New users guide

This guide introduces you to the game in a step by step manner. Rather than look in detail at each page, we’ll whizz through it all like any eager beginner should, teaching you enough about how things work to get you going. If you want to find out something specific about a certain aspect of the game, you can check out our page by page guide.

Introduction

Welcome to MMA Tycoon – the most comprehensive and enjoyable MMA sim on the net!

Within the free section of the game, you can create and manage fighters in the virtual MMA universe. Sign them to organizations and compete against fighters managed by real life users from around the world. Have you got what it takes to train the next great champion?

If that’s not enough to satisfy your lust for glory, you can also try your hand at running a multi-million-dollar company. All the companies within MMA Tycoon are run by real life users and you can be one of them! This part of the game costs just $10 for 3 months or $30 per year (which helps us fund and develop the game). You can run a fight organization, a nutrition company, a bookmakers, a clothing company, a gym or create a new fighting alliance.

The possibilities are seemingly endless so take a look around and make your bid to be the ultimate MMA Tycoon!

Stuff you need to know

Times and dates within the game run on real world times. So Saturday 12th of Jan 2008 in the real world is Saturday 12th of Jan 2008. Each city within the game operates on the current timezone for that city and events and training within that city will happen at the appropriate time for that timezone, e.g. events will start at 6pm local time.

To make things more interesting and exciting, the game does run at an accelerated speed (3 times as fast as real life). Fighters will age one year every 85 days (12 weeks and 1 day), so training and fight frequency are also sped up accordingly. Whereas a fighter might feel comfortable fighting every 2 months in the real world, they’ll be able to fight much more frequently in MMA Tycoon.

As a manager, you’ll earn 10% of your fighters’ purses and sponsorship income. Unless you run a business, this will be your only source of income. You may give money to your fighters but you may not take money from them.

Taking a look around

The first thing to do is take a look around and get used to the interface. If you have eyes, you can probably figure out most of this section by clicking on stuff and looking at what it does. If however you don’t have eyes, you’d probably better read on.

Main Menu

File:Menu.jpg

You can access most of the game’s features directly from the main menu, so let’s work down it.

• News & Events: As with most of the options, it does exactly what it says on the tin, displaying general news and upcoming / recent events. Check here regularly for game updates, plus all the important in game news.

• Highstreet: Here you can find all the shops and businesses based at your current location. You can also view other locations around the world.

• Map: View all the world cities and either visit them or move your base permanently, as well as see the local time in the cities.

• Rankings: View a massive selection of rankings for fighters, companies and managers. Who’s the richest, who’s ranked #1, who has the longest win streak? It’s all in here.

• Search: Again, does what it says on the tin. Find fighters, companies or managers here.

• Forum: Make contact with your fellow managers from around the world and discuss anything related to the game or the wider world of MMA. Making connections in the world of MMA Tycoon can be extremely profitable so make the most of these features.

• Profile: This is your manager profile page. Here you’ll find a summary of all your fighter stats, your own reputation, as well as the option to create a new fighter and much more.

• Mail: The in-game email system is a vital part of communications. You can send informal messages to other users, whilst you will also receive alerts whenever important events occur.

• My fighters: A list of all your fighters, their bank balance and their next fight. If your fighter needs a contract or a fight, check the box in here and they will come up in the appropriate searches on the search page. Here you’ll also see any released fighters and their current record. You may sign up for QFC's, Create New Fighters and access the Free Agents page from here.

• Fight offers: Accept or decline pending fight offers and also view all confirmed upcoming fights.

• Contracts: Accept or decline pending contact offers and also view existing fighter contracts. If the promoter is in breach of the contract, you can also terminate the contract here.

• Sponsors: Your fighters can get sponsored by nutrition and clothing companies within the game. Accept / decline offers here and view existing sponsorships.

• Possessions: View both your own and your fighter’s possessions (clothing and nutritional supplements). Change what they are wearing and also whether they are using their supplements.

• Finances: A summary of your manager, fighter and company finances. You may give money to your fighters and companies and withdraw money from your companies, however, you may not take money from your fighters. As their manager, you will receive 10% of their fight purse but you cannot simply rob them with the click of a mouse!

