2016-07-08 11:53

Chapter 02 - Build a stadium
Version 1.2.0 - 02.07.2018

You can ask every manager you’re willing to ask, most will give you this advice.

‘Build your stadium first!’.

Why is it a MUST as first task?

Because without a stadium you do not earn much money and since the visitors of RZA football games are nuts and totally football freaks, they will come to your games in huge numbers, regardless for your level and strength.
130.000+ in regular season games are quite common, even more is possible.
So every seat you do not build is lost money.
Almost every manager in RZA has a full build stadium or is on his way to get a full build stadium, which means it has 144.300 seats. A huge stadium compared to real live arenas, but who cares, as long as the fans are coming?

Be aware that with the new Mediacenter the pressure to build up your stadium did get a bit lower, but since the game mechanics in other areas of business did not change, you better NOT ignore the stadium and focus on other areas first, like players or coaches! My advice is to simply use the Mediacenter income to get the stadium build as quick as possible!

The full stadium is built with a total of
130.000 regular seats,
13.000 executive seats and
1.300 VIP seats,
separated by the
2 short sides (25.000/2.500/250 each) and
2 long sides (40.000/4.000/400 each) of a stadium.

A new stadium starts with 10.000/1.000/100 and as you can see, the road to a full build stadium is a long one. Each regular seat does cost 300$, an executive seat does cost 1000$ and a VIP seat even 3000$ each.
That does sums up for a block of 10.000/1.000/100 seats to 4.300.000$ in construction costs and the whole project sums up to at least 51.600.000$ (this is depended on other factors. The money you have to invest or don’t have for other projects is even higher). As a new manager, depended on your starting date of course, you will need very likely a whole season at least to build it up completely. In the past two seasons were quite common. With the Mediacenter income you get to a full stadium faster, but only if you invest the most of it into the stadium (see later Chapter 11 for money topics in general).

There is always the rule that you can build only 10% of the next lower level amount of seats and the better the seat quality, the higher is the income. The income is for each regular seat 40$, an executive seat does bring you 200$ and a VIP seat even 700$ per league game.
For playoff games it’s even more, since each seat income gets a multiplying factor.
For one regular season game this sums up for that block of 10.000/1.000/100 sets to 670.000$ of income if sold out. So you will need some games to get the construction costs back, but since construction is only one time and you have at least eight regular season home games and 15 shared Supercup games, this will become very profitable fast.

Regular season home games are all yours, Supercup home games will be split 50/50 as will Champ of Champ games and all playoff games. Check the scaling factors for playoff games in the manual. They will earn you big time money.

After you did finish the licence you should put all the money into the first few new seats and you should always max out the highest quality of seats.
So if you have the money for the next 10.000/1.000/100 set of seats you should buy it, and don't spend the money ONLY on regular seats. It just doesn’t make sense. If you have only money for a part of those set, like 5.000/500/50, I do suggest doing this at the start anyway, but later you should think about small steps carefully.
Once you get your first few incomes from Supercup- and league-games, add step by step additional seats until you get more and more money from your games.
The process is quite slow and gets faster the more you keep your other expenses in check.
The bigger your stadium gets and the more seats it has, the more money will come in your pocket with one game.

Tricks to place an order:
The side under construction won’t generate income as long as the construction is not finished, which is 4 days (As far as I know the time is 3 full days, which are 3 daily updates plus the next daily u p d a t e after completion). If there were already existing seats, those won’t generate ANY income while construction is going on.
So if you place the order for construction on the wrong site, date or time you will have less or even zero income the next home game. That’s missed income you will miss for the further extension.

Trick 1 - Build on the side with the lowest amount of existing seats.
At the start you have one side with seats, the rest is open. So a possible approach is to build on an open side first. Then the next side and so on, until all sides do have seats.
Until then you were never in danger to lose any income.
Once you have a few seats on every side, always s e l e c t the side with the least amount of seats to do the next building phase, since this will cost you the least amount of missed income from that side.
You should think about bigger steps, once you have to make one of the four built sides available for further construction work. As a rule of thumb, I suggest to not increase the stadium size with less than 10.000/1.000/100 for each step, better more.
It just doesn’t make sense to add a few hundred more seats to generate a few more dollars in some time in the future, while you lose much more money during construction time because of the close side.

