Road to Glory - TEW IX Edition

[Bad Collin]

55 minutes ago, alpha2117 said:

Is it just an economy of scale thing though?  When you are larger then does very cheap still have the same effect or is it a case where you are just throwing money away?  I get the sense that when you are running small venues very cheap attracts a lot of bodies and those bodies do spend the money elsewhere but at a larger size does that have the same effect or is it just that you are filling an arena either way and getting less for it? 

The ticket prices are already scaled by pop though. Maybe this is the balancing issue, ticket prices should be even lower for smaller promotions.

[Bent]

Yeah, i ran some more test on my next show by changing my Pop before the show. On 100 pop i made 120k more (323k vs 440k) running on normal. On 10 pop i made 1197 from tickets and merch on very cheap and on normal i made 1300.

So idk if it's just down to the pop i am on that makes Very Cheap extra good, or if it just was an anomaly the first time i tested.

Edited August 23 by Bent

[Fabibi]

I've finished my second year, I rolled 21 so I added 10 points to my character's consistency.

I've increased my starting company size to Tiny, currently sitting at 18 popularity in its home region of Western Europe. I've barely been able to complete my owner goal of becoming Tiny, and now he asks me to increase the company's size to Small within 2 years which seems really difficult. Can I get fired if I fail a critical owner goal ?

The owner also changed the company's product from Silver Age Wrestling to Respectful Wrestling, meaning that I have to book 20 mins matches, a Steal The Show and a Technical Masterclass every show which feels really challenging.

I'm 23K in debt but I've started making a bit of a profit by switching to normal ticket pricing.

I've tried to apply to be the booker of European Wrestling All-Stars but got rejected because my Booking Skill is only 34.

My character is progressing well and I have a high skill in psychology, basics, technical, selling and consistency so for now what I'm really struggling is the booking aspect.

[moafnsteel]

Finally got my first 50 rated match with my UC! It was a tag match, but hey it still counts right?!  I rolled an 18 on my roll so +10 to Basics which is nice!

[beemer]

13 minutes ago, moafnsteel said:

Finally got my first 50 rated match with my UC! It was a tag match, but hey it still counts right?!  I rolled an 18 on my roll so +10 to Basics which is nice!

I got three of the four guys in my fed! Just lacking Ryan Castle.

[moststay]

3 hours ago, Fabibi said:

I've finished my second year, I rolled 21 so I added 10 points to my character's consistency.

I've increased my starting company size to Tiny, currently sitting at 18 popularity in its home region of Western Europe. I've barely been able to complete my owner goal of becoming Tiny, and now he asks me to increase the company's size to Small within 2 years which seems really difficult. Can I get fired if I fail a critical owner goal ?

The owner also changed the company's product from Silver Age Wrestling to Respectful Wrestling, meaning that I have to book 20 mins matches, a Steal The Show and a Technical Masterclass every show which feels really challenging.

I'm 23K in debt but I've started making a bit of a profit by switching to normal ticket pricing.

I've tried to apply to be the booker of European Wrestling All-Stars but got rejected because my Booking Skill is only 34.

My character is progressing well and I have a high skill in psychology, basics, technical, selling and consistency so for now what I'm really struggling is the booking aspect.

You could get fired for failing the critical goal. It all depends on how low the owner's opinion on your performance is, if you pass any other goals you should be fine.

[Arlie Rahn]

Question - when starting a challenge like this, do you start as the owner or booker? I am starting a game with a small company and trying to build it and not sure which to choose.

[Bent]

For this specific challenge you start as booker only, as part of the challenge is dealing with owner goals etc.

But for other challenges with similar starts such as Local to Global I think you can start as Owner. At the end of the day though, all these rules are more like guidelines. No one is gonna call for your head if you tweak the rules a bit to fit your own preference.

[Arlie Rahn]

What's the big difference? You just run the risk of being let go if you don't meet the owner's goals?

As owner, your big goal is to not be losing money after three years, right (and therefore go bankrupt)?

[Bad Collin]

13 minutes ago, Arlie Rahn said:

What's the big difference? You just run the risk of being let go if you don't meet the owner's goals?

As owner, your big goal is to not be losing money after three years, right (and therefore go bankrupt)?

Yeah, owners goals are a big part of the challenge in an RTG. Also they set maximum amounts for workers wages and can change the product.

[lr10540]

44 minutes ago, Arlie Rahn said:

What's the big difference? You just run the risk of being let go if you don't meet the owner's goals?

As owner, your big goal is to not be losing money after three years, right (and therefore go bankrupt)?

The biggest difference is ability to sign/keep workers. I'm not sure exactly what Packer's financial preference is, but I'm pretty sure it's the highest setting, so you'll likely never outbid USPW for workers. Owner goals create limitations and challenges in some scenarios. Those are the only real differences.

