Crispy™ RPGs similar to sports management games?

[BarbequeMasta]

Since we're on the subject, which version of football manager is the best overall. Allways wanted to try them but never got into it.

 

[J1M]

Where you manage a roster of adventures, hire/fire them, manage equipment, their quests, grouping, etc.,
Darkest Dungeon has some similarities, but I'm looking more for a game with a heavier focus on management and branching narrative.

Yes, but the 'sport' that resolves conflict has no nostalgia or outside industry teaching players about its nuances, so the conflict resolution (combat) tries to keep things learnable by making them start very simple and tries to keep things interesting by frequently adjusting the rules with new opponents and abilities.

There is no Superbowl for RPGs, so a story of some kind gets tossed in as well.

Another challenge designers aiming for this subgenre face is player expectations regarding combat outcomes. Players expect to win every battle in an
RPG, whereas for a sports game in season mode players can accept winning 60 or 70% of the time.

 

[Drew]

Since we're on the subject, which version of football manager is the best overall. Allways wanted to try them but never got into it.

The one you put the most time into.

12 and 13 are generally regarded as very good, but they're very gamey in their setup, many things are abstracted away from real football. I can't speak to earlier editions but given their lack of mentions except for the occasional "haha i'm playing cm2 again" I would guess they don't hold up.
14 and 15 moved towards real football and are good, they also still used the old regen face generation, so with debski's hair pack you get a lot of variance but still human looking regens. This is important to me, but not to everyone.
16, 17, and 18 seemed weak to me. They had glaring, exploitable issues in the match engine (put three central strikers in your team and you'll score five goals a match because other teams just leave one of them unmarked at all times), they didn't add much to the tactics generation, or to anything else, and they FUCKIN RUINED REGEN FACES. HOLY FUCK THEY LOOK LIKE ALIENS. They forced all 3d models on you all the time and these look like some 2005 abominations compared to what came before.

The scouting and injury overhauls that came in 19 and 20 were nice improvements to move the players' experience closer to an actual manager. But, I had burned myself out and still wanted the old regen face generation to attach myself to a save long term.

Spoiler

Seriously look at how fucked these look.

The one in 16 is the best case scenario, don't be fooled. Those ones were fucking wank as well.
The ones before that don't have debski's hair pack installed, so they would've looked better if you wanted them to.
When they made the forced change to 3d, debski said "fuck this shit i'm out" so there was no equivalent upgrade for 16+

 

[JarlFrank]

Second from the right has a MASSIVE forehead lmao

 

[Drew]

That's how every single one of them looked that year
Massive forehead, alien eyes, hair that didn't fit on the head

 

[Zednick]

Here are two recent-ish indie games that check most of your boxes. Swag and Sorcery is really, really, really bad. The other is ok but disappointing overall.





A few better suggestions:





There's a demo for Gladiator Guild Manager that's worth checking out.

 

[Joggerino]

Where you manage a roster of adventures, hire/fire them, manage equipment, their quests, grouping, etc.,
Darkest Dungeon has some similarities, but I'm looking more for a game with a heavier focus on management and branching narrative.

What you describe really reminds me of vagrus. Check it out but note that it's in early access and there was a lot of work to be done when i last played.

 

[vota DC]

Jagged Alliance 2.

Deadly Games even more. The learning isn't added during the "match" like Ja2 but in another phase like football manager games.
Mercenaries are more spoiled like football players. Psycho mercenaries will quit if they don't have enough kill/mission ratio, mercenaries will get upset if they are fired (aim has no problem in 2, MERC you can piss mercenaries if you don't pay them). Also they can work for your opponent in multiplayer but sadly I haven't tested It.

 

[luj1]

Jagged Alliance 2.

/thread

 

[Abu Antar]

This looks cool, but not might not meet you requirements:


More:





There was this hockey management game that I for the life of me can't remember. Players had different stats/feats and it was purely text-based, if I remember correctly.

 

[Lilura]

Jagged Alliance 2.

/thread

Yes, and yes.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Battles of Norghan is decent. Got it on Steam, runs out of the box on my Windows 7 system.

It's got tactical turn based combat, you hire gladiators of different races/classes and they gain XP. You can train them, give them better equipment, etc. Battle victories give you prize money that you can use to buy the equipment or send your guys training. I'd say the focus is about 50/50 on battles and management.

For a more literal sports game that feels somewhat RPG-y, try Football Tactics & Glory. It combines your usual football management game with turn based tactical football matches. Each player can learn one or two special skills and specialize on various classes (defender, goalkeeper, midfielder, attacker) that give bonuses to their respective roles on the playing field. I don't care about football, don't even watch the world cup, but this game is damn fun.

Then there's Domina, a game where you play as a Roman noblewoman who inherited a gladiator school. You buy gladiators, train them, have them fight in the arena, etc. The battles are real time and can either be directly controlled like an action game or you can let the AI fight for you. Gladiators can either get wounded and surrender, or die permanently. It's usually a good idea to level up several gladiators equally rather than focusing on just pushing one guy cause if he dies, you're fucked. It's pretty basic overall, but it's good.

There's also Age of Gladiators, which has two games set in ancient Rome and one in a sci-fi setting. They're pretty mediocre tbh, although they do have tactical turn based arena combat, and a decent management layer.

