The Beginners Guide

Hopefully this thread will provide all the information required for a beginner to play the game, and give hints on how to progress without running out of money.

The thread will only take you through your first year as a promoter. It won't cover TV, PPVs, streaming, pro gyms - these are things you should not worry about until you have come to grips with the game.

First of all, pay attention to where you are setting up your promotion.  Some countries are more costly than others.  It's not just the economic development rating of the country you should consider, but also the size of the country.  Being based in Kazakhstan, and bringing in an opponent in from the other side of Kazakhstan for example will be more costly than being based in Dominican Republic and bringing in an opponent from  anywhere else in this country or neighbouring Haiti or Puerto Rico.

Also, consider the number of neighbouring countries from where opponents can be brought in, if there are none available in your country.

Once you have chosen the HQ and created your promotion, you will automatically be assigned 4 "start up" fighters.  You can look at these fighters individually via the "Your Stable" screen.

At this point, you won't know a lot about the fighters attributes - these are revealed gradually.  

You need to assign a trainer for each fighter.  When looking for a trainer, find one in the same country as the HQ, who already has other fighters in their gym at and around the same weightclass as your fighter. This is because when preparing for a fight, fighters will automatically try to find sparring partners in the same gym with a style similiar to the scheduled opponent.  The sparring partner can be up to 2 weightclasses higher or lower.

Also, look for a trainer who is competent at training your fighters style.  i.e. if he is a boxer-puncher style, look for a trainer with at least 600 in boxer-puncher. The lowest level of trainer are unlikely to have good stats across the board, so just look for someone who is competent at training your fighter, and getting him prepared for fights.  So also look for Fight Prep and Gameplan attributes of 600+

Note that when you assign a trainer, your fighter becomes based in this city and when scheduling future fights, expenses will be worked out based on your fighter travelling from this city.

Now you have 4 fighters all with trainers, you can go about setting up your first show and getting your fighters their debut fights. If you look at the fighters screens, the trainer will recommend how many rounds the fighter can fight.  This is also shown in the Stable screen. None of the fighters will have enough stamina to fight more than 6 rounds, so you can create a show in 2 weeks time to give the fighters enough time to prepare.

Try to find a venue in the same location as where your fighters are based (i.e. the city where they are training).  This will keep travel expenses down. Also to keep costs down, avoid booking fights on a Thursday - Saturday which are the most expensive days.  Your unknown fighters and your unknown promotion are not going to sell many tickets, so just book a tiny venue maybe 60 - 90 seat capacity.

Once you have booked the venue, you can go to each fighters individual screen and select Schedule Fight from the drop down list.

Choose the show you have booked, and non-title fight.  Choose the appropriate number of rounds (4 or 6 at this point).  You can see the trainer recommendations at the top of the screen. Click the "Recommended" checkbox and change the locality drop down to "Nearby".  This will search for opponents recommended by the trainer within 100 or so miles of the show. This should only return opponents which your trainer thinks your fighter will comfortably beat while gaining him experience.

If no fighters can be found, then uncheck "Recommended", and add a maximum class of 50, and perform the same search.  From the resulting list choose an opponent who looks non-threatening (e.g. 0 or 1 wins and numerous defeats).

If no fighters can be found "nearby", you'll have to change this back to All, and then search for opponents in the same country instead.

Once an opponent has been selected, put in the fight purse offer. If the opp's minimum fight purse is higher than your fighters purse, it is possible that they demand more money.  Just to avoid a rejection and then having to repeat the offer, just offer a little bit more (maybe add 10%)

Confirm the fight offer, and when the screen returns to your fighters page, immediately put him in fight camp so he starts preparing for the fight.

The fight offers will process at the end of the game day (one game day being 3 hours in real life).  Once they have gone through you can look at the show and should see the fights scheduled.  You will also see estimated ticket sales for the show.

Note that at the beginning of the game, your promotion is unknown as quantified by the Reputation stat you can see on the Office Overview.  This reduces the number of tickets your promotion will sell.  Also, your fighters are largely unknown - the first show will probably just be attended by the fighters friends and family!

At this stage, you will not make money on shows.  Fight purses will exceed show revenue, and you should just try to keep expenses as low as possible.  However, each show you put on will increase your promotions reputation.

Now, there is nothing further to do with these fighters until the fights simulate, so what you can do now is look for more fighters to sign.  4 fighters is not enough for your promotion to be sustainable.

There are two approaches you can take here.

One way of increasing reputation is simply by signing fighters.  You could just use the Pro Search screen within Scouting to find low class free agents to sign.  These will have low signing fees and signing a number of such fighters will boost your reputation.  If you are going to do this, just go for 1 year contracts, as they are likely to be not very good - you are just getting them for the rep boost and to put on more shows, again with the intention of increasing rep.  You can do the same with amateurs as well - look for low class ams who are willing to turn pro and sign a few on 1 year contracts.  Make sure you have plenty of capital left as this will gradually reduce as you pay monthly trainer fees, HQ upkeep and cover initial show losses.

The second approach, is to hire a scout to look for decent fighters in your country.

You need to hire a scout in the same country with attributes of 700+ in the Assessment and Potential.  The former indicates how well the scout can assess a fighters current stats, and the latter is how well they can judge a fighters potential.

You can then create an assignment for the scout.  Choose the country to scout, and make sure you are only looking for free agents (you don't want to scout fighters already signed at this point as you don't want to be spending money on compensating promoters).

Also, select the attribute search option, and put in some minimums for some of the attributes. You want most attributes to be 600+, but this is not an exact science. you can have fighters who are incredible in a number of stats but have one low stat which would mean he would be missed as not fulfilling the attribute criteria.

As a minimum, I would set Gameplan, Ring IQ and Training to be at least 700. Note that scouting assignments cost more, the bigger the country.  If you are already in a large country, perhaps limit the scouting to a specific region.

Once set up, the scouts take approx 1 month to find their first fighters.  You will see a "next update date" in the assignment row for the scout.

When the scouts find fighters, be mindful of their class and how much their signing fee is.  At this point you want to go for cheap. FOr the more expensive fighters, you might want to just shortlist them for now, and maybe you can go back to them in a few months if you have the cash

As you sign more fighters, you will be putting on more shows.  with experience you should work out how to judge how many tickets a show will sell, and gradually book larger and larger venues.  by the time you have been around 6 months or so you should be breaking even.

By the 12 month mark, you may be making small profits and generally heading in the right direction.

One final point to make - if your capital falls below 10k, you can get emergency funds (a 50k boost) from Promoter Options.  You can do this twice.  

By this point, you will be ready to move on to the "Intermediate Guide" thread (coming soon!)