Football, Tactics & Glory: From Stardom to the Sidelines and Back

Football, Tactics & Glory:

Football, Tactics & Glory: From Stardom to the Sidelines and Back

Football, Tactics & Glory: Training the Player and the Players

Football, Tactics, & Glory: Statistically Uncertain

Football, Tactics & Glory: A Team History

Time to Beat: 140 Hours

Football Manager is the most popular football simulator available on Steam. Sega published the first version in 2005. I played twenty hours of the 2015 version and found a number of discouraging features. I recognize twenty hours in minuscule compared to players who invest two hundred, or two thousand. But my thoughts, recalling them after a six year hiatus, is, in short: Football Manager didn't provide sufficient feedback. It lacked stats to demonstrate which players were performing and which weren't. I know it has such stats, but they didn't seem sufficient. I've played similar games, Out of the Park Baseball '09 (90 hours) and Eastside Hockey Manager (15 hours). I've always admired the numbers based sports manager in theory, but never enjoyed them in actuality. This review isn't about those games. It's about Football, Tactics & Glory, and whether I found Creoteam's genre alterations appealing.

Creoteam is a Ukrainian company, with very little history. According to Steam and Wikipedia, they developed Collapse, a panned hack and slash game, in 2008. Their next release, as far as I can see, was Football, Tactics & Glory. It debuted on Early Access in 2015, with the full release in 2018. Unlike the other sports management sims mentioned previously, Football, Tactics & Glory plays like a fusion of video game and board game. Or as Creoteam's website describes Tactics, “XCOM meets Football Manager”. This is an effective representation.

(For the purpose of this series I will refer to the game player – you, the human being playing the game – as “player”, and the players on the field, as “characters”, like I did in my Madden review.)

Football, Tactics & Glory adapts the rules of football (or for American readers, soccer), to be played on a 10 x 7 grid, with two 24 turn halves. The number of turns varies slightly depending on the sort of activities that normally extend a regular football game; penalties, injuries, and the ball going out of bounds. Those 48 to 51 turns are divided into three turn segments. One team executes three turns, and then the other team performs three. The main use of a turn is an action. Actions include; power shot, precision shot, dribble (one, two, or three spaces), crossing pass, pass, lofted pass, swap position, tackle, aggressive tackle, press, or hold. A few special actions don't cost the player a turn. These include Skills and special abilities available to only characters in specific positions, such as break-in or false kick. Gameplay is fast paced, and a full game requires only fifteen minutes to finish.

On each of their turns the player chooses one of their eleven characters. They move or perform an action. Along with moving, many actions are non-competitive. But many actions require a roll. Each character has four attributes. Accuracy, Passing, Defense, and Control. Some actions require a roll against a character on the other team, like Passing vs Defense, when trying to pass through an enemy. Other actions require a roll against the difficulty of the action. Lofted passes require the passer to roll against a standard number (60 for a distance 4 pass and 110 for 5 spaces). Finally, some actions require a roll against an action taken by a character on the same team, such as heading a crossed ball. Each character compares the potential of their attribute they use for the action, and rolls. Their potential is the value of the attribute. Football, Tactics & Glory generates a number between one and the maximum value (the potential). Football, Tactics & Glory offers three RNG (Random Number Generator) settings; Default, Decreased, and Expected. The first is completely random. The second generates a number that is never lower than 30% of the character's potential. Expected is described as, “randomness plays slightly in [the player's] favor”. This setting, crucially, can not be changed once selected.

To counteract its randomness, Football, Tactics & Glory includes Sporting Anger (also called Motivation). Every time a character fails in their action their Sporting Anger grows. Failing easy actions, and rolling especially poorly, like rolling a 1 with a potential of 150, seems to fill the gauge faster. When full, the character becomes Motivated. His skills increase by 30% for the next six turns.

Each action costs a character energy. Some actions deplete energy faster than others. Some energy is regained at half time and the end of every day. When a character's energy drops under 50% they receive escalating Skill penalties. The less energy, the worse their Skill deteriorates, but even at 0% energy characters remain too effective.

The usual rules of football apply. Football, Tactics & Glory includes offsides, red and yellow cards, indirect, direct, and penalty kicks. It fails to regulate injuries. Injuries occur due to failed tackles; regular, aggressive, or slide. An injury may cause the character to miss as little as the remainder of the match, or as much as a half season. An injury may incur a yellow or red card. Two yellows, or a red eliminates the offending character from the match. But while bookings do occur, injuring a character doesn't guarantee a yellow card penalty. In one game, the other team injured four of my players, without a single ejection. This injustice placed me at a serious disadvantage. Even if I had four understudies as good as the first string players, I wouldn't be able to field them all. Football, Tactics & Glory only allows three substitutes, and doesn't make an exception for injuries. The developer needs to punish tackles which result in injury. At the very least, causing an injury should result in a yellow card. In real football I understand this is not viable, because it could be abused by flopping. But the video game does not share that concern. We're talking about injuries because Football, Tactics & Glory can be played as single games, but the focus is on the campaign.

Football, Tactics & Glory introduces the basic gameplay mechanics in a preliminary match. The player controls an up and coming superstar, you! In your first game, you suffer a catastrophic injury that ends your career prematurely. Cut to black. Fifteen years later the president of an amateur team in the player's country of choice approaches you to manage his organization. Depending on the chosen difficulty, the player starts with a mixture of amateur and experienced players. Regardless of the nation, the player faces the same challenges. All Nations use the European model (I think?). Each nation is divided into five leagues: Amateur, Third, Second, First, and Premier. Teams play a season against teams in the same League, and also a Cup (one comprising the Amateur, Third, and Second Leagues, and the other of the First and Premier Leagues). Top ranked teams in the Premier League play in a Cup against the best teams from other nations. It is possible to compete simultaneously in the League Season, National Cup, and International Cup. At the end of each season, the top three teams in a League advance to the next, while the bottom three drop to the lower.

The teams are only partially based on real teams. Many are just the names of large cities, embellished with a fictional insignia. Some teams do have the correct name, because the name is just the location. A few real teams do feature their correct insignia. No team includes real life characters. But players can download modifications through Steam to add the real names and logos.

Next week, the Campaign, Skills, Experience, Specialization, Positions, and more.

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