Below the text menu, we have 5 buttons.

• Homepage. The house symbol takes you back to the homepage.
• Affiliate program. The green $ sign takes you to the referral page where you can earn 20% of all earnings generated by people you refer to the site.
• Help site. The blue I symbol will bring you to this help site.
• Edit details: Here you can edit your manager details (photo, contact details etc).
• Bookmarks. A VIP feature where you can bookmark your favorite links within the site for easy access.

VIP Section

Finally, below the five buttons is the VIP section. Starting from just $10, you can add an extra dimension to your MMA Tycoon experience, as well as supporting the site. Visit the VIP page for more information on the extra features you will receive.

If you are not a VIP then this will display a "get VIP" link. If you are a VIP it will display my businesses, start new company and tycoon assistant links.

That’s the main menu sorted but there are a couple of other important pages to mention here.

Other pages

• Fighter profile page: You can reach an individual fighter’s profile page from either your manager profile page or the my fighters page. Here you can set their fight tactics, as well as viewing their stats and fight history.

Here you can also set your fighter’s training intensity. Your fighter can train full time, part time or work full time and depending on that choice, you will get a different level of income, basically from a virtual job.

Train full time: No income
Train part time: $200 weekly income
Work full time: $400 weekly income

Should your fighter get into financial difficulty, they may have to stop training and work full time to regain some financial security.

• Gym/Training: Obviously a major part of the game is training your fighters. You can find all the gyms via the highstreet and join them either from the gym page itself or from your fighter’s profile page.

Once you have joined the gym, you select the type of training you want to do, either by joining a group of fighters training with a coach, by working alone on the gym equipment, or by sparring.

• There a few other pages which we haven’t covered here, notably things like the betting shops and arenas, which you can find on the highstreet. However, it’s not necessary to cover them at this early stage, so we’ll move onto creating a fighter and getting involved in the game!

Creating a fighter

When you start out you won’t have any fighters – It’ll just be you and an empty office. Go to your profile page and in the bottom right hand corner is an option for “create new fighter”.

Once you’ve clicked that, you’ll be presented with a form to create your new superstar. If you are a basic user you can create 4 fighters, if you are a VIP user you can have up to 10.

Give your fighter a name; please do NOT use the name of a real fighter!

When creating your fighter’s height and weight, note that they will be able to cut weight but just like in real life, it may affect their performance. Also, feel free to try making a 7 foot tall 135lb fighter but he won’t get very far, sorry. Just like in real life, height and weight will affect things like speed, strength, how effectively they can strike and how easy they are to take down. In short, keep it within the realms of reality and your fighter will do just fine.

Now, with all your new hero’s personal details in place, it’s time to move onto his stats.

The older the fighter, the more points you’ll get to allocate at this stage but obviously, they’ll be x years closer to retirement, so you won’t be able to train them for as long. Another point to take into account is that the younger a fighter is, the faster they train. If you are looking to fight immediately, you should look to make them older, while younger fighters are more of a long term investment. The choice is yours.

Within the game we have 4 types of skill.

• General skills: (boxing, wrestling etc). These values are displayed to the public (to some degree at least) on your fighter’s profile page. They are independent of, but related to the next group of skills – effectively indicating how well they put the following individual skills into practice, as a complete skillset.

• Individual skills: These skills give a detailed breakdown of your fighter’s abilities. Training these will also affect your fighter’s general skills and physical attributes. These are not displayed to the public, only the manager of the fighter, or their mentor if they have it set, may look at the fighters individual skills.

• Physical attributes: You can have all the skills but if your body isn’t in shape, you’re not going to get very far. Don’t neglect your fighter’s physical condition. Early on, it’s also worth noting that the better your fighter’s conditioning, the harder he’ll be able to train without getting tired.

• Hidden attributes: As with the real world, some people have “it” and some just don’t. You’ll never get to see these attributes but you can affect them somewhat. The 9 hidden attributes are as follows. Intelligence, experience, heart, chin, injury proneness (if that’s a word), KO power, self confidence, cuts and fast learner.

