codey_v3

To add to what others have already said, it is pretty common for insignificant and tiny companies to hire workers for $1100 per show deals, even if it doesn't financially smart to players. The idea is that those more expensive workers will bring more eyes to a promotion and allow it to grow faster even if they're taking a financial hit to start. It might not be a strategy that makes sense as a player because you can look at your financials and know that based on how much you're losing and your overall growth rate if it will work or not, but it is a strategy that real indie promotions use all the time, leveraging the popularity of expensive ex-WWE workers to entice more people to come to their shows. Sometimes they'll even pay the big bucks to guys like Scott Steiner to just sit outside and sign autographs so long as it brings more people to the event.

If I want to build someone FAST at a local level I hire 40+ year old workers that have had their time in the sun (Flying Jimmy Foxx, T-Rex, etc.) and sign them to short contracts where I job them out. Currently doing it with Benny Benson to get Logan Wolfsbaine over fast in MAW. But at a basic level, it's just about having them beat more over guys. If I have a guy in the 20 pop range, I have him feud with and beat someone in the 30 pop range or even just beat him on tv with no feud. That's pretty much a guaranteed 5 pop gain, and the loser is gonna lose 3-4 points that can be regained just by having him on tv. You really just have to continually have thme beat more over guys, they'll gain 1-2 points beating guys on their level but it will take forever. It's why your midcard is so important. Everyone loves your Rocky Goldens and Scythes, but those guys aren't getting over to the point they are without people like American Machine or John Greed sitting in the midcard to beat, and if you don't maintain those midcarders with their own storylines and give them their own wins then you're going to have a hard time building someone to superstar status.

Sweet! My last TEW2020 save was using this mod and it was the most fun I ever had. Simmed up until 1970 and then started a local fed that was the dominant promotion in the world by '88, when I saw that TEWIX was coming out.

5 shows seems like a pretty good gauge, you'll be able to get them around 20 pop in that time if you're a big promotion, and that will show how good they're performing compared to your other lowcard workers. Personally I'm a big fan of 3 month exclusive contracts for trial workers, because it lets them build some experience working house shows even if I'm not using them on every show.

Funny you say that, my longest running game in 2020 was like 18 years with the Effganic organic mod. When I got to the late 80s, I realized that I was legitimately stifling the growth of the game world just like the WWF did in the 80s. Pretty much everyone talented and not physically destroyed in the US worked for me, and there was absolutely no one in the smaller promotions that was talented enough to really help train the younger guys anymore. Because the whole point of that mod is to let the game world develop on its own starting at 1920, I made it a point then to really trim down my roster and be intentional about who I used, because I had really talented guys just sitting in jobber teams or that I would only use every other week or two. I wanted to release back into the wild to see how they could flourish, it was really cool to be able to check into the equivalent of like a TNA and see that a guy I didn't give much opportunity to was winning championships elsewhere.

Just had my best show yet, which isn't saying much because at MAW's size every other show is the best one yet until you hit 2026 probably. Please don't judge me on the match-only show, Sam Keith forced me to run a modern throwback product, and my tv shows are only 60% matches so it evens out! A few notes: Carlos Barrera has developed into one of the better workers in the roster with 76 brawling, and TNT is a TCW training school grad I hired and probably my future figurehead if he turns into what it looks he can Marco Gonzalez is just too good. I pushed him as a young developing face and he's been feuding with Big Money Inc., my stable consisting of Avalanche, The Historian, Xavi Ferrera and Carl Batch. I had him lose to Historian here, but later in the night he distracted Nate DeMarcus to let Avalanche win, turning him heel to join the stable he's been feuding with. LA Stars are the best free agent tag team in the US, period. They're so good, and #1 has a lot of singles potential too, I'm already thinking of a future angle where they feud and #2 loses a mask vs mask match but pulls off #1's mask anyway, sparking a LOOOOOOONG blood feud. Texas Hangman got a bad match here against an aging Doc Hammond, but he was supposed to be fighting Mitchell Aldred, who injured his spleen. Hangman's been my undisputed top babyface and had a 364-day, 15 defense title reign. He started as Aldred's muscle, got over on his own and turned face and won the title. He won the 2023 Rip Chord Invitational and I'm having him win again in 2025. Big Papa Swoll is a future champ, he's developed so much this save. I've always been unlucky with him in that he usually doesn't show much skill growth, but in this save his brawling skill is improving at a rate of 4 points per year and his already impressive entertainment skills are still going up. Plus I complimented him a couple of times and we're like family now, he's never going anywhere. Youngman is Ernest, whose first name I hate lol. I'm doing something different with him now. For the past ten years I feel like I've booked him as a super serious Bret Hart type, but for some reason I've just decided to transform him into a loudmouth 80s-style joker character, sort of like a modern Seth Rollins with a Joey Janela wardrobe. He and Whitehead tore the house down, at 66 overness Youngman's in-ring performance here was 92, it's insane how good he is, and I honestly stayed away from him for two years straight because I assumed that someone would hire him.

Gotcha! I've tried to stay up to date, must have happened in my game before it got addressed. Glad to hear it's fixed even if its a mostly cosmetic thing affecting the AI!