You can actually calculate the missed income, since every income per seat is available. To give you a feeling for the income you would miss, here some sample numbers.
You do have a side with 10.000/1.000/100 seats and decide to extend it? If there is a league home game in the next 4 days, it will bring you 670.000$ less of income. If that was your initial stadium and the initial stadium side, that means ZERO income for such a game.
The side is bigger and does have already a block of 20.000/2.000/200 seats? The missed income does rise to 1.340.000$ if there is a league home game coming the next few days.
For a block of 30.000/3.000/300 seats this is already a missed income of 2.010.000$.

So it makes sense to s e l e c t the smallest existing block in your stadium and extend it which a nice additional amount of seats and accept the smallest amount of missed income, if necessary.

Trick 2 - avoid the maintenance costs
A nice side effect of a building order, regardless of the chosen side, is that for the side you did chose to extend you don’t have to pay maintenance, which can be quite some money over a season.
It’s just unwise to start a new construction phase right before the next regular season home game. Better start AFTER the game or in a week with away games.
That money you save is money you don’t get subtracted on financial updates, which means you keep more of your hard earned money and you can use that to extend the stadium faster.

To be fair, it’s not that much compared to the construction costs and if you feel uncomfortable regarding the timing and execution of this trick, don’t do it. A wrongly executed order will cost you much more money than you can ever generate by that trick.
A 10.000/1.000/100 block does cost 40.000$ in maintenance. Remember the income was 670.000$.
But just in case you like to know the mechanics I will try to explain it.

You know that construction takes 4 days, you know your home games in league and Supercup (and maybe even Champ of Champs) so you can play your construction time around the games.
Given a last home game on Saturday in the league and then no home games until Supercup on Thursday? Place your order right after the last home game on Saturday on the biggest built block (at the start that might be the initial side) or if you have several sides already build, use as many as possible to place the order.
Now, in the optimal case, your stadium size is officially ZERO until construction does finish.
Financial u p d a t e from Saturday to Sunday? ZERO maintenance costs. 1st day of construction.
Daily u p d a t e to Monday (you have an away Supercup game, right?). 2nd day of construction.
Daily u p d a t e to Tuesday (you have a bye week or an away league game, right?). 3rd days of construction.
Financial u p d a t e from Tuesday to Wednesday. ZERO maintenance cost and you stadium does finish today and the seats ready for sale.
You have now a bigger stadium and saved some money during that time, while losing no income.

Trick 3 - the Supercup games
It’s unlikely that your Supercup games are scheduled as your home games, since the engine tries to schedule at season rollover on the biggest arena for each game, but teams turn BOT and also do BOTs play BOTs and if you took over one of those BOTs or a former full build stadium team, you might have home games on Supercup Monday and Thursday.
So check your Supercup games and maximize the income by switching the home site if possible.
That’s a trick you should use in general until your stadium is finished.
Check every Supercup game and check them regularly, because teams can fall BOT and that might change the circumstances. A once nice 144.300 Stadium might shrink to 11.100 seats from one day to another one. So check at least a day before the Supercup game, because you can’t switch site on gameday. It can also happen that an opponent does not have a full built stadium, but a bigger one as you have and you decided to play in his, but he was lazy or crazy and did start construction at the wrong day to expend it. Look out for that.

If you do find a game which is not scheduled the best way, change it.
With human opponents I suggest to write a PN and then ask to change the site through the game page and hopefully the opponent accepts the change, with BOTs you only need to change the site and the system does grant the change immediately.

This also helps to have the needed construction days without a home game, at least sometimes.

Speeding things further up:
If all goes well and you did put all money into the stadium build, your income will increase dramatically over the weeks and you can at some point start building other stuff or can start building your team.

This will take time and there are some shortcuts, but they are not 100% sure and they are also not without a price in a different currency.

Shortcut 1 - cut all unnecessary players
That means, take a look at your roster and cut all unneeded players and work with a minimum players roster, without coaches and without all other stuff you might want to buy or build.
This would keep your costs at a total minimum and will give you more money to build seats with.
But it will also keep your team in a baby mode for some long time, a season or so.
It will also not save you a lot of money, since you don’t have a big players-wage-bill anyway.
A fresh team does have a wage bill of around 65.000$ per update. It’s possible to cut the roster down to 38 players and some players do need only less than a 1.000$ per update. Means, you can cut all down to 35.000$ to 40.000$ per update. As you can see, those 25.000$ less in wages won’t help much.
But the possibility is there and for sure you will cut or sell some of the players anyway. The question is, when you will start to hire new one. With this shortcut, you do delay that for some time.

Shortcut 2 - sell your draft players
This can be a money kickstarter. In the past there were times when a good draft player did deliver a 100.000.000+$ money income at once, which lead to an instant stadium build.
But times did change and not many players do change teams for that kind of money anymore.
Still, the right player at the right time will give you big cash injection and even a higher 7-digit figure and more will help to speed up the process.

