UFC 2010 Career Mode Guide
UFC 2010 includes a completely redone career mode with some important new elements and considerations for you to make, so your strategy from the last game isn't going to work. It's not an easy way to play, either, so let's look at the new career mode and dive into a few new tips for getting your created fighter up to speed. (Note: this is mostly a guide for people that are having trouble in Beginner difficulty. Many of these tips will work on Experienced, but it's possible that some or all of these strategies will fail miserably in Advanced or Expert modes.)
Picking the initial style
Picking your fighter's initial style actually has a pretty big effect on your fighter, as it dictates some of the moves you'll have available to start. Sure, everyone has a basic selection of punches, kicks, knees, ground transitions, and submissions, but if you're going to have a starting base, make sure your initial fighting style matches it. If you can't decide, going with a Muay Thai or Boxing base is a perfectly good choice.
Difficulty
In UFC 2010's career mode, choosing one of four difficulty modes (after some practice matches) is a permanent choice. Higher difficulties will give you more points in sparring and fight camp sessions, but you'll also have a much tougher opponent so you might not get as many to start. In general, UFC 2010 is a harder game than last year's entry, so if you were playing on Experienced before, try Beginner now. If you were on Advanced, try Experienced, and if you were on Expert, try Advanced. Going straight into Expert career mode is a lesson in pain, one you should be well-prepared for.
Fatigue
The Stamina stat from UFC 2009's career mode has been replaced by Fatigue. It does the same thing, but now it counts up from 0% to 100% instead of the other way, so high numbers are bad. Resting always takes off 60% of your Fatigue and training and sparring usually add less until you near the end of the career, so you'll often have to make choices to do fights at 30% fatigue and the like. Keep in mind that the best way to train often involves pushing yourself even once you've hit 100% fatigue; the game complains about injuries, but the only thing injuries do is give you lower multipliers (which means lower stat gains) during training. Injuries don't happen as soon as you get to 100%, though, but when they do your multipliers will worsen even more, so you just have to watch it and rest the first time you see significantly lower numbers. For example, your sparring "injury" multiplier at 100% fatigue is usually 0.50x, but if you keep sparring at 100%, you'll eventually drop to 0.25x.
Training
Training brings up your three core stats: Strength, Speed, and Cardio. All 3 are vital to make a good, well-rounded fighter, and all career fighters should be aiming to get all of these to at least 70. It's up to you if you want to mix your training sessions in with your sparring and fight camp sessions, but it's smart to get all of your stats and skills up to 30 early on, and then take each your core stats to 70 as you get the Level 2 training equipment for each stat.
For really long training sessions, like when you get Level 2 training gear and want to take Strength, Speed, or Cardio all the way from 30 to 70, you'll do it in less time if you don't rest after each session. The same random injury thing can happen with training as it can with sparring (you can tell when you start getting 2 points per Intense session instead of 3 when at 100% fatigue), so if that happens, rest once and go back to the grind. Depending on how you play, you may find that a no-rest strategy also works in Sparring sessions, but keep in mind that your guy won't spar as well when at 100% fatigue - that's not a problem with marathon training sessions.
Conditioning
Conditioning is a new stat that reflects your overall readiness to fight. Having a higher conditioning has an overall positive effect on your speed, power, and toughness, so if you're having trouble winning fights, try doing things to keep your conditioning high as you go into a fight, like using a Game Plan or a light Training session the week before a fight, keeping your fatigue low as you go in. Don't worry if your conditioning sucks at the beginning of your career; by the time you get into the UFC, you should easily be able to push it close to 100% when you want to.
Stat decay
Your stats don't just stay put like they used to in UFC 2009. Neglect dropping points into any stat for too long, and it'll start to decay down to the last milestone you achieved (0, 30, 50, and 70) for that given stat. This goes for your three main attributes as well as for your fighting skills. What this means is that if you plan on having any stats above 70, you'll need to keep sparring over the course of your career to keep your skills fresh - and it also means that when you're trying to go to fight camps and build some stats heavily, you might have to let a few others decay on purpose.
Point milestones
Your stats won't decay below 30, 50, and 70 points, so at the start of your career, the best strategy seems to be to get as many stats to 30 as you can before decay starts eating some of them away. Some will have to be lost, but getting a good four or five skills to 30 (plus maybe one or two attributes) is entirely possible. Getting to these milestones so that you can stop worrying about those stats for a while is key to managing your career properly and losing as little of your fighter's potential as you possibly can.
Sponsorships
With UFC 2009, you could just slap one good logo on your shorts a bunch of times to gain popularity. Now, you'll only get credit for each distinct logo once, but you've got 10 spaces on your shorts, 10 on your shirt, and 5 on your hat. This means that early on, you should just get every new sponsor logo one time on any article of clothing, and keep adding as they unlock until you hit 25 total and fill them up. Once more than 25 logos are available, go through and make sure you've got the 25 best ones on your clothing. It can be a pain early on, but it does generally mean less shuffling around of the sponsor logos in the end - and you'll get your training equipment and new sparring partners earlier in the career.
Sparring
Free sparring mode gives both you and your AI sparring partner points for every successful action, whether it's landing a strike, performing a transition, or blocking the other guy's move, and the difference between your points and his points decides how many points you'll get to put into your stats (with some invisible formulae applying during the final calculation). The opponent gets points for blocking your moves and attacks, so your focus should be on both maximizing your performance and minimizing his.
It seems like if you're fighting on the ground, you should go for lots of easily-done transitions that the opponent has trouble reversing (North-South to side control and back) and fast, un-blockable punches from Mount Top (posture up by pulling away on the left stick and hold left trigger to punch to the body) or North-South. Try and do this from a position where he'll need to transition twice to stand up, so that when he does get out, you just transition again to put him back where you want him.
If you're a stand-up fighter, I've found that it's generally best to focus on lots of punches wherever your sparring partner is not defending, stopping only to regain stamina. If the guy starts blocking high and backing away, move in while throwing punches to the body, then go back to punching and elbowing in the face after 2 or 3. If he gets rocked, immediately switch to body punches until he starts blocking those, then smash him in the face until he crumples on the floor. And when he does, don't try to actually finish him, because technically he's blocking those punches (yes, even as he lies in the fetal position) so you're actually losing points. Just give him a leg kick, then back away a bit to wake him up and get him on his feet, and repeat with the face-punching.
If an opponent is rocked and lying prone and you accidentally move forward to stand over him and finish the guy, click the left stick, back off a step and let him up. Then rush in and start beating him down again as soon as he gets up - this will get you more points overall. Oh, and one last thing: at the beginning of every sparring session and fight camp, click the left stick as you advance to run towards your opponent. It gives you more time to gain points, puts your opponent closer to the cage, and you can almost always get off the first clean shot.
Focused Sparring
Focused sparring is an interesting way of gaining points that comes into play mostly in the latter half of your career. Here, you gain bonus points by performing only in a specific area - so if you choose Ground & Pound focused sparring, then you'll only gain points with takedowns, transitions, and strikes on the ground. Any bonus points you get must be spent immediately and only in the area you focused in, but they ignore the increased costs you must pay once you start raising your stats higher and higher. You'll quickly find that early on, your weeks of training are better spent doing Free Sparring, but keep this in mind once stats get up to 50 or more. Depending on your sparring style and how many points you get in each different sparring style, this might worth it earlier rather than later. Experiment here and there to see.
Here's an important part of Focused sparring: it ignores your current fatigue. What this means is that once you start putting Focused sparring sessions into your routine, you can do them at 100% fatigue with no penalty. As far as I've seen, you always get the same 0.30x multiplier.
Fight camps
Fight camps are there to teach you new moves, but now you'll be learning each move separately. You can mix in any move from any discipline into your repertoire, but you'll have to take time away from training stats in order to do it. This means that you'll want a good well-rounded set of moves that you are comfortable using. If you have no idea what moves you want to do, consider looking at some of the licensed fighters in Exhibition mode and picking one you like, then going into the command list and looking at some of their moves - then work on those in career mode.
When you enter fight camps, you'll have to perform moves pertaining to whatever move you chose to learn; if you want to learn elbows in ground and pound, any strike from a top position on the ground will do. If you actually perform the move you're trying to learn, you get about a 50% bonus. You'll have to have some good strategies for maximizing point gains in the fight camps, so make sure you know how to get out 3-hit sequences in offensive clinch positions, 2-hit standing combos, lots of ground transitions and attacks, and the like.
With some of the moves you choose, it won't be worth trying to get the "special" points that you get for using the actual move you're learning. For example, if you want to transition from double underhooks defense to double underhooks offense, you'll have to sit there and let the sparring partner actually get you into the double underhooks defense position first, which may never even happen in one session. Instead, grab him in the clinch, posture up once, then click the left stick to push him away, and repeat. Each of those 3 elements counts as an offensive clinch transition, so you'll be racking up points fast.
What I've found is that you want the fastest attack, clinch transition, or ground transition you can get, and just spam that as much as you can and as successfully as you can. This may take some experimentation. For example, if you want to learn one of the many clinch striking moves, try getting the opponent into a Muay Thai clinch, back him all the way up to the cage, and then start kicking his legs in the clinch. He can't block it, will have a hard time transitioning you off, and you can do a lot of fast attacks to gain points. If you're trying to fight stand-up, hitting pads is super-easy, but getting 2-hit combos can be tougher in that you've got to land two attacks in quick succession that aren't blocked and the opponent hasn't retaliated against in mid-combo. Try coming in with a one-two to the stomach or mixing up high and low quickly. You'll need to learn how to maximize these if you don't want to waste extra weeks on these moves.
Finally, remember that the extra multiplier loss due to injury that you can see in Free Sparring or Training modes won't happen in Fight Camps. You'll get fewer points, of course, if you do them at 100% fatigue, but it won't just suddenly tank like it does in those modes.
Cred, Rel, and Pop
Throughout the game you'll get many chances to increase your credibility, popularity, and relationships with other fighters. You'll always be gaining cred and pop for winning fights, but you can also get extra popularity by disrespecting the other fighters (which drops your relationship with each separately). All of this generally gets you the training equipment faster as well as the UFC event opportunities (which, just like last year, I haven't found to be worth bothering with). Still, it's better than trying to increase your relation with other fighters, because while the game says that you'll get bonuses when working on moves in their camps, it's only for the specific camp invites they send out. And the worst part is that they will only be offering you a single move, and you can't even see what move it is before you commit a week to trying to learn it. For that reason, I recommend you disrespect all fighters equally, and maybe even skip the weigh-ins altogether. I mean, there's already enough dialog boxes, popups, loading screens, and Mike Goldberg-isms going on. You don't need to have to deal with the weigh-ins as well.
Take your career slowly
One thing you'll quickly find out is that if you always take the highest-ranked fight you can, you'll be fighting for a UFC belt by about 10 fights in - assuming you win every fight, which will be very difficult. Your stats will be way behind where they need to be to fight in the UFC, so you'll have a tough time taking on the top 10. Instead, take on the easier challenges early on to slow down your meteoric rise, so that when it comes time to fight for the belt, your stats will be a lot closer to your opponent's. You can raise your stats in the weeks between practice fights to get a head start, and then when you enter the WFA, take it nice and easy.
Endgame
You'll quickly find that near the end of your career, it'll be difficult to work at anything less than 40-100% fatigue. You'll probably have trouble keeping all of your stats and skills that exceed 70 in tip-top shape, and you'll learn that some chunks of moves in the fight camps will disappear once you've gotten enough related ones ranked up to 3. Still, you'll be able to keep many stats and skills near or at their max, not just at 70, but it'll take good Focused Sparring strategies (ones that win you 20 or more skill points per session). Try to get good enough at at least 2 or 3 different "types" of Focused sessions (Stand Up, Clinch, Ground & Pound, for example) so that you can spread the love of easy points around - especially once those skills are reaching or exceeding 90.
Minmaxing
Your 12 year career is quite a long time to train and build your skills, but many weeks can go wasted in recovering lost stats and skills. If you want to completely maximize all of your points, you should get every stat to 30 first, then stop training and sparring altogether, focusing entirely on learning moves in fight camps. When new sparring and training options open up to allow you to get stats and skills to 50 and 70, do those only up to those no-decay milestones, and then immediately go back to the fight camps to learn more moves. Repeat at 70, then spend a good chunk of your career just working on learning all the moves you want, with the last few years spent just building stats and skills to wherever you want them above 70. I haven't seen what the effect of a good online fight camp will have on your sparring sessions, but it stands to reason that two players working together might be able to do really well training each other in the career mode's online fight camp option.
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