Cycling Manager 2023
Berniece Domnick
Become a sports director, take part in the world's top cycling races and lead your riders to victory. Set race objectives, negotiate contracts, find new sponsors and build your team season after season.
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2024 Nacon. 2024 Published Nacon and developed by Cyanide SAS. A.S.O. is the worldwide exclusive licensee of the following trademarks registered by Socit du Tour de France : Tour de France, Paris-Nice, Lige-Bastogne-Lige, Paris-Roubaix. Criterium du Dauphin is a registered trademark of A.S.O.. La Vuelta is a registered trademark of Unipublic. All rights reserved.
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Pro Cycling Manager is a series of cycling management and real-time simulation games created by Cyanide. The game was first launched in 2001 as Cycling Manager, but the series took on the Pro label in June 2005. A new version is released every year to coincide with the Tour de France. The game is offered in a variety of languages (including French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese) although the actual language configuration depends on the local publisher. Pro Cycling Manager runs on the PC. The game is produced in cooperation with most of the main professional cycling teams under the aegis of the IPCT and the AIGCP. In September 2007 a PlayStation Portable version of the game was released, called Pro Cycling. It is engineered to take advantage of PSP gameplay and it offers a limited management mode.
In Pro Cycling Manager there are three game modes: Career, One-off Race and Track Cycling. In Career, the player becomes the manager of a cycling team of their choice. In One-off Race, the player can lead their team in any race without reaching the race date in career. In Track mode, the player can ride as a track cyclist in track disciplines such as Keirin, Points race, etc. In the 2015 version of the game there is a new mode called Be a Pro (later called Pro Cyclist), in which the player creates a custom young cyclist, sets his personality such as climber or sprinter, and builds his career.
The fact that 2020 saw the rise of a new era of Grand Tour champions, including Tadej Pogacar, Primoz Roglic, and a year later Jonas Vingegaard, exemplifies the unpredictability of road cycling. In PCM, where the present cycling season and potential sequential seasons get simulated, this unpredictability is definitely an advantage, as every outlined scenario has an inherent degree of possibility.
There are typically two playing positions in such a managerial sim, either start from the top, from the vantage point of a team (close to) competing for wins, or from the bottom while building a team or cyclist from a lower ranking in a process that takes multiple in-game years. The advantage to the former position is the possibility of simulating road cycling season 2024 from within the current peloton, whereas the bottom-up option allows one to imagine what the future of road cycling could look like.
Both positions also speak to the promise of realistic representation customary of annual sports franchises. In my playthrough, I played as a world class team manager for the 2024 season and as a rookie pro cyclist for a career far beyond that.
Typically, road cycling requires patience, picking the right moment to attack, planning a sustained effort that does not have a cyclist overextend their stamina, and taking care of any unforeseen circumstances. Especially on intense mountain stages, gaps between riders can be minutes. For this reason, I prefer simulating stage races such as the Tour de France and playing as climbers with a chance to win it all.
In PCM, certain strategies are favored over others. Attacking is highly inefficient stamina-wise, so winning a mountain stage with an attack is unlikely, unless there are more than the usual fine margins between riders. At the same time, my pro cyclist, developing into a top level climber and stage racer, could not follow any attacks by punchier climbers, nor make up ground by a sustained effort due to the AI suddenly coordinating their efforts perfectly.
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Everyone has little guilty pleasures, one of mines is to watch endlessly the best stages of the Tour de France. From childhood, biking is one of the favorite things in my life, and in spite of the controversies around cycling in general and Le Tour in particular, my fascination remains indefectible. I love it all... The drama, the determination, the work that goes behind, the views of France from above. The winners. And that's where it struck me this summer - managing 21st century organizations like a team of the World Tour of cycling is plain wrong.
I know the broad basics, I think. Most cyclists in the Tour De France are not riding for personal victory, with only a few on each team seriously competing in the various sub-competitions. Their teammates run support: trying to control the pace of the race; helping or hindering breakaways; mounting attacks; fetching and delivering water bottles; and straight-up doing the hard work. Air resistance is killer in this endurance sport, so support riders take the lead and cut through the wind, letting stars draft behind them and save energy for key moments. And that's just on one day. Each rider is a resource to be strategically deployed for the good of the team, their energy consumed intentionally and carefully across individual stages, the weeks-long tour, and the wider competitive cycling season.
It can be beautiful to watch teams deliver their sprinters to the finish line seemingly out of nowhere, the colours of team jerseys congealing into a mass then flaking off as riders burn themselves out one-by-one until only sprinters remain in the desperate final few hundred metres. Sounds to me like a fitting theme for management and strategy games.
Cyanide Studio's Pro Cycling Manager is the big name in the genre, started in 2001 and following up with sequels every year since. It's got fancy 3D graphics, the official teams and cyclists, and races including a recreation of the Tour De France. It seems fine?
It's a Football Manager sort of dealio, a game where you pick a team and play through a season. Manage finances, rosters, health, sponsors, training, tactics, equipment, and such. Then you can watch races in a 3D real-time view, issuing orders for riders: telling them when to draft, when to attack, when to share effort pulling with other teams, when to drop back for water deliveries, and so on. What I've played seems fine. This seems what I'd expect from a cycling management game. I'm being a bit unfairly vague and dismissive because I'm more into the other bike strat-o-sim I've been playing.
The Cyclist: Tactics is a spunky little indie effort, released last year. It has no flashy 3D graphics, none of my favourite real riders or teams, no Tour De France license, not even real countries for the setting. But it does have turn-based bikesport with a fun board game feel.
Camshaft Software's game hits many of the same notes as Pro Cycling Manager, with the usual team-managing career mode, but its races take places on courses abstracted into top-down boards divided into nodes. I enjoy seeing the tactics laid out so plainly with numbers: which moves require 'no' effort, the power of the peloton boosting you along, the importance of taking your turn pulling to keep a group happy, the extra effort of climbs or rough surfaces, the recuperative powers of coasting downhill, how to pace yourself across a long course, and so on. I haven't learn whole new facets of tactics from the game but being encouraged to model a race in my head so plainly with numbers does make me think about them more. And it's fun! I am enjoying mulling my moves, even if the fledgling team of Rock Peloton Shotgun are struggling a little under my leadership. Yeah, I need to replay the tutorial.
Several people have recommended the board game Flamme Rouge for the tactics and thrills of bicycle races. I've not played it but your words are tempting. Oh hello, I've just seen Quinns (RPS in peace) reviewed Flamme Rouge with Matt Lees for Shut Up & Sit Down. Hmm!
I recently dug out my Pro Cycling Manager2006 CD to have some good old (lazy) cycling fun again. It took mesome steps to actually reach the fun part though. Problem one was my lack of CDdrive on my laptop, but luckily that was easily solved by simply making an isofrom the disc and then mounting it with something like WinCDEmu.
Some preliminary googling did not turn up anything, but in the end I did stumbleupon this wonderful forumpost.The rest of my post will be mostly rehashing what is mentioned there for thepurpose of having it backed up for me.
First off, let us fix things so the game at least starts. For this we use thesilver edition of the game, which Cyanide released some time after theoriginal. The silver edition includes the 1.0.0.8 patch and removes theStarforce protection. Supposedly it also introduces a language selectionissue, but I only use English and did not encounter anything out of theordinary. Simply copy the files included in the zip file into your game folder(something like C:\Program Files\Cyanide\Pro Cycling Manager 2006\). Twolinks are provided, they link to the same file so you can decide which you wantto use. If neither work, let me know, I should have it backed up.
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