Booking an Insignificant Japanese Company

[Exeter]

I was considering trying to book a user-made Japanese company for the first time, and wondered whether I should set up a touring schedule right away, or whether it made more sense for an insignificant company to start out with monthly events and only begin touring once it had gained some popularity? What would be more realistic? Any real-world examples?

 

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Scott Zodiac]

Money will be your biggest issue. What difficulty were you thinking of starting from? I’ve started on Rock Hard and you make a loss on each show, so you have to balance running shows with money. Your starting economy and wrestling business play a massive part too with a large difference in sponsorship between high and low. I’ve found popularity growth depends on the wrestling business state, but be aware that it is capped by default in TEW2020 so you can only go up in popularity by a certain amount every month, so running more shows doesn’t increase your popularity, but will drain your finances. You can turn this off in the options though if you want to.

[hecatomb]

When I started the save I've been playing for the last few months, it was a company I made that started at insignificant in Japan. I honestly don't remember exactly what happened in the beginning but I did not have a touring schedule set up. I went with 4 events in my first month as a round robin tournament and then 1 event the other 11 months. I think I started up touring in year 2. I do not think it would hurt to tour since the costs are greatly reduced with it but there are a couple of reasons I would not.

 

One reason is realism like you mentioned. I'm sure it is not unheard of but, from my research, small promotions in Japan go with a schedule that is pretty similar to most independent wrestling around the world now. That is pretty much a relatively standardized event schedule, generally 6-18 events a year. There is not a lot of substance there with limited wrestlers and money so it just wouldn't make a lot of sense to run shows that were not great since your "big" shows are going to be not that great anyway.

 

Another reason is that you want to get out of the money pit you will be in ASAP. Not because touring will pile it on a ton more but because I believe a lot of the game play comes in when your promotion has more options in who you have on the roster and what the story of your company is. That comes with money and financial security. For me, that happens around Tiny and builds from there. Obviously, you can have very intricate storylines from the start but, to me, it is very immersion breaking to do that for crowds of 20 people. When we start getting 100 people coming to a show, I feel like it is time to start adding some story to the matches. For the first year or so, it is just setting up winners and losers, building stats and building pop. People are going to these shows on a whim and are not invested in your product so there will be no continuation in anyone's mind outside of you and your wrestlers from show to show. By adding tours which are very insignificant shows, you will be adding more time to get to that point and you may get burned out before the fun begins.

 

One note on Japan is the existence of Shogun TV as a broadcaster which seems overpowered but is default. It has Small coverage but only requires a Tiny size. Get on there as soon as you can.

 

I've questioned in the past if I even want to do tour shows because it is basically like planning out the house shows in other companies as opposed to TV shows which I feel have more impact. I feel a lot better about booking a TV show because you can still see those gains. Tour shows - not so much. I do keep with them and feel like I have a balanced system that is not super realistic but it keeps me playing. The AI have like 8-12 tour shows with an event at the end and that is pretty realistic but not too interesting to play out IMO. I do 3 tour shows and 1 event per month for some months(similar to a western TV+1 event/month setup) and I do a combination of either 3 lesser events and 1 regular event or 4 regular events per month.

 

With 3 tour shows, I work on stats and build to the event similar to what happens in Japan. They are mostly multi-man tags involving people who will either have singles or 2 man tag matches on the main event and then sprinkle in other random multi-mans on the tours and event for people not in a story or going for a belt.

 

The 3 lesser + 1 normal event is for "cup" tournaments with single elimination. The lesser events are the tournament with the event being the finals + other things.

 

the 4 event months are for round robin tournaments.

 

I think 4 event months are very OP (and 3 lesser+1 normal is somewhat OP) because they get you a lot of money but I also want people going all out in my main tournaments. I've compromised with the Cups since they only slightly hold back on lesser events -- opposed to fully hold back on tours and not at all on regular events.

 

Hopefully some of that was helpful but I'd also be interested in hearing any other thoughts from people.

 

PS: https://www.cagematch.net/ is a great resource to research the wrestling world. I use it a lot to get info on number of shows different promotions do, how many times they defend belts and which ones per year, what regular attendance is for small shows and big events, how many matches per show, how many wrestlers they use, etc. I get very tied to having a realistic world in this game so I spend more time doing research or playing god on the backend than I do booking shows. If you want to use it, I'd suggest 2019 and later since the Covid world is much different.

[Exeter]

Thank you, that's incredibly helpful. I'll be sure to do some research on cagematch as well; that looks like a great resource.