The Completionist Life: Forza Horizon 4 (Part IV — Becoming a Tuner)
Ah, Forza Horizon 4! A game that lets you take over six hundred cars and turn some of them into completely uncontrollable rocket platforms.
Last time on The Completionist Life: Forza Horizon 4, we talked a little bit about what a “base tune” was, and how to set one up (in a particular style) for the Road Race skillset. Today we’re going to talk at least a little bit about a lot of stuff! Because there are several different types of races, and several reasons to mess with the inner workings of a good (or potentially good) vehicle. So strap in; it’s a lot.
We’ll recap real quick so we’ve got it all in one place, and that’ll let me go a little further in-depth about why everything is what it is.
Base Tune Theory
The way I see it, a base tune is whatever settings are generally close to whatever works for your style of driving. The closer you can estimate your acceptable range of tunings, the more effective your base tune is for you. And if you’re not particularly competitive — if you’re not going for a world record, or things like Online Adventure or the global rankings thereof, or aggressively pursuing Rank 20 Tuner — then base tuning might be all you ever need.
The base tuning that I apply to most of my cars is, as stated a few times before, entirely based on HokiHoshi’s videos, which you can watch instead of reading through this, if you prefer.
The Dreaded “Formula”: Tuning Rollbars With Math
Before you start your tune, find the stats listed above. You can find them when you’re selecting a part in the Upgrades window, or selecting a vehicle from your Garage. The one we need is “Front”, which tells you how much of the car’s weight distribution is on the front half of the car. We’ll use this to balance the car’s rollbars, springs, and dampers.
If we had a vehicle whose weight was exactly 50/50 balanced front and rear, we would set the sliders for these three things so that they all lined up exactly in the middle. For this car, the rollbars, springs, and dampers will be set according to the weight distribution: 60% front, 40% rear. If you feel comfortable estimating where to put these sliders, you don’t need to use a formula, but it can help. This section will help you do the math.
The easiest way to demonstrate the use of “the formula” is with the rollbars, because every vehicle has the same range of values for rollbars: from 1 to 65.
(Max — Min) / 100 * Front + Min
Plugging the correct range and Front value in will give us this:
(65–1) / 100 * 60 + 1 = 39.4
which just happens to be the value we used for the Front Rollbar in Part III. To get the Rear Rollbar, you can either do the same calculation again (but using 40 instead of 60, to represent the rear weight%), or do this:
(Max + Min) — Front_Value
which will give you: (66) — 39.4 = 26.6
So I’d base tune a car with 60% Front by setting its Front Rollbar to 39.4, and its Rear Rollbar to 26.6.
If you don’t have a calculator handy when you’re tuning rollbars, you can estimate by setting front and rear rollbars to 33, and moving them 0.6–0.7 ticks for every 1% away from 33.
Then, you can either use the formula above to tune Springs and Dampers, or simply adjust their sliders so that they line up with the positions of the sliders on the Antiroll Bars page.
Phew. Sorry about all that math. Anyway, on with the rest of the tuning.
Base Tunes
If you want to follow along, I’m going to try these out on an Abarth Fiat 131 fitted with tires and suspension to match the type of course we’re tuning to. It’s a smaller, boxy-but-versatile rally car that we can set up for any of the basic disciplines — road, rally, drag, street, and even drifting. It’s more likely to excel at rally and offroad races, but it’s good enough to show you just how much different you can make a single platform feel with mods and proper tuning.
I generally feel that the various Rally championships have a good selection of similarly versatile cars, so if you have a favorite, give it a try.
Road Race Base Tune
Some of the settings here will be a set number, or based on the formula above, while others will be a general range to start from. Starting in these ranges should give you a tune that is balanced enough to drive competitively, while giving you some room to experiment and eventually move outside of those ranges if you want to change the way it drives.
Tire Pressure: 28.0 PSI (Front and Rear). Lower tire pressure can make tires heat up faster, which improves their grip sooner, but it can also delay your car’s reaction to your steering.