Each of these attributes will be allocated a random value between 1 and 150, affecting your fighter accordingly. During the creation process, you can pick 3 of these attributes that you’d like to boost – once you’ve done that, all you can do is cross your fingers, hope for the best and click submit… Your potential superstar has been born!

To view more information on what each of these skills does, click here. In the meantime, let’s go take a look at your new fighter.

more about your fighter

Let’s take a quick look at your fighter’s profile page. Aside from all the stats and tactics, you’ll notice that there are 4 new values here – Energy, Morale, Hype and popularity.

• Energy: Your fighter already has a value for conditioning but this is an added dimension. Think of conditioning as the size of the gas tank and energy as how full that tank is. Training will reduce your energy levels, which in turn will mean your fighter goes into his fights with less gas.
• Morale: Affected by both the condition of the gym in which he trains and also fight results. Low morale means your fighter won’t fight or train so effectively.
• Hype: Hype is the most important value within the game, be it for fighters, organisations or indeed your own manager status. Hype represents how highly other people view your skills and when compared against other fighters and managers, it forms the basis of all rankings within MMA Tycoon.
• Popularity: Is kind of like a more complex hype rating. It takes into account who you beat, how you beat them and also if you do it in exciting fashion. Also, more exciting fighters will take less of a hit if they lose.

You’ll also notice that although you allocated fighter skills numerically (1-150), they are displayed within the game using descriptive words. This helps keep you on your toes! Each value will cover a range of 10 digits, e.g. 10-19 is abysmal, 90-99 is superb and so on. To see a full list, click here. When you first start out, you may wish to turn on Beginner Mode, to give you a bit more information.

Be rest assured that whilst you may not see any improvements from training initially, the actual value is steadily ticking over. If you want to keep a closer eye on this, you can do so by using the tycoon assistant.

Speaking of training, let’s take a look at that!

Training

When they first come into the world your fighter will be training part time at their local Cozad MMA Academy. Run by the legendary Cozad family, these gyms are open door, offering mediocre coaching in an adequately maintained gym.

Your fighter will appear on the gym page with a grid of 12 training slots; Monday to Saturday, am and pm. Fighters training part time are limited to 6 slots per week instead of the maximum of 12.

Here you can either select to train with the gym’s trainer, spar with other fighters or train cardio / strength on your own. If you join a trainer, you’ll train whatever he’s teaching during that training slot. Check out the trainer’s schedule in the middle of the page.

Training tips

When training individual skills, the more training partners you have the less time the trainer will be able to spend with you. As a result, the quality of training can often depend as much on the quality of your training partners as the quality of the coach. If you get one on one training time with an average coach, that's probably just as benefitial as being trained in a big group by an elite coach, so make sure the gym you train at isn't too busy.

When sparring, your fighter’s improvement will depend entirely on the quality of your sparring partners. If nobody else turns up to spar, your training session will be wasted.

When training strength, cardio or yoga you’ll just be hopping on the treadmill or pumping the weights, so it doesn’t matter how good the coaching is – all that matters is the quality of the equipment.

Do not underestimate the importance of conditioning when planning your fighter’s training. The better their conditioning, the less energy they will lose after each training session.

The lower your fighter’s energy and morale levels, the less effective the training will be.

Moving gyms

Because it’s open doors and relatively cheap, your local Cozad gym will be pretty busy, offering less than ideal training conditions.

If you want your fighter to progress quickly, you’ll need to sign them up to one of the user-run gyms in your area.

When deciding which gym to join, you’ll need to go to the highstreet and scout out your options. Take a look at how well maintained the gym is, how good the trainers are, how many other people train there and how much they intend to charge you in gym fees. If it seems reasonable, sign up!

A user run gym may have more than one coach for you to train under; it should also offer a higher level of coaching, in a well-maintained and less crowded environment.

The cleanliness and equipment quality of these user-owned gyms fluctuates over time, so keep an eye out, to make sure the owner isn’t letting their gym standards slip. Poor equipment will affect the quality of training and also your fighter’s morale. Nobody likes to train in a dirty or run down gym.

