Introduction
Version 1.0 - 04.04.2016

Hi there,
My Name is Daniel and I’m running under the nickname jack6 for as long as this game is live (and even before that).

Before you start reading this guide or start playing the game, you should be aware of the nature of this game.

Red Zone Action is not a game like Madden NFL, where you can start up a franchise in seconds, where you are able to simulate 20 seasons over a weekend and where you are also able to control your individual players with a gamepad.

No.

Red Zone Action is slow paced management game, much more a game you can login a few minutes a day and watch your team prosper over days, weeks and years. Quickly you will learn that a few minutes per day might not be enough and you might need a bit more time, but the speed of the game itself won’t change.

A season last in real world time about 3 months (12 weeks) and there are phases in the game where you might not need to do much, until the next season start. Sometimes it’s a month or so.
You will learn that you still can do things during that time, but never the less, the next league game might be a month away.

Patience is a virtue here.

You will start with a bunch of backyard footballer of all ages and in bad shape and you will need several seasons to transform your team into a championship winning bunch of pros. That’s right, SEASONS as in several real life months, maybe years.

This guide is meant to give you an overview of all the aspects of the game from a manager’s point of view. It does not aim to substitute the manual and it also does not aim to be the complete and ultimate truth, stating the only possible way to play this game. In fact I might have missed some stuff and I’m sure some described aspects of the game are interpreted or handled different by other managers.

I think many things in this guide will help you, big time, but if you did find a different approach, a different strategy for whichever aspect of this game, try it, use it, and if you like, share it with the community. Or if you like to, share it with me to discuss it.

This guide has a few limitations, but should give you a good start to make up your mind about the game and you place in it.

Remember, this is only a game, so cheating, lying or rage shouldn’t be an issue here.
If you lose, congratulate your opponent, regardless what an ass he might be (and I did not find many here, so chances are slim you meet some), analyse your team and try to be better next time.
If you win, be grateful you did, but don’t count on it as an everlasting step forward. Your opponents might come back with a new playbook, new players and then everything might be different.

If you have questions about the game, ask the community. Sometimes they have nice tips, sometime they are not really willing to share. That’s something you have to accept. Never the less, most of them are a nice bunch of people and if not willing to help openly, they might help you per personal notice (PN).

I hope I did cover most of the needed stuff in this guide.
If you see gaps or you think I should add something, don’t hesitate to write me a PN and I’m happy to discuss the topic.

Enjoy the guide!

Daniel aka jack6

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Contents
Version 1.0 - 05.07.2016

Introduction
Abbreviations
Chapter 00 – What’s this all about?
Chapter 01 - Getting Started
Chapter 02 - Build a stadium
Chapter 03 - Rework the initial roster
Chapter 04 - Training your players
Chapter 05 - Manage your coaches and Coaching
Chapter 06 - Built and use Facilities
Chapter 07 - Roster Management over the seasons
Chapter 08 - Manage your Youth Academy roster
Chapter 09 - The lottery of the draft
Chapter 10 - The long way to become RZA Transfer Tycoon
Chapter 11 - Earn and spend money in the game
Chapter 12 - Hire and slash you staff
Chapter 13 - The games your team can play
Chapter 14 - Create and maintain your Depth Chart
Chapter 15 - Game settings or death
Chapter 16 - The gruesome playbook
Afterword

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Abbreviations
Version 1.0 - 05.07.2016

Skills:
Physical Skills:
SPE - Speed
STR - Strength
AGI - Agility
PC - Physical Condition

Non-Physical Skills:
VIS - Vision
POS - Positioning
TAC - Tackling
Car - Carrying
BLO - Blocking
PAS - Passing
CAT - Catching
FOO - Footwork
PUN - Punting
KIC - Kicking

Player-Values which are not skill related:
Constant Values:
INT - Intelligence
TW - Teamwork
TAL - Talent

Non-Constant Values:
MOR - Moral
TC - Team Chemistry
RAT - Rating
EXP- Experience (also for coach)

Others:
PN - Private notice / personal notice
EXP- Experience (of a coach)
CON - Consistency (of a coach)
TFL - Tackle for loss (a ball carrier is tackled behind the line of scrimmage)
MOTY - Match of the year (a type of play intensity)

You will get used to those names very fast, so don't be frustrated early.
Lots of names at the start, but you will learn them quickly.

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Chapter 00 - What’s this all about?
Version 1.0 - 04.04.2016

Your goal is ... well, that's the first thing you should think about.
This is an American Football management simulation.
This includes
- managing the club financially, including stadium building, fanshop management, player wages, coaches wages, supporting stuff, sponsors
- managing the roster, coaches and staff, including recruiting new kids, buy and sell players, scouting and drafting new players, setting the depth chart(s)
- managing your facilities and stadium
- managing the training including activating and deactivation important facilities, specializing players and build new ones from scratch
- setting up tactics for the upcoming game including setting up playbooks for offense and defense, scouting your opponent
- getting in touch with all the other (well maybe not ALL) managers to get tips, help or get cursed, because you're team beats the shit out of everybody

If you look at all these topics, it seems hard to NOT lose focus on some of these areas.