If you would like to know, how much you can get, I can't give you a serious answer.
The prices do depend heavily on the managers need at that time, your players quality, the manager’s pockets and which type of players are hip right now.
The downside of that draft player selling is that your chance for the first few good players on your team was moved to the next season, since you sold your first generation.
This is a risky shortcut and can pay off huge, or it can backfire.

Shortcut 3 - sell the good players from your initial team
This is easier said than done, because there is no guarantee that there are one or more players like this on your initial team.
But if you have such a player, like a 19 year old 50 INT, 50 TW with uncapped speed and strength at 45+ (which would be a jackpot) there is a big amount of money possible.
It would also kickstart your stadium build and of course would delay your team building just a bit in case of a few players or quite heavy in case of many more.

Shortcut 4 – avoid the TOP Manager title as long as possible
When you reach 100.000+ seats with your stadium you will get the title TOP Manager. This will automatically trigger the start of the stadium decay. That means with each home game the stadium will get damaged by 2% and that will reduce your capacity by 1% (see the manual). After a few home games, this will get serious, because your ticket income will go down and the costs for repair will go up. For the repair in detail see the section below, the shortcut itself is to avoid the TOP Manager title itself as long as possible to keep those extra costs away from your team as long as possible.
So if you have the chance to increase the arena to something above 100.000+ but not much, it might be wise to wait another Supercup or Home game to make that step even bigger.
Overall you should do this only for a short period, since the additional costs are not THAT high and you will limit yourself more by not increasing the stadium, than by paying the extra costs.
But the barrier is there and if you can avoid it with some clever management, do it.

Overall, you need money for the stadium and you can only earn money by regular season games, by selling players at the beginning or you can try to avoid additional costs and have a bit more money to spend that way, but there is only a minimal amount possible.

There will be a time you are quite satisfied with your income and your stadium and at that point you might start thinking about adding players, coaches, staff or facilities, means improving other aspects of your team.

When that time comes it is up to you.
Be aware that there are some risks when you start spending money for "other stuff" before the full stadium is there, but whenever that happens, please do not stop building your stadium.
You can slow it down, you might even skip an u p d a t e or two, but my advice is:
Do not stop before it has 144300 seats fully build.

My other suggestion is to ask yourself what you would like to do and what you have the most fun with, because neither of the mentioned shortcuts are fun. None.
Selling your best players, limiting costs to the max? No fun.
Be aware that in best case you have to delay the foundation of your team for ONE season (equals 12 real live weeks), in worst case, make that TWO seasons (equals 24 real live weeks!), even if that is unlikely now with the mediacenter income.

If you are OK with such plan, fine.

It wouldn't be mine and back in the days I started my team I did very fast spend money on "other" things, and I did never sell a draft player until some seasons had passed (and the reason for selling was not a kickstart on finances) and I did not sell my best players, ever.

So make a rough plan to build your stadium and have fun. That's my major suggestion.

Some words on the stadium repair at that point here:
As mentioned , once you did reach the Manager rank “Top Manager” which means you built your stadium to 100.000+ seats, each home game will damage your stadium by 2% and that will reduce your capacity by 1% (see the manual). After a few home games, this will get serious, because your ticket income will go down.

To avoid this, there are two ways.
Manual Repair:
You can manually order the repair on the stadium page. That costs 156.000$ per 2% damage + 100.000$ per order. You lose around 1% visitors per 2% damage so it can be calculated when you lose more money than you saved by not renovating your stadium and saving the 100.000$ per order. This does a bid varies because of league level and your opponents, since weak opponents won’t draw as many visitors as top opponents will do. So you have to check your attendance and you should also check for BIG games, like your team playing the team with the best record. Also your staff level does influence the attendance.
It’s safe to say that everything under 90% status is beyond economical reason, at least for level 1 and better. So you have to repair somewhat between every home game and every fifth home game to get the most out of your ticket sales.
For level 2 this might get down to 80%, but you can calculate that quite easily. Or test it.

Hire help
The other way is to hire a facility manager for 1.200.000$ per season who will then repair your stadium after every home game. That’s economical not really a good choice, because the 100.000$ order costs and the repair costs will stay the same, but it will release you of worrying over that topic.

Up to you.

You can find a bit more about the Facility Manager in Chapter 12 for Staff.

forward to Chapter 03 - Rework the initial roster
back to Chapter 01 - Getting Started

Tags: Jack6s RZA Guide