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| GUIDE: How to build a team from a fresh roster. | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: 1st July 2016 - 03:13 PM (51 Views) | |
| Avakael | 1st July 2016 - 03:13 PM Post #1 |
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Guide to team building. Welcome! You've just been handed control of a brand new franchise. Perhaps you're just taking control of an existing one- in that case, this section will be slightly less interesting to you, but should still be informative. Make sure you read the rules section back to front, so you don't make any mistakes. If you have any questions about those rules, make sure to ask the league manager. After opening your roster, you'll see a few things. Firstly, you'll spot this grid; >>Picture Link>> This is the active playing roster. It's currently empty because the team is brand new. In this tutorial, we'll be filling it up with players to try and make a competitive team. You should start by putting your team name in the top row. Today, I'm building the Imperialian Angels. Secondly, you'll spot this other grid; >>Picture Link>> This is generally referred to as the lines calculator. The game uses combinations of player statistics for each part of the game (refer to the rules section to see exactly what). This is here to tell you exactly what numbers the scorinator itself will use. Finally, scroll down and you'll see something that looks like this; >>Picture Link>> This is your player management list. You will have different players to what I have here, and those players will all have their own statistics and ages. Let's quickly go over which is which. Each player has 5 base statistics- Speed, Accuracy, Intelligence, Skill, and Teamwork. They are all very loose concepts; obviously in the real world, you require all 5 things in abundance in every single situation on the ice. But here, we use them more generally. Speed is the first statistic. It loosely refers to how quickly a player can skate, but may also refer to reaction times. Speed is used in Off, D-Off and Def. It is also used by the goalie when saving shots on goal. Accuracy is the second statistic. It loosely refers to the ability of players to move the puck to each other, or to shoot it at the net. Accuracy is used in Off, and is used by the shooting player in Sh. It is also used by the goalie when saving shots on goal. Intelligence is the third statistic. It loosely refers to the ability of the player to read the play; what one might call "hockey sense". The average intelligence of the participating players is used in all 5 equations- Off, D-Off, Def, G, and Sh. It is also used outright by the shooting player in Sh. Skill is the fourth statistic. It loosely refers to the ability of players to perform actions such as poke checks or block passes, but is also used in the broader sense near the net for both the goalie and someone attempting to take a shot on goal. Skill is used in D-Off, Def, and is used by the shooting player in Sh. It is also used by the goalie when saving shots on goal. Teamwork is the fifth and final base statistic. It loosely refers to the ability of players to work together to achieve an objective. Teamwork appears in the fewest equations, but is still very important; firstly, the teamwork of the linemates of the shooting player are added to Sh (to represent actions such as screening the goalie, set up passes or tipping the puck in), and secondly, the teamwork of the defencemen assisting the goalie are added to G (to represent actions such as blocking shots or impeding passing lanes). There are then numerous other statistics listed, and are explained as follows. Sum is simply the combined values of all 5 base statistics. It is never used in the game scorination itself, but is of relevance to other things such as player progression restrictions. It is also useful as a drafting preference statistic. GR stands for Goalie Rating, or the ability of a player to play as goalie. It is the combined value of a players Speed, Accuracy and Skill. D-Off/Def refers to the ability of a player to play a defensive role as part of those values in the lines calculator. It is the combined value of a players Speed and Skill. Off refers to the ability of a player to play an offensive role as part of that value in the lines calculator. It is the combined value of a players Speed and Accuracy. Sh refers to the ability of a player to take shots on goal, as per the Sh number in the lines calculator. It is the combined value of a players Accuracy, Intelligence and Skill. The previous four values generally deliberately exclude either intelligence or teamwork, even though they may appear as per the relevant values in the lines calculator; this is because it's not worth extrapolating the average intelligence figure, and teamwork influences equations by itself in its own way. You should independently take account of those values when making decisions. Age refers to the number of seasons a player has played thus far. Refer to the rules section on player retirements for more detailed information on player ages and retirements, and thus what to look out for. Retire? is a clerical category used by the league manager when making retirement rolls. When the league manager gives you information on who in your team has retired, he will leave the rolled numbers in that column, but otherwise, it will normally remain empty. At the very bottom of your sheet, underneath the "retired" header, players who have moved on from the IIHL after finishing in your team will be listed. So now that these numbers are explained, let's start making decisions on who should go where in your team. I've started on this team by going down and highlighting particularly high values in Intelligence, Teamwork, GR, D-Off/Def, Off, and Sh. >>Picture Link>> Now, here's the difficult bit. You have 6 different types of position- LW, C, RW, LD, RD, and G. The catch is that once a player is assigned to one of those 6 positions, you can't change them. That includes changing them between LD and RD, or LW and RW. This rule is deliberate- even