You get a high flying team with super staff and top facilities?
If you did not manage your money carefully, it is easy to get into deep trouble and lose everything you did build over seasons.

You want one phantastillion dollar on your bank and keep your spendings low?
Watch your team suffer on gamedays and while you might be the richest manager there is in RZA, for sure you won't be the most winning one.

Your good team does age but you did not invest much money in recruiting and training young players?
See your team fall apart in just a few seasons and brings you back where you started. All your former players do now play golf and are drinking margaritas in Florida while you are stuck with a bunch of nobodies and a long rebuilding phase.

So let's start and tackle some stuff.

The first thing you should do is make your license, which is the topic of the upcoming chapter.

But before that some more hint.

First of all an important navigation "trick".
Under the menu (with "Home", "Front office" and so on) you do always find your team name.
This team name is also a link to your own teams overview page.
Why is this important?
When you do look at other teams, in your league or Supercup or for whatever reason, many of the sub menu pages are set to show THOSE teams players, coaches and so on (now market with a star) and if you want to return to your OWN team pages, just click on your team name and all subpages are linked to your OWN team related pages.

Any teams front office screen will give an overview of the team and if that manager is an supporter, it will also show the team batch.
On your own page, the most important info is the calendar.
It shows almost all upcoming events for finances, training, youth pull, games and the draft.
ALMOST?
Yes. It does not show upcoming playoff matches, if you did not click "Show Results" in the top menu bar (which shows the money, credits, the time and so on).
To see upcoming matches completely activate "Show Results", but this will show you the results of the last games in the league pages, your match page and might spoil the fun.
Also not shown is stuff like construction stuff (end date of construction would be nice), fan shop delivery stuff, transfer market bidding endings, season start/end days.
So you have to check other pages for that and you get for some of that stuff a notice on your pinboard.

Still a good tool to coordinate your next steps after login.
The login day is always highlighted, so you can see what happened until then and can also see what will happen the next few days.

Fine, time to get to work.

Here is a short plan how to proceed the next few weeks or the next few seasons if you have a new team:
- Make your Licence
- Build your stadium
- Rework initial roster
- Build Draft order
- Get Coaches
- Get support staff
- Get Youth Academy
- Fill roster gaps by transfer market
- Build simple playbook

It's not a must to proceed exactly that way and many of those topics are ongoing processes while you learn the next step, but as general guideline it does work.

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Chapter 01 - Getting Started
Version 1.0 - 04.04.2016

So you decided to be an American Football coach and manager?

Well ... we will see ....

Welcome to the game!

You got your team now and will have to get used to all the big and small tools to manage your team successfully.
I want to give you a hand with that first steps and bring you on the same level as all other managers are, or should be ...

Where to start?
The first step should be to fulfil your manager license.
You will get money for every completed task (75.000$ for each task) which will help you big time to start your franchise initially.

The game will give you reminders about the not completed tasks until you finish it, so don't worry about a link, but if you like to know:
You always find the link on your teams overview page on the right side, next to your team name as a certification icon (if the license not finished, it has a red bar over it).
It's a good idea to finish the tasks almost in order, but you might have finished some already because you were curious and browsed through the pages, which is a good thing!
You get the money for calling up the pages at the first time. Nobody is tracking your surf behaviour or your knowledge. So no real tests and this is only a get-used-to-the-pages-license, not a learn-to-play-in-detail-licence. The details you will learn over time and hopefully a few by reading this guide.
Still, read that on the license page, and later the manual, it helps a lot.

#1 - Enter the FAQ.
That's a good start. You can reach that point through the "Help/FAQ" link on the top of page.
Most of the stuff is self-explaining.
I will come to many of those points during this guide step by step.
But I suggest reading the FAQ, because it's directly from the source of the game.

Read it and at least remember where it stood.

#2 - Walk through the manual
It should be called RTFM - READ THE F*peeeep* MANUAL, but the admins don't want to be too harsh, so they were polite.
It's essential that you read that stuff.
This should give you a good start and if something is not well explained, ask for clarification on the forum or at least search for the topic on the forum (link is under "Forums/search forums" forums)
I will explain many of those things later in this guide from a different perspective.

#3 - Watch your players list
You can find here an overview over your squad, sorted by Offense, Defense, Special Team and Youth Academy and on each of those groups by positions.
Your initial squad is a bunch of random created players, talented, not so talented and fillers. Old guys, youngsters and mid-agers.
Sorted by their randomly given initial positions and by Offense, Defense and Special Teams.

