I’d like to see single player races against bots. Imagine you start a race at any time, and join 50-100 NPC riders. Some are on your team and help you up climbs or lead you out in the sprint. Others are on competing teams and launch attacks, chase you down, etc. You could race on countless courses - climbs, hilly circuits, flat sprints, long or short, etc.
There could even be “missions” or scenarios: your goal is to get in the break, or bridge a big gap, or win all the mountain points, or lead out your sprinter. They could even be designed to give you a certain type of workout: solo off the front doing a threshold effort, chasing down attacks with shorter VO2 efforts, or sprinting multiple times.
Single player races would have a few advantages over regular multiplayer races:
- Start at any time
- Choose from many routes
- Team tactics
- Always a big field of riders
- Difficulty could scale to rider ability
- Replay races to try again
There’s always a possibility that this would draw attendance away from live racing, but I don’t think it would. I see it as a more engaging way to get a workout and some race practice. I know I would have more fun in a race simulation than grinding out another ERG workout to Netflix.