General Career Tips

Simulate Qualifying

If you're at the head of the pack during qualifying, you have a great chance of winning the race.

Often times you can get a feel for your chances of winning a race even before it begins, thanks to Forza 2's on-by-default qualification simulation. Before every Career Mode match, your 360 will take all of the cars in the race and simulate qualifying laps for them, and rank them accordingly on the starting grid. If you're in first place on the grid at the outset, then there's a good chance that your car is the best on the track, and you'll probably be winning the race no matter what. If you're in second place, and the car in front of you is a different model vehicle, then it will likely get a bit of a jump on you off the line, but you should be able to overtake it with skilled driving.

For our purposes, we didn't even bother to try races where we qualified in fourth place or lower, as we found that the car that qualified in first place is usually almost impossible to catch up to in these situations, barring some severe pack-ramming on the first turn. In situations like these, we just quit out and waited for a more powerful car to come along before trying the circuit again. If you really want the car that's available as a first-place prize, though, feel free to switch everything down to easy mode and give a difficult race a whirl in the best car you've got.

Getting Extra Cash

You can earn extra cash in Forza 2 by adjusting some of the difficulty settings in the options menu. Here are the best options for getting extra cash without making the game too frustrating.

Enable Simulation Damage: The default damage setting, Limited, will still let you damage your car; it'll just prevent systems from taking more than 50% damage. Unfortunately, that's generally going to be more than enough to cripple your car and prevent you from taking first place, which - let's be honest - should be your goal for every race you enter. If you're going to restart the race when you take enough damage anyway, you may as well set damage to Simulation mode. You'll earn 10% more credit for each race, and if you're able to get out front of the pack and avoid collisions, you're unlikely to take any damage anyway.

Bump the AI Settings: If you're interested in even more cash, then after racing a little while, you'll be able to set the A.I. Difficulty to Hard for a 10% bonus to your rewards. This isn't going to be an easy setting to deal with if you're like us and have a tendency to play with a loose, arcade-like driving style, but for races where you can bring a preponderance of firepower to bear, this is essentially free money. What we mean by this is that after you unlock certain powerful cars by winning races, you should find yourself absolutely dominating some of the races that they're eligible for, even without modding them.

The AI settings will directly affect your opponents' speed, so don't play on hard unless you're sure of your abilities.

True, some of the cars that you receive for winning races are going to be trash, especially early on, but some of them, such as the Tommy Kaira M20b that's unlocked in the Goodyear 150HP Invitational that you can compete in at level 7, are expensive and powerful vehicles. (The Impreza retails for 141,000 credits, for instance.) The reason these cars will help you win on Hard difficulty is because they're going to simply outspeed most of the competition in the races that you've unlocked, allowing them to pull away from the pack in the straights, even over short straits, which thus makes these races much more forgiving of turning mistakes on your part. The aforementioned Impreza will be able to easily win races like the Asian Open, the AWD Shootout, and the Boosted Shootout, all without any modifications, even when the opponents are set to Hard.

You'll need to judge the relative strength of your car before deciding whether or not to run with Hard A.I., though, as harder A.I. settings in a field with relative parity will probably result in some swift drops to the back of the pack, unless you're quite good at following a proper line and cornering. Still, though, if you're able to beat cars with both simulation damage and Hard A.I. on, you can increase your winnings by 20% per race.

Maximum Cashola: Of course, if you're absolutely destroying the competition in a certain event, then feel free to switch all of the difficulty options so that you get extra cash. The maximum boost you can earn is +50%, which isn't quite as good as the first game's +100% bonus, but which will definitely help your financial stability in the long run, especially when you get into the races with big rewards. Switching off all of your automated systems will result in a car that's very difficult to control in turns, though.

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