The POS position shows the position the player is assigned to at the moment.
You can change that in the player details (that's the next task).
The stars under RAT shows you the rating of the player at that position at the moment. If you change the position, the rating will change, too.
If you train your player and he gains some skill points on the right, needed skills or when he gets more experienced, his rating will go up and he will have more stars.

The rating is NOT a guarantee for a good player, it's only an indicator, based on a simple (but unknown) formula.
It basically calculates all position relevant skills and other values together and the result is displayed as stars.

The MOR stands for the moral value of that player.
Moral will rise and fall, depended on your success on the field, your training facilities and other things.

PC stands for physical condition and gives you an instant overview of the ... well ... physical condition of your player.
It should be at least in the 90s, so at the start you will have to train it early and more to get it in the right value area.

Please note on TOP of the page the HINT with the links. They allow a download of the roster in different formats.
This helps a lot, if you track your squad with excel or whatever program you like to work with, which can process tables.

#4 - Check your players details
Ah ... now we get to the first real management task.
You start with a bunch of amateurs, of whom some have to chance to become pro players.

I do suggest to first work yourself through the licence and do other stuff, before you do on details the rework of your roster, but feel free to play around if you like. To complete the licence it is enough to call the details of one single player.

Later you have to go through your complete roster and have to evaluate their skills, talent, age, teamwork and intelligence.

Once you made up your mind about the supposed players position you can adjust his position with the combo box and pressing the button SET.
The green hook will show you the successful change.

You will also have to adjust the training setting.
Once you made up your mind regarding the position you should train him in one of the primary skills and for the start on physical condition with a higher percentage than 50%.
Once your squad has reached the 90s in PC, you can switch that to any setup you think is best for your team and your player.
With STORE the training settings are stored (wow!) and a green hook shows the success.

Oh .. wait a minute ...

How should you evaluate your players?
That’s the reason I did suggest to wait on that task a bit.
I will explain the evaluation process to you later.

#5 - Set match settings
You should do this later, after #6 and maybe #7
With #6 you will set a depth chart, with #7 a playbook.
AFTER that stuff it makes sense to set up a match setting.

#6 and #7 done? OK, the settings are important.

The settings are the first step to control the behaviour of your players on the field.
The second step is the playbook, which overrides some rules of the game settings, if a rule for the game situation exists.

You should not change much in the beginning, maybe the substitution rule "At which level of Fitness / Energy you want start to substitute your players?" or the kicking distance "Try Fieldgoal instead punting on 4th down when distance".
You should set the depth chart and the playbook (normally "standard") and your playing stile for each down.
I suggest a more running oriented stile, since in the beginning your QB and your WRs are bad and the running game is much easier.

You should set a default setting (at the bottom "make this your default"), to prevent a bad setting if you forget to set a setting on a game once in a while.
The engine will pick the default and it will be OK.

You can save the setup with a name like "initial setup" or whatever and then you can make a quick setup on the "Games/games" pages with a few clicks from now on.

For the licence it's not needed to setup THE final setup, any will do.

#6 - Set your depth chart
For the licence it's OK to set up any line-up.

Later you will have to do this in details and with a bit more analysis and plan.

Go to the team menu and s e l e c t the depth chart menu point.
Let's start with the standard depth chart. As a supporter you can later setup additional depth charts, for example for cup games, bot games or friendlies.
You can now s e l e c t a specific position, like the QB and you get your complete roster under the position window.
Now you have to s e l e c t each player to play on the QB position by pressing the ">"-Button.
The player will be set as a QB (under POS) in the players list and more important he will also be visible right to the players list as "Your depth chart for QB:"
If you have more than one player you can setup a ranking.
The first player is the starter; second the backup and so on.

You should do this for every position, even for positions your playbook will not play, like NT if you play a 4-3.
You never know, when you need it.

The depth chart will help you in every game if everything is OK, but more important it will help you if you have missed something or something went wrong, like an injured player, a forgotten playbook setup and so on.
It should prevent a totally goofy line-up on gameday in most cases.
But it cannot prevent total chaos, if some real bad stuff happens like all QBs are injured at once. Bad luck.

You should fill it up in total (so 55 players), because if you don't do it, the engine will fill it up to the max on gameday and then you might have players on your game roster you didn't want.

All of your players have now a position they play on gameday, so let's move on.

#7 - Check the playbook
You can setup a playbook for offense and defense to play certain plays in certain situation.
These rules will always have the highest priority, so they will override the game settings.

You can specify these situations on offense through: quarter, on down, yards to go, distance to GL, score, clock, formation, pass/rush and direction.
You can specify these situations on defense through: quarter, on down, yards to go, Distance Goalline, score, on formation, use pass formation, use rush formation, prefer, LB Blitz % and SF Blitz %.

There are several wildcards "any" possible, so you can make general rules like last second FG or hail mary passes.