[lr10540]

I guess I'll do kinda a 5-6 month update since I'm booking 5 shows a month and there's some fun stuff that happened. And also, after reading the last page or so, I kinda wanna brag lol.

We were making like 4k a month running a weekly event + named event on WrestleWorld. I changed that this month to 4 monthly shows + named event. It works the same as 2020 where a weekly event draws less than a monthly event, so that increased my per show income from like 2k to 10k. So with this new found surplus of cash, I decided to sign my second written contract to by far my best worker, KC Glenn. He'll be with us into his early 40s now (he's 33 iirc) but the biggest signing..... Tommy Cornell Jr on a 5 year deal (Because he wouldn't sign a 10 year deal) for 10k a month. Growth has been steady, rapidly upgrading merch again. Might look to sign another worker or 2 to develop a 4 pillars kind of thing and then look at production values. With KC Glenn getting 80 ratings (his individual rating, not segment ratings) and both my UC and Cornell regularly getting 50-60+, I feel really good about the rest of the year.

[alpha2117]

9 hours ago, Bent said:

Yeah, i ran some more test on my next show by changing my Pop before the show. On 100 pop i made 120k more (323k vs 440k) running on normal. On 10 pop i made 1197 from tickets and merch on very cheap and on normal i made 1300.

So idk if it's just down to the pop i am on that makes Very Cheap extra good, or if it just was an anomaly the first time i tested.

Sort of makes sense.  At different levels different things will work better than others.  

[Bad Collin]

10 hours ago, lr10540 said:

I guess I'll do kinda a 5-6 month update since I'm booking 5 shows a month and there's some fun stuff that happened. And also, after reading the last page or so, I kinda wanna brag lol.

We were making like 4k a month running a weekly event + named event on WrestleWorld. I changed that this month to 4 monthly shows + named event. It works the same as 2020 where a weekly event draws less than a monthly event, so that increased my per show income from like 2k to 10k. So with this new found surplus of cash, I decided to sign my second written contract to by far my best worker, KC Glenn. He'll be with us into his early 40s now (he's 33 iirc) but the biggest signing..... Tommy Cornell Jr on a 5 year deal (Because he wouldn't sign a 10 year deal) for 10k a month. Growth has been steady, rapidly upgrading merch again. Might look to sign another worker or 2 to develop a 4 pillars kind of thing and then look at production values. With KC Glenn getting 80 ratings (his individual rating, not segment ratings) and both my UC and Cornell regularly getting 50-60+, I feel really good about the rest of the year.

So 4 monthly shows a month works? That is a massive exploit. 

Monthly events draw the same as Annual events. Weekly events draw about half of that and tv shows draw about a sixth of the annual show. It's the same number of shows but what we call them has a drastic difference on how useful they are. 

[Self]

Got my 75 rated match, and then some. 

Tommy did not like taking the pin in that one (I think SNP are inflating his ego with the Jesus push). Pretty disappointed that my guy was the weak link. He's been on par with Welsh Dragon and Rhys Pendragon thus far, and I've had a few 74-rated singles matches with Junior. He did recently lose his manager to Camp Cornell in the storyline, so maybe that chemistry was helping him more than I thought. 

Rolled a 9 for a bit more Toughness. 

The show also got me my first 75+ rated show, so more booking skill. Personally, I don't find that particularly exciting a bonus. There's plenty of booking help available to max out creativity, and I'm generating more finishes than I can be bothered to use. Only the first boost felt useful. 

SNP might be the next casualty in my game. $6 million in the hole. Bankruptcy is looming. 

[alpha2117]

19 minutes ago, Self said:

Got my 75 rated match, and then some. 

Tommy did not like taking the pin in that one (I think SNP are inflating his ego with the Jesus push). Pretty disappointed that my guy was the weak link. He's been on par with Welsh Dragon and Rhys Pendragon thus far, and I've had a few 74-rated singles matches with Junior. He did recently lose his manager to Camp Cornell in the storyline, so maybe that chemistry was helping him more than I thought. 

Rolled a 9 for a bit more Toughness. 

The show also got me my first 75+ rated show, so more booking skill. Personally, I don't find that particularly exciting a bonus. There's plenty of booking help available to max out creativity, and I'm generating more finishes than I can be bothered to use. Only the first boost felt useful. 

SNP might be the next casualty in my game. $6 million in the hole. Bankruptcy is looming. 

6 million - that a lot to spend on Exotic Dancers and South American ... ummmm Coffee yeah Coffee ... how will Carnie find another sucker to pay him to do that stuff? 

[Bad Collin]

37 minutes ago, Self said:

Got my 75 rated match, and then some. 

