SimGolf: How do you get 'creative' holes?

[Khan Singh]

As far as I can tell, the more imaginative your hole design in SG, the lower it's "imagination"' score ends up being. I have double doglegs par 5's with trees in the middle of the fairway that have -7% imagination ratings. But a 150 yrd par 3 without much going on except a nice seaside view gets 75%.

What is up? Anybody know the secret?

[General Ludd]

I believe that creative holes are ones which offer a wide variety of plays, giving the golfer a wide selection of different ways to play a hole.

[WarpStorm]

The trick to making any type of hole, is to cater to those sims that have the skill, in this case imagination. How do you cater to them? Not by thinking of a hole as what you would think of as imaginative, but rather by looking at what they are doing at your hole.

Use the shot analysis tool to see where the players with the skill you want are shooting. Make sure that you make the hole easier (by at least one stroke) for the players with the skill than the players without it.

You have to make the hole have at least a one stroke difference to matter. Imaginative holes need to give a bonus for use of draw, fade, and high backspin shots.

[Khan Singh]

Yeah, but I've got doglegs all over my course and still my imagination scores are terrible. All the imaginative golfers do is play to the wrong fairway.

The only real way I've found that works is to put the fairway, not in front of the green, but to one side. So the sims have to play a hook into the green. Which seems kind of stupid to me. But I guess I can do it.

The sims really seem to like a gimmicky course.

[Steve Clark]

Here is an example of a Creative hole in which I believe has > .50 ratings in all three areas, as well as 200+ in fun...



I'm not sure if I mentioned this here, but here's the story on this hole. I needed a dogleg right hole but one that also emphasized strategic elements (accuracy and imagination). About 170y from where I could place my 5th tee, there was a forest of pine trees with two large scenic trees on the sides. I used those scenic trees as the margins of the fairways but I kept a string of pine trees in the middle. The reason was that since I wanted a dogleg right, I decided to make the inside of the fairway bend to be more of a precision shot off of the tee (hence, a narrower fairway) but it rewards the better golfers with a direct approach to the green (esp. if one can hit it long). On the other side of the line of trees, I created a wider fairway opening for those that would be intimidated by a narrower one. The downside is that because it's on the outside of the bend, it requires a more difficult approach to the green. As indicated by the ratings on this hole, it has something for everyone.

[Grumbold]

Play that hole on hard or impossible and I think you could guarantee golfers quitting in droves. There are just too many tree-bouncing opportunities

One thing I think is going to be good about the full game is that you will have to adapt course design quite significantly for different difficulty levels.

[yin26]

Here's a Creative hole that got a Top 18 rating. I think the trick is that *some* holes need to be gimmicky. You gotta really have a mix in there.

[ColdWizard]

nevermind, misunderstood the issue at hand

[Steve Clark]

Originally posted by Grumbold
Play that hole on hard or impossible and I think you could guarantee golfers quitting in droves. There are just too many tree-bouncing opportunities

One thing I think is going to be good about the full game is that you will have to adapt course design quite significantly for different difficulty levels.

That I did not think about. It seems that all the golfers on the lower levels care about is variety. It will be interesting to see how different the harder levels will be, esp. since that Skills will be more important than Fun. You still have to have holes that are creative, strategic, etc. but balanced just right so that both the experienced and inexperienced golfers will come and play.