[TME] Rebalance the tyre compounds

[kimden]

The soft tyre is too fast initially, allowing strategies like Soft pit Soft pit ... Soft pit Soft to be winning in too many cases. The hard tyre loses almost always to medium, if the player manages tyres properly.

It of course can be solved by tyre allocations, but from international experience it's a quite boring way, as with tyre allocation favouring slower compounds you could just make a super compound with good speed and durability and use it once. I suppose tyre modding is not about limiting superpowers, but about strategy.

[Nomagno]

First of all, the track.xml of each track should support selecting three-four compounds the kart_characteristics.xml list to be the "virtual soft, virtual medium, virtual hard, virtual alternate" tyres, and the entire UX should be redesigned around this.

This system allows to add as many compounds as needed

• How many compounds do we need to cover all reasonable STK tracks? I feel like a valid approach would be to design one set of tyres for low-speed tracks like Ampfing/X-Kart/Minigolf, another for regular tracks such as Hacienda/Nessie's pond/Red Bovine Ring, and another for high-speed or high-deg tracks like Corkscrew/Ardennen-Spa, resulting in 9-12 compounds. Some tracks, like Palm Mountain, would sit inbetween categories, and could select tyres in a non-contiguous range.
• What should be the criteria for designing tyres AND for determining pit stop lengths on tracks? For example, the criteria used by Pirelli for F1 is that both a one-stop strategy and a two-stop strategy should be valid options in a 300km race (for this the two-stopper has to be a bit faster to compensate the risk of traffic), and the pit times in F1 are usually in the order of one-fourth or one-fifth of a lap, getting close to one-half in RBR and close to one-sixth in Spa. The criteria for STK need to be a bit more lenient, specially as pit time having a uniform criteria for ALL tracks would be boring, for instance I doubt anyone wants to see tyre gameplay in Bonebreaker be the same as Brondehach ;). So, regardless of the criteria used to adjust, tyres should be able to be mixed and matched to create, together with pit stop length, the gameplay you want for the track you're adding TME support to.
• How exaggerated do the compounds need to be? Soft is a ridiculous compound that basically acts like a caricature of itself. Same for medium and hard. However, this is not a simulator, I think we need to make them easy to distinguish as soon as you switch, at least to a top player.
• How much should the kart class and weight impact degradation? Currently, it's just based on the weight differences, and it seems fine, but maybe had coding how much the heavy kart degrades more than the light kart offers better control.- Should each compound have its own "personality"? For instance, current soft has the quirk that its peak acceleration is actually around 95% of tyre life so as to not shred itself to pieces in starts, and similarly peak grip/turning of the hard tyre is around 95%. Moreover, the tyres' degradation curves have a little bit of variety sprinkled in, they're not symmetrical and their "cliff" arrives differently (for the hard tyre, it's gradual, for the soft it's VERY sudden, while the medium actually loses too much turnability way before it would hit its cliff in terms of topspeed)

[kimden]

1. 3 per track seems fine, but I wouldn't fix it, sometimes 4 is good too, and what about wet weather in the future?
   It would be good to have not slow AI for them to measure track characteristics required for tyre choice without human involvement (apart from spreadsheet itself), but we have what we have
2. I don't really want strict stuff, unless it's absolutely needed for the strategies to be not far away from each other. STK needs (much) more pits than F1 I would say.I don't know about the rest.