Tommy did not like taking the pin in that one (I think SNP are inflating his ego with the Jesus push). Pretty disappointed that my guy was the weak link. He's been on par with Welsh Dragon and Rhys Pendragon thus far, and I've had a few 74-rated singles matches with Junior. He did recently lose his manager to Camp Cornell in the storyline, so maybe that chemistry was helping him more than I thought. 

Rolled a 9 for a bit more Toughness. 

The show also got me my first 75+ rated show, so more booking skill. Personally, I don't find that particularly exciting a bonus. There's plenty of booking help available to max out creativity, and I'm generating more finishes than I can be bothered to use. Only the first boost felt useful. 

SNP might be the next casualty in my game. $6 million in the hole. Bankruptcy is looming. 

Great Match! Best I have got so far is a 70 via a one on one with TCJ. I miss that guy.

What are SNP spending their money on in your game? Did they hire the old 21CW guys? In my save 21CW are still alive in September 2026 but 11m in debt and SNP still have 5.7m in the bank.

[Bad Collin]

Just to analyse this show exploit a bit. Let's say we want to run a standard schedule of 5 shows a month;

If we set the shows up as annual/monthly shows we can have five shows at full attendance, Weekly events seem to be 50% of that and tv shows 20%.

So at my level of pop (49 in home region):

• 5 annual/monthly shows - $120,475 in ticket sales
• 1 annual show, 4 weekly event shows - $77,599
• 1 annual show, 4 TV shows - $47,039

We can obviously tape tv shows but at this level the broadcast revenue is only about $1200 per show so chicken feed compared to ticket sales.

It's up to you what you do with this info. Personally I feel like having more than one monthly or annual show a week is unrealistic and exploiting the game because the AI tend to stick to basic schedules (e.g. in my save my main rivals are SNP and they have annual events and one TV show). However the TV show revenue is pathetic. I'm thinking of having a weekly event which is not broadcast and then a big annual event on Wrestleworld at the end of the month. The idea being that we are touring the weekly show around the country to try and get people to attend or tune into the big show.

What's everyone's thoughts on this?

[Bad Collin]

According to the manual we should be penalised for running more than one monthly ppv but it doesn't say anything about ticket sales. @lr10540, are all of these events running on WrestleWorld? Are you getting the same number of viewers?

[Charasmatic Enigma]

15 minutes ago, Bad Collin said:

Just to analyse this show exploit a bit. Let's say we want to run a standard schedule of 5 shows a month;

If we set the shows up as annual/monthly shows we can have five shows at full attendance, Weekly events seem to be 50% of that and tv shows 20%.

So at my level of pop (49 in home region):

• 5 annual/monthly shows - $120,475 in ticket sales
• 1 annual show, 4 weekly event shows - $77,599
• 1 annual show, 4 TV shows - $47,039

We can obviously tape tv shows but at this level the broadcast revenue is only about $1200 per show so chicken feed compared to ticket sales.

It's up to you what you do with this info. Personally I feel like having more than one monthly or annual show a week is unrealistic and exploiting the game because the AI tend to stick to basic schedules (e.g. in my save my main rivals are SNP and they have annual events and one TV show). However the TV show revenue is pathetic. I'm thinking of having a weekly event which is not broadcast and then a big annual event on Wrestleworld at the end of the month. The idea being that we are touring the weekly show around the country to try and get people to attend or tune into the big show.

What's everyone's thoughts on this?

While we're talking about schedules, I thought I'd throw up something I've been testing. It's essentially a variation on what I used to use during the 'Cult' phase on I think TEW 13 (if anyone else has been playing that long). My company is based in the Great Lakes, and I run one annual event a month there (which down the line will form my 'PPV' events) - but I'm also running a monthly 'on tour' event. This essentially means I run 1x event in the Great Lakes and 1x event in the South West every month, using seperate 6 person rosters for each. By only using wrestlers based in the South West, I don't pay them travel for events in their home area - and the 'Give night off' function prevents anyone getting upset for not being used on shows not in their area. This method has proved surprisingly effective, and in November 2022 I am officially out of debt.

I've updated merchandise to level 3, and by essentially doubling my early game pop (as I have both Great Lakes and South West pop) I have doubled by merch money. This approach has negated the early game money troubles, but similar to the above I'm not sure if it feels too 'gamey'?

[Charasmatic Enigma]

1 hour ago, Self said:

Got my 75 rated match, and then some. 

Tommy did not like taking the pin in that one (I think SNP are inflating his ego with the Jesus push). Pretty disappointed that my guy was the weak link. He's been on par with Welsh Dragon and Rhys Pendragon thus far, and I've had a few 74-rated singles matches with Junior. He did recently lose his manager to Camp Cornell in the storyline, so maybe that chemistry was helping him more than I thought. 

Rolled a 9 for a bit more Toughness. 

The show also got me my first 75+ rated show, so more booking skill. Personally, I don't find that particularly exciting a bonus. There's plenty of booking help available to max out creativity, and I'm generating more finishes than I can be bothered to use. Only the first boost felt useful. 

SNP might be the next casualty in my game. $6 million in the hole. Bankruptcy is looming. 

Great match Self! What size are you at now? Are you generating enough money to after any of the big names 21CW's death has left without a home?

[Self]

37 minutes ago, Charasmatic Enigma said:

Great match Self! What size are you at now? Are you generating enough money to after any of the big names 21CW's death has left without a home?

Still Small. 50 pop in Wales and 29 in the Midlands/South. I have a little over 8 months to get to 59 & 35 for Medium or Red Dragon gets mad, and I think I might make it. I think I over-estimated how severe the cap of monthly pop increases are. 

Running a Very Cheap 2-hour event every two weeks. When I run big venues (Swansea, Cardiff) I can make $11k profit in a month, but I'm usually handicapping myself by also running small & medium sized venues (Newport, Carmarthen) that I set up at the beginning of the game. I'm assuming the pop gain is the same, even if attendance is significantly smaller. It adds flavor to my game.

I made a copy of my save and tested TV for a month. Lost $12k and made barely any pop gain. Waste of time. 

I can absolutely afford a few select 21CW guys, but I've stuck to midcarders and road agents. Rhys Pendragon ($900) and Welsh Dragon ($1.4k) felt essential to the concept of my promotion. Tommy Cornell Sr ($900) is my head road agent, while the Dark Angel; Clifford Wilson ($600) came in to translate for the Joshi workers I brought in. I'm not too familiar with 21CW so I needed to look up where their stars went, and it explains how SNP ended up in debt. They snatched up a bunch of them to exclusive written deals. Having lost/dropped their TV show in September (it was on Wrestleworld GB, so I can't imagine it was much of a money-spinner) they're running one PPV per month... but they're still paying Landon Mallory, Apollo Prince and Alton Vicious $100k+ a month. Each. 

SNP's financials. Not mine. Definitely the roster. 

I probably do need to make one big hire, as my shows have started getting the occasional 'lack of big names' penalties. I only have one Major Star (Neville Jones). Pendragon, Cornell Jr and Welsh Dragon are objectively my best workers, but they haven't been here long enough for the fans to see them as big, big stars. 

 

[Bent]

I'm currently in April of 27, and with 57 pop in my home region and 40+ in the neighboring regions I'm on the cusp of reaching medium.

 

Aaaaand my UC tear his rotator Cuff. Luckily surgery was a success so I'm only out for 218 days instead of the full year, but considering I'm the company champion, top baby face, and about halfway through being established as figurehead, timing really couldn't be any worse.

[Goliathus]

3 hours ago, Bad Collin said:

to you what you do with this info. Personally I feel like having more than one monthly or annual show a week is unrealistic and exploiting the game because the AI tend to stick to basic schedules (e.g. in my save my main rivals are SNP and they have annual events and one TV show).

Unrealistic is why I am enforcing my own house rules to only do shows akin to the AI schedule. I accept that I will play a much longer game with this rules of mine.

Unrealistic shows frequency has always been a part of the game since the previous iterations anyway, so I think players should just play the way they want on this.

Like, we are allowed to be gamey on this challenge anyway. Players can choose to min-max their initial character with a lot of 75 and 0. Players can do 1 hour show with limited talent and still earn pop as the same speed as a much longer shows that need more creative points. And many other power gaming stuffs. So, I think we should just let players play how they want and it's more about the journey than the result. It's not like we have a "speed run hall of fame" on this challenge where it's about finishing it in the shortest time possible.

Edited August 24 by Goliathus

[Bad Collin]

34 minutes ago, Goliathus said:

Unrealistic is why I am enforcing my own house rules to only do shows akin to the AI schedule. I accept that I will play a much longer game with this rules of mine.

Unrealistic shows frequency has always been a part of the game since the previous iterations anyway, so I think players should just play the way they want on this.

Like, we are allowed to be gamey on this challenge anyway. Players can choose to min-max their initial character with a lot of 75 and 0. Players can do 1 hour show with limited talent and still earn pop as the same speed as a much longer shows that need more creative points. And many other power gaming stuffs. So, I think we should just let players play how they want and it's more about the journey than the result. It's not like we have a "speed run hall of fame" on this challenge where it's about finishing it in the shortest time possible.

Very true and I wasn't trying to police anyone. My monthly shows are gamey anyway because the AI never uses them.