"Other" Sports Sims - Recommendations

[SirFozzie]

Since we've had ones for boxing and horse racing, I thought to create a thread where we can recommend other sports sims.

American Football:

King of the (H)ill- Madden

It kinda has a sim mode, and with its sheer popularity, it has to be mentioned.

Text Sims of Note

FOF 8 - Well, duh! This is FOFC, so I'm pretty sure everybody knows it.

Wolverine Studios (Pro and College): I have yet to try the new versions (Pro Football 22 is out, College Football 22 hits early access Monday, but they've been iterating pretty well so far. I am going to be giving them a shot at some point, and will update when I do.

2nd and Ten (Second and Ten Version X) Aimed at more replay fans then fictional universes, but this is one of the most detailed sims out there. If replaying historical seasons is your thing, then this is probably your best bet.

[SirFozzie]

Basketball

King of the Very Ill- NBA 2K
It's your main (really only) choice if you want an action/sim, but has many strikes on it from a sim-perspective, including 2K Sports rapacious microtransactions policy and force to do things other than play/sim games.

Text Sims of Note:

Wolverine Studios: While the Football games are slowly iterating their way into a mature status, the Pro and College Basketball games from Wolverine are the best ones out there, especially for modeling the moving-part nature of basketball players (If you try to run a pace and space offense with players more suited for a post up or one-on-one style you'll suffer.)

Fast Break Basketball (Pro and College) Hasn't had a new version in many years, and updates are sparse, but still a very good sim.

[SirFozzie]

Baseball:

King of the Hill- OOTP series. (outoftheparkdevelopments.com) literally the 9000 lb gorilla in this category. While I have concerns about the Perfect team mode getting all the feature updates, (please god do not let them get into the NFT-craze), This is the top one out there.

Console: MLB The Show: Now on both Xbox and PS series, this is the 9000 lb gorilla of the console industry. While they haven't yet gone down the full "Bleed your customers dry" microtransactions mode that NBA 2K has, I'm seeing some worrying signs. New version (and cover star) to be announced this week I believe. Will we see it make the jump to PC?

[SirFozzie]

Other Sports:

Hockey- Franchise Hockey Manager Series (I haven't played a version in a couple years, I have to try to get back into that)

Soccer - Football Manager. (the digital equivalent of crack). Pro Evolution Soccer was up there for a while, but has (hopefully) bottomed out, because I think there's no lower they can go). FIFA (Consoles)

Combat Sports

Sims: Leather (Boxing ios/android), Boxing Club Manager (Boxing, just released into Early Access, not feature complete), Title Bout Championship Boxing (a straight conversion of the board game sim, World of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA)

Console: UFC 4 (to be free for PS+ users in February apparently)

Wrestling:
Sims: TEW 2020 and Wrestling Spirit (Grey Dog Software), Wrestling Empire, Pro Wrestling Sim:

Console: AAW, Retromania, FIre Pro Wrestling

Tennis:

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.

Tennis Elbow Manager: Haven't tried this one out yet, though I do own it.

Console: AO Tennis, Tennis World Tour,

Horse Racing:

Rival Stars Horse Racing
Starters Orders

(Haven't played either of them, so I'll let others opine on it)

Racing: Motorsport Manager (F1/sprint car/touring, wish they'd make a new version with NASCAR style)

[Mota]

Great recommendations! For me, boxing and tennis have been the gap that I didn't know much about. I might pick up Tennis Manager 2021.
I've been playing a lot of Action PC Sports games, they are season replay games, but have a nice presentation that's much more modern than Strat-o-Matic. Statistical simulation seems to be at least just as good.
I'm also due to upgrade all my Wolverine Sports games, I think I'm still working on the 2020 versions.

[molson]

I'm curious about the two new Wolverine football games. I haven't played a text sim in a while but this season has made me think about it again.

[weegeebored]

Coincidentally I started playing Motorsport Manager again the day before this thread was started. I highly recommend the Fire Fantasy 2021 mod which can be found through Steam Workshop. To avoid installation issues, RTFM.

[BYU 14]

Originally Posted by molson

I'm curious about the two new Wolverine football games. I haven't played a text sim in a while but this season has made me think about it again.

I have not played the Pro game, but i really enjoy the College games, which continue to get better and better.

[stevew]

DD:PF 2021 is on sale for 10$

[Brian Swartz]

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.

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.

[whomario]

Not in the mood for a long thread, but not yet mentioned:

- Pro Cycling Manager / TDF are both decent, albeit in a bit of a rut with the budget shrinking. Some flaws but good fun and it's a fun sport to play as it's kind of open ended in terms of goals. (PCM is the classic sim style game with overall team controll while TDF from the same studio is more focussed on the races as such with larger scale and thus longer races)

- F1 Manager is about to be released and while there are likely some flaws (driver development and regression looks terrible ...) and lots of mechanics look to be straight out of Motorsport Manager it also seems a very decent starting point with plenty of depth if you are into F1. Goes much deeper that MM when it comes to parts development/engineering. From Frontier so i am optimistic on future patches and versions being improvements.

[SirFozzie]

Have you tried the Cyclist tactics game, whomario? Was interested in that one.

[whomario]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

Have you tried the Cyclist tactics game, whomario? Was interested in that one.

I hadn't even heard if it before you mentioned it but yeah, looks like an interesting concept

[Brian Swartz]

By the way, somebody needs to become our resident expert on Rocking Soccer (more popular game similar to Rocking Rackets, by the same devs).

[Ksyrup]

For "console" tennis (I put it in quote because I use the keyboard), I really enjoy Tennis Elbow. TE4 has been in early release mode for about a year but it's surprisingly polished. I think the ball movements feel pretty authentic and you can make it pretty difficult on yourself to hit just the right shot instead of just being in the general vicinity.

[PilotMan]

If you're not playing CJBL Basketball, you're missing out on an incredible, incredible FREE, multiplayer college basketball game.

[Austin90]

If you're interested in hunting sims. I played Way of the hunter recently, I'd say it's pretty good comes close to the real thing in terms of feel!