So, you’ve gotten into Retro Bowl? It’s not hard to see why. The arcade American football game has people all over the world falling in love with it and the game of football. Whether you’re just starting out, an experienced player, or don’t even know the rules of football, this expert guide will have something for you.
1) First, before starting the game - are you a football fan? If you aren’t, welcome to the beautiful game of American Football! Retro Bowl has become so popular that it's introduced many players to the game of football. If you’ve been watching football your whole life, you’re fine going on your prior knowledge, but if you’re a non-US player or even just a player who has never gotten into football before, look up the rules. There are plenty of excellent video explanations on the basic rules of football, no longer than ten minutes. You certainly don’t have to do this, but if you are unfamiliar you’ll thank yourself later.
2) After completing the tutorial, you’ll find yourself in the pro draft. You’ll be tempted to pick many different positions here - maybe shore up your defense with a ball hawking defensive back, get a powerhouse runner that can bowl over opposing linebackers, but the number one thing you’ll need is a Quarterback. In Retro Bowl, as in real life, the Quarterback is the most important position on the field, and you’re going to struggle mightily without a good one. Find one with high potential in his arm power and stamina - you’re going to want to be able to hit your receivers deep, even in late game situations.
3) Make sure you upgrade your facilities. Your three facilities (rehab, stadium, and training) are all important - but you’ll want to upgrade your stadium first. Why? Well, the stadium upgrades make it so that your fans become happier with every win, and are less unhappy with every loss. When they’re happy, you’ll get more coaching credits with every win, which you can then turn around and spend on everything you need to make your team great - players, coaches, other facility upgrades. Virtually everything you want in this game will cost coaching credits so start off right by making sure you’ll have a steady flow of coaching credits coming in.
4) When you’re just starting out and rebuilding your team, you’ll come across an event where your staff will inform you of an interesting undrafted prospect you could sign. This is a small event, but assuming you have a free roster slot and cap space, you absolutely should do it. For one, it’s an essentially free player helping you out. For another, you can trade the player for a draft pick which will give you much needed flexibility in the offseason. Trading him during the season will induce a small morale penalty, but if you take him into the offseason you can trade him for no penalty at all. That, my friends, is pure value.
5) Around this time, the game will also unlock bullet throws for you to use by tapping the screen before you throw the ball. These are fast, low angle throws that are, sadly, completely unusable - at least as of this patch. Try it a few times yourself to find out, but you’ll quickly realize that the ball will just bounce off your receiver’s hands almost every time. Instead, learn to use the standard lob pass and anticipate your receiver’s movement. You’ll have a lot more success that way.
6) Right now, you should be making your way through your first season on the job. Congratulations! However, there is a problem - your defense is likely starting to let up some big points to opposing offenses. This is especially frustrating in Retro Bowl, as you have no control over what the defense does on the field. This can only mean one thing: it’s time to get help.
7) A defensive coordinator improves the odds on the die rolls that happen behind the scenes to determine if your defense allows the opposing offense to gain yardage, get a stop, or even a turnover. Even a small increase in those odds will add up in the aggregate, so hiring a defensive coordinator early will help your teams. I’d recommend hiring a five star coordinator as soon as you have the coaching credits to do so.
8) You’re also running into dilemmas presented by the game. These are choices presented to the player between games that have various benefits and drawbacks. A lot of these decisions will have benefits and drawbacks, but one doesn’t. If you see one of your players playing Retro Bowl during practice (Meta!), then you should always praise him. It boosts his morale at no cost to you, and chastising him only makes his morale go down with no gain.
9) 1Now that you’ve gotten through your first full season, it’s time to talk about some general tips. First of all, let’s talk about my favorite feature, the Hall of Fame. Click the little yellow banner at the top of the player profile screen to put them into the Hall of Fame, and this will allow you to look back at their accolades and stats in the future. The trick here is this is the only way the game keeps track of player stats long term, so if you have a player that you want to remember at all, you must put them into the Hall.
10) If you’ve been struggling with maintaining an elite defense in Retro Bowl, let me tell you the secret - less is more. The best defense you can have consists of a five star DB, DL, and LB, and no more. Due to how Retro Bowl handles its random rolls to determine the outcomes on defense, having more players does nothing to improve your defense’s performance. Once you have one five star player in every position, adding more players will at best keep your performance the same, and at worst actively make it worse. So just keep one player of the highest quality in every position in the defense, and then use your resources elsewhere.
11) Build your team mainly through the draft, and only use free agents to plug holes as needed. Is your team a quarterback away from competing? Splurge on a quarterback! Is your team a quarterback, running back, and two wide receivers away from competing? It’s going to be best to save your coaching credits and build up a team from the ground.
12) Running backs can be unintuitive to a novice player, especially when the passing game is so prolific. I’ve even seen people discussing if it’s worth it to have a running back at all and dear reader, let me tell you - it absolutely is.
The trick to playing with a star running back is to realize his strength compared to other offensive positions. Running backs, more than any other position, can use their strength attribute to stiff arm guys on every play. A running back with a maxed out strength can reliably stiff arm guys, if you know the technique - just swipe into the player you want to stiff arm. I like to think of it like I’m checking a guy in hockey. If you can master this simple technique, you can rip off ten yard runs every play. This allows you to control the ball, tire out the opposing defense, and run out the clock at the end of games.
13) This brings me to the second reason you should pick a star running back: their strength makes them an excellent option for returning kicks. Receivers and defensive backs, the other two positions that can return kicks, do not have the strength of running backs on average. Putting a running back in the role can seriously help you get those extra 5-10 yards after first contact, making your field position that much better.
14) This brings me to a tip on kickoffs - don’t waste time you don’t have on them! You will never get a kickoff return for a touchdown above medium difficulty, so don’t bank on that happening. Instead, if you have the option for a touchback when you need to drive down the field quickly, take it. Teleporting to the 25 is a much more efficient use of time than running it out to the 35.
15) One last kickoff tip that doubles as a tip any time you’re running in open field: if you see that the opposing team is drifting to one side of the field, consider swiping backwards to slow down and let the blockers engage. Patiently waiting and then reversing field is a great way to get an extra 10-15 yards on top of your previous gain.
16) So, back to the topic of your roster - what is the ideal roster construction? This is ultimately going to depend on you and your goals. If you want to make a roster that’s just five offensive linemen and a running back, go for it! The point is to have fun and win the way you want to win. However, in this author’s opinion, the ideal roster construction would be:
One of each defensive position (DL, LB, DB), as we talked about earlier
One QB, because he’s the most important position on the field
One RB, to make sure you have a pass catcher out of the backfield
Two WRs, for your bread and butter passes.
Two TEs, for making sure you have as many skilled pass catchers as possible
One Kicker, for those last minute game winning kicks
17) Know your routes! Learn to recognize which routes are good for what purpose - which ones are high probability but low yardage, which ones are good safe routes to check down to, and which ones have high breakaway chance. I’ll give just one example for the sake of brevity - the route where the TE runs straight up the field is virtually unstoppable. If you have a quality TE, that will get you chunk yardage over and over again.
18) When your players level up, beware of useless stats! There are some stats that are more or less useful to level up based on the player’s position, but there are only two statistics that, as far as we know, have no use: speed for OL, and speed for Kickers. Leave speed as the absolute last thing you upgrade with them.
19) Be aggressive, always. Always go for two, always go for it on fourth down. The pressure you put on your opponent to always keep up will prove overpowering once you can convert those short yardage scenarios with regularity - they’ll have to constantly score two point conversions to keep up with you. They’ll have to get lucky every time and hope they can keep up with you. You only have to get lucky once, the first time they miss a conversion they’re playing catch up.
20) An advanced tip that even seasoned players don’t know: by clicking on the year in the upper right hand side of the screen, you’ll be granted stats on all your games, as well as how many times you’ve restarted a game. That’s right, the game knows when you exit out at the last second to stop yourself from losing, but that’s alright. I don’t think the game cares.
21) Another fun thing to do in Retro Bowl is customize your team! By going to the settings and going into the team editor, you can change teams names and look. Do you believe a team should have never moved away from their retro colors? Do you want to relocate your team to your hometown? This under-utilized feature can often be overlooked, and it’s a great way to customize your game experience.
22) Now let’s wrap up with some tips for the spin-off, Retro Bowl College. Firstly, for international players and people unfamiliar with the college game, I’d recommend looking up the difference between the pro ruleset and the college ruleset in America. The biggest, and most fun, change between the two is the overtime rules. College overtime rules allow for a true back and forth in the overtime period, so you won’t have to worry about teams winning the coin toss and driving down to score on you before you even have a chance to fight back anymore.
23) In Retro Bowl College, you’ll need to maintain your students GPA in order for them to maintain academic eligibility. The trick to this is to maintain academic excellence. You can meet with your players to improve their GPA, but it costs more to improve the lower their GPA is. If you stay on top of it and make sure all your players float between a 3.0 and 4.0, you’ll have all your players available and the most resources to boot.
24) Another note on GPA in Retro Bowl College is that you’ll get warnings should a student be close to academic ineligibility. If a student is close enough, you’ll get a dilemma to let the player about to enter ineligibility study, which makes the team unhappy, or refuse, which lowers the players GPA. You should always pick the GPA boost. It’s a lot more expensive to get a player off of academic parole than it is to raise team morale, and you’ll notice one player missing entirely over a morale hit spread around the whole team.
Another difference is that the Minor colleges go into a tournament at the end of the season, while the Major colleges replicate the structure of the CFB playoff. Ultimately this comes down to personal preference. If you’d rather win a huge multi round tournament, pick a Minor college. If you want even making it to the playoffs to feel like a huge accomplishment, pick Majors.
25) Finally, have fun. This isn’t a competitive game, there are no leaderboards, and you’ll be making the fun for yourself. This is a guide about how to play the game optimally, but don’t feel beholden to that. Maybe you want to see what a game would look like with nothing but an elite running back. Maybe you want the challenge of trying to win a championship with no star players at all! Once you’ve mastered the controls, these are the challenges that give the game longevity.
Retro Bowl is taking the world by storm for a reason. Its addictive arcade gameplay, paired with its light sim elements, make it one of the premier football games on the market today, and it shows up games with far greater budgets.
I’ve been a football fan my whole life, and it’s brought me a lot of joy to see people who I love get into this sport through Retro Bowl. I hope that you have a similar experience, that you too will fall in love with this silly sport through this wonderful little game.
Now for the real question: when are they going to release Retro Bowl Canada?
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