You don't have to setup rules in the first place, but you should consider some basic rules to avoid stupid engine decisions, like on 1st and 10, 15 yards from the GL, 10 seconds to play in the 4th quarter, behind 1 point and the engine decides for a FB dive, instead winning the game through a FG.
But since your players are amateurs at the start, don't bother about the rules yet, come back later and set some up.
Be aware that this can be really hard work, quite frustrating and you might even get the feeling you don’t get a grip on this. It might be a good idea to tackle this topic after you did get comfortable with all the other aspects of the game.

There is an example offense and defense playbook linked to the manual, you should have seen them, since you completed task #2, right?

#8 - Check the economy
The economy should be your number one priority at the start. Don't bother with getting better players or getting coaches.
First you have to setup the INCOME!
Income will come from TICKETS on gamedays (regular games, supercup games, playoffs and free friendlies, no income from additional friendlies and friendly cups), merchandising from your shop, sponsors and selling players. You also get money at the beginning by completing the manager license, but that’s only a one time event.
Setting up the stadium will be task #9
Selecting a sponsor is no task, so go and s e l e c t one now if not done yet! You will get additional money for your stadium setup. Go "Front Office/Sponsor".
You will get 3 sponsors to choose from, I suggest the one with the highest amount per u p d a t e and the lowest bonus on game wins.
You will not win many games in the beginning (if you did not land in a BOT-driven league, in that case I do suggest the sponsor with the highest bonus per win). If you like to have more details on the sponsors, deep down in the guide I do cover all financial aspects in detail.

Don't bother with the fanshop at the moment. Even it brings good income in small packages it's not worth to invest in it now, since you get bigger income through the stadium setup.

#9 - Build your stadium
Visit the page and get the money. Now finish task #10, #11 and #12 and THEN come back!

Done?

Now put any dime you have into the stadium, but don't touch the already setup seats at the home sideline.
Build seats on the visitors sideline.
Please notice that you can only setup 1/10 VIP seats of the executive seats, and only 1/10 executive seats of the regular seats.
So the optimal new visitor sideline seats should be something like 1000 regular seats, 100 executive seats and 10 VIP seats.
At the moment there is no limitation on when which seats are more preferred by the fans, so always max them out regarding the 1000/100/10 rule.
It doesn't make sense to put only regular seats in, because the income by those seats is the worst of all three categories!

#10 - Challenge another team for a friendly match
For this one, browse through the teams in your league and look for a team without a friendly match.
The challenge Button is the telephone icon on the chosen teams overview page.
You should challenge for a free of charge friendly. Don't hesitate to challenge 10-20 teams, the engine will cancel all other challenges, once one team accepted your challenge.
Later you might use the challenging tool to get automatic friendlies regularly.
You can also ask for a friendly in the forum!

#11 - Set the training
Go to the training page ("Team/Training") and setup the training for your players (if not done while you checked your roster).
Remember, that physical condition should be your first priority in the beginning.
Once you have a better income you could also buy a mountain as first facility (I suggest NOT to do that, since you very likely need that facility only at the start and you will have to demolish it afterward, but feel free to do that, if you like) to get better results, but for the start you have to settle with training it with 50%-90% priority.

#12 - Check the Mentors page for additional help
This task is easy to complete (just go to "Help/Mentor") but you should also READ the infos on the page and even consider to contact one of those fine managers who volunteered to help new managers through the first phase of the game. Don’t feel offended if a mentor doesn’t answer you fast enough or never, some are quite busy, and some did volunteer ages ago and their personal situation might have changed a bit over the time. Simply ask another one or even ask for one in the forum.

Now you should have completed the whole license.
Build your stadium and your life as a football manager begins!

So, now start to roll up your sleeves and get to the real work.

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Chapter 02 - Build a stadium
Version 1.0 - 04.04.2016

You can ask every manager you’re willing to ask, most will give you this advice.

‘Build your stadium first!’.

Why is it a MUST as first task?

Because without a stadium you do not earn much money and since the visitors of RZA are nuts and totally football freaks, they will come to your games in huge numbers, regardless for your level and strength.
130.000+ in regular season games are quite common, even more is possible.
So every seat you do not build is lost money.
Almost every manager in RZA has a full build stadium or is on his way to get a full build stadium, which means it has 144300 seats. A huge stadium compared to real live arenas, but who cares, as long as the fans are coming?

The stadium is built with a total of
130.000 regular seats,
13.000 executive seats and
1.300 VIP seats,
separated by the
2 short sides (25.000/2.500/250 each) and
2 long sides (40.000/4.000/400 each) of a stadium.

A new stadium starts with 10.000/1.000/100 and as you can see, the road to a full build stadium is a long one. Each regular seat does cost 300$, an executive seat does cost 1000$ and a VIP seat even 3000$ each.
That does sums up for a block of 10.000/1.000/100 seats to 4.300.000$ in construction costs and the whole project at least 51.600.000$ (this is depended on other factors. The money you have to invest or don’t have for other projects is even higher). As a new manager, depended on your starting date of cause, you will need very likely a whole season at least to build it up completely. Two seasons are quite common.

There is always the rule that you can build only 10% of the next lower level amount of seats and the better the seat quality, the higher is the income. The income is for each regular seat 40$, an executive seat does bring you 200$ and a VIP seat even 700$ per league game.
For playoff games it’s even more, since each seat income gets a multiplying factor.
For one regular season game this sums up for that block of 10.000/1.000/100 sets to 670.000$ of income if sold out. So you will need some games to get the construction costs back, but since construction is only one time and you have at least eight regular season home games and 15 shared Supercup games, this will become very profitable fast.

Regular season home games are all yours, Supercup home games will be split 50/50 as will champ of champ and all playoff games. Check the scaling factors for playoff games in the manual. They will earn you big time money.

After you did finish the licence you should put all the money into the first few new seats and you should always max out the highest quality of seats.
So if you have the money for the next 10.000/1.000/100 set of seats you should buy it, and don't spend the money ONLY on regular seats. It just doesn’t make sense. If you have only money for a part of those set, like 5.000/500/50, I do suggest doing this at the start anyway, but later you should think about small steps carefully.
Once you get your first few incomes from Supercup- and league-games, add step by step additional seats until you get more and more money from your games.
The process is quite slow and gets faster the more you keep your other expenses in check.
The bigger your stadium gets and the more seats it has, the more money will come in your pocket with one game.

Tricks to place an order:
The side under construction won’t generate income as long as the construction is not finished, which is 4 days (As far as I know the time is 3 full days, which are 3 daily updates plus the next daily u p d a t e after completion). If there were already existing seats, those won’t generate ANY income while construction is going on.
So if you place the order for construction on the wrong site, date or time you will have less or even zero income the next home game. That’s missed income you will miss for the further extension.

Trick 1 - Build on the side with the lowest amount of existing seats.
At the start you have one side with seats, the rest is open. So a possible approach is to build on an open side first. Then the next side and so on, until all sides do have seats.
Until then you were never in danger to lose any income.
Once you have a few seats on every side, always s e l e c t the side with the least amount of seats to do the next building phase, since this will cost you the least amount of missed income from that side.
You should think about bigger steps, once you have to make one of the four built sides available for further construction work. As a rule of thumb, I suggest to not increase the stadium size with less than 10.000/1.000/100 for each step, better more.
It just doesn’t make sense to add a few hundred more seats to generate a few more dollars in some time in the future, while you lose much more money during construction time because of the close side.

You can actually calculate the missed income, since every income per seat is available. To give you a feeling for the income you would miss, here some sample numbers.
You do have a side with 10.000/1.000/100 seats and decide to extend it? If there is a league home game in the next 4 days, it will bring you 670.000$ less of income. If that was your initial stadium and the initial stadium side, that means ZERO income for such a game.
The side is bigger and does have already a block of 20.000/2.000/200 seats? The missed income does rise to 1.340.000$ if there is a league home game coming the next few days.
For a block of 30.000/3.000/300 seats this is already a missed income of 2.010.000$.

So it makes sense to s e l e c t the smallest existing block in your stadium and extend it which a nice additional amount of seats and accept the smallest amount of missed income, if necessary.

Trick 2 - avoid the maintenance costs
A nice side effect of a building order, regardless of the chosen side, is that for the side you did chose to extend you don’t have to pay maintenance, which can be quite some money over a season.
It’s just unwise to start a new construction phase right before the next regular season home game. Better start AFTER the game or in a week with away games.
That money you save is money you don’t get subtracted on financial updates, which means you keep more of your hard earned money and you can use that to extant the stadium faster.

To be fair, it’s not that much compared to the construction costs and if you feel uncomfortable regarding the timing and execution of this trick, don’t do it. A wrongly executed order will cost you much more money than you can ever generate by that trick.
A 10.000/1.000/100 block does cost 40.000$ in maintenance. Remember the income was 670.000$.
But just in case you like to know the mechanics I will try to explain it.

You know that construction takes 4 days, you know your home games in league and Supercup (and maybe even Champ of Champs) so you can play your construction time around the games.
Given a last home game on Saturday in the league and then no home games until Supercup on Thursday? Place your order right after the last home game on Saturday on the biggest built block (at the start that might be the initial side) or if you have several sides already build, use an many as possible to place the order.
Now, in the optimal case, your stadium size is officially ZERO until construction does finish.
Financial u p d a t e from Saturday to Sunday? ZERO maintenance costs. 1st day of construction.
Daily u p d a t e to Monday (you have an away Supercup game, right?). 2nd day of construction.
Daily u p d a t e to Tuesday (you have a bye week or an away league game, right?). 3rd days of construction.
Financial u p d a t e from Tuesday to Wednesday. ZERO maintenance cost and you stadium does finish today and the seats ready for sale.
You have now a bigger stadium and saved some money during that time, while losing no income.