The skill scale for coaches is the same as for fighters - Useless through to Elite. However, you don't necessarily need to train with an Elite coach to get the best possible training. When your fighter is at a low level he can get the top training as long as that coach is a few levels better than him. You can read more about that here.

Don't let your fighter run out of money

If your fighter's bank balance drops below $200, they will be sent to work full time for a FULL WEEK! During this week they will not be able to train at all. Don't let this happen. If your fighter is running out of money, set his training intensity on his profile page to part-time. This will give you $200 per week income, which will cover gym fees.

Note that if you change gyms, you'll pay a joining fee and then you'll also have to pay the full week's gym fees on Thursday, so make sure you have enough to cover both fees if you are moving gyms.

Taking a rest

Do not use the above mentioned training intensity to simply rest your fighter. As this variable can only be changed once a week, instead on the gym page set your fighter to "no training" for one or two sessions. This gives exactly the same rest per session and can be changed on a daily basis.

Getting a fight

There are two way to get your fighter a fight.

• Get him a "Quick fight" at the Quick Fighting Championships (QFC).
• Sign with one of the many fight organizations within the game which are run by real users.

Quick Fights

Quick Fights are the easiest and quickest way to get your fighter up and running in MMA Tycoon. They are non-contract based fights, which are available to any fighter with less than 75 hype, that is not currently signed to a fight organization.

To sign up your fighter for a quick fight;

• go to the my fighters page and then click the link to quick fights.
• click "book".
• your fighter will then either have an opponent booked immediately, or you may have to wait until an appropriate opponent is avaiable (the next time a fighter of that weight, in that location, attempts to book a quickfight).

The fight will then happen 2 days later in the chosen location - make sure your fighter is at that location come fight time, otherwise they will miss the fight and will incur penalties.

There are of course pros and cons to quickfights. Quickfights are quick and easy but you don't have any say in your opponent and you will only receive $50 to fight and $50 win bonus. If you would rather plan your opponent a little better and get a healthier paycheck, you'll need to sign a contract with one of the fight organizations run by our users, so let's find out how to do that.

Signing a contract

If you want your fighter to get signed up by one of the fight organizations within the game, the first thing to do is click on the “my fighters” option in the main menu. Click the “need contract” box and with any luck, one of the organizations will offer him a contact.

If your fighter currently has a record of 0-0-0, you may want to think about getting them a couple of Quick Fights to build up their record.

If that doesn’t work, DON’T go spamming promoters, asking them if they want to sign your fighter. DO get yourself onto the forum, make some contacts and see if anyone will take your fighter on. Visit the appropriate section on the forum and look for promoters who are actively seeking out new fighters for their cards.

If your fighter STILL can’t get a contract, just keep training and improving your fighter and if the worst comes to the worst, you can always offer to fight for free in your first fight, to get your foot on the first rung of the ladder.

If someone does decide to offer your fighter a contract, it will appear in the “contracts” page. When reading over the contract, everything is self explanatory apart from the inactivity clause. As a fighter you want the inactivity clause to be as short as possible but the opposite applies for the promoter, so beware.

Basically, if the period of inactivity mentioned in the clause is reached, you are allowed to leave your contract. This figure is reset when you are offered a fight, whether you agree to the fight or not. Conversely, the fight organizations are allowed to terminate the contract from their end whenever they like, with no justification (it's a harsh world).

When you are starting out, only sign your fighters to organizations who hold events in his base city. Your fighter cannot afford travel and hotel expenses when first created, so would not be able to make it to any other location for a fight.

Fight offers

Once your fighter is signed up to an organization, you will need to agree to a fight. It's basically just the same as signing an organizational contract - you will get through a fight proposal and you accept or reject it.

It doesn't hurt to tick the "need a fight" box on your "my fighters" page, to remind the promoter that you're looking for a fight. If you do that, you will appear on a shortlist on his organization's homepage.

Once you've signed a fight contract, make sure your fighter is in the right city come fight time and make sure your fighter can make that weight. If either of those things don't happen, you won't be able to fight.

