In two days Rabona, the new football manager on the Hive Blockchain, will start it's second season and all new players will finally be able to really participate in the game. Since I took part in the more or less closed beta and play the first season during the last four weeks, today's post will be about my experiences with the game. I will try to give you some tips that should make it easier for every player to start out.
Beginning
In order to play Rabona you first have to buy a starter package. This costs $5 and is mainly intended to avoid bots, as you could probably get a lot of advantages by using botnets. The Starter Pack contains 280,000 RBN (the in-game currency), plus 11 players to play the first games with. If you register here via my Ref-Link you will receive an additional 25.000 RBN starting bonus, which you could use to scout another player directly.
First: Do your tasks
For starting the game I can recommend to use the tasks you can find on the mainpage. First of all they give you an insight into the game's functions and secondly you get rewards in form of RBN for fulfilling them.
Special focus should be put on bringing your stadium up to level 5 - this increases it's capacity and thus allows for much higher revenues.
Daily routine
Before I go into detail about the game mechanics and explain what they do, I would like to make a kind of checklist for the daily tasks. This should help you to find your way around, especially at the beginning. I will put a question mark (?) behind some of the points, which means that you don't have to do them every day necessarily .
- Training
- Upgrade building (?)
- Adjust ticket and other prices
- Set up your lineups for the next games
- Check the sign and market page
These are at least the things I did every day. There are also other things, but they are not necessarily important for the beginning or have to be done less often. Now let's get to the actual game mechanics.
At the end of this post I will give you some general tips that can be very helpful at the beginning of the game, so be sure to read the post to the end ;).
Game mechanics - An overview
In summary, I would (currently) divide the game into three areas: Team management, finances and game management. I think the division is pretty good, you can decide how much time and thought you want to invest in which of these aspects and let some of them be fulfilled automatically by the game. The exact game mechanics will now be discussed.
Team management
One of the central game mechanics is - of course - team management. This includes, among other things: Training, scouting new players, (re)negotiating player contracts or generally deciding which players to keep and which to sell or whose contract to terminate.
Players have different stats in Rabona (who would have expected it :p). There are: Goalkeeping, Defending, Passing, Dribbling, Shot, Headball, Speed, Endurance, Cleverness, Teamplayer, Vulnerability and a few line-up stats, which determine how well a player can handle a certain line-up. (OS is by the way the Overall Strength)
Depending on the player's position, which can be either goalkeeper, defender, midfielder or attacker different values are important. For goalkeepers goalkeeping is the main skill, for defenders it is defending and passing, for midfielders it is passing and dribbling and for forwards it is passing and shot. The other stats are important for all players. Little tip: Teamplayer seems to be really important, so try to find players with good teamplayer stat if possible.
Of course they also let soccer teams train. The training in Rabona always affects the whole team, individual players cannot be specially selected. Also not all skills can be trained, the ones that can't be trained, I wrote italic above.
You can do a training once per 24 hours. You can choose between a few attributes and line-up training. You can also skip the 24 hour cool down for a fee of $1 (but this might change in the future as training is a relatively strong game mechanic).
What I like about Rabona Training is that training not only has a positive effect on the stats, but also has disadvantages. As an example: Below you can see a passing training. Of course it increases the passing skill, but it also generates some negative stats (even if they are not big). The whole thing involves a bit of tactics and not just a dull "train and done".
What I would wish for the future: More possibilities to individualize trainings, e.g. choosing players and similar features.
Players in Rabona have contracts that can expire. On the teampage you can see the remaining contract period for your players (in seasons). You can extend them, which leads to a higher salary per player, or you can let them expire, which leads to them leaving the team and allowing other teams to sign them.
Finances
But this is already drifting into the next category: finances. As I just mentioned, players have salaries that have to be paid. These are passive expenses that you always have. In addition, there is maintenance for the stadium and other buildings, which also become more expensive with every upgrade. Other expenses you have, but which are optional, are costs for scouting new players, which costs 20.000 RBN each. On top of that there are costs for upgrading the stadium and other buildings, which can be higher.
On the other hand there are the revenues. These consist mostly of ticket income for the games (at least for me, I don't know how much money can be made by trading players). You can set a ticket price for this, which then also influences how many spectators you get - a very cool mechanism. Similar to that you sell bratwurst and beer. To find the optimal price you need some fine-tuning, but after a few games you should find a good balance between price and sales. You also have "Advertisement contracts" - advertising contracts that you sign for several seasons and that bring you a fixed amount of RBN seasonally.
In general, it seems to me that it is relatively easy to make a profit. Especially if you have upgraded the stadium a few times, you will get enough spectators to make a profit. Here are some screenshots of my finances from my second last season:
game management
The last central game mechanic I want to address is game management. In Rabona you have the choice between five different line-ups for the matches. You take the 11 players for the starting line-up and 10 substitutes into each match.
At the moment you set up the line-up by adding and arranging the players in the list on the right. I don't think this solution is very optimal, but a better version is already in the works, where you can place the players directly by drag & drop into a playing field. What I can recommend: Finish the team once, submit and then simply copy the JSON transaction and broadcast it with the corresponding match ID for the next matches by code.
If you do not submit a line-up, the game will do this automatically. The players are automatically created according to the highest OS value, but this is not always optimal.
In Rabona there are injuries and cards. You have to take these into account when setting up the team, because players can even be absent for 10 matches. So it is important to have a few spare players in stock. But you should not exaggerate, because the salaries can exceed the income, especially in the beginning, if you have too many players under contract.
The stadium
Another game are is the stadium, which I have already partly mentioned above. The stadium consists of several buildings which can be upgraded with RBN and which have different advantages.
The upgrades take a certain amount of time, which gets longer with higher levels. As shown in the screenshot, upgrading the stadium (the building) to level 7 takes 5 days. It is also important to note that each upgrade increases the maintenance costs of the building. So you have to weigh the benefits and costs of upgrades to avoid losses.
The market
What no blockchain game should miss is a market. This works quite simple in Rabona: You put a player up for sale for a fixed RBN price and others can buy him. There is a 5% fee, but this fee will be burned.
You can also "freeze" players and convert them into an NFT. The player will stop aging, stop playing, no salary will be paid, etc. However, you can still trade him. These functions cost 0.1$ each for freezing and unfreezing.
Many small details
I have now described the rough game mechanics and actions, but there are still many smaller and also bigger things to do and consider. For example, there is a home advantage, you have different regional, national and international fans who have different influence on the number of tickets sold and similar statistics and subtleties, but you should have played for and experienced them yourself.
General tips
At the end of this post there are now a few tips for the way. They are not in any particular order, but simply written down crisscross.
- Visit sign regularly! The players there are free of charge and there may be some good ones, which are simply no longer needed by people from higher leagues
- Pay attention to the team player value, it is very important
- Don't overdo it with the number of players in your club, it gets expensive quickly, but you still have enough to have substitutes
I think that says most of the game. If there is anything I forgot to mention or there are any questions I will be happy to answer them here in the comments or you can ask on the Rabona Discord.
If you register with my Ref-Link you will receive 25.000 RBN at the start of the game - a good bonus.
That says it all, have fun and good luck with managing! :)