Training

Posted by: Mateusz Mucha on Wed, 02 March 2005 22:45:49 (2121 Reads)

Those of you who have read my Platypus Guide (don't worry if you don't know what it is) know that I'm crazy about training. It's not hard to guess that we've put a lot of effort into designing a system that would be much better than anything we've seen so far. Same reasons stand behind the decision to bring you the basics of training at the very beginning of our dev-blog adventure :).

For most of our mechanisms, we use a simple design system. Before even thinking about any features, we wonder: "What do we want to achieve? What do we want to avoid?". When it comes to training, there are several main areas of interest. Let's start with them to make "what we want and what we don't want" clear to you.

Areas of interest: what do we want to achieve?

1. Skills.
Many issues here. We don't want people to concentrate only on one skill for particular group of players. We want to make sure players will increase in skills for most of their careers (before they become 3x years old grandfathers). Etc, etc.

2. Number of players receiving training.
We want all players to train. On the other hand, we don't want teams that have 40 players just because it's profitable.

3. Coaches.
There should be few coaches in every team. Every coach should have skills making him good for some tasks and bad for other tasks.

4. Fair level of complexity.
Developing a training plan for your team should require some work and thinking. Even when you're a pro.

5. Interconnection with other areas of the game.
How you train should impact other areas of the game and vice versa.

How is it designed?

Knowing what we do and don't want, we designed a system that basically (I won't go into very specific details) looks like this:

Coaches. Every team has a head coach, up to three assistant coaches and a goalie coach. All of them (as well as all other members of staff) are hired via auctions, where managers bid on future salaries. Head coach and assistants are identical in terms of being the same kind of character. So when you go to auctions, you will not see "head coaches" and "assistant coaches". You hire them and decide: "this one will be my head coach, that one will be his assistant".

Training groups. There are 5 different training groups. First, second and third group are for training outfielders' technical skills. Each assistant you hired may be assigned to one of these groups. Fourth group is for physical training (outfielders and keepers train together here). Special staff member that takes care of that will be added, he's not present in the current version. Fifth group is for training keepers' technical skills and that's where goalie keeper is hired.

Talent. Every player is be somewhat talented in all technical skills (passing, tackling, dribbling, shooting and air). Not equally in every area - so Frank might be a young tackling genius and somewhat less talented in shooting. Talents are correlated, though, so it's not very likely to have someone very talented in one skill and helpless in another.

Intensity and players getting tired. Among all other characteristics, players are somewhat tired. You choose how intensively each group trains and it's totally up to how much training and fatigue (each player's endurance plays a big role here, too) will your players receive.

Training types. For each group, you'll be given a choice of what they want to train, a list of "training games". Each "training game" is simply a mix of skills that are being trained. So for example, a DRB-pas-tck game would train a lot of dribbling, little passing and little tackling. There will be one- and two-skill sets too, but they will give a smaller overall benefit. Once we have nothing better to do, we'll assign real-life names for those "training games".

Factors that influence skill improvement. When it comes to training, coaches have 5 relevant skills, identical to player technical skills. Now, when you choose a DRB-pas-tck set for a given group, an outcome for passing will depend on:
-- player's talent in passing.
-- passing skill of an assistant that's assigned to this training group.
-- passing skill of head coach (lesser impact, during training he wanders around and helps all 3 technical groups).
-- intensity of training.
-- an importance of passing within this training game (it's a minor skill in DRB-pas-tck).

Conclusions.

That's basically all. Let me show you an example screenshot. Please keep in mind it's still development phase, so the looks and data displayed are not final yet. At the left side you have an assistant coach (Lech Petelak), training routine chosen for this group (SHOOTING-dribbling-passing) and intensity. On the right side, there are 4 players currently assigned to this group and drop-down boxes that are used to move those guys to some other group.

As you can see, there are many factors to be considered by you as a manager. Some decisions you might have to make:
-- should I hire an coaches that are all-rounders (decent in every skill) or great in particular areas and worse in others?
-- should I hire good coaches for assistants? Remember, your good assistant might be somebody else's head coach and do a better job there...
-- should I organize groups by player's "professions" (defenders together).
-- or maybe I should organize groups by players ages (old and experienced players require different training plans, for example it's good to train physical skills while players are still young).
-- or maybe I should organize groups by how tired my players are? Main squad players tend to be more tired (they play more often and in more important games).
-- should I use a short-term strategy (put a lot of effort into games and let my players rest a bit during trainings) or count on long-term benefits and concentrate on harsh training (and better players in the future)?
-- similarly: should I rely on old, experienced and skilled players or maybe on promising youth? Or should I rather look for a good balance?
-- should I use balanced, three-skill training routines or pump certain players within their main skill (one-skill routines)?

Tell me it looks cool or I'll call you a liar! Anyways, I've just described you our training plan. Please go to feedback forum and tell us what you think about it!