I've hit 2025, and there's a new feature of the new AI that is bumming out: in 2024, almost all of the regional promotions in the US have retired all of their championships and brought in an entire new group of them, effectively resetting the lineage of some really long-running championships. At first I thought it was the AI saying "Ok, the prestige of these titles is too low for our current size" but then I looked at FCW, and their new championships ALL have less prestige than the retired ones. Has anyone else experienced this?

I did some editor tomfoolery for this, but I just hired a cool randomly generated brother tag team. TCW had two guys, one 22 and one 24, graduate in the same year name Dan Stubbs and Wyatt Stubbs. Seeing that, and seeing that they were on handshake deals, I had to have them. I went into the editor and made them brothers, then renamed them Dan and Wyatt King, the Iron Kings and brought them in. Honestly, they're a pretty prototypical brother tag team. Wyatt is the older brother, and he's much, much more talented than Dan right out the gate, but his star quality is only 50 and he's on the smaller side. Dan, meanwhile, is the younger brother with pretty abysmal skills, but he's charismatic, has 85 SQ, and at 260 pounds has 87 menace with the ability to play pretty much any kind of gimmick. Wyatt will be the workhorse for a couple of years, but Dan is going to be a star and I can't wait to see how he develops. Dan and Wyatt, the Iron Kings:

Yeah you just have to eat the losses for a little bit. Luckily MAW is already eligible for a WrestleWorld deal at the start, so that can help mitigate the losses a lot. Even if you dip into the red a bit I wouldn't worry, the pop gains from being on WrestleWorld itself will help you shoot back up. I stuck with them for two years before switching broadcasters and I think by the end of 2023 I was pulling in $100k a month.

Personally I appreciate the size of the game window, but I think that's because I shove it to the side of the screen and stick a show, movie, youtube video, whatever in the remaining third and it's nice. I don't have a second monitor so I appreciate being able to throw on something to watch while playing the game too.

As far as actual skill improvement goes, it really just comes down to lots of matches with guys that are more skilled. Wrestlers learn in the ring, so get those reps in. If a guy doesn't fit on the main card, make sure you book them in a pre-show match. If you're running weekly cards, the guys you want to improve need to be wrestling every week. There are natural limits to how much a guy can improve in any given month, but generally what I look at is this: if I have a guy on roster for one year and his primary skills only went up by 2 points in that time period, I write him off as a lowcard guy for years. He's not going to improve fast enough to be useful for a very long time if he's being used every week and his improvement is that slow. But if you see a guy who's primary skills are raising 4-5 points in a year? Strap a rocket to him as soon as he gets to 20 experience, that's a guy that you won't need to worry about strategically improving, he'll do it all on his own. As far as gameplay strategies for improvement go, this is what I like: I typically play saves that go 10-15 years, so I'm big on long term development. In my last save in 2020, I instituted a young lion system and a development promotion in my US promotion. Essentially, if you were a graduate of my dojo (I kept it to 4 a year) you would be a young lion jobber for a full year on my main show, which usually got guys' experience up to around 20. After that year was up, I would ship them off on excursion to a with a touring schedule for 1, 2, or 3 years depending on how much more seasoning I thought they needed. That way they get a ton of experience overseas, and get to come back with good skills and a new gimmick and I get to skip the part where I stick them in a tag team for 2 years to get better. Development was for people I didn't train in my dojo or dojo grads if they still weren't good enough when they came back from excursion. For them, I liked to sign 2-3 years contracts, that way I felt like I gave them a fair chance to improve enough to be called up. Take advantage of all the training mechanics. Like someone else said make sure you assign a head trainer to your inner circle, and if you've got a performance center make sure you assign your prospects to train there.

Something like "Almost guaranteed" feels like a fair choice. On that note, which of these two is more likely: likely to succeed vs a safe bet? Because in my head, a safe bet and likely to succeed mean pretty much the same thing. I've been just assuming that safe bet has a higher chance of working, but I've truly got no idea.

Is it possible to view the remaining length of a workers contract in their profile anymore? It was available in 2020, and I know I can still go to the company roster to view contracts, but it would be really nice to be able to quickly see how much time is left on a contract when I'm just viewing workers at random.

Personally, I'd advise against keeping Tornado. He's on the wrong side of 40 and his neck is so far gone the only real use he has is to put over undercard guys you want to immediately get over, like a Logan Wolfsbaine or Ernest Youngman. I like keeping Arsonal, Benson, Foxx, and The Elite, but Biggins, Tornado and Tana all were drained of their popularity in favor of young guys on their way out. TCW has honestly been so fun to start out this go around. You've got so many longtime guys they've leaned on forever that could just go in the ring, and now they've allowed most of those guys to either get too old or too banged up to perform up to standard while also ignoring that they needed to get fresh new talent in. The company's bled top guys and undercard guys alike, and it's really fun to figure out how to take advantage of what you do have while building what you don't. For example, I don't particularly like One Man Army as a singles wrestler and he's pretty shot, but I couldn't let him walk when his contract was up because I needed him in the midcard. I just didn't have enough faces in that 50-60 overness range, and without him my cards would be really imbalanced. Plus, I get to keep him around as a backstage enforcer until I get some other tough guys with enough respect to fill the role.