Gearing: For quick-and-dirty tuning, adjust the Final Drive so that all the gears are just visible on the graph in the lower-right. We’ll discuss Gearing more in-depth when we get all the way down to Drag tuning.
Camber: -1.5/-2.0 Front, -0.6/-1.2 Rear. This will make your tires tilt inward slightly (from top to bottom) in an attempt to give the outside tires better contact with the road on a corner. The rear tires have less of an angle, so that they don’t lose as much contact with the road when driving straight. Fine-tuning a car for really good cornering can be a lot of work, which I generally don’t do, but a range like this shouldn’t break the ability to drive it competently.
Toe: 0.0 Front and Rear. Toe adjusts the front-to-back angle of your wheels inward or outward. Sometimes a very slight front toe-out (+0.1/+0.2) is used to improve steering reaction time, but toe is generally not used for a base road tune unless there’s something more severe that you need to compensate for.
Caster: Between 4.0/4.5. Caster adjusts the steering column so that turning the steering wheel also rotates the tires, so that they have additional camber. Setting it too high or low can have weird effects on your cornering, so this is a good starting point with the rest of this base tune.
Antiroll bars: Here’s your chance to apply “the formula” from the previous section. Rollbars (or Antiroll bars, same diff) are meant to keep the car from rolling off the road in the middle of tight corners. Too soft, and the inside tires might lift off the road. Refer to the formula above and adjust them based on the Front weight of the vehicle.
Springs: Also called suspension. The suspension comes into play when your speed or direction changes — accelerating, braking, entering and exiting corners. Springs that are too soft can “bottom out” and scrape, losing speed and possibly stability. Springs that are too tight will not transfer enough weight to the right places, and could send you off in a straight line. (These are tuned on the same formula, but since their minimum and maximum values will vary, a shortcut is to move the Front and Rear sliders to match those of the rollbars on the previous page.)
Ride Height: Front and Rear should start at, or near, their minimum for a road tune.
Rebound Damping: Bump and Rebound settings deal with how easily your tires retract into the suspension, and push back out of it, when hitting a bump or any uneven terrain. Lower settings mean longer, slower bounces, which can be good for offroading; higher settings attempt to absorb bumps and road imperfections quickly, which is generally preferred for road tuning. (This is the third and final setting that follows The Formula. Again, you can simply match the positions of the sliders on the Springs / Rollbars for now.)
Bump Damping: Set these to about 60% of the final values for Rebound Damping to get your tires back down onto the road quicker.
Brakes: Brake Balance determines how much force is applied to the front/rear tires. The default 50% generally doesn’t need to be changed here. Brake Force should also be at least 100% to ensure they can be fully applied, but you can increase this to 110–120% and see if it works with your driving style. (This assumes that you have turned off ABS in the settings. With ABS on, any Brake Force above 100% simply won’t be applied to any of the wheels automatically.)
The Differential settings deal with how much power is sent to each individual wheel, and at what point that differential is locked to prevent a greater difference in power. Without the differential, all four tires would always be locked (100%) and rotate at the exact same speed, making your car handle like a brick. We’re going to skim over these settings for now to finish the tune.
Front Differential (on FWD/AWD): Acceleration 25%, Deceleration 0%
Rear Differential (on AWD/RWD): Acceleration 50%, Deceleration 0%
Center Differential (on AWD): between 55–70%.
Offroad Base Tuning
Some base settings will be different for offroad, and we’ll only cover the differences. You should at least have Rally Suspension (where applicable). Rally or Offroad tires are optional for cars rated below 800, but I’d consider them a requirement somewhere between 800–900.
Tire Pressure: Front 28.0 PSI, Rear 22.0–24.0 PSI. Tires will heat up slower off-road and in colder temperatures, which makes them less likely to reach their peak ability to grip the terrain. Lowering the rear tire pressure provides some extra grip that’s needed for pushing through dirt and offroad terrain, without sacrificing too much steering responsiveness.