Trick 3 - the Supercup games
It’s unlikely that your Supercup games are scheduled as your home games, since the engine tries to schedule at season rollover on the biggest arena for each game, but teams turn BOT and also do BOTs play BOTs and if you took over one of those BOTs or a former full build stadium team, you might have home games on Supercup Monday and Thursday.
So check your Supercup games and maximize the income by switching the home site if possible.
That’s a trick you should use in general until your stadium is finished.
Check every Supercup game and check them regularly, because teams can fall BOT and that might change the circumstances. A once nice 144.300 Stadium might shrink to 11.100 seats from one day to another one. So check at least a day before the Supercup game, because you can’t switch site on gameday.

If you do find a game which is not scheduled the best way, change it.
With human opponents I suggest to write a PN and then ask to change the site through the game page and hopefully the opponent accepts the change, with BOTs you only need to change the site and the system does grant the change immediately.

Speeding things further up:
If all goes well and you did put all money into the stadium build, your income will increase dramatically over the weeks and you can at some point start building other stuff or can start building your team.

This will take time and there are some shortcuts, but they are not 100% sure and they are also not without a price in a different currency.

Shortcut 1 - cut all unnecessary players
That means, take a look at your roster and cut all unneeded players and work with a minimum players roster, without coaches and without all other stuff you might want to buy or build.
This would keep your costs at a total minimum and will give you more money to build seats with.
But it will also keep your team in a baby mode for some long time, a season or so.
It will also not save you a lot of money, since you don’t have a big players-wage-bill anyway.
A fresh team does have a wage bill of around 65.000$ per update. It’s possible to cut the roster down to 38 players and some players do need only less than a 1.000$ per update. Means, you can cut all down to 35.000$ to 40.000$ per update. As you can see, those 25.000$ less in wages won’t help much.
But the possibility is there and for sure you will cut or sell some of the players anyway. The question is, when you will start to hire new one. With this shortcut, you do delay that for some time.

Shortcut 2 - sell your draft players
This can be a money kickstarter. In the past there were times when a good draft player did deliver a 100.000.000+$ money income at once, which lead to an instant stadium build.
But times did change and not many players do change teams for that kind of money anymore.
Still, the right player at the right time will give you big cash injection and even a higher 7-digit figure and more will help to speed up the process.

If you would like to know, how much you can get, I can't give you a serious answer.
The prices do depend heavily on the managers need at that time, your players quality and the manager’s pockets.
The downside of that draft player selling is that your chance for the first few good players on your team was moved to the next season, since you sold your first generation.
This is a risky shortcut and can pay off huge, or it can backfire.

Shortcut 3 - sell the good players from your initial team
This is easier said than done, because there is no guarantee that there are one or more players like this on your initial team.
But if you have such a player, like a 19 year old 50 INT, 50 TW with uncapped speed and strength at 45+ (which would be a jackpot) there is a big amount of money possible.
It would also kickstart your stadium build and of cause would delay your team building just a bit in case of a few players or quite heavy in case of many more.

Overall, you need money for the stadium and you can only earn money by regular season games, by selling players at the beginning or you can try to avoid additional costs and have a bit more money to spend that way, but there is only a minimal amount possible.

There will be a time you are quite satisfied with your income and your stadium and at that point you when you start thinking about adding players, coaches, staff or facilities, means improving your team.

When that time comes it is up to you.
Be aware that there are some risks when you start spending money for "other stuff" before the full stadium is there, but whenever that happens, please do not stop building your stadium.
You can slow it down, you might even skip an u p d a t e or two, but my advice is:
Do not stop before it has 144300 seats fully build.

My other suggestion is to ask yourself what you would like to do and what you have the most fun with, because neither of the mentioned shortcuts are fun. None.
Selling your best players, limiting costs to the max? No fun.
Be aware that in best case you have to delay the foundation of your team for ONE season (equals 12 weeks), in worst case, make that TWO seasons (equals 24 weeks!).

If you are OK with such plan, fine.

It wouldn't be mine and back in the days I started my team I did very fast spend money on "other" things, and I did never sell a draft player until some seasons had passed (and the reason for selling was not a kickstart on finances) and I did not sell my best players, ever.

So make a rough plan to build your stadium and have fun. That's my major suggestion.

Some words on the stadium repair at that point here:
Once you did reach the Manager rank “Top Manager” which means you built your stadium to 100.000+ seats, each home game will damage your stadium by 2% and that will reduce your capacity by 1% (see the manual). After a few home games, this will get serious, because your ticket income will go down.

