Pro Cycling Manager 2024: Balkan Diversity challenge

Create a custom team from one of the 10 countries within the Balkan region. The starting team must consist of 1-2 riders from each country – with a maximum of 14 riders.
Now the editor work starts on the 1st of January. Edit the sponsor contract to last until 2050. You will not be changing sponsors for this challenge.
Open the editor and go to DYN_SPONSOR_research and set budget max for your teams to €15.000.000 (It will not affect your current budget – but just allow for manual budget increases later).

Go to DYN_sponsor_regions and add all 10 Balkan Nations as nations of interest and give them 10 pct. interest each.

Now go to STA_Race. Identify all the races in the Balkan nations and write down their IDs. Add all these races to the list of favorite races of the sponsor on the DYN_sponsor dataset. Feel free to add a few favorite World Tour RACES as well.

You must participate in all Balkan races. So go to DYN_TEAM_RACE and find every Balkan race and make sure you are invited to them. You must do this every season.
If you are eventually promoted to world tour this becomes impossible as you are not allowed to the races. Once this happen the Italian pro continental and WT races will act as the Balkan races.

Congratulations – You are now ready to begin the challenge.

The factors that can increase or decrease your budget varies. You may only change your budget once a year in late October. How much your budget changes depend on the following.

Let us assume you started the season with a budget of €800.000.

Start here. If your team over performs in the team ranking in comparison with the team budget, then your budget increases. The formula is the following.
Find your ranking on the team ranking points system. (E.G your team finished as number 30 in the world). Now open the editor and look at the “DYN_TEAM_SPONSOR” dataset. Sort the teams by budget size and countdown to number 30 – and note the budget of the team with the 30th highest budget (E.G. €1.300.000)
Now the base increase for your budget is going to be 20 pct. of the difference between this amount and your starting budget. I.E 0.2*(1.300.000 – 800.000)=-€100.000.

Add this to your base budget to arrive at a preliminary amount of €900.000 (A).

Did you achieve your sponsor goals and make your sponsor happy?
If your sponsor confidence is below 95 – then subtract 10 pct from (A)
If your sponsor confidence is above 120 then add 10 pct. to (A)
I.E. Your sponsor confidence at the end of the season is 90. Then the budget is not €900.000*0.9 = €810.000. (B).

I am not yet sure how sponsor confidence work in PCM 2024 – so I may revise this scale later on.

You must participate in all Balkan races. The performance in these races gives you points, which you must note down during the season.

Winning a Balkan race + 1 point.
Mountain or sprint jersey + 0.5 points.
Winning Balkan race with rider of same nationality (I.E. Greek rider winning Greek race). +3 points.
10 visibility +1 point.
Best rider outside of top 20 -2 points.
Visibilty 0 -1 point

Each point adds up to one percent increase on (B). I.E. You collected 10 points for the season
I.E. €810.000*1.1 = 891.000 (C)

Note: Italy is the Balkans of pro-Cycling Europe. Once promoted to Continental-pro, then Italian pro-races replace the Balkan races. The same goes for World tour races. Albanians are the Italians of Balkan. If they win Italian pro-races you get the +3 bonus as well.

No chain is stronger than the weakest link.
Now you will be graded on the performance of the worst nation from the Balkans. Go to the Nation ranking. Identify the lowest scoring nation and note down the placement on the rankings for this nation.
Top 40 (for worst nation) = + 20 per cent
41 – 60 (for worst nation) = + 10 per cent
61 – 80 (for worst nation) = + 5 per cent
81 – 100 (for worst nation) = 0 per cent
100 – 120 (for worst nation) = – 5 per cent
120 – 140 (for worst nation) = – 10 per cent
Add the result to (c). I.E your worst ranked nation in the Balkans is number 105.
I.E. €891.000*0.95=€846.450. (D)

For every contract signed with a foreign rider, you budget is reduced by 5%.

I.E. You hired one non-balkan rider €846.450*0.9= €761,805 (E)

What level are you playing at?
Very Easy: Add 20 Per cent to (D)
Easy: Add 10 Per cent to (D)
Normal: No change to (D)
Hard: Subtract 10 Per cent from (D)
Very hard: Subtract 20 per cent from (D)

I.E. You are playing on normal difficulty. No change.

Finally it is ensured that your budget change is in the interval between -10% and +25%.
Check that the total change is within the -10 to +25% range.
In this example you starting budget was €800.000. That means that the budget for next year must be in the range between €720,000 and @1,000,000

Congratulations you are done. Your budget for next year has been reduced to €761.805. You can change it on the DYN_team_sponsor page. Make sure you do better!

I personally use the DBEdit by Davy Depudit. Which can be downloadet from the WorldDB – discord server. https://discord.com/channels/675749069184040980/

I designed the challenge on the worldDB – database, which can be downladed from the steam workshop – you may use other databases, but may have to adjust the rules accordingly.

I created an excel spreadheet to assist with the calculation. It can be downloadet from
https://mega.nz/file/Z6dWFBbA#ojMUvB5LSlCOxWS2GPCFMgp1bPO2MNuaJo13mrZeeug

The development team of pro cycling manager is welcome to steal any ideas for game design in future seasons 🙂

Good luck to anyone giving it a try 🙂