Toe (Front): +0.2/+0.4 (optional). This can increase your car’s oversteer, if you are having trouble making corners. As mentioned in the Road tune, too much of an angle here could make it difficult to drive in a straight line, so +0.4 toe out should be a maximum at first.
Toe (Rear): -0.1/-0.2 (optional). Rear toe-in can help with stability on rough terrain, and also compensate for any instability that comes from having the front toe-out.
Caster: Between 4.0 and 6.0, depending on the vehicle. (Setting this too high can make your steering a little more unpredictable, and potentially center your steering sooner than you’re ready for it, so I usually start in the same 4.0–4.5 range as my road tunes.)
Antiroll bars (Front and Rear): Between 6–13 if you’re driving on smoother (but still offroad) surfaces, but as low as possible in the worst conditions. Here, we want to have more grip on the uneven terrain wherever possible, and stiffer road settings might not work for that.
Ride Height: 50% of maximum, rather than the highest or lowest possible. This gives us room to adjust much higher or lower as needed.
Bump Damping: Start at 35–40% of Rebound Damping. Again, the Road tune is stiffer because it’s meant for smoother surfaces. Landing on the ground too hard after a bump can make it difficult to navigate rougher terrain.
Drift Tuning
This is a little more niche, but as you learn more about drifting and start looking at things like Drift Adventure you might want to have a quick-start tune for them. Pick up Drift Suspension as a must-have. The best tire compound for your setup will depend on your setup’s torque and horsepower; higher power requires more grip for control.
Tuning a vehicle specifically for drift is also a little more tricky (much like drifting), so the base settings are more likely to need to be adjusted immediately once you’ve tried them out. However, some of the default settings on a Drift Suspension are similar, if not equivalent, to what’s recommended here and elsewhere.
(Most of these settings are designed to facilitate throttle-steering rather than “normal” steering. In other words, you are jamming the car sideways, and pushing yourself through the corner by accelerating and spinning the tires. This means having less control over your regular steering, but more control over how you come into and out of a drift. Drifting is … a lot more than that, but this is a pretty basic explanation.)
Tire Pressure: Front 28.0 PSI, Rear 15.0 PSI (or as low as possible). The rear tires should have as much grip as you can stand in order to navigate through a drift.
Camber: -5.0 Front, 0.0 Rear. Adding more negative camber to the rear tires can help if you’re spinning out too much.
Toe: +5.0 (Out) Front, 0.0 Rear. Adding Rear toe-out can make your car more prone to spinning out, but toe-in can add stability — while decreasing your potential overall drift length.
Caster: Set to 7.0.
Antiroll bars: Set the Front rollbar as normal, but set the Rear rollbar as low as possible. This is another setting that adds grip for drift control. You can stiffen the rear rollbar later if there’s too much grip.
Springs: Start with normally-balanced suspension, as detailed in the Road Race tune.
Ride Height: Start with the minimum, as we do for the Road Race tune. You can add more grip later, if needed, by softening the suspension and raising the Ride Height.
Rebound / Bump Damping: Similar to Road Race tuning, but after setting Rebound, choose a value of 50% or lower for Bump Damping. I start around 40%.
Brake Balance: Setting your brake balance all the way to the left (the front brakes) will give you the option of using the brakes to swing the vehicle more when cornering.
Differential: If AWD, start your Front Accel/Decel settings as for the above tunes. Set Rear Acceleration to 100%, and start Rear Deceleration at 100%. (If you need more control over the vehicle after a drift, lower Rear Deceleration as needed.)
Every setting that adds grip to the rear should, in some way, promote throttle-steering. If you find yourself pushing into the corner so much that you go off the road, you can try decreasing some of the grip, or changing the way that you accelerate in the corner. Again, there’s a lot of nuance to drifting, and you might end up just playing some of it by ear.
It’s worth noting here that RWD is more common among drift specs “in the real world”, and while AWD is usually king in Horizon, it can be worthwhile to learn more about tuning a RWD drift car — especially if you plan to try out Drift Adventure, whose events sometimes require it!