I'm not aware of a game where you manage a roster of adventurers and send them dungeoneering, though.

There's also gladiator Manager:



It's a bit short on the management part, during the first season in the 5th division, at least, even the salary cursor can't be manually controlled, the only thing you can do to increase the salary you can pay is to earn more money.

On the combat part, it's TB "blobber-like" with a really good movement system where you can move to outflank opponents but they will attack you or lock you so it's always a risk/reward situation but picking one weak gladiator early on with two of yours to kill him fast and then outnumber the others is also very efficient.

Last but not least, don't play on normal mode, I picked normal + d20 RNG and not only I'm first in division 5 during the first season but I'm also killing everyone.
Of course, I've played my share of pbem/browser gladiator management games back in the days and i'm putting special efforts in killing my opponents but really, I'm killing 90% of my opponents while the other team have 4 kills at most my counter is at 36 and it adds 36 points to my league points (victories x2 + kills).

I'm also at 0 defeats, aside from a cup one, won first two fights, then i was facing the 1st team of division 1, recruited 2 convicts and watched them die, well, only one died, pathetic...

One "legendary" gladiator showed up available to get recruited but my salary mass isn't high enough for me to recruit him and i fired half my team up to the point the remaining ones are convicts fighting for free (i can't fire them just yet) and good gladiators I won't fire.



TL:DR
Play on hard mode, not sure about the RNG mode though, only played with d20.

Spoiler

When they're on the ground or blinded, aim for the eyes head!

 

[Darth Canoli]

After checking, my kill rate is only 60%.

Also, the reason I mentioned difficulty is the game warning you it's HARD and you'd get stuck on division 5 on the first season in normal and you should play on easy...
Fake news, there was a couple of tough fights and one of my good gladiators died but it was bad luck as it also was the only defeated gladiator I had and during a 3vs3 or 4vs4 so I still won.

Last but not least, I just found out you can switch places during movement phase, it's drag and drop.
Would have helped.

The combat is quite good, you get special moves or boosts when leveling up (special moves are better), you get boosts during training (training skill check every week) and boosts after a fight (intelligence check).
The special moves make all the difference along with managing the control during the combat
>50 you attack under you defend, except when your opponent is disabled or you really have to attack to regain control (retiary, usually, defense does that)

 

[shilence]

Since we're on the subject, which version of football manager is the best overall. Allways wanted to try them but never got into it.

Necroing this to plug the obvious choice: Boong!?: Die ultimatiefe Fußballsimulation for Windows 3.x (1996) - MobyGames[URL]https://www.mobygames.com/game/boong-die-ultimatiefe-fuballsimulation[/URL]

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Wizardry-likes have similar teams management. In particular the japanese ones, there are too many to cite and I am lazy.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

I always considered Football Manager et all to be role-playing games of kinds -- and that's not only because the series has more stats, systems, actual simulation and choice on offer than CD Projekt, Bioware and all those borderline RPG devs these days could ever bother with.

You get to role-play a manager after all. Subsequent releases even introduced character creation screens, where you can edit your attributes and what type of manager you are (which influence a host of things, including your knowledge of young players, your standing with the board, your interaction with your squad and how willing they are to listen and much more. )

More interestingly, AI managers have attributes of their own (even edited personalities). It is/was always hilarious to look around certain types of AI managers and see them storming out of the press conferences quite regularly, as their personality would dictate. :D

If you'd succesfully translate this over to a more traditional RPG, this could actually be quite interesting. Like a game of Jagged Alliance 2, except for the battles not being under your control, but developing accordingly to your picks in personell, how you train them, you how treat them and how much your own personality/attributes are reflecting on all of that. Will check out some of the recommendations so far.

12 and 13 are generally regarded as very good, but hey're very gamey in their setup, many things are abstracted away from real football. I can't speak to earlier editions but given their lack of mentions except for the occasional "haha i'm playing cm2 again" I would guess they don't hold up.

I've personally stopped playing it by the time I (finally) deemed football to be the pretentious, exploiting, boring shitshow it is, but that seems a good overview of yours. FM13 also was the first edition that simulated the 90 minutes in absolute full (prior it was somewhat short of that). Additionally, any edition prior to FM12 didn't even have a "collision avoidance" between players, that is -- in their movement off the ball players could ghost through their markers as if they didn't exist. Basically, there were no lines of code that "checked" if a run of movement off the ball was "physically" viable, e.g. if there stood somebody in the way so that the runner had to move around that player rather than ghost straight through him.

As a consequence, tactics that 24/7 every match, all season, kept like 10 guys glued behind the ball and who would boot the ball aimlessly towards a lone, pacey forward, were actually successful (and commonplace). IIRC, the engine still doesn't have an actual collision DETECTION proper to this day, that is players "physically" actually connecting and blocking running paths as such.

There were still various tactical AI bugs too, like AI managers semi-regularly not protecting their own backline, e.g. tactically employing a player who doesn't always venture forward from his position in front of the backline. This exposed even supposedly "elite" AI managers frequently to the counter, and also made it more difficult for them to rebuild attacks once it breaks down by easily shuffling the ball back to such a guy.

Maybe on of the reasons why FM12 is still considered quite popular.