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2016-07-08 12:02

Chapter 05 - Manage your coaches and coaching
Version 1.2.0 - 03.07.2018

A very important part of the game is the head coach and assistant coach hiring and in general having such coaches.
Without a coach setup you will miss a big chunk of training progress each u p d a t e and even if it's cheaper to have no coaches, it's hardly worth it, since all money of RZA won’t buy you a great team. But you can coach your players to become one hell of a team.

On top of that the coaches do also influence the performance of your players on the field. So your coaches decision will add a bonus to the supported positions and will give you a penalty on the non-supported positions.

General:
No one should hire a coach too early in the game.
Coaches are expensive and will eat away a big part of your income once they are part of your team and every Dollar you have to spend for them on every u p d a t e is a Dollar you can't spend on increasing your income, if you are still in the phase of building up a stadium, that’s crucial to know and understand.

A normal coaching configuration will cost around 500.000$ to 3.000.000$ per update. It’s possible to stay under that figure and it’s possible to exceed that figure, but I think the most do settle with 1.000.000$ to 2.000.000$.

While a team with a full build stadium will easily have that money available, a team with a small arena or even a team with the start configuration of the stadium will have big problems to have that kind of money. On top will those teams have an even bigger problem if they would hire a coach setup too early because they won’t have much spare money to increase the stadium further and that would cripple the franchise right from the start. Once you have a matured roster, you will very likely need the income of a full built stadium and depended on your strategies, that money won’t even be enough.

So don’t start with hiring coaches too early!

My suggestion here is to monitor your income very closely and hire coaches only if you are sure it will not halt your other progress.

A valid strategy for the start could be to hire a HC and A FEW (with the new coaching limits in place you need at least 2 coaches to cover all players on a minimum roster) with the same CP configuration and shift all players on those positions.
That will ruin your playing success and will look strange on your roster, but you will be able to build Youth Players with regular training and you will also be able to train your regular players on common skills like VIS, POS or AGI (or even STR and SPE, if still needed) for some time until you are able to afford more coaches and get your coaching strategy going. You should choose those ACs based on their supporting skills (see later in that chapter). A DL-AC would be a good one, or a LB-AC, maybe in combination with a TE-AC or a FB-AC.
But those coaches would still cost money, so check your income!

AND DON’T HIRE A HC ONLY!

A HC doesn’t help you, if he is alone. He will just cost money.
Overall this can only be the first step in your coaching strategy (which I would not recommend) and with a full build stadium you should think about a whole set of coaches.

A few words on the HC:
The HC does somehow influence all aspects of the ACs performance, but the manual does not reveal how, so it’s anybody’s guess how he does that.
Here is my guess.
The manual does state very clearly that the HCs CP does influence the max level of the ACs, so if you do have a HC with a CP level of let’s say 70, you can’t hire an AC with level 71. You need a HC with a level equal of higher than the highest AC level.
Now comes the in game influence of the HC on training and games.
Each coach has EXP and CON and for every event the calculated CP is used (see chapter 04 for training how this is done or the manual). It can happen that the calculated CP of the HC is lower than the calculated CP of one or more ACs.
Here is my guess: The calculated CP level of the HC is also the max level for all ACs on gameday.
What does that mean?
Think about a CP level 70 HC and some ACs the same level. Now the calculated CP is done for each coach, HC and AC. The HC gets 65, because of low EXP and low CON, while all ACs have high EXP and CON and get 70+ calculated CP. My guess is now, that for all ACs the CP-level of 65 is used on that event. That can be a game or training.
If that’s true, it can be wise to have a HC a few CPs points higher than the highest ACs, or to have a high EXP HC, to ensure that his calculated CPs are most of the time higher than the calculated CP of your ACs.

Skills or Positions?
Since the coaching system in RZA is a bit tricky, there are pros and cons for certain configurations.
It is impossible to fill all spots of ACs, so you have to focus on some positions and you have to ignore at least one position, maybe more.

All coaches do support specific skills for training. That means that you can’t train all skills with the same speed on all positions. For example is the progress on KIC training by the QB-AC minimal, while of course the PAS training is supported and therefore fast. Unsupported skills are treated like there is no AC on that position. There is always a base training progress on every skill on every position, but that won’t be very much. You can double that progress with the right setup and the right training.

