Soccer Star

I want to change the 'no brainer' situation of SS1, where picking your squad and setting your training are almost automatic now, since fitness and morale just go up and up to the point where you can turn off fitness training for the rest of the season.

I also want to introduce more squad rotation. There will of course be more injuries and suspensions, which will make that more likely.

But when it comes to fitness and morale, what I really want to achieve is a situation where it never reaches max (although that's not a bad thing if it comes towards the end of the season and you're on a roll maybe). In general, they should fluctuate, so that you need to keep your eye on training routines and need to keep at least a few fitness routines running most of the time.

Also, I've changed it to 2 training sessions per day, so 10 in total now.

So, my plan is to have fitness work as a combination fitness / fatigue. It works out fine, the only problem is that it's slightly counter-intuitive in that players should get fitter by playing in matches, due to 'match fitness'. The way I'm looking it would be something like this....

Match - Lose fitness (tiredness), gain morale, form fluctuates.
Skills / Comp training - Lose fitness (tiredness), lose morale (boring training), gain form.
Fitness training - Gain fitness, lose morale (training), no form change.
Rest - Gain fitness (rest), gain morale (rest), no form change.

So the idea here is, if you over-play a player (youth players could handle it of course), he'll get tired and you'll need to either rest the squad, or throw in more fitness training. So in general, what you'd be getting is, your match players would gain enough morale to balance up the training, the training (probably 2 or 3 rest/fitness sessions) would balance up the match tiredness and players on the sidelines would be extremely fit, but would be losing morale due to nothing but training (the reserves will probably help to restore a bit of their morale though).

The overall idea is to get rid of the no-brainer approach and also to ensure that you can't just spam 10 competitive training sessions each week with no consequences.

As I said, the major stumbling block for me (apart from balancing it), is that losing fitness in a match sounds counter-intuitive.

Also, it may sound complicated, but honestly it's not. I'd try to balance it so that in general, you just have something like 3 fitness sessions, 2 rest sessions and 5 skills sessions and that keeps everything balanced nicely. But if you really want to cut a few corners here and there, you might be able to sneak in an extra skills session and get away with it.

Yeah, I'm fine with that.

On a slightly seperate note re- injuries/suspensions etc, at the moment red cards and injuries aren't shown on the results page , would this be possible as now if next weeks opponents get a player sent off/suspended you wouldn't know.

_________________
Cheers
Dave.
Barton Blitz......WPL 53 Mancs F.C......WPL 64 Wigan Wildcats....Opal 58
Swinton Pirates ....ELZ 24 Dinamo Petrovac....ELZ 54
Manchester Dragons...RH 17 Stonefield Cobras ...RH 26
Luosto Tunturi...WS 7 Locomotiv Leigh. ...NSA 18 Limone Sul Garda .....BS26
Trafford Rhino's ...MOA 10 Tyldesley Panthers ...MOA 38

Just for the record fitness training can't be turned off for the season now as anyone not in the main 13 loses fitness after a few weeks and sooner or later those players are needed.

Sounds good though

_________________
Cheers
Rich

CHARSCOT WANDERERS.........WPL1
DEP EL CELTICO.........................WPL37
WASCISCO RED SOX...................WPL43
ZIASTE NEQUENO.......................WPL24
CASTLE ROCK FURIES..................WPL31
OSSUS STELLA SEI.....................ELZ56
REVELSTONE..(C 05/6, 08/9)........RH15....(191T)

Errr, where do you want to see them? I haven't done the scout reports and next weeks opponents yet, but yes, it will show injured / suspended players, or maybe, not show them at all. I could put red cards under the goalscorers in matches, but it'd be kinda hard to keep track of it all. And where would injured players show, when they're injured in training? It needs to all be visible on scouting / opponent reports.

k, still, I think we'll agree that it's a bit crappy right now?

My only real concern with the new idea is if people are bothered by players LOSING fitness in matches? Is it so bizarre that it's a problem, or isn't it really an issue? If it's not, I'll go with this basic idea and have some 'fun' balancing it.

On that topic, it's ready for testing soon. Still no transfers, grounds, financial stuff, but in terms of content, I'd say it's 75% done. Having said that, it's madly imbalanced and I really want you guys to help me with that. Balancing is mind-numbingly boring so hopefully you guys don't mind reading a few match reports and pointing out the errors etc.

Maybe if there was a "marker" next to a player's name to indicate an injury or suspension that was placed automatically?

