I'd be very interested.
Highly Evolved
Got a 32:35 last night.  First no retry run.  Interesting that it's exactly 36 seconds behind your run.

Here's how I'd like to start race 1.

https://clips.twitch.tv/SneakyScrumptiousAlpacaHeyGirl

Would give me an extra $250 buffer in the first race.
Edit history:
ktwo: 2018-04-05 09:42:46 am
As mentioned in darkwing's chat, I found out that unused nitros are worth $250 at the end of a race. This makes getting the silver motor much easier (for me at least) since you then only need 2 start boosts in race 1-4 iso 3. Some of the other races change as well and I'm in the process of re-routing them.

With the new routes (that are partly still wip) and the accompanying higher consistency in the early part of the game, I managed to improve my time to 31:49 ("stream time", starting point when race 1 appears and end point when crossing the finish line of race 36).
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/246831780
+ I got the first car upgrade after race 6. This is the earliest possible (unless you count race 4, which would be TAS-only with the current knowledge about the RNG) and very luck-dependent (10%?), but I have a feeling we will end up with this (or after race 7) being a requirement in the end.
+ No major mistakes
- I got hit 6 times (12, 15, 17 (twice), 24 and 34)
- I didn't get the second car upgrade until race 15. I aim for race 14, but if you get the first upgrade already in race 6 or 7, it should be possible to get it even earlier. It saves very, very roughly 3 secs for each race with the second upgrade.
- A fair amount of minor execution mistakes. It didn't feel like neither more or less than previously, but as I'm getting better at the game, I hope I'll be able to save a bit of time by generally cleaner gameplay.

Around 31:40 looks like a good target time for me at the moment.
Highly Evolved
Got a 32:04 tonight with a rough first 5 stages, but a race 6 car upgrade myself.  Got second one after 14.  My sum of best is in the 31:2x range with I'd say 10 seconds of noise because of motor purchase.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/247210958
Edit history:
ktwo: 2018-04-07 07:39:23 am
There has been a lot of progress done on understanding how the RNG works:
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9164
Much of it is (imo) pretty heavy reading and TAS-only, but there will be stuff that can be used in real-time as well. The discussion is still very much ongoing, but a few things of note:
* The last two letters on race 6 are always identical. That means there is no need to skip the zipper on the right side and go for the the letter instead (unless it's an 'I').
* The letter generation algorithm looks at which letters the different cars miss. The next in line will be favored. Towards race 9, pretty much all cars will be missing 'I'. That's why that letter is so common from race 9 and onwards. And it's also the reason for the early letters being more common in the early game.
* The cpus do actually "cheat" with the letters. Every race, one of the cpus gets an additional letter (in race 2, it's cpu2, in race 3 it's cpu3 etc). This is skipped every fourth race since the player is not part of this "cheating". The letter that is given is the next in order. So if a cpu has 'P', 'R' and 'M', it will get an 'O' for free. This contributes to the heavy skewing of everyone getting the earlier letters and that everyone will miss 'I' around race 9.
* Because of the point above, I'm thinking that it might be better to skip some letters to ensure the other cars don't pollute race after race with the same letters. For example, it's very likely that race 10 contains one or two 'I'. By avoiding them on purpose, one of the other cars will get them instead, which will improve the situation a bit for race 11. And in race 11, one should probably try to avoid the upper letter in the ice section (very likely an 'I'). One can instead go for the lower one, since it's anyways rarely (never?) collected by the other cars.

I expect some more real-time strats to be revealed, even though it's still probably going to always be a lot of RNG involved in getting the car upgrades.

By the way, nice time. I expect a lot more time to come off once you've started to practice the individual levels. I know you're already aware of it, but there is quite a bit of "free" time for you to save just by adjusting the routes a bit.
I just got a 31:47 off-stream (but of course locally recorded). I got hit a few times less than in my previous pb and got the car upgrades in races 6 and 14. Overall, this was more or less offset by worse execution though. The time save corresponds roughly to improved routes.

The new understanding of the letter RNG has some implications, but it's still a game of probabilities and will likely change again from what I'm doing now, so I don't think I'll go too much into it at the moment.
The time is now down to 31:41 (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/249077607, the attempt starts after around 5 min or so). I got slaughtered in race 12 by not collecting the missiles and ended up getting hit three times because of that. Those were the only crashes though, so there was definitely an improvement in the execution this time. Car upgrades in 6 and 14. There is room left for saving time, including some minor route adjustments that I need to test some more.

Later in the stream I got the 2nd car upgrade in race 12, which is a first for me (even though I've had the right letters to do it once or twice before). I was surprised to see that it only ended up saving 3s in total in race 13 and 14. If the time save isn't bigger than that and considering how luck-based it is, I might not consider it something to grind out for in the end.
Highly Evolved
Watched through the run while matching splits.  10 of the 36 races you get a time I haven't matched.  11 of the 36 are times better than my PB but I've beaten.  14 of the 36 my PB is better.  Left out stage 1 'cause of the timing different.  Would likely be in the set of 11 if I included it.

Gives me a good set of stages to practice on once I do so.
Edit history:
ktwo: 2018-04-15 02:21:11 pm
I've added a description of the letter RNG to the guide in the knowledge base. I've also put down my thoughts on the two car upgrades with suggestions on which letters to collect in the different races. I'm not sure how easy it will be to follow for someone else, but I needed to write things down for myself to somewhat structure my thoughts on this topic.

Finally, I've done some minor routing changes in a few races (3, 5, 8, 25, 30 and 34) and uploaded the new videos in the guide as well. Now I feel ready to get back to doing attempts again.

Edit: 31:34 off-stream. The execution was very mediocre. Upgrades in 6 and 12 though.
Edit history:
ktwo: 2018-04-17 07:05:45 am
ktwo: 2018-04-17 07:04:13 am
ktwo: 2018-04-17 07:03:25 am
31:18, www.youtube.com/watch?v=imzTR6AJ3sE
(this run was timed from green light appearing on race 1, which would be "start of player control")

This is the first time I'm actually happy with one of my runs. So many things went right this time and only a few things went wrong. There is still some time to save, but unless my skills and/or routes improve by a level or two, this pb is going to be standing for a while. It could even be my final pb. Let's see how things develop.
+ No crashes (first for me)
+ 1st car upgrade after race 6
+ Several more start boosts than I usually get. Especially in the early races.
+ Thanks to all the additional start boosts, I could buy Mega after race 20 (iso 21).
- Missed two or three zippers (I haven't re-watched, but I think that's it)
- 2nd car upgrade after race 14. Getting it after race 12 doesn't look completely out of the question, so 3-4 seconds could be saved from this alone.
- A handful of minor execution mistakes, but not that many (considering my current skills in this game)