Post by Shindigs » Wed Apr 06, 2016 8:16 pm

This post is now outdated. Some of the information is still very much correct. But if you scroll down to my next post you will see the "correct" assumptions about trainers and what schedules to use. All the stuff about squad management and condition management from this post still applies though.



My pool of data isnt' big enough to be conclusive yet. And I haven't used the editor to setup a 0 outside influence testing case. But so far from 2ish seasons of closely monitoring attribute changes 3 times a season on ALL my players (even that 15 y/o in the U-20 team). Once at June 1st. This one give me feedback on how much influence won awards/playoff has given the player. Once at September 1st. This one gives me feedback on how much ONLY practice has done in the off season. And finally once at January 1st. This one gives me feedback on how the player has done with a mix of gametime and practice in the first half of the seasons. The things I've noticed in no particular order are the following:I manage in Swe-2 so I can get in A LOT of young players to stick in my U-20 team. If they do well there (as in at least 5-10 total attribute points per time of recording attributes (about 4-5 months apart) I let them stay there, if they do not I bring them up to the main team and have them get little to no game time while sitting on the same practice schedule as my normal players. If this still doesn't let them grow I toss them in the U-18 team as a last resort until they improve or their contract runs out.I always found the "both off and def coaching affects all technicals" in Malhotra's Guide to be incredibly counter-intuitive, and since I was seeing little to no growth when I used that guide I decided to scrap all the gamey illogical bits, and keep the rest while filling in with what made sense to me. One being that I use a coach with good off/def and conditioning style for skating, a technical based only good offense for shooting & Off. Skill and a tech based with only good def coaching for Def. SkillOne of my young guns on the 1st line was showing absolutely no improvement (relative to his linemates) until he turned 19, then Boom! +14 attributes in 4 months just like that. He won the top goal-scorer for the entire league his rookie year, and saw puny growth in the 4 attributes per year region. It simply wasn't his time yet. Another one of my youngsters who was drafted 22nd overall to the NHL and is rated as "like Evgeny Kuznetsov" by all 7 of my scouts, even the grumpy one that doesn't like anyone. She (yeah regen with a girl's name) showed almost no improvement in her first year with my team. Then in the first half of her 2nd season she pulled a +10 in 4 months growth spurt, her window wasn't until she turned 18. Much like my other wonderkid that got drafted 6th overall in the NHL draft. As soon as he turned 18 he took off like a rocket. 16->20 speed in 8 months. a total of +40 attributes in 1 year. And this is with the second rate coaches I can muster in the second tier of swedish hockey. He is one of those players that show very little growth in the Off-season (except that one time), and fairly limited growth in the first half of the season. But when it comes time to hand out the trophies and he won: Top Rookie, Top player, Top Passer, Top Point Scorer he bumped up by 13 attribute points just like that. This isn't absolute proof that doing well = improving a lot. But it sure points towards that being a great help IF and only IF it's during the growth window of that player. The Goal-scoring machine that wasn't ready yet showed nothing for his Top Goal-scorer award. I get the feeling stuff like getting a lot of ice time and winning trophies are percentage based modifiers, if your base growth during that period was going to be good. It's now x% better. If you weren't meant to grow much that period x% more of nothing is still nothing. In the other (older) end of the spectrum, players like Jagr can keep going til they're in their 40s, meanwhile my 50 point per season (52 game season) machine lost his mojo at 27, and is now like watching a slow over-paid trainwreck as his attributes nosedive regardless of what training I put him on, or how well he does. He's just one of those players with a short career, sadly.* Incredibly limited sample size, due to swapping from "high" rating non-technique based to "low" rating technique based after only 4 months (1 set of logged attributes)Just earlier today I put in all my "report cards" in excel to another sheet and checked the pre and post coach change attribute gains. Obviously there are 1000 different incidental circumstances that can skew these results, and no doubt have. But the fact that swapping to a much worse coach with technique based style (beggars can't be choosers) I still saw about a 16% gain in defensive attributes. When I did a straight swap from one coach with about the same attribute to another that also was technique based on the offensive side of things the rate of gaining shooting attributes (Def, Sla, Wri) increased by a whopping 161.1% and the gain of offensive attributes (Dek, Fac, OTP, Pas, Sti) increased by a more reasonable 41.7%. Maybe having a technique based skating coach would also be better, but when my current conditiong based one takes not one, but TWO 16 speed players to 20 speed in less than a year. I see no reason to improve on that formula, even though it would make logical sense for a technique based to be even better. Not like I had a choice in the matter anyways, in Swe-2 you have like 2-3 Technique based coaches in total at any given time to choose from, and 2 of them will no doubt be goalie coaches. I got super lucky to find my offensive skilled coach in the off-season.