Gladiator Manager

Fun game. Very addicting.

Good core options, great historical theme, feels realistic, love the stats. Not easy, so I could see impatient players not giving this time to breathe. Completed my first year. Finished in last place after winning my first two matches. Anyway, I love gladiators, and this game is much, much better than the other ones out there. I get an OOTP and TEW feeling playing this. Very addictive sim. GUI could improve maybe add some more bells and whistles. I found combat to be too complex run manually, so have been using Live Quick Sim. Hard to find good talent to sign if you lose all the time (bad cycle). Highly recommend if you like text sims, management games, or gladiators.

The game is fun enough to overlook some of its glaring issues. The meh: It is horribly optimized. It takes 3 to 5 minutes to load a save file. Some of the classes got less attention then others. Barbarian is straight up awful and Rouge is just ret light. While defender and leader can buff the entire team. Gladiator wins any 1 v 1 except against rets, rets are the single best unit in the entire game. Once they win their 1v1 they can sweep the legs to assist other fighters in gaining xp. Freestylers are the jack of all trades, masters of none, who can potentially fill any roll and can be used if you are unsure what your opponent is going to throw at you. Bare bones game play. Lack of information. I lost 20+ control on a turn where I hit them and they missed me... and it didn't show a single dice roll in the detailed report screen. Which was frustrating. Bull$#!&: I click start fight. I charge my opponent. I hit em. Knock em down. Crush their skull like a grape. 0 xp. 0 match rating. W.T.F. Next fight. I slowly approach my opponent, helping them to steady their balance. Making sure they don't fall and hurt themselves. Then I make a "safe" attack so I can try and get some xp this time. I hit their right leg for ~30 damage and bruise their hip. The fighter yields. 0 xp. 0 match rating. I quit playing for a while and try to figure out how the game is actually supposed to be played. The Rng. It's the weakest part of the game hands down. But it's still not horrible. I've seen it done a lot worse in so many other games. The D20 system is obviously the best. But can get frustrating. I always seem to have one fighter who rolls a critical failure once per fight and I can count on one hand the number of times an opponent has crit failed. Dynamic is a joke. The one time I tried it my custom gladiator had single digits in every stat and his highest skill ceiling was like 30. Meanwhile, my first opponent had a fighter who's lowest stat was 69.... My first fight of the game. Ridiculous. Did I get one of those. No. No, all my guys sucked. Hard. The good stuff: Simple rock paper scissors mechanic that is properly implemented. The correct type of fighter can punch up, the higher level ones can punch up even higher. More tactical depth then games with the word "tactical" in the name. You get to see your opponents roster and have to figure out which of your fighters have the best chance to succeed. Even the parry dodge system is actually better than you'd think it be. Some fighters can only poke at you. Some teams have modifiers which favor one over the other. Well done sir. I'd like to shake your hand. Impact stats. You definitely feel the difference between a low level fighter and a high value fighter. Maybe a little too much. For example. If you have a 100 strength fighter and you go against an opponent with 20 toughness, your fighter bypasses armor and deals anywhere from 500-2,000+ damage to whatever body part they hit. Which is insane as body parts only have 100hp. This theoretically should be an uncommon occurence. But. Your custom gladiator can achieve this very easily. And depending on your rng settings... Uh... Yeah. I can happen. Men AND women fighters. It's a small thing. But It means a lot to me personally. Cus I love customization, and womanz. Would I rather stare at mens all day or feminines? Come on. It's just science. It's a feature painfully missing in some games... and even if you want to add it in a mod you have to add a terrible, bloated mod and even then the functionality of it doesn't work right. Not in this game though. Customization options. Honestly. I probably could have put this up in the meh section. But I did create 6 different people who do look singular enough. The clothing options are really the only bad part. There is like 3 different options and none of them are great. In summeyation: It's a fun game. Enough moving parts to be engaging. It's not deep enough to play for any substantial amount of time. It feels like demo, or a proof of concept. It feels like it would be super easy to make a second game with all the missing mechanics implemented. Better training mechanics, dynamic events, weapon and armor smiting/management, surgery/recovery, drugs, expanded perk system, different tournaments, better scouting, variations in buying fighters. Like, for example, lets say you go to a town to fight, you could visit the jail and get criminals, or the slave auction or the stands. Could be fun. There is, a lot, that feels like it could very easily be bolted onto this game that would improve the depth immeasurably. This game truly isn't bad, it would just be easy to make it so much better. And I mean, I think I picked this up for a couple bucks. So, great value.

quit the o;d school fun tekst game would love to have a gladiotor type game which would be high end like the old boardgame by avalon hill

This is a fun little management sim which is well worth the price. It may seem unfair at first until you get the hang of it. Make sure you leave some unused space in your roster or new gladiators will not appear. Don't get too attached to any particular fighter! Management is more important than fighting in this game. You can become champion using nothing but autoresolve if you hire (and fire) fighters appropriately

game dead

Good game, 2nd version with more leagues and some improvements would be great even though it is almostly certainly not going to happen. If you like simulation management games or turn based you can do either, personally simulated all matches. Was worth cost, no doubt.