To avoid this, there are two ways.
Manual Repair:
You can manually order the repair on the stadium page. That costs 156.000$ per 2% damage + 100.000$ per order. You lose around 1% per 2% damage so it can be calculated when you lose more money than you saved by not renovating your stadium and saving the 100.000$ per order. This does a bid varies because of league level and your opponents, since weak opponents won’t draw as many visitors as top opponents will do. So you have to check your attendance and you should also check for BIG games, like your team playing the team with the best record. Also your staff level does influence the attendance.
It’s safe to say that everything under 90% status is beyond economical reason, at least for level 1 and better. So you have to repair somewhat between every home game and every fifth home game to get the most out of your ticket sales.
For level 2 this might get down to 80%, but you can calculate that quite easily. Or test it.

Hire help
The other way is to hire a facility manager for 1.200.000$ per season who will then repair your stadium after every home game. That’s economical not really a good choice, because the 100.000$ order costs and the repair costs will stay the same, but it will release you of worrying over that topic.

Up to you.

You can find a bit more about the Facility Manager in Chapter XX for Staff.

Kommentare bitte hier / Comments please here

Chapter 03 - Rework the initial roster
Version 1.1 - 23.06.2016

Here you are, with a fresh team and a bunch of no-good-players with no-good skills and an overall team rating of somewhat around 35-40% while the big shot teams do have 75%+ rating.
How will you ever get to that point?

Honestly: You will need seasons to accomplish that, lots of seasons.
There were several teams with fast developments, crashing into the scene and some were even cheating, but even those did need around 5 seasons to get to the top.
Many did need more and some did never make it all the way, or they made it and had a hard time to stay there. There are teams out there which do play since season 1 and never were an Elite team and never won a level 1 championship game.

A crucial step is right in front of you and you can lay the foundation of your team right there.

The initial roster needs your attention, some kind of.

There are some strategies you can use here.

General:
In general you should always start with training PC and a needed non-physical skill on that position.
Since most of the time the future position is not clear, you can train POS or VIS at first, those are needed for basically all positions, some do need the former more, others the latter.
Overall the combination PC with VIS/POS will help to avoid throwing away trainings the best.
After PC trained to 90%+ you should switch to STR and/or SPE training.
Finding the physical caps on you players is the most important issue for the future positions.
But don’t rush to switch all players trainings now, first read some of your option.

Handling the bunch of losers:
If you boil the strategies down to their essential core there are not many ways to deal with the set of players you have at the moment.

Ignore them
Here is the truth: You will sell or fire 50% to 90% of your initial team in the next 3 or 4 seasons.
Most of them suck, they have bad physicals and when you have them ready on the physical side, you already got several players in the draft and maybe on the transfer market which are way better or at least more promising.
So it might save you a lot of time, money and head scratching by just ignoring the initial players the most or completely, cut most of them or let them find their physical caps and cut the worst of them THEN and start planning the real team setup.
I'm not saying this is the best way to do this, it's just a possibility.
If you like to go that way, I suggest only to train PC for those which are destined to build the playing core of your team. The rest which are not sold or cut should focus on the physicals. PC does come by the season rollover automatically as long as their TW is higher enough (roughly >= 35, but also players with lesser TW values can get a PC boost on rollover, but could also get a decrease). You should consider a value of 35 as a basic must have skill value on TW for this strategy. You just don’t want a slow training player on your small team.

Work them as a whole
Another take is to accept them as what they are and try to make them the best players they can become, as long as they are on the roster. That means you do sort them all based on the tips I did write down a few lines below and you train them as starters, backups and prospect and you do try to improve your team over the coming weeks and seasons. You will lose most them anyway when you do hit the transfer market, the draft and the Youth Academy, but for a few seasons a good amount of those players might stay as starters and backups on your roster, so why not treat them as that.
This does bring as catch only the work itself you do invest into them, which might be some sort of wrong investment, if you judge it from the outside. Still, this can be a quite satisfying work.

Start with the young ones
Here is another truth: Every player with age 24+ will not become a long time starter. With no coaches, with training PC and STR and SPE first until you have a good picture on your roster, not only one season might pass, it might be even more seasons, until the last of your players has only red caps on his physicals.
THEN you will start with serious skill training and you might have now coaches, but with a wild mix on TW you might get 8 to 12 skill points a season and with 3 to 4 skills to train per position and a retirement starting with 30+, it's unlikely your older players will get past a value of 35+ in all needed skills.
Yes, some of the older players might still be your best players on the roster, but not for long.
So why not scratch that and start with a good bunch of young players and have those around the next 10 to 15 seasons?
But there is a catch to that path.
You do need a YA to get youth players regularly and you need a good scout to find the good youth players.
Or you need some money to buy young players for a few thousand bucks per player.
And once you have that system rolling, you will have to deal with selling some of your loved players in the future to create roster spots for the next generation and that might become a quite hard decision at that time. Managers tend to get found of their long cared players. No kidding.
Still, this does work.

