Mana Games

[petrone_maxi]

I´m always able to play the Australian Open of the second year without even playing the qualy... I ussually start my player training about 24 or 25 weeks, start playing 4 Futures, train 2 weeks more, play 2 or 3 more Futures, start playing 4 of 5 Challengers and then enter in the Top100.

[Curtis]

I have to play around 20 Futures before I even qualify for Challengers. What level of difficulty do you use? I'm on the highest.

[Zorromorph]

Something I was thinking about the game.
It becomes really easy to enter in the Top 100. Futures and Challengers are played by really low ranking players. In Real Life there´s players who spent a few years playing in those Challengers, while in every game I´ve played my main player is playing ATP by the end of the first year/Start of the second year as the most!Players ranked in the Top 100 plays Challenger sometimes.
In the other way, in TEM a lot of High ranked players plays in the ATP250.

This can be achieved by modding(just did it and tested).

In the TourCategory.Ini you need to change BestPlayer(set it lower, I put the legal minimums which are 51 for Challengers and 101 for Futures, Top 50 and Top 100 players aren't allowed to play them IRL). I also found it useful to mess with the TopPresence value to influence what events players play.

With a representative, not full schedule(meaning, not all the Challengers and Futures, just some of them each week) this isn't enough to make it look like the real tour but it is in my opinion an improvement. For example, when I did this for the first week I got DA into the 150-200 range playing 250 events, yet there were the likes of Ginepri, Sluiter, Petzchner, and Zverev(all Top 100 players) in Challengers for Noumea and Sao Paulo. The futures varied wildly, with 'full' week schedules ending up with only players in the 300s and lower, while in weeks like during the AO, guys who are just out of Slam main draw range in the low 100s(i.e., Guccione at 102) were playing futures and the Challengers had a lot of 100-150 guys. Too many, more ought to have been playing the AO qualies IMO which had a range of 175-350 as the top qualifiers elected to go play smaller events.

It's actually an interesting choice from a practical POV: as a Guccione type of guy, would you rather try to qualify(25 pts if you make it), or go to a Challenger where three wins there gets you the same or more against basically a little more diluted level of competition?

To really make this work, you need the full schedule of events -- which means you need more players -- etc. but you can fiddle with it and improve it in this way.

[Brecht]

I have to play around 20 Futures before I even qualify for Challengers. What level of difficulty do you use? I'm on the highest.

Hi Curtis, do you make your player play directly tournaments, I mean after the first four weeks of training, or do you let her train some months before entering the first tournament?

[Curtis]

I started with the recommendation that came with the version of the game I first played, to get into the earliest French Futures on the schedule. So, I play those two back-to-back, then take another three weeks for training, find $8500 futures for two weeks, then repeat as necessary.

One reason I've found that to be good advice is that it allows Emily (my character) to keep earning experience points while training. That allows her to max out her mental skills long before the end of the first year. I also work heavily on her physical skills, so it's only her technical skills that lag, although they do lag badly.

I also have her play doubles, since that practically doubles the rate at which she picks up experience. Until she's good enough to routinely make the futures finals, or to get into futures matches without qualifying, I just sign her up for doubles the second of the two weeks, but later she plays as much doubles as singles. She will usually reach number 3 in doubles before she cracks the top 20 in singles. (She and a teammate will be tied at 3, and her other two teammates will be tied at 1.) Remember not to sign up for doubles in the first week of the two, because if you do well in doubles (and you should always do well), you'll end up not being allowed to qualify in singles for the second week.