TCRF pageBasic information
Developed by Impression Games, published by Sierra at around 98. I sunk many hours into this game as a kid.
There are two versions, one called Ultimate Soccer Manager 97/98, the original release.
And one called Ultimate Soccer Manager 98/99, which updated the teams/players but also contained bugfixes such as the "8th season crash" fix.
There are apparently some more bugs with the first or with both versions - I have not confirmed these:
Google AI wrote:
The "Infinite Salary" Assistant Glitch: An infamous exploit carried over from Ultimate Soccer Manager 2 was partially ironed out. In the older version, you could offer an assistant manager a maxed-out salary (£99,999,999) and then renegotiate it, causing the integer math to flip, resulting in the assistant paying your club roughly £13 million a week.
Bosman Free Transfers Exploit: The AI logic was tweaked because Version 1.0 let world-class AI players casually run down their contracts. While it fixed a few logic loops, it actually created a new strategy in Version 2.0 where players could proactively "scavenge" superstars on free transfers (though you still had to pay high wages).
Loan Player Leverage: A minor design oversight remained in the Version 2.0 economy, allowing players to loan a multi-million-pound player from a big club and immediately use that loaned player as a financial "makeweight" or trade-bait to permanently buy a player from a different team.
A speedrun of this game should aim to win the season.
Winning the season could entail winning the Europe Cup - winning the final triggers a short FMV video sequence of players holding up the cup.
When winning the league itself and clicking to go to the next season, there is a similar standstill victory image.
There is also an FA cup but I'm not sure if that is important.
In the German 1st Bundesliga, you can win the DFB Pokal as well as the European Cup, thus winning two cups in a season.
Whereas in lower leagues, you don't qualify for any cups at all.
You can play as a Manager or as a Coach. Manager is the same as Coach except you make financial decisions such as expanding the stadium, building shops, setting prices for merchandise, etc. For a speedrun, Coach is the better choice, less stuff to worry about...
I played as Coach for Arsenal in the Premier League on the 98/99 version, took care of my team and gave everyone proper training and placed everyone in proper positions. Savescummed like crazy and it still took me about 2-3 hours to complete a season.
There is an "instant finish match" feature to skip through matches, but there are about 70 matches or so. When players are not in proper positions, it seems the chance at winning is reduced significantly.
TAS plans
Perhaps a TAS can luck-manipulate to win each match one after the other to finish a season in 5-6 minutes.
Needs some research. Perhaps other clubs have fewer games or a better schedule to finish a season slightly quicker.
I'm not looking to TAS this at the moment.
Note about game stability
I managed to get the game to work without problems in DOSBox-x in Windows 95.
If nothing is done, the game can suffer from the audio hang softlock bug.
It also has a problem where garbled mess gets rendered when left-clicking.
To fix this:
I used "cputype=pentium_mmx" - although I'm not sure if it had an influence fixing the stability.
More importantly, set hardware acceleration to off, both in Control Panel -> System -> Performance -> Graphics
as well as in the DirectX diagnose program (Run... -> dxdiag -> Audio or Sound).
Have not had any crashes, audio hangs or audio desyncs at all after this.
I tried determining the lowest number of games for any chosen team when playing as Coach on Real Hard difficulty on the 98/99 version, by choosing the team and then looking at the fixture list on day one.
Teams listed here have been tested - any missing teams have not been tested.
It looks like teams such as Auxerre (French Div 1), Milan (Italian A) and Sparta (Dutch KPNT) have the lowest number of matches for a season, 34 matches. A run aiming to just beat the season and end the run on the victory screen should use one of those teams.
I will be doing a test playthrough with Auxerre.
EDIT: Nvm, Auxerre had two hidden games, Milan and Sparta had one each.
EDIT 2: I don't know, but I tried Juventus, which is supposed to have 35 games, but I somehow got a "European Cup Qualifying match" and a "2nd leg" match with no opposition to click on. The week went by and I got entered into a group phase so I got like 42 games... Not sure how this happened and how it can be prevented aside from choosing a different game.
English - Prem - Arsenal / Manchester United
Charity Shield: 1
European Cup: 1
League Cup: 1
FA Cup: 1
League games: 38
Minimum matches: 42
English - Prem - Chelsea / Newcastle United
Cup Winners Cup: 1
League Cup: 1
FA Cup: 1
League games: 38
Minimum matches: 41
English - Prem - Aston Villal / Liverpool
UEFA Cup: 1
League Cup: 1
FA Cup: 1
League games: 38
Minimum matches: 41
English - Prem - Wimbledon
League Cup: 1
FA Cup: 1
League games: 38
Minimum matches: 40
English - Div 1 - Barnsley / Watford / Bury
League Cup: 2 - a third one is listed but won't get played if you lose the first two, apparently.
