dko wrote: ↑April 7th, 2022, 8:52 am
I've been playing this game off and on since the Access days, and have always used the classic swing. I experimented a little with PS and RTS but quickly became frustrated and stuck with Classic.
Since MrT hijacked the forum (and I mean that in only the best way, since he is so interesting to read), I have a renewed interest in RTS. I have again begun playing with it in practice mode and while it still remains frustrating, I do agree with others that have said that it is more like the real thing than the other swing types.
I think the best speed I have achieved on a drive is 106 mph (about 170 kph to you MrT, if you read this), but seem to unfailingly hook everything because I can't seem to keep my swing on plane and almost always go just to the right of the intended path. For swing speed, (1) does it matter if I hesitate at the top of the swing, and (2) do I have to really accelerate the mouse to get a higher speed? For flight path, is there any trick to better control the swing path to either hit more squarely or, say swing from the inside to get a designed fade?
I suspect the answers to my questions are practice, practice, practice, but was wondering if any of you who swear by RTS have any additional insight you might share with me?
While you wait for pmgolf's wisdom and experience, I will provide my $0.02....
I suppose that there is more than one way to improve.
For me, in using RTS, what has improved my outcomes the most has been to learn to stay relaxed. Any bit of tensing up in my body seems to have consequences on my swing. I have played probably around 500-550 games since I returned to the game about 1 year ago, 16 months ago. My average length is currently 258 meters or about 285 yards (I was born in Europe, but I have been a US citizen for a long time and I can use either the metric or the imperial system). If I look at just my last 150-200 games, my average is 260 meters or 286 yards. % of shots on fairways 85-86%, but I play a lot of tough courses (most of my games are played on the hard ones with narrow fairways, etc. ). And I probably never played a single game without wind after the first week. Being a fanatic for realism, if I play around water, wind is always set to gusty or even more so windy. I am saying this for my driving is actually really good. If the rest of my game came close to my driving, I would probably be annoyed and have quit already.
Longest drive ever 358-359 meters or almost 400 yards (Kapalua, long par 5 downhill) . I am writing this not to brag, there is nothing to brag since driving golf balls is not a standalone sport, but to point out that at the beginning I was a disaster and I kept hooking or slicing like there was no tomorrow. And I stayed bad for about a month. I even created a contraption to slide my arm straight in between two rails. It did not help much! So I realized that my hand/wrist movement had to be smoother and started to hit with less forward movement which, actually, was creating higher speeds? And there I began to get it right. Once I relaxed 100%, I started to hit straight like an arrow, unless an evil wind pushed the shots out of the way, that is.
I am currently transitioning to Champ level, i.e. no red-bar. But I have used that mode in practice to train. When I look at the red bar, often I am too worried about where to stop and concentrate less on the shot. Without red bar it is all about the shot. I often hit with closed eyes and can feel the loading in my hand. I am still not there with short shots, but with long shots I can hit with closed eyes. I relax, go to a happy place, and let go. When I play with woods usually, even in Pro mode, I do not look at the red bar and do on my own.
Fading/etc ... You can play a bit with the position of the golf ball and the club faces. But that takes forever in RTS and it is not as evident as in Classic Swing. I am saying one thing and maybe it is just my imagination: the last 3-4 months, I think of fading the ball and it happens. I got to a point that I move the mouse only so slightly that I can actually slice or hook the shot on purpose by amounts that are good to go around trees or to avoid the wind pushing my shots into the woods, etc. Links never ceases to amaze me. This game must have come from another planet.
Type of mouse. I tried probably 5 different mice (big, small, gaming, ergonomic, you name it, I have them laying around) and it did not make much of a difference. However, if the mouse does not track well, then you have an issue. It happened to me once and there was a little amount of lint in the bottom which I collected somehow. I was hitting horribly and it felt bizarre. So I checked. Once I cleaned the bottom of the mouse, everything went back to normal. I am back to use my everyday mouse and not planning to buy any fancy one. Also be careful of the batteries.. A couple of times the batteries were on their last bits of juice and the mouse was not operating properly.
Water. There is no denying that water or the OBs hazards are the nasty ones. Going over the water is not usually an issue, stopping the ball close to the pin is. In particular if you, like me, use Mc/Mc as your slowest setup. If the pin is 5-10 yards from the water (difficult pin positions, 90% of the times just put the cups around the perimeter of the greens), I have not found the recipe for success. If the cup is in the middle, I am better. I need to play pretending that there is no water, just fairway. The moment I get caught thinking of water, my body tenses up and the shots lose 10-15 mph. I play that trick and I am good. "There is no water, it is just an illusion!".
Woods/irons. I am much better with woods in this game than with irons (in real life it is the opposite). What helped improving my game was to start using W5 a lot. I got rid of I1 (hardly ever used) and I2. That helped me a lot. Irons I go through phases, even now that I have accumulated experience: one week they fly like kites, another week the speed is so low that I need to almost up two clubs. Never managed to understand why. So, I learned to do a lot with W5. I also almost gave up on chips. With Mc/Mc or higher and some of the nastiest greens, balls never stop or stop too soon. I found that LW in flop mode is my savior on the golf course. High trajectories produce lesser horizontal speeds on landing. Chips I do use, but only if the greens are of the flattish kind. Very volatile though. One game I might sink 3 chips and then go 1 week without one single one going in. Not sure if it is my swing or just I cannot read the greens. Same outcome though.
Surprisingly perhaps, I still play in Classic Swing mode with a different player. The two modes do not harm each other. But they do not even help each other either. So there is no real benefit. I just find RTS much more rewarding feeling-wise. As soon as I switched to Mc/Mc or higher, it really felt like on the real courses: swearing, cursing, wishing bouts of diarrhea on the "enemies" (I assume you can guess who they might be), jumping from my chair for a shot went into the cup, etc. . The good news is that, again, while after switching to Mc/Mc I felt like powerless and thought I was never going to master it, now it feels even sort of slow 85-90% of the time.
What does separate me from scoring -10, -15 regularly?. Putting! It is not that I am missing much, the problem is that I have become a specialist in missing the hole by a few inches. In golf, unlike track, you cannot say "I got second on the 100meters but I still run in 9:90! ". In golf either the ball goes in or it does not. Sad, but what can we do? What kills me on putting? Slanted greens, in RTS I plan a certain trajectory but then over-correct it on release. In Classic swing I cannot do that, at least. In RTS, I can see my arrow completely out of alignment after a putt on slanted greens. It is the only part of the game where I have not made any worthwhile improvement and for which I have not a single word of advice. Needless to say, perhaps: when moving from standard to challenging settings, the aspect of the game that requires the most re-learning is putting because with fast greens even a small pitch can take the ball on a journey completely off the path to the hole if not accounted properly and balls will not stop easy once they get going.