Best of all worlds
And another truth: There is no fun in extreme approaches.
Think about it:
Is it fun to cut your roster to 38 players and ignoring the rest, building slowly piece by piece an under stuffed and outmatched roster only to get the reward in 5 to 6 seasons?
Is it fun to bring a prospect to a certain level, only to realize that the new draftee is not only as good as him, but also 8 years younger, you just need a roster spot and you have to cut the prospect before he ever played a single meaningful game?
Is it fun to cut your roster to 38 players and just building on young guys which do need 5 to 6 seasons to become competitive and then you have to cut every season a few of them, because you need roster space for the next generation?
Not really, at least not for me.
So why not set some limits and caps on skills and parameters you want or need and improve you crappy team step by step and when the time comes to cut some players it's easy to find them, because you kept a few of your crappy players?
But there is also a catch in this approach: Some players will become good ones, even starters in terms of RZA overall, and then they won't be easy to cut, because cutting them will make your team worse!
I had a center which was not really good in physicals, STR and SPE under 40 each, but had the best skills on BLO, VIS, POS, AGI and FOO and was until retirement good enough to be a starter. He was from my initial roster and was one of those players who I never was able to replace until he left on his own. This can happen.
There are managers how don’t allow such stuff, but it’s up to you how you like to manage your team.

General, the second:
Regardless of the strategy, you may want to optimize your initial team to get the most out of your roster.

Step 1 - look for physicals:
Look at the following skills: STR, SPE, INT and TW. All other skills are not important at the moment.
In best case, you have the caps on STR and SPE or do have at least some of them high enough (40+) to know they make a difference.

Step 2 - look for combinatons STR/SPE and INT:
I do value STR higher than SPE regarding sorting criteria, because it's quite likely you will get more fast players than strong players and you are free to decide otherwise.
So I suggest starting with the strong players (STR > 40) and fast players (SPE > 40). Players which would fit into both categories, I would put into the strong group at first.
Now start sorting the strong and the fast ones into sub categories.
Strong and smart
Just strong
Fast and smart
Just fast
In this context you can make the cut for being smart at INT >40, but you can also decide to lower that requirement.

Step 3 - Try to sort the players into positions:
Strong and smart: QB, OL, LB
Just strong: DL, RB, TE, K, P
Fast and smart: SF, LB
Just fast: RB, TE, WR

Positions with good physicals which you could use in both categories (so STR and SPE > 40) are LB, RB and if you can effort it DL, QB, TE and SF.
Some do see QB as SPE driven, not STR driven, since most passes are short anyway and SPE does help to avoid sacks. It’s up to you.

Of cause for every position a 50/50 skilling would be optimal, but you won't find those guys very often, if ever.

Don't bother with G and KR positions, use your best LB, CB or SF as G on the depth chart and your RB or FB as KR.
This way you do save some roster spots and they do need the same skills anyway.

Step 4 - Use TW as a guideline:
I did mention TW as another skill and you should think about the TW-value of each player the following way:
The more TW, the faster the training.
In addition, TW does help in line play.

So the TW-value should be a factor for your sorting the following way:
High TW: OL, DL or players with lots of trainable skills
Low TW: Rest.
Which players do need more trainable skills you can find in Chapter XX - Training your players, but in general those are Liners and FB and TE.
Which level of TW you s e l e c t at being high is up to you, but TW >40 is a good one as first value, you might have to adjust this to a lower value to have a complete set of liners playing.

Be aware that a TW-value below 35 is not really helpful in the long run, but don’t understand that value in a way that TW = 34 is bad and TW = 35+ is good. It’s only that way that from around 35+ the results do get fast enough to support most strategies.
For the first roster it's OK to keep players until you can substitute them with better ones, but in the long run, try to avoid players below TW < 35. Sometime you will get some in the draft and it’s up to you if you like to keep them, but in general they have two major setbacks.
They don’t get training fast enough compared to higher TW valued players and they will likely not gain much or no PC training at all during season rollover, their PC do even decrease the lower the TW value is.
I will explain this later under Chapter 04 - training your players.

Step 5 – You might use the other skills now:
At the end of you rearranging process, when you have sorted all the players, you might THEN look for the other skills and take an already trained RB (means high CAR skills) as RB, but only then.
If that guy is better off as OL, use him as lineman. The skills will come, slowly, but they will come and you will exchange most of them anyhow in the near future.

Minimum Roster Requirements:
What's left to know is, how many players should you sort to the positions?

You need
QB: 2, RB: 2, FB: 1, WR: 5, TE: 1, OL: 7
DL: 7, LB: 6, CB: 5, SF: 3
P: 1, K: 1, G: 0, KR: 0
The P and K can be identical, but then needed higher TