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Originally Posted by SirFozzie
Tennis Manager 2021 : I've fooled around with this one, and I'm kinda surprised that the Rocking Rackets folks haven't picked up on this yet. Needs to add doubles, but already models the Men's, Women's and Junior tennis circuits very well. I have some problems with the goal system (players stay with you based on personally set milestones, with no wiggle room (you have to have 66% milestones to keep them each season, but it's pass/fail, if someone wants to be rank 5 by the end of the season, and they're rank 6, then it counts as a fail and they'll likely dump you as a coach.) It is heavily discounted during the current Steam Lunar Sale, so it may be something to take a flyer on.
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If Tennis Manager filled the void I would be ecstatic, IMO it doesn't from what I've seen. I will probably still buy it to get ideas about what works and what doesn't.
I did watch part of a playthrough of the 2022 version on YouTube, which led to some conclusions:
** Way too easy to make money; financial side of the game was borderline broken.
** Junior players can play apparently unlimited events or at least way too many, whereas they are actually limited to only a few IRL.
** Starting player without ratings justifying it able to dominate immediately for the first few years.
** Some of the stats were way off. Example: Osaka on the womens tour having more aces than any of the men. That's just .... not how tennis is played.
** Training system very gameable. The idea of knowing exactly how close you are to the next arbitrary tier of a skill to four significant digits (xx.xx%) and being able to predict exactly how much effort you need to put in to get that improvement, etc. turns me off personally. It's sort of a stand-in for what appears to me to be a lot of feature creep - i.e. fluff such as many of the upgrades to your academy that don't represent particularly interesting gameplay decisions from what I can see, but just fit the 'more is better' mantra that grinds my gears.
** Too much FM-like in terms of things like pointless IMO press interviews and the like. I've never seen any implementation of that kind of feature that didn't feel to me like tacked-on click-through tedious busy work.
** I don't think the 3D matches actually work, and I've never seen a tennis game in which they did. Tennis Manager is better than other tries in the sense that players do hit errors occasionally, net cords/lets/double faults happen, but the frequency with which low-level players paint the lines/corners or rip laser-like crosscourt winners is unintentionally hilarious. This is an extremely hard aspect to get right for sure, and I understand the desire to have the viewable matches in for marketing purposes, but in terms of being a reasonable simulation of tennis the game would be better off without it.
I acknowledge that as a tennis semi-fanatic I'm biased and things will bother me that won't bother people with less interest in the sport. It does seem to have the right tiers of events and I think the idea of building up a tennis academy with infrastructure is potentially quite cool. Doubles would be really good to have but it's actually more important to me to get more of the core elements right.
Tennis Elbow Manager I have. It's just .... strange. It does some things really well, similarly to Tennis Manager 2022 in terms of setting up the different tiers of tournaments, having different styles of players, etc. Both have the same issue IMO of just so many different ratings it's hard to tell what impacts what, and TEM can tell you what a player's skill is down to a tenth of a percent .... but the impact of court surface for example isn't quantified, exactly what some of the ratings do is described poorly or not at all, it has a visual match engine which the first version didn't but it also comes with the disclaimer that playing out your matches will drastically skew your results ... it's good for a one-man effort but the dev has announced they won't be continuing it and I sort of get the feeling from it that I would from a number of sci-fi movies, the kind where they just announce numbers dramatically without context (reactor up to 83%) etc. It also doesn't have an open-ended career mode, you have a limited (I think 25) number of years that you can play with the stock players and then the game is over. So there's no building a history, using fictionals, and so on. Match strategy also pretty much boils down to using your players default style, or changing to a different one of the preset s at a penalty. One really big improvement in TEM2 over the first game is the training schedules feature; in the first one training your players was the majority of the game, and boiled down to oppressive busywork after a while. That's relieved significantly in the sequel.