FA Cup: 1
League games: 46
Minimum matches: 49
English - Div 2 - Blackpool / Reading / Fulham
League Cup: 2 - a third one is listed but won't get played if you lose the first two, apparently.
Auto Windscreen: 2
FA Cup: 1 - a second one is listed but won't get played if you lose the first one, apparently.
League games: 46
Minimum matches: 51
English - Div 3 - Barnet / Rochdale
League Cup: 2 - a third one is listed but won't get played if you lose the first two, apparently.
Auto Windscreen: 2
FA Cup: 1 - for some reason, Barnet lists a 2nd round game but Rochdale doesn't. I assume if you lose round 1 you won't have to play the 2nd round match.
League games: 46
Minimum matches: 51
English - Conf - Barrow / Leek Town
FA Cup: 1 - a second one is listed but won't get played if you lose the first one, apparently.
League games: 42
Minimum matches: 43
France - Div 1 - Bordeaux / Monaco
League games: 34
UEFA Cup: 1
Minimum matches: 35
France - Div 1 - Paris-SG
League games: 34
Cup Winners Cup: 1
Minimum matches: 35
France - Div 1 - Auxerre
League games: 34
Coupe de ligue: 1 (hidden, shows up later)Coupe de France: 1 (hidden, shows up later)Minimum matches: 36
France - Div 2 - Ajaccio AC / Nice
Coupe de Ligue: 1
Coupe de France: 1 (apparently shows up later during the season, needs testing)
League games: 40
Minimum matches: 40
German - 1st Bundesliga - FC Bayern München
European Cup: 2 - (1 group phase game is listed but will be skipped if you lose the qualifiers)
DFB Pokal: 1
League games: 34
Minimum matches: 37
German - 1st Bundesliga - 1. FC Kaiserslautern
European Cup: 1
DFB Pokal: 1
League games: 34
Minimum matches: 36
German - 2nd Bundesliga - 1. FC Köln / Karlsruher SCGerman - RLWS - LR AhlenGerman - RL-S - FC AugsburgGerman - RL-N - VfB LübeckGerman - RLNO - VfB Leipzig
DFB Pokal: 1
League games: 34
Minimum matches: 35
Italian - A - Juventus
League games: 34
European Cup: 1
Minimum matches: 35
Italian - A - Milan
League games: 34
Coppa Italia: 1 (hidden, shows up later)Minimum matches: 35
Italian - B - Torino / Verona / Cremonese
League games: 38
Coppa Italia: 1
Minimum matches: 39
Looks like I might be TASing this after all.
I got Windows 95 working in Bizhawk and did some testing. It looks like the (instant) result of a match, including everything else (scorers, yellow and red cards, attendance etc.) doesn't change regardless how long you wait. It will change, however, if you go to certain screens or change some crucial things. I made some notes:
CHAIR
Evaluation - seems to only work once
TRANSACTIONS - TRANS
Player Search - sending offers...
Sell Players - new contract, or choose not for sale...
MANAGER - MNGR
Read Newspaper
Phone
SQUAD
Team Selection - Swapping positions...
Team Selection - new contract, or choose not for sale...
Team Talk - Changing settings...
Staff - fire someone
Team Training - Changing any training...
MATCH
Cancel Match in tunnel
For example, in your office (MNGR), clicking on the newspaper or the phone will change the outcome, but clicking on the television or the fixture list doesn't.
In the beginning of the run, I would just make sure to put keeper, defenders, midfielders and strikers in the correct position. This increases the chance of a win. Then start the next match, if it is a loss, a different or additional position swap is required.
After winning a match, you can go directly to the next match - if that's a loss, you can go to the phone or newspaper beforehand to change the outcome, or go to the team selection again and swap positions, or go to team training and have the assistant trainer suggest and set the training plan. Those are all working ways to manipulate the outcome of the next match.
Juventus is a good candidate, easy to win with and only has 35 games.
I finished a run
Link to video
Unfortunately, I ran into a major problem preventing me from submitting this to TASvideos.
The Windows 95 installation movie doesn't sync anymore, both on 2.11 and 2.11.1.
It looks like the crashes I encountered while working on it destroyed it.
In TAStudio, I advanced 200 frames at a time, saved, it crashes, I restarted it, advanced another 200 frames, rinse and repeat.
And at the end I exported to bk2.
But now that bk2 desyncs...
Unless I can reconstruct it and re-sync it, this is not going to be submitted.
EDIT: The resync was successful. The submission upcoming soon.
TCRF page
Basic information
Developed by Impression Games, published by Sierra at around 98. I sunk many hours into this game as a kid.
There are two versions, one called Ultimate Soccer Manager 97/98, the original release.
And one called Ultimate Soccer Manager 98/99, which updated the teams/players but also contained bugfixes such as the "8th season crash" fix.
There are apparently some more bugs with the first or with both versions - I have not confirmed these:
