NGL Biathlon
The Tournament section is a single season you put together yourself. You pick the kind of competition, your athlete, the rivals and the calendar, and the game runs the season with standings, bibs and medals. Players ask us whether created athletes can take part, how to change the calendar and what happens when you do not qualify for a pursuit. All of that is below
Tournament or career
A tournament lasts one season or one championship. It has no money, no training and no shop, and nobody ages or retires: those belong to the career. Ratings come from your save's roster, and the tournament picks up edits from the Athletes section right away, which is how it differs from a career. More on that in Athlete packs. A save can hold several tournaments at once, and the Tournament section lists them all
Tournament types
- World Cup: a season across every track in the game, with athletes from every country
- Northern Europe, Western Europe and Eastern Europe Cups: a shorter season on the tracks of that region, and only athletes from its countries take part. A regional cup shows up in the list only if your save has athletes from its countries
- World Championships and Winter Games: seven races on a single track. At the World Championships they go in this order: mixed relay, sprint, pursuit, individual, single mixed relay, the relay of your gender and the mass start. The Winter Games start with the mixed relay and the individual, then sprint, pursuit, single mixed relay, your relay and the mass start
Your athlete and rivals
After the type you pick gender, country and athlete, or press "Random athlete". Any athlete switched on in the Athletes section can be yours, including ones you created. For a regional cup the country list is limited to that region
The next screen already has a field of rivals. The game takes the highest-rated athletes of your gender from those switched on in the save, and their number follows the "Athletes in sprint and individ." setting, 42 including you by default. The "Select Rivals" button opens the list, where you can tick anyone you want to face and untick the rest
Tournament settings
The same screen has four switches. "Short mass start" and "Short relay" are rules for the whole game, so changing them here changes them everywhere. "Run the relay for the whole team" hands you every leg of your team's relays. With "Broadcast only" you do not race at all and watch every race as a broadcast. The last two belong to this tournament and are set when you create it. The difficulty level comes from the game's Settings
Building the calendar
For the World Cup and the regional cups the game lays out every track of the tournament in random order as stages. The first nine get a typical weekend, such as sprint, pursuit and mass start, and the rest start empty. From there you can:
- move a stage up or down and change the order of the season
- press "Duplicate" to add another stage on the same track with the same races
- delete a stage with the cross button
- add races with the "Add race" row: mass start, sprint, pursuit, individual, short individual and three relays, and remove any race with its own cross
A few rules keep the calendar sound. Each format appears once per stage, and relays once per type, so one stage can hold the standard, mixed and single mixed relays together. A stage can have either an individual or a short individual, not both, and they share one points table. A pursuit can only be added straight after a sprint or an individual (standard or short) on the same stage, and that race cannot be removed while the pursuit stays. Relays are available only if your country has enough athletes for a team. Stages left without races simply do not enter the season. The line at the top counts how many races of each format you have, and "Finish" saves the tournament
For the World Championships and the Winter Games you only choose the track, the programme stays fixed. The game picks the weather for every race itself
During the season
The tournament screen shows the next races and your place, and holds the Schedule, Results, Total Score and Medal Score screens. Before every race you choose your suit and skis, and every pair of skis is available. The start group becomes yours to choose from the second individual race, once you are in the top third of the standings. At championships you can choose it from the first race
Points go by place: 90 for a win, 75 for second, 65 for third and one point for 40th. Total Score has tabs for the overall standings, each format and two nations tables, one for standard relays and one for mixed relays. Three bibs go to the leaders: yellow for the overall standings, red for the format of the next race and blue for the best athlete under 23. There are no bibs at championships. Before every relay the "Lineups" button lets you edit every team for that race, your own included
Pursuit and mass start
The pursuit field comes from the sprint or individual (standard or short) just before it: by default the top 21 start, and the "Athletes in pursuit" setting changes that number. If you finish lower, the pursuit goes ahead without you and you watch it as a broadcast. The mass start at the World Cup and the regional cups takes the top 21 of the overall standings. If it is the first individual race of the season, the 20 highest-rated rivals start along with you. At championships the mass start takes the medallists of the earlier races and fills the field with the strongest of the rest, and you always start