being able to switch sides of defencemen or wingmen at will was found very early on to make things too easy. You can fiddle things around as much as you like during this building process, but as soon as you've made your decisions and submitted your team to the league manager, those positions are locked. You can still switch players between lines and/or bench them, but once they are declared an LW or whatever, they're an LW for life. At the end of each season when progression happens, you can change the positions of up to 2 players, but doing so costs 1 point from all 5 of that player's statistics. I've built more than a few teams from the ground up under this simulation, and I've found that the best thing to do is to pick the goalie first. A good goalie can make or break a team; a goalie that isn't so great tends to do more of the latter. You don't have to start with a goalie first, of course; I'm just a cautious kinda guy. We haven't had very good luck here- we have three options at GR54 (almost everyone getting a new roster is going to have a better option than that), but that's still serviceable and if our choice of goalie truly isn't up to snuff, we can try and draft a better one at the end of the season, or try and trade for a better one. Or if it turns out the rest of the team isn't quite great yet either, we can simply give him the time he needs to develop. I decide to rule out Tad Loftin as goalie first. I will sorely miss either the Sh 56 or Sh 58 from the other options, but Tad Loftin's intelligence statistic isn't that great, and goalies never use teamwork in the scorinator- which means his maximized teamwork statistic would be wasted. He would do well, or at least okay, in every other spot on the team, so we'll save him for later. I then decide that I'll be picking Errol Nix as my goalie over Stefan Esparza. Esparza has the slightly better Sh score (and in fact the best Sh score on my team), and will do well as a top line forward player, but more importantly in my mind, Esparza is much older than Nix; Esparza at age 5 could retire at the end of only 1 season and leave me in an even stickier bind for a goalie, but Nix will play for a minimum of 3 seasons before we start rolling for his retirement at the end of each year. That means Nix will have more time to develop. It also means that if I wind up doing badly this season, I could trade Esparza for a first round draft pick to someone who needs another star forward to shore up their premiership chances. If I didn't have much choice but to pick an older goalie at this stage, I would also consider identifying a backup before proceeding elsewhere. They wouldn't have to quite be as good as the current goalie- it's assumed that there would be at least one round of player progression before they needed to play. But the backup should definitely be a couple of years younger. I simply copy and paste Errol Nix and his 5 base statistics into the goalie slot on the roster (use destination formatting for cleanliness). I also decide that Esparza will be my top line Center, so I copy him into the 1st C slot. >>Picture Link>> To make sure I don't accidentally reuse either player, I'll go down and highlight their rows with another colour. >>Picture Link>> At this point, you should also notice that numbers have started appearing in the lines calculator. >>Picture Link>> I'll take the opportunity to explain what they mean at this point. Esparza is a 1st line Center, and thus contributes to the Off, D-Off, Def, and line Sh values of his team. The Off number shown is 42; Esparza has a Speed of 16, and an Accuracy of 20, making 36. The remaining 6 comes from the average intelligence of his line; his intelligence is 20, but excel counts the empty cells as zero. 20 divided by 3 is 6.666 reoccurring, but the lines calculator rounds the number down to the nearest integer of 6, giving a combined number of 42 there. The same occurs in D-Off, except the Lines calculator uses Esparza's skill (18) instead of his accuracy; Def is the same as D-Off, except the other players in the equation are his left and right defencemen, not his left and right wingmen. The "average" intelligence of 6 is also included in those numbers. You can see Esparza's personal C-Sh of 64; it includes his Accuracy, Intelligence and Skill, plus the "average" intelligence yet again; in the cells of the Sh values of his LW and RW linemates, you see his teamwork of 17, plus the "average" intelligence yet again. In the case of goalie Errol Nix, he contributes only to the G values; his contribution is the same regardless of what line is on the ice at the time, of Speed 18, Accuracy 20, and Skill 16. His intelligence is also averaged with the left and right defencemen on the ice at each point of time, but there are no defencemen on the roster at this time, so we are simply seeing the same number (his intelligence is the same as that of Esparza) added to all 4 cells. As we add players to the team roster, we'll start to see the lines calculator take further shape. Rodrigo Trapp, in my opinion, is a perfect fit as a top line defenceman (great stats in everything other than Accuracy, which defencemen don't use), so I slot him in the roster accordingly. I also select Gayle Houghton to be one of the wingmen for Esparza- he's not an amazing shot himself, but his high intelligence and teamwork, plus Off value of 34, will provide Esparza with excellent support to give our superstar center the best opportunities he can get. Porter Fong's low speed makes him slightly problematic to place- his excellent teamwork will assist with Sh chances, but his speed is poor and that hurts the line he plays on. As a result, I'll avoid making him a center. His intelligence would be an asset regardless of whether I told him to play with the top line forwards or with my top line defender, but despite his excellent Sh (the best I have remaining), I'll instead put Tad Loftin as the other top line wingman- his Sh will still require years of improvement, but his Off numbers are still some of my best. Also, I've gotten lucky with the average intelligence- Porter Fong would have combined with the other two for 20+20+19=59, 59/3=19.666 reoccurring, rounded down to an average intelligence of 19, which is excellent and could even become 20 later down the line, but 20+20+14=54, 54/3=18, which means that Loftin's less than lofty intelligence score still scrapes the line in at only 1 less for the average intelligence than if I'd parked Porter Fong there instead. For the other top line defenceman, I decide I have a tossup between Dwain Cooley and Porter Fong- Cooley will be 1 less G, but 2 more Def. Cooley instead strikes me as a decent candidate to be, say, my second line center, and so I put Fong in the final top line spot, and Cooley as my second line center, and the roster continues to grow based on who's best for the team. >>Picture Link>> >>Picture Link>> >>Picture Link>> Eventually, you'll fill up your top 21 positions. I won't discuss how I chose the rest, you can probably extrapolate if you really want. Here's the roster, lines calculator and player management table yet again at the end of those 21. >>Picture Link>> >>Picture Link>> >>Picture Link>> One random point to make while I think of it- when deciding on what players to put where, you may want to think about the ability of the player to progress in that manner. In the offseason, each player increases two of their statistics by one. But unless you have wildcard points available, no statistic can go up by more than one point. A situation where this might be worth taking into account is where you are trying to choose between two players of the same value- for example, let's say two players with the same goalkeeping ability. Player A has 15 speed, 20 accuracy, 20 intelligence, and 20 skill; Player B has 18 speed, 20 accuracy, 20 intelligence and 17 skill. Both players are GR55, but player B would be able to progress faster, because player A can only increase 1 of the statistics that he actually uses; the other statistic is wasted on his teamwork. The availability of wildcard points doesn't change the size of this theoretical gap. It's not that likely you'll stumble into this issue at the teams foundation, but keep it in mind. We have to put the remaining 9 players in our reserves, but before we do that, I'm going to appoint a team captain. Holding the team captaincy gives a +1 bonus to all 5 statistics of that player. However, it can't push any statistic above 20, and they lose the bonus should the captaincy pass to someone else. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to give the team captaincy to Dwain Cooley, my second line center. I then place a ( C) next to his name, and increase all of his statistics by 1, bar his teamwork, which was already 20. I suggest that you only change the statistics of your captain on the roster itself, not in the player management table, so you always know his real, base statistics. >>Picture Link>> Finally, we have the 9 players left on your roster that were not lucky enough to get a spot amongst the active players on your team. These are your reserves- copy and paste them all into your reserves section. These players, while not actively playing, still need to be assigned positions before your roster is legal. This can be easier than building the rest of the roster- you're probably not trying to fit these players into the existing jigsaw, so you're best off just assigning them the position they'd be best at if there were no other factors influencing them. >>Picture Link>> And on that note, we're done! This roster is 100% compliant and ready to roll. In the end, the Imperialian Angels are actually a pretty decent squad, with both strong offensive and defensive depth. Don't worry if your first attempt isn't this good- this list was stronger than I suspected it would be, I had some good luck with line-mates complementing each other well, and I've done this dozens of times for playtesting. The purpose of this guide is to help you try and see what I see when I'm building a list from scratch. Some general tips -Actively follow your team and try to understand the way the simulation works- all the maths are openly viewable. Work out its strengths and weaknesses, who's scoring your goals, who isn't scoring your goals, who's keeping goals out and who isn't keeping goals out. It'll help you make better informed decisions down the line. -Similarly, keep an eye on the games ahead; make sure you know exactly which team you're about to play. Once you're comfortable with what you're doing, you can start to consider roster adjustments intended to better prepare your team for your specific opponent. -Trades are naturally tempting. While the idea of trading one good player for two or three not so good players seems good, in general, the manager getting the one good player is getting the better deal. Make sure you're getting something good back for your part of any bargain. -When the draft happens, it's important to try to get players to fill your specific needs, but getting too specific on your preferences can hurt you. In all 3 drafts we did for the competitive playtesting, the teams that selected players by highest sum alone did fine, and furthermore, almost always better than teams that were only really selecting by 2 or 3 individual statistics all up. -If your team sucks, it's not the end of the world. Make a plan to be good again in a few seasons, to have all the pieces together at some specified point in the future. Trade away old stars that you don't expect to have at that time, and get high draft picks or quality young players back. There's no rule against tanking. -Teams that simply coast along, draft as best they can and try to quietly improve without doing anything unusual will probably find themselves in the middle of the ladder every season, struggling to reach or make an impact in the finals. Every team has player progression, not just yours, so alone it won't impact your place on the ladder much. Either trade up for a proper run at the championship, or start rebuilding. Proactive team managers aren't always doing well, but they're much more likely to reach the top. |
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