The myth of defensive and mental training

Just a few analytic words about driver training in defense and mental attributes.
I will start with Jason Chen's list from another thread. I am assuming this list is accurate.

Speed: Fast Corners, Slow Corners, Wet Weather
Physical: Health, Stamina, Weight, Reflexes
Technical: Feedback, Workrate
Defensive: Decisions, Focus
Attacking: Aggression, Overtaking, Bravery, Decisions
Mental: Charisma, Influence, Anticipation, Feedback, Teamwork, Work rate, Bravery, Focus, Composure

My contention is that overemphasis on defensive training and complete lack of mental training is not necessarily a good thing.

I agree that building the "leaning rectangle of speed" is the best approach to driver training. However I think the best path to that end comes from looking at the places that defensive, mental, and attacking have crossover in the attributes that they train.

Both Defense and Attacking train the attribute Decisions
For the sake of this analysis I will only note that Mental trains Bravery and Focus which are also trained by attacking and defense.

In order to build the perfect rectangle it is probably best to avoid crossover training in these attributes. For example training Defense slightly ahead of Attacking will avoid the crossover of decisions.

But even these things are not my primary point.

The attacking attributes of aggression, bravery, and overtaking are just as important to race pace as the defensive characteristic of focus. Especially in the middle to later stages of training your driver. Thus avoiding Attacking training will inhibit your drivers overall speed.

Also the Mental characteristics of anticipation and composure are important to overall race pace.

I have seen my drivers pace seemingly jump by training neglected attacking. I have also seen the same thing by training neglected mental

Define 'rectangle of speed'
also, attacking does NOT train decisions.

What most people seem to do, and I think is best to train speed, phycial, defence AND attacking but you have a free choise of what to train so if you think some thigs are good to train you might gain an advantage on most drivers :D

The "rectangle of speed" is the shape of the training graph when you train speed, physical, attacking and defense and ignore mental and technical.
I assumed Jason's list was accurate. Does mental also train bravery and focus? If not then the crossover that I mentioned does not exist.

I am not that concerned with my own training but more with the idea that seems to prevail that Focus is the be all and end all to race pace and that one push of the mental training button will ruin your driver. These ideas are picked up and perpetuated leading newcomers and some not so newcomers to avoid certain areas of training that are important. 

I only want to be a voice that says that mental training and attacking are not so evil after all.

Ok I've played this game for a long time and here's how I think about it, I'm pretty sure there are no crossovers either.

The oder on what things are important for a driver to change is Phycial, Speed, Defending, Attacking, Mental and then Technical
There are some stats in mental that are more improtant then that but let's not completely get into that. A driver will benefit from all of the training what you do to it, some more then the other. Now I can already hear the question of why everybody is training the drivers without training mental and technical? The higher the level of a driver, the worse the setup the driver makes is (doesn't really make sense but I'm pretty sure this is the case) so if you keep on training mental and technical after already getting the 'rectangle' your driver will be better, but the worse setups make that he'll be slower. Also it's not possible to just use other setups that do work for the driver as it seems like if the driver isn't feeling good with the setup he won't preform as well. 

With this strategy, when I have drivers that have a lot of mental/technical from the start I tend to not fullly train attacking yet and my drivers seem to benefit from that a bit. I'd say never get your drivers over level 14 as it won't make them better in the race. I have my drivers around level 13 and when the other stats (in mental and technical) degrade I fully train attacking. The degrading of a driver gets more if a driver gets older as well so it's harder to keep phycial, speed defending and attacking close to 20 when they're over 30.

hope this helps anyone reading this :D

This may sound slightly niave, but as a newbie i think i can be forgiven for saying, that surely training your driver to a rating of 20 out of 20 for ALL areas can only be a good thing? otherwise what is the point in training past a certain point, in fact what is the point in training at all if you can just employ a new driver that has been trained appropriately by someone else and then let go every time you level up

Tim I stated in the post above why it's not good to have your drivers at rating 20/20, maybe reading it helps. Asking questions which have already been answered doesn't help.