*What I mean by this is that your players will replenish at about the same rate as if they were on resting, or even faster. One of my players regenerated CON at a rate of 4 per day when resting (except under the "tired" effect) and regains 8 per day while on this training routine. Most normal players regain 8-10 per day while resting and 6-8 on this routine. I only ever rest players with the "tired" effect, and only do so during the season. In the off-season there seems to be a bug making players immune to injuries, this seems to turn off right around regen day (late Jul/early Aug when you should be swapping to the stock "General" schedule anyways).I've played around with putting some of my more demanding roles (defensive defensemen and power forwards) on 3 Int, 1 Med and 1 Lig. But this made them regain condition way too slow, without showing any more gain in attributes. If you want to keep your players working out every single day you need to learn which tempo your individual players can handle. I know that my 1st line right wing (16 Sta) can handle playing on "high" in the 1st line and on "low" in PP-2, while the center (17 Sta) has to play on "normal" and "very low" unless there is a 2+ day rest between games. I aim to not let my players drop below about 85% if I can help it. Far as I can tell, if you have fast players giving them less ice time on high+ tempo will give you more bang for your buck than giving them more icetime on normal or lower, since they won't leverage their pace unless you "unleash" them.I haven't run the exact numbers on the physicals gain per period. But having had several players gain 3-4 speed, 1-2 acc, 2-3 Sta etc. under my regime with 1 coach on both Conditioning and 1 on Skating, one of them doing ONLY Skating, and the other doing Conditioning + Tactics (cause I couldn't find a remotely capable coach with technique based+good tactics/Determination/Man Management/Working with Youngsters that wanted to come to Swe-2. Chocking, right?), I didn't see much reason to go into details. It works so well I really don't have to. With technicals I've been seeing much less impressive growth, so there I wanted to delve a bit deeper. Using only 1 coach with less than stellar ability (think 12 coaching forwards and ~14 in the "mentals") my players on "intensive" shooting have an average gain PER attribute of 0.43 per period (1.30 per year) in the shooting department so that is an average of +1.3 Deflection, Slapshot AND Wristshot per year. Which will put my 16 y/o's all at about 15-17 in all three attributes by age 20 unless they hit their PA caps. In the Off. Skill department I'm currently seeing an average gain across all players with "intensive" Off. Skill of 0.56 per period (1.7 per year), this will give them +6.8 in Deking, Faceoffs, OTP, Passing, Stickhandling from when I find them as 16 y/o's until they hit their 20th birthday. Since most "good" offensive minded regens will have about 8-11 in their offensive attributes (except stickhandling, cause reasons) this will essentially put them at or near their PA cap by the time they are 20 barring unforseen circumstances. You'll have a whole team of Connor McDavid's before long if your scouts weren't lying to you! (hint: they generally are) The reason I'm less enthralled by the 1 coach approach for Tactics is that I see little to no correlation in my excel sheet between the tactics training and the teamwork attribute, which apparently is supposed to be what it improves. I see more of a change in mentals based on how the player is getting on and on the attributes of your captain(s). Players that often get called up to International duty (even in the U-20s) seem to grow more mentally as well. But that is incidental at best, since they also happen to be my best players so they are supposed to be growing more in the first place, but maybe if I had more capable tactics coaches I'd see more of a change there? When it comes to my worries with 1 coach on Def. Skill, the numbers say it all; the gain in the Checking, Hitting, Pokecheck and Positioning department is only 0.14 per period (0.43 per year) for a total gain of +1.75 from their 16th to 20th birthday. That would only make them 11-13ish in their defensive attributes at age 20. No wonder I can never find good young defensive defensemen! (hint: the real reason for that is that they are all in the AHL being farmed to the high heavens with competent coaching staff and salaries that aren't mainly consisting of gift cards)I'm too tired to remember all the other stuff I was supposed to bring up. So here's a picture of my "report cards" for my first line. The 1st one is the 1st line Center, sadly I started recording these cards just after he gained 24 attribute points over the summer. Since then he really slowed down a bit, for some frame of reference on the attribute totals at the bottom of each of their cards. Taylor Hall has 392 @23, Connor McDavid has 358 @18, Nail Yakupov has 337 @21 and Iiro Pakarinen has 319 @23. The 1st player here is 18 (potential: Like Evgeny Kuznetsov), the 2nd is 19 (potential: Like Brendan Gallagher) and the 3rd is 20 (potential: poor man's Rick Nash), the second is the one that just would not grow until he turned 19. As you can see at the bottom I have recorded which training schedule was used when, he tried several (the one he gained 14 with, he gained only 2 with the first time around). It just wasn't his time yet! The third, oldest, player only had 225 total attribute points @19 when I got my hands on him. Clearly he hadn't gotten to his "window" yet. But just look at him go! in april 2016 when I finished scouting all of these and acquired them Onni Ventelä had a total of 248 and Håkan Bergman a total of 225, now they have 294 and 284 in January 