_________________
Cheers
Rich

CHARSCOT WANDERERS.........WPL1
DEP EL CELTICO.........................WPL37
WASCISCO RED SOX...................WPL43
ZIASTE NEQUENO.......................WPL24
CASTLE ROCK FURIES..................WPL31
OSSUS STELLA SEI.....................ELZ56
REVELSTONE..(C 05/6, 08/9)........RH15....(191T)

Yeah, that's good, had originally thought with the goalscorers as you would see on the telly

Player X scored

Player Y red card/SO

Either way gives a good sense of what you're up against

_________________
Cheers
Dave.
Barton Blitz......WPL 53 Mancs F.C......WPL 64 Wigan Wildcats....Opal 58
Swinton Pirates ....ELZ 24 Dinamo Petrovac....ELZ 54
Manchester Dragons...RH 17 Stonefield Cobras ...RH 26
Luosto Tunturi...WS 7 Locomotiv Leigh. ...NSA 18 Limone Sul Garda .....BS26
Trafford Rhino's ...MOA 10 Tyldesley Panthers ...MOA 38

Where, on the results? Do you need to see that, or wouldn't it be fine to have it indicated on the scout report (i.e the player sent off is either missing or shown as sent off or something)?

Yeah exactly, it's because fitness and fatigue aren't the same thing. I could rename it from fitness to condition, which might make more sense, but even then, it'll go down during a game and up during training. There may be a better solution which allows fitness to rise in a game (as it should) but you still require fitness training. The numbers in SS1 are wrong, you basically just do the simplest approach and get the simplest results. For SS2, I want to find a simple, but necessary balance, so that you can't just spam and win. So something needs to reduce the player's fitness so that fitness training is necessary.

Obviously I could add the fatigue rating as I always wanted to, but the simpler the better. Another rating is another rating.

So if you had fitness go up in matches and up in fitness training, where would it go down? What would be the need for fitness training? You could say it's necessary for the unused players but then you have that awkward situation, which I never liked, where all players go through the same training, even though some of them don't need it. So you're training fitness for the reserve players but it's totally wasted for the match players.

There might be a solution somewhere.

Tez the dog to the rescue, as always.

I think this is a much better and much simpler solution. It's basically similar to SS1 except that you need to maintain fitness sessions and there may be ways you can cut the odd corner and gain the odd skills session with it.

Remember, 10 training sessions each week, not 5.

So for each skills/rest session, the player loses 1/4 of a fitness rating. For fitness sessions, he gains 1/2 (so 1/4 gain in total). And for a match, he gains 1/2 of a rating (will vary with how much time he spent on the pitch, but we can say 1/2 rating usually).

So now what you have, each player will lose 2.5 ratings of fitness each week, meaning you need to run around 5 fitness sessions a week to maintain stable fitness. 5 fitness sessions will cancel out the losses completely, 6 would mean the players gain fitness slowly. 5 + a match will mean slow fitness improvements. Remember that almost every player will get a match since unused players will usually get a reserves match, which will help with fitness (that's kinda the point of the reserves).

This does mean that players will max out on fitness eventually and it may mean a mad rush to max fitness early in the season (which isn't unrealistic anyway?), but unlike SS1, fitness will start to drop again unless you stay on top of it. Actually I don't like the mad rush, so maybe I could come up with a solution to that... hmmmm.

Oh and to add to that, for morale, it would be similar. The player loses 1.5 ratings per week but gains 1 per match and 0.5 per rest session. So assuming 1 match per player (reserves count), you'll need to have 1 rest session to maintain the same morale, or 2 for a slight improvement.

Form could be similar but is mainly based on match performances. So a player loses, let's say 1.5 ratings per week but gains between 0.4 and 0.9 in each game he plays (based on his performance, so 0.5 for a 5 performance). He also gains 0.25 per skills session. So assuming 1 match at 5 performance and 4 skills sessions, he'll maintain parity. Obviously skills sessions are the best session anyway, since they improve ratings.

So for basic parity, you'll need 4 fitness, 1 rest and 4 skills sessions, leaving 1 free (on average) to improve one area faster.

This will mean that you can fairly easily max out on 1 rating by, for example, doing 7 fitness, 1 rest, 2 skills until fitness is maxxed then reduce it back to 5 sessions. But at least you'll have to think about it and other circumstances

Yeah Rob, it's not. I'm fairly sure that most teams do intense fitness sessions earlier in the season and by late season, the players are much fitter and are probably working on skills more.

Aye, testing it now but I'll do most balance testing when I get you guys to help out. It's making my head hurt :p

Heh, typing out my ideas here worked a treat, because I just copied the numbers into the code and it seems to have worked first time. Seems like a good idea, type them out first, get them right in my head, then paste into the code, rather than trying to fathom it out as I go along. You'd think I'd know that after 30+ years of programming but.... nope

Even simpler, I've made it so that each rating (FFM) reduces by 2 ratings each week and each match restores 0.5 and each relevant session restores 0.5, meaning that 1 match + 3 sessions should equal parity, leaving one session for boosting. Plus sometimes they play extra matches, plus trainers, so it should see a gradual improvement over the season.

Not sure if making them all the same will be boring, it'll need testing and some input from you guys. But for now, it's balanced fairly nicely at least.