Thanks Yuri, those are some of the things I wanted to mention.

Tim, it turns out that the most important characteristics for race pace are speed, physical, attacking and defense. Because of that, early training (at rookie level) that emphasizes these areas is important. The characteristic of Focus seems to really help lower level drivers so defense is beneficial in the early stages. 

I think that once those four areas are fully developed (level 20) it becomes more important to conteract the atrophy of those characteristics than to develop mental or technical.

I also have noticed that as feedback increases your driver gets more picky about what he accepts as "feels good" and thus getting all of your practice runs to return "feels good" is more difficult. Thus you may want to refrain from training Technical too much. I also feel that training Mental too much kind of makes your driver "cranky" for lack of a better word. But I have the impression that the characteristics of composure and anticipation, which are trained in Mental, especially help for the start of races and also assist in overtaking and defending. So I would not want mental to be too low either.

My list was based on Ricardo SpeedKing's IGP Manager tool v3.5. Link to that thread is here:

http://igpmanager.com/play/?url=forum-thread_7/702

I have trained my drivers and I found his list to be 100% accurate.

Also, according to Justin Sutton (aka FakeGhostPirate, FakeGhostPieRat and etc.), FOCUS is a very beneficial attribute to train. I trained my drivers on defending to get their focus up and their pace improved by around 15 seconds (50% race distance).

This thread is also a very good one about Driver Attributes. Post #16 by Jason Lee is especially good. Link here:

http://igpmanager.com/play/?url=forum-thread/4509

I trained my drivers on Speed, Physical, Defending, Attacking and Technical (roughly in that order; I trained Physical every other race), and they are winning races consistently in a very competitive league. (even though that's largely down to 100% design, but I'm beating other teams that also have 100% design)

I find Technical to be slightly beneficial in the wet conditions and without any negative effect. Link to my drivers:

http://igpmanager.com/play/?url=team-driver/381672

http://igpmanager.com/play/?url=team-driver/68038

Mental Training of drivers allows for higher Gear ratios & better Brake settings

I agree with Jason Lee with the exception of "don't touch Mental" I have direct experimental evidence that this is not good advice. I agree that mental probably sould not be trained too high but "don't touch mental" is going too far. I believe that any losses in speed attributed to mental training were actually due to atrophy of other characteristics while training mental and that the mental training itself did not slow down the driver.

I have never trained mental on any of my driver yet, but I might experiment with that.

I race with one manager that never trains mental but he hired a driver that had fairly high mental and technical stats and that driver has never shown any lack of speed. Quite the contrary.

Then if your list is accurate the crossover effects may have led some to think that their drivers were slowed down by mental training because the graph may not have filled out to the edges in attacking and defending due to decisions and bravery and focus being assigned to the mental area of the graph. Thus something like "I trained mental and now my graph won't go all the way to max in defending or attacking"

Nah. I will give an example. Focus is under both defending and mental, so training either one will train focus. I trained Decisions and Focus to 20 by training defending without training mental at all.

Jason, that is not what I meant. I wasn't claiming that you couldn't get the attributes to level 20 but only that the graph may look different thus "tricking" some into thinking that they had not gotten full benefit from training because of mental training. Thus if Mental trained bravery several times putting the growth in the graph in the mental area, then when you had completed the attacking training (all attributes at 20) your graph would not show attacking fully to the edge of the graph.

My point is to show reasonable cause that those who say "don't touch mental" may have misinterpreted something to come to that conclusion. Weather it was by seeing a graph that did not fill out as expected or attributing atrophy in other areas to loss of speed from training mental.

Okay I see what you meant Leslie. But at least I didn't see any benefit from training mental. In my league there are quite some drivers that are lvl 19, but my drivers (lvl 14) are at least as fast as them, if not faster. (typed from another of my three accounts)