Gladiator Manager

Gladiator Manager is a sports management game with tactical, text-based battles. You manage a team of gladiators and try to win a five-tier league and a cup. You recruit fighters by assessing their skills and potential, train them, and choose lineups and tactics to gain advantages over opposing teams.

Manage your team

Fighters have one of four origins—veteran, citizen, criminal or slave—with different characteristics and mechanics. They belong to six classes: gladiator, rogue, barbarian, defender, retarius and leader. Each class can take perks from other class trees, and fighters can develop specialist skills for countering particular classes.

You manage training, development, wages, signing fees, prize money and kill bonuses. New fighters become available every four fights, with recruitment options depending on your team’s reputation. Fighter bravery influences team popularity, which in turn affects crowd attendance. Discipline, bravery and morale also matter in the arena, and disobedient fighters may sometimes ignore your orders.

Tactical battles

Fights use simultaneous turns: you and the opposing team issue orders to all fighters at once. Outcomes depend on choices to attack, defend, move or use a special strategy, as well as class advantages and rock-paper-scissors decisions. A fighter’s control affects their chances of success; defending successfully in earlier turns can build control and create better opportunities to attack. You select teams for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 fights.

Fighters can unlock over 30 special moves and more than 60 passive perks. Battles also account for armour, blood, discipline, bravery and morale. Fighters can be injured, maimed or killed, or succumb to fear and yield.

Injuries and battle reports

The game includes more than 100 types of injury, with consequences that vary by injury. Fighters can suffer blindness, concussion, unconsciousness or severed limbs, and injuries have a detailed recovery system with temporary or permanent effects.

An optional detailed battle report shows every random roll and the mechanics behind each outcome. Randomness has three settings: simulation, the default; low RNG, similar to the D&D D20 system; and fixed, with no RNG. Training outcomes are also shown: a fighter’s ability to improve an attribute depends on the training focus you set and their innate potential for that skill.

Leagues and records

The competition has five leagues, each with ten teams, and a cup that spans the leagues each season. Other teams’ matches are fully simulated using the same options available to you, without shortcuts or AI advantages. The game tracks fighter statistics and displays them after each fight.

Fighters and customisation

A portrait generator creates more than 310 million possible fighter portraits. You can customise world themes, including team and division names, and choose fighter names drawn from Rome, Gaul, Britannia or modern-day Europe: England, Spain, France, Italy and Russia. You can also mix names from all themes. The game’s text and SQL files can be modded, including for name generation and save files.