Here is a list of supported skills by position, as I’m aware of:

Position	SPE	STR	AGI	VIS	POS	TAC	BLO	CAT	CAR	PAS	FOO	PUN	KIC
QB	X	X	X	X	X				X	X
WR	X	X	X	X	X			X	X
TE	X	X	X	X	X		X	X
RB	X	X	X	X	X				X
FB	X	X	X	X	X		X		X
OL		X	X	X	X		X				X
DL	X	X	X	X	X	X					X
LB	X	X	X	X	X	X		X
CB	X	X	X	X	X	X
SF	X	X	X	X	X	X		X
ST	?	X	?	?	?	?			?			X	X

(I never tested SPE, VIS, POS, TAC, CAR on special team ACs but it can be assumes that this is supported for G and KR, which would make that coach the one with the most supported skills. But since 2 of those skills are pure special teams, the value of that is not that high)

Now you can approach the coach selection from training point of view by two ways:

Focus on positions
Here you just s e l e c t the positions you would like to support and go for it. Positions without a coach you can either decide to train without them or you can decide to switch them to skill supported positions and train there a bit faster, at least for some time.

Focus on skills
Here you can try to s e l e c t coaches based on their supported skills and try to get the most skills trained by the least amount of coaches.
Why to do that?
You could decide to have really good coaches on a few crucial positions, covering crucial skills and having therefore the fastest training possible by that. Or you just like to have as few coaches as possible by covering the most skills on training and having at the same time the least amount of wage spending.
Be aware that with the coaches limitation on supported players, this can become tricky, see later in the guide.

Regardless of the selected approach, the non-supported skills will always progress slower in training and the players which are playing on positions they are not assigned to on the roster do get an out of position penalty on gameday. For example you might train a player on OL in blocking, but do have him on the depth chart as TE and he plays TE, he will get a penalty since he officially is an OL.
The whole process can still be worth a try, for example for players with their career prior a league depth chart position or prior a starter position.

Common patterns
Managers do tend to hire coaches in patterns and you can find many different patterns in RZA. These patterns are the most common ones.

The youth is the key:
Hire 1 high level head coach (CP >= 90), the higher the better, and then higher 10 low level ACs (CP <=60), with the sum of the ACs CPs = the max usable CPs. In average that means 55 CP per AC.
The main goal on this one is to maximize the youth academy training points you get as a bonus on top of the regular training. This can be up to 205+ points = 2.0 skill points, per update.
That means you can train your youth players quite fast, they will enter your senior team very likely in better shape than drafted players and it will be more than 1 per season, depends how the points are used.
On top of that you have a lower sum of coaching wage, since low level ACs do not cost much money. The big time HC will cost a lot (up to 1.000.000$+ per update), but the ACs will cost you only 30.000$ to 60.000$ per ACs.
The main deficit in this tactic is that the regular training speed is quite low, only a bit faster than a position without a coach. Depended on TW of players and the CP and EXP of the ACs, the difference is between 1% and 25% better than without an AC. So high EXP for the ACs is a must to get the best out of them.
That will slow down your youth player development by regular training (so without extra training points), means you might need to use the extra training points here to compensate, or you have to wait longer to find the caps.
Once a player is in senior team, his development is also slower. Thanks to the new increased training progress they still might cap their main skills, maybe even on all A- and B-skills. Still this will take time.
If you want to compensate THAT for the youth academy players, they need to leave the academy in a very good shape with already high skill levels in A- and maybe even B-skills.

All I need is money:
It's similar to the first option, only you hire not only 10 cheap ACs (CP <= 60) but also one cheap HC (CP<=60, minimum is the maximum of all AC CPs, so if one is 60, the HC has also have 60 points).
Why would you do that?
In principle you get almost the same stuff as in the first option, but it will give you a much cheaper HC (somewhere between 50.000 and 100.000$), so in total a much cheaper coaching wage in general, but you will also get less extra training points (around 150 points = 1.5 Skill points)
In general, money shouldn't be an issue at all with that strategy.
There are not many ways to overcome the quite bad coaching speed.
With money flooding in, the transfer market will become your best friend to buy a few good players needed or good prospects to work with.
You will not have all positions with always well trained players available, so focus, focus, focus which means, build certain positions on your own in YA by pushing their skills with extra training points and buy the rest. Maybe you do limit yourself on formations to avoid some positions like FB or TE, or buy and adapt, which means always buy the best players available for future development and switch your focus from season to season based on your roster.
It could also be a valid strategy to buy young draft players and put them into your youth academy to develop them even further so they might be already very good when entering the senior team.
With the increased training progress of season 30 this strategy became more interesting, since now you actually can train player to their caps and likely the market will be flooded with high trained players in a few seasons.

Star Machine:
Hire 1 big time HC (CP >=90) and buy a few big time ACs (CP >=90, CP <= HC CP), best spread to positions which do cover almost or all skills trainable.
This will give you on those positions rapid training, 0.7 to 1.1+ skill points per u p d a t e on non-physical skills and even ,more on physical skills.
Now your players will progress here very fast and you will reach the talent caps quite often, if not always, on all A- and B-skills.
The con on that strategy is that it is the most expensive one. Not only will the coaches cost you a ton of money, since the players will develop fast, their wages will rise in the same speed.
You will also not get many youth academy extra training points, the fewest of all the setups presented here. The reason is the small amount of ACs, which do cut back heavily on the bonus given.
In addition you do have several positions without a coach, so slow training is common there.
There are some ways to deal with that.
You can either try to build star player after star player after star player and sell them.
Good players do in general generate good selling prices. But there is no guarantee here and you better sell them young, because old players normally don’t generate much attention. The age of 25 is probably a good guess as latest chance for a big income.
The money earned could be used to buy better players on the other positions, which you first have to find! This could become more easy in the next few seasons after season 30. On top might the money also help to support the expensive coaches and players wages.
Another way to deal with the slow training on unsupported positions is to train those players out-of-position and shift only the starters late in their career to avoid at least for the starters the out-of-position penalty.
This will work with a clever spread set of ACs, but keep in mind that now the ACs have a limitation on trainable players, so don’t put too many players on an AC and check the numbers again and again after draft, transfers and youth player promotions, since you might then be over the limit on some positions.
With a quick training you also might need lesser players on your roster, which means you can either use that space to build up players for sale only or you can just save the money and enjoy the roster space.
This might come in hand with the new “you can’t fire your retiring players after the first week rule”.
With the new increased training progress, this strategy become almost obsolete, since many managers can now train quite good players with a cheaper setup, so the market for players will be worse and that way the income needed for this strategy become harder to get.

Best of all worlds (almost):
Get a big time HC (CP >= 90), 1 big time AC (CP >= 90, CP <= HC CP) with the same CP level and fill the rest with 7-8 mid level ACs (CP >= 60 and CP <= 80).
The high level AC will give you speed training on youth academy and also senior players could benefit from that training speed.
The other positions with ACs will train good enough to be competitive.
In addition you will get some more extra training points than on the “Star Machine” approach for the youth academy to speed up the training there.
The main con here is still the quite high coaches wage.

Level it out:
Make your wish regarding an amount of ACs and then spread the CPs equally.
That CP-level is the level you need for the HC also, at least.
Sometime you have ACs a bit higher than average, sometimes lower, so you need a HC with a CP level on maximum level of all AC CPs.
Especially positions with only a few A-Skills trainable can get a lower level CP AC, which gives you room to get higher level CPs for positions with more trainable A-Skills.
Normally that means 7 to 9 ACs which would mean CP levels of 78 in case of 7 ACs to 61 in case of 9 ACs, in average.
This will give you decent progress on training with a mid-level to high level, but not highest level, coaches wage amount.
Training speed is not as fast as with the "Best of all worlds"-approach, but you also have a bit more money in the pocket, or at least, you can still pay everybody and you are not in the red figures.
The extra training points will be a bit less than “Best of all worlds”, because the HC-CP does built the base amount and with lesser CP there, the bonus calculation just starts on a lower level.

Overall a mixture of those strategies is possible and if you look at the top teams, you will find a lot of different combinations in the details, but in general those 5 approaches are common.

Some comments on coaches in general:
Coaches do influence your training big time and the amount of coaches and their CP is 1/3 to 1/2 of the training progress of your roster, with the rest coming from each players TW value and a basic progress.
So take your time to find a strategy and STICK to it for several seasons.
In RZA nothing comes from one season to the next one.
It's all slow progress and takes several seasons to see the results of a certain strategy.
As a beginner the team will increase in team-strength each season, until you start losing the 1st few better players, which could happen after 8-10 seasons (or earlier, if you did make splashes in the transfer market, but your core will be likely the drafted players, which do leave after 8 to 10 seasons)
You should be able to judge the progress a bit after 3 to 5 seasons.
Switching before that will not really help you, unless you did something really stupid or you KNOW what you do.
Firing coaches will cost you also some big money bags and MOR and TC, so think twice before you hire one only to send him packing after a season or even faster.

Coaches and supported player amounts for training
Since season 25 the ACs do only support a certain amount of players for training. If you do exceed that amount, the training for all players on that position will get a penalty of 75%, means the players will progress only by 25% of the regular rate and this does then effect ALL players on that group, senior team with fixed positions, ‘free position switch period players’ and youth academy players!
That’s a heavy penalty, so better review your roster regarding those numbers, especially after the draft, a transfer or a youth academy promotion. You might have been at the limit prior such an event and suddenly you are over that limit and your whole group of players on that position will not get much training until you solve this. There is no need for a rush, since all new players have a ‘free switch position period’ and those players are not counted against those limits, which give you some time to sort things out, but that also means you might forget about the limits after a while and are caught by surprise weeks or months after the event. Be aware that there is NO warning implemented, which gives you a hint on top of the page, like it does regarding players leaving the team or the academy at season end.