2018, for a gain of 46 and 59 over 22 months. For Onni there was an exact 40 attribute year at the start of that period that did most all of it, and for Håkan a gain of 42 points over the last year leading up to this point. Based on history I'm expecting Onni to gain around 15 points again once he wins the point and assist league, and potentially player of the year. Håkan on the other hand grows very well from off-season training so he keeps a more even pace. Know your players!P.S. On a somewhat unrelated note, I just found a 14 y/o defenseman in sweden with 263 total attributes. Yeah, 18 work rate, 17 determination and 14 passing at age 14. This can only end well, 7 points in 10 games as a d-man with barely 20min ATOI agrees with me, and I have him on a contract until he inevitably goes straight to NHL at 18, score!After having put together some more stats from the "report cards" I think I've found a constant. The average total attribute gain of a player in both the 1st and 2nd year was exactly 10.38889. It could be a coincidence of epic proportions. Or it could be the cap of how much attribute gain my coaches can muster. If the latter is true this would mean that the total amount of avaliable attribute points per year is decided by the quality of your coaches; the CA, PA and if the player is in his "window" would then presumably only decide how much of that pool said player would be allocated. But again it is still way, way too early to tell. But if my players average 10.38889 attribute gain by the time I finish year 3 the odds of it being coincidence is pretty much not a thing. And figuring out if swapping coaching staff will increase this cap (if it even exists) will give good feedback on how much schedules and coaches actually change the effectiveness of training. I really hope it doesn't work that way though, since it would mean a team with a lot of very even good players would only show very small gain to all players (everyone takes an equal portion of the "pool") whereas having 1-2 amazing players on a team with so-so talent would give them the option of taking home absolutely monstrous amounts of the attribute pool (if such a thing exists). This is all hypothetical of course, but it does make some semblance of sense if applied to real world hockey; a player forced to carry his team will get huge amounts of game-time and have a very large responsibility to grow and keep putting up the numbers, if he doesn't the team just fails. Whereas a team with a very deep roster can cause complacency due to there always being a "backup" to take the heat off if your superstar player is off his game for a while.In other news, this is how the split of when my players have gained their attributes looks like:On the far left you have how many attribute points have been accrued (on average) each month within the given time period: Early(Sep 2 - Jan 1), Late(Jan 2 - Jun 1) or Off-season(Jun 2 - Sep 1).In the middle is the total amount of attribute points gained in each period (on average). And finally on the right is the highest gain in each period recorded by any one player; Håkan Bergman from the previous pictures and examples hold both the Early and Off-Season records, very impressive of him.Also note that the numbers are correct in relation to eachother, however they are way too low due to the fact that out of laziness (mostly) I didn't bother to filter out the old and inactive players that are way past making any increases. Thus there are a lot of 0s lowering the average gain per period, as you could probably guess based on the very sizeable difference in the top gains per period compared to the averages of the same period (far right bar vs. middle bar)Another interesting thing, to touch upon the 10.38889 average again, is that in the two "early season" periods recorded by myself so far. The second period with the new technique based coaching staff was showing 28% more gain than the previous one. But even with that 28% gain the total amount gained over the 1 year with lower early season gains and the latter higher one was the same (10.38889). Which I can't fully explain without my "pool" hypothesis.The Hypothesis was thankfully wrong. Got an average gain per player of 14.92857 on the third floating 1 year window, so at the very least there is no set cap that ignores your coaching staff/player potential/training routine. My coaching staff has improved ever so slightly and I've gotten rid of some older players, which makes it logical that the average gain per player went up. The average age of my roster is now 19 years old. Still had a >80% win rate in the league though. Can't get promoted though since the game engine cheats to the high heavens in the playoff matches, it's not even subtle about it:/Slightly OT, but since condition management and training go hand in hand; if your captain is doing well in a game he slows down the condition loss of all players on the ice together with him. I noticed this by accident when I made Onni Ventelä my captain, all of a sudden I could up the Tempo of everyone on the first line by one step and still have them use less Condition in a game than before, the obvious downside being if your captain doesn't do well in a game and you don't check often enough; everyone on the first line will be completely wrecked after the game and will need to sit out a game or two. In other news Onni went to the KHL and Håkan to the SJ Sharks leaving me short 2/3 of my first line in the Off-Season.If you make sure to maintain your players in the 85+ Con range like I mentioned before, your "injury prone" and "fairly injury prone" players will essentially never be injured. As long as you keep their con that high you can just ignore that on their scout report. It will never come into play.