Street Tuning
Street races might appear to be similar enough to road races, but they have one or two characteristics worth mentioning. First, unlike Road races, there are no walls placed alongside the course to prevent you from veering off of it. Second, you have traffic to deal with, which means making more decisions during the race. But the characteristic that is most likely to affect our tuning is that you’ll often have to deal with sidewalk curbs that will make a tighter suspension behave unpredictably. So the main thing that I adjust for Street tuning is to start with lower Bump Damping values — somewhere around 35–45% of Rebound Damping, similar to that of the Offroad tune. This allows us to keep most of the asphalt-specific tuning while also running over curbs somewhat smoothly every so often.
Drag Tuning
Drag races are unique in that the entire goal is to take off in a straight line faster than everyone else. (The one exception to this rule is the Juggernaut race, which goes down most of the length of the highway, including several bends that are iffy at ludicrous speed.) A drag tune arguably requires more knowledge of “pure” tuning, and less of the act of driving, than tuning for any other discipline. It’s also one of the two disciplines (drifting being the second) that benefits most from an understanding of how to mod a vehicle for the best power-to-weight ratio. Since the driving in drag races is minimized, the power-to-weight ratio is one of the main factors of how well your car throws itself forward.
This also means that tuning your best drag vehicle has a lot to do with what mods you use to build it. Mods that increase power and/or decrease weight are high priority. Building a drag car will also teach you to look for lighter parts that aren’t necessarily involved in accelerating; for example, even though you won’t necessarily use them, Race Brakes are the lightest brakes you can equip!
Drag tuning requires maximum stability and maximum tire contact with the road for straight-line travel, so a lot of tuning that deals with cornering will be less important here.
Tire pressure: Your drive tires — the tires that are receiving power — need to have the best grip possible immediately. Start by setting your rear tire pressure to the minimum (15.0 PSI) for the most grip possible off the line. If you’re using an all-wheel-drive setup, do the same for front tire pressure. Forza physics emulates real-life in many ways: the grip of your tires improves as they heat up, and it takes longer to heat them up if the tire pressure is higher. Normally, the extremely low tire pressure would also slow your steering response times, but again, this is not important for drag racing.
Camber: Since this is primarily used for cornering, start with 0.0 on both front and rear camber. You can add very low negative front camber (up to -1.0) if necessary for steering, and even lower positive rear camber (up to +0.4) for stability, but you generally want your drive tires to be flat on the ground for contact and acceleration.
Caster: A high caster value in other types of racing can center your steering (even when you don’t want it to). Here, that’s exactly what we want, so set it to the maximum (7.0).
Antiroll bars: Again, these are typically for cornering, but can make a small difference in how you launch at the beginning of a race. Set them lower for grip, but tighten them up if your launch feels unstable.
Springs: Start with front and rear suspension at the minimum.
Ride Height: Start with the rear ride height at maximum. Front ride height is considered a matter of preference, so start with the minimum and raise it later as needed when tuning.
Damping: Start with Rebound Damping as low as possible; you can adjust this in small amounts to control how your suspension pushes back against your launch. Bump Damping should also be low to absorb everything it can.
Downforce: If, for some reason, you have racing wings installed on your drag vehicle, make sure their Downforce is tuned all the way to the left (the “Speed” side).
Brakes: Leave these at default settings; there are no tricks to be found here.
Differential: Acceleration (Front and/or Rear) should be locked at 100% for straight-line driving. Deceleration shouldn’t be needed, but you can put those to 100% also.
Gear Tuning
I’m putting this in its own section because it has its own special tricks to it. We’ll start from where we just left off: Drag tuning.