Those AC limits are quite high right now and Peter did mention that he will monitor the results of this rule change and might adapt the number later.

Position	Amount of supported players
QB	10
WR	20
TE	12
RB	12
FB	10
OL	20
DL	20
LB	16
CB	16
SF	16
ST	6

Keep in mind that those limits are only affecting those players which do have a fixed position, so players within their ‘free position switch period’ and youth academy players are not affected by this.
You get a message when their ‘free position switch period’ ends and you can also see their date on the players detail page, so don’t worry too much about not finding the info on the date you need to act.
I did put for ST coaches a limit of 6, but the manual says for P = 6 and K = 6, so maybe ST can at least support 12.For me an open question is, whether there is also a limit on G and KR, but since I do not use special team coaches, it’s not a high priority for me. If you find something out, let me know.

Coaches and their performance influence
As mentioned do coaches influence the performance on the field and the manual does give you even the formula.
But what does that mean?
You remember hopefully the training chapter and the calculation on training points.
Coaches had a big influence there and that same influence does play into that game performance calculation.
The general formula does say that with no coach and no CP the performance does sink to 94.5% if the random factor is the worst, 95.5% in case of the random factor is the best.
Here some samples with a calculated CP = AC CP (which means in case of a real AC hired an EXP level of 4*) (worst random factor = -50, best random factor = 50)

CP-Level	worst (random factor)	best (random factor)
<50	94,5%	95,5%
50	99,0%	100,0%
55	99,5%	100,5%
60	100,0%	101,0%
70	100,9%	101,9%
80	101,8%	102,8%
90	102,7%	103,7%
99	103,5%	104,5%

Normally you shouldn’t have CP levels between 5 and 49 because with a full set of ACs, you will try to reduce the unused CPs of the 550 CPs available to zero or almost zero.
Since a few seasons in case of no coach the system does visualize this as ‘Basic’ and with CP 50, I’m pretty sure the math was not changed behind it, so better avoid not used coaches CPs.
As you can see, positions with no AC (CP <50) do perform worse than normal and positions with an AC do perform better in general. No ACs will cause almost no performance penalty, but also no training bonus.

Keep in mind that the use CP for that calculation is influenced by the EXP and CON level of that coach, which can lead to quite big over performance bonus or penalties. The manual does state over 10% +/- are possible (which I was not able to reproduce, best I got was a bit less than 6% for coaches with high CP, high EXP and low CON).

With that in mind, you should think not only about training and skills to s e l e c t AC positions for hire but also which position might benefit best from coaches from the gameplay point of view.
At least one position is left without an AC (many do s e l e c t the special team coach here) and sometime you just have 7 to 9 of all positions covered.
Which position will you leave with a constant 5% penalty?
To compensate that you would need to have that player 5% better trained, which he won’t get done fast, since he has no AC.
Many do see the lines, QB and LB as a must for ACs, but if you lean on running, a QB might not be essential and he can also be trained quite quick.

That whole topic needs some time to get used to it, the good thing is, once you made up your mind regarding the strategy and have the coaches hired, all you need to worry about then is their retirement.

Retirement
At some point in his career (age 60 or higher) a coach will give you the hint he will retire after the season and you have a full season to think about a replacement.
You could fire him immediately, which will cost you some money as retirement gift or you can wait until you find his replacement (which would fire him, once you hire the new guy) or you can wait until season end and he leaves the team without extra money and you have to look for his replacement THEN, including the risk not finding a good replacement for some updates (means your players don’t get the best training during that period and your game performance might suffer also).
Remember that a fired coach does cost you MOR and TC on that position, so better avoid that before a crucial league game or deal with it. Smoothest way to overcome this is to let the coach retire and then hire a new coach, but sometimes you just don’t want to wait that long and just don’t want to accept the risk of not finding a replacement before the first game of the new season.
Be aware that some coaches CP configurations are used more often than others and if you need to hire a specific configuration you might end in a bidding war.
Replacing coaches is never easy and some managers do hire young coaches on purpose to avoid that event as long as possible. But young coaches do come in general with a lower EXP, which does slow down your training progress until the coaches get this experience on gameday.

Regardless you path, don’t forget to check whether you did accomplish your goals after a few seasons regarding training speed and youth progress and if you are satisfied, congratulation, if you are not, back to the drawing board and think about a different approach or some adjustments.

Don’t hesitate to ask in the forum or in private other managers, many are willing to share some experience.

forward to Chapter 06 - Built and use Facilities
back to Chapter 04 - Training your players

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