Watch your energy levels

Note that your fighter's energy will drop with training (and having fights), so make sure that when you approach fight time, they are at least around the 80% energy mark. Also, once your fighters have faught, they may pick up injuries or cuts, so make sure you don't book him for another fight too soon.

Preparing for your first fight

Once you’ve signed a contract and know the name of your first victim, it’s time to prepare for the fight!

First of all, you’ll need to make sure your fighter is not worn out come fight time. The important value here is their “energy”. If it is low, take them off training for a while and it should recover – aim to peak come fight time, whilst maximising your training.

The next thing to think about is your fight tactics. Make your way to your fighter’s profile page and at the bottom you’ll find a number of “either / or” tactic bars. Do you want your fighter to fight on the feet, on the ground, or a bit of both? There are plenty of options to choose from and all will affect your chances of winning greatly.

When deciding upon the tactics you should take into account both your own fighter’s skill set and his opponent’s. Although you can’t see all your opponent’s skills, you can get a rough idea from the fighter description on their profile page, which will read something like this…

“Rodney Trotter has competent striking and proficient wrestling skills. He holds a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.”

The striking figure is a combination of their boxing and muay thai, whilst the wrestling and BJJ figures are a direct representation of the appropriate skill. The belt grading for BJJ works as follows –

white>blue>purple>brown>black>red

although you’ll have to figure out what level someone is promoted! Suffice to say, it is not linear like the other skills.

When you’ve picked your tactics, click update and hope for the best!

Once fight time arrives, you’ll get a screen appear telling you that one of your fighters has fought – time to find out if you’ve trained a little gem or a bit of a pudding. Fingers crossed.

Post fight changes

Post fight, a number of changes to your fighter’s stats will occur.

• Hype: If your fighter won this will go up, if they lost it will go down. The amount it changes will depend on how good your opponent was, compared to your fighter. If you beat someone who was more hyped than you, it will increase much more than if you were the favorite. Likewise, if you’re an underdog and you lose, you won’t drop as much hype as if you were favored.

• Morale: As above.

• Popularity: Works like hype but also depends a lot on how aggressive and exciting your fighter was.

• Energy: Fighting is a tiring business so as you’d expect, your fighter’s energy level will always drop after a fight. Time for some rest and relaxation!

• Cuts: Your fighter may get cut during a fight. Their profile page will display how long the cut will take to heal. If you fight again too soon, it’s likely that the cut will open up very easily.

• Experience: Your fighter will have gained in ring/cage experience, so this hidden attribute will receive a boost.

• Injuries: If your fighter picked up an injury, it will be displayed on his profile page. You can train as normal whilst injured but you don't want to fight until it has cleared up.

• Finances: Your fighter will also receive his fight purse and you’ll receive your 10% cut.

Most importantly though, your fighters record will hopefully now read 1-0 and you’re on the way to global domination!

Crap, I lost

If you are unfortunate enough to have lost your debut, there are a number of possibilities.

• Your fighter had a poor skillset. Did you create a BJJ white belt then he got subbed? Did you create a sprawl and brawl fighter with no agility (to stop the takedowns)? The possibilities are endless. Have a good think about what attributes you gave your fighter and consider whether they fit the tactics.
• You set inappropriate tactics. Have a good read through the fight tactics guide and see if you've missed anything.
• Your fighter was tired. If you send a fighter into a fight with low energy, he will probably get spanked. Make sure your fighters are fresh come fight time!
• Your fighter is just a complete pudding. There are a number of hidden values, such as chin, KO power, heart etc. It's very possible that your fighter is just rubbish. Give him a few more fights to assess his abilities and then consider releasing him to the free agent list.

Summary

So that's it! You now know enough about MMA Tycoon to get you up and running. If you now want to learn more, check out one of the following pages.

• Page by page guide - a more in depth look at all the pages within MMA Tycoon.
• Introduction to companies - If you become a VIP user and want to open a company, here's where to start.

GOOD LUCK AND WE HOPE YOU ENJOY MMA TYCOON!