When setting up the gears on a drag car, you have three major priorities. The first priority is to launch off the line as quickly as possible, which means spinning your tires as little as possible before achieving grip and moving forward. We do this by adjusting the height of 1st gear, and observing how it affects our launch. If 1st gear is standing up too straight on the graph, and we jam the throttle, we might have too long of a burnout before we gain traction, and other cars will be out in front of ours. If 1st gear is too long (leaning to the right on the graph), or we’re too light on the throttle, we might gain traction before we have enough power to lunge forward.
Second, you want your remaining gears to be operating at the highest power in their range. Typically, this means “shorter” gears, but how short depends on your engine.
The graph that you normally see when selecting engine mods (above, left) is related to the graph that shows your current gearing (above, right). The orange (horsepower) curve is showing you how much horsepower is used, from the beginning to the end of each gear. The left side of the power graph is the bottom of each gear, and the right side is the top of the gear. This means that, for example, if you shorten 2nd gear so that it starts halfway down the gear graph, it starts with the horsepower halfway across the power graph.
However, engines are not at full power in the middle of a gear. Shift into 2nd with a setting like that, and the engine will pitch down a lot, and your car might even stutter a little as it tries to regain power to accelerate through the rest of the gear. So, if we wanted to get the most power out of each gear — and potentially sacrifice a higher top speed for maximum acceleration — we would make the gears look shorter, like this:
Some engines’ power distribution has a much more gentle curve at the top, even flattening out, giving them a wider range in which each gear will have optimal power. My Fiat 131 has only a very narrow range where the power is flat at the top, so I make some allowance for still being pretty high in the power band, and still getting something out of each gear.
This brings us to the third major concern for drag tuning: if you finish the race in the middle of a gear, or in the middle of shifting gears, you’re not optimizing power. If you’ve already tuned 1st gear (and you should have), it’s better to adjust 2nd and up than it is to mess up your good 1st gear tuning by changing Final Drive.
General Race Gear Tuning
I showed you the Drag tuning first in order to introduce the idea of the “optimal power band”. Drag gearing is arguably simpler than most, because the entire goal is to milk that tiny optimal power band for everything it’s worth. For other types of racing, it’s not so simple — getting out in front of everyone isn’t the same as staying there, and if you hit your top speed too quickly and too often, it’s probably too low, making it easier for opponents to come back and pass you again. Like everything else in tuning, it’s about finding a balance between a high top speed and high acceleration.
Your gearing philosophy for any given tune can also depend on other characteristics; if your car isn’t overpowered with turbo, and it has handling good enough to take corners without losing too much speed, you might be able to work with longer gears and lower acceleration in general. If you have trouble passing in the corner, but you reliably end up in 1st or 2nd gear coming out, maybe your driving style is better suited by having the first few gears shorter to get back up to the 100+MPH range (and potentially passing an opponent who is coming out of the same corner).
As you start to experiment with gear tuning, you might also start to notice where in a race you start to overtake your opponents, and understand why that is; if you pass several cars at the start of a race, your lowest gears are probably shorter than theirs. But if you’re racing a lower-class vehicle configured with much better handling, your graph will look a lot different, probably having a much longer 1st/2nd gear and much shorter 3rd-6th gears, allowing for those higher-speed passes down the road.
You don’t generally have to dive this deep into gearing against AI; but it’s not a bad time to learn, either, since there’s less at stake than there would be if you were competing against ranked online opponents, for example.
Optimal gearing and tuning will also reap benefits in freeroam, since you’ll be be able to tweak your car to aim for new records on PR Stunts, even in Forzathon Live events. Impress your friends.
Differential Tuning
This is another particular bit of tuning where you could end up really deep in a rabbit hole. Entire videos are made about it. You can probably do fine with the base settings above and skip this section, or come back to it later if you really want to learn more about the inner workings of a Forza.
If you look at the Differential window on an AWD car, you’ll notice several headings: one for Front diff, one for Rear diff, and one for Center. Front- and rear-wheel-drive cars don’t have all three of these, because not all four tires are drive tires in those setups; the front tires in a RWD car will roll freely, as will the rear tires in a FWD car.
The good part is that we can cover each part in a specific order and just skip the ones you don’t have in your vehicle.
As I tried to explain before, the purpose of the differential is to govern whether, and how much, each tire can receive a different amount of power. Our base tuning settings for differentials are generally good for average amounts of power, but when you start getting into the higher-powered Supercars and Hypercars, you can start losing control. If any given differential is out of whack, you can experience a couple of different problems cornering. I’ll try to run it down quickly if you want to see how it works; find a good long corner that you would expect to encounter in a race, and get ready to start taking that corner many, many times. Or, you can just follow along with the explanation.
Rear Acceleration: Our base tunes start this at about 40–50%. Our tuning goal is to raise this value as high as possible without the wheels locking up in a corner, which will cause you to understeer through it. If you take the corners just fine, start bumping Rear Accel up by 10% at a time until you understeer to find the limit.
Rear Deceleration: Once you’ve found a limit on Rear Accel, set Rear Decel 50% lower (or set it to 0%, if Accel is lower than 50%). If you find yourself turning way too sharply when applying the brakes, you can start bumping this value up 5–10% at a time.
Front Acceleration: In our base tunes, these start around 25%. Here, we’re kind of doing the opposite: the goal is to move this value as low as possible without losing traction, under/oversteering, or losing too much power in the middle of a corner. If you hear the engine struggling, try adding 5–10% at a time until you’re powering through the corner properly. But if you’re understeering, the wheels are locking too soon and you should lower it 5–10% until you find a good balance.
Front Deceleration: There aren’t many reasons to raise this above 0%, outside of the less-traditional disciplines like drag and drifting, but you might find an instance where you actually need your Front Accel above 50% and could use a non-zero setting for Front Decel.
Center: This is the one that only appears on AWD drivetrains, because it determines how much power goes to the pairs of front and rear wheels. (Fun fact: setting this to 100% is functionally the same as having a rear-wheel-drive car, which is silly and probably pointless.) 55–70% is a good range to start from, but I’ve tuned a few vehicles as far to the rear as 80%.
While goofing with these settings, you might sometimes lose traction and see smoke coming from the tires. If you’re really astute, you can see which tires are smoking. This can give you some clues as to where your problems are; for example, the outside tires on a corner losing traction can mean that your front or rear differential needs to be adjusted higher, but if all your tires lose traction, your Center differential might be too high.
There’s loads of other things you can consider for not-just-road-racing. Some rally and offroad tuning might benefit from slightly higher differential settings in general. The fastest Hypercars might also need a little more Rear Accel and Rear Decel, say, 60% / 10%, just to stay on the road. Higher-weight vehicles, like massive trucks with a longer wheel base, have outright refused to turn for me at all until I zeroed the differentials altogether and softened the rollbars on them. Experiment like the scientist that you are!
Beginning Troubleshooting
If you’re not accustomed to this kind of problem-solving it can be a little daunting to figure out what to do with a car that’s not quite doing what you want. Aside from hunting down a no-explain list of common problems and the ten things you can try to fix each of them, the best way to start learning to fix cars is to learn exactly what each part does. (The in-game blurbs are verbose and occasionally copy-pasted wrong, which can be frustrating for curious aspiring gearheads.)
If you are a good video-learner, you can find a video series that explains things in a way that you understand. (Video tends to run by too quickly for me and I end up either rewinding and replaying for an hour, or running it at 0.5x speed and waiting an hour anyways.)
Of course, there’s also the science way. You can take a car that works fine, and pick a slider to completely screw up in one direction, and note the differences in how it makes the car drive. Then you can move that slider all the way in the other direction and do the same thing. It might feel like it takes longer, but you might also learn more intimately.
Other Unusual Tuning Situations
And on that note, doing all of this science for yourself is the key to feeling out how all of the different tunings and mod setups work.
PR Stunts
Sometimes you’ll run into that one Speed Zone, or Speed Trap, or Danger Sign, that just seems to slip from your grasp. Maybe you’re trying to get that elusive third star on it, or hit a Seasonal objective, but it’s just too much. It can be a humbling experience to have to go back to the lab to figure out how to crack it. Or maybe your friends have set a record on that stunt with a car that you own, and you want to figure out how. You need to figure out how. There’s nothing wrong with tinkering with a car for one specific purpose. For science. That’s how we learn and grow.
Rear-Engine Layouts
I used to have a really hard time with some of the Porsche 911 series and other cars whose weight was mostly in the back of the car as this weight distribution made the car handle in ways I didn’t expect. At higher classes, you can use the front downforce wing to compensate a little bit. In some cases it’s also worth trying to mod the car with parts that get that Front% closer to 50% than, say, 40%. Experiment with different parts and configurations and see what works best for you in most situations.
The first thing I usually try if I’m having problems with a rear-balanced vehicle is setting the rollbars as I would if the car’s Front% was over 50%, and tuning the rest of the vehicle normally. This usually gives me a good starting point to determine whether there will be more problems down the line.
The “Daily Driver”
Everybody’s got one. You’ve got a “go-to” car that you slam-pick when you just want to drive around like a Skill Score magnet; something that’s fun for Forzathon Live events but more importantly is just fun for you to drive. A car that beckons you to just screw around in it is, to me, the essence of Horizon. The fact that it is viable for any sort of campaign progression is merely the icing on the cake.
My “daily drivers” — especially where Forzathon Live is concerned — are usually an interesting hybrid of Road and Rally tuning. They have enough of the characteristics associated with Road tunes to keep up with Speed Traps and Speed Zones on the asphalt, but sometimes they also have Rally tires and a softer suspension so they won’t get hung up on events that end up being primarily in the dirt. The Rally tires also end up being at least mildly serviceable on any Drift Zone that comes my way. The more cars you acquire and drive, the more potential freeroam slam-picks you’ll encounter.
Forza Edition cars that have Skill Boosts are easily at the top of this list. The one I keep coming back to is the Renault 5 Turbo FE. With its 7x max multiplier and native Skill Boost, it’s not a record-breaker at the Speed Traps, but it’s competent enough to keep up, and enough Skill Score rounds come up in Forzathon Live that it is nearly essential for cracking the round as early as possible.
Playground Games
The Playground Games series of events is unusual and really demanding compared to racing events, and the Seasonal Games event counts towards Festival Playlist, so it absolutely merits a spot on this list. Tuning a car for Playground Games is a special case to me. You’re not on a set course, so the terrain is unpredictable by default. You generally want to be able to out-maneuver opponents, so the ability to oversteer and still have traction and launch acceleration is important. And the majority of arenas are offroad terrain — but sometimes it’s the rolling beach hills outside of Bamburgh, sometimes it’s the jagged and bumpy Railyard. Optimizing a car for any specific arena is a really good challenge that combines some of the different tuning disciplines we’ve covered here. Getting it right can feel like a huge accomplishment when you score a win on the Seasonal Games on your first try.
The Wrapup
I know that this was a lot of information, crudely organized, in a relatively small space; but with a little practice, you should be equipped to take on any Seasonal Championship, at any class, with any of the cars provisioned for it. And if you’re like me, the more you learn about tuning, the more you want to learn about tuning, and eventually you’ll be crafting world-class vehicles that really can tackle anything, despite the odds. Maybe you’ll share your world-class tunes and work your way up to being a Rank 20 master Tuner, or keep your brilliance to yourself and use it to become a Grandmaster in the Ranked Adventure series. Or maybe just completing the Seasonal Championships is good enough. It’s up to you.
This article was the longest for me to compile, and it’s still a little messy to me. But I think it’s also the jumpoff point for Doing Everything. The majority of the rest of Forza Horizon 4 can really start to fall into place when you’ve got a feel for what your cars do and how to make them do what you need. There may be other articles in this series in the future, but for now, I’m exhausted, and I’ll be getting back to my weekly series about seasonal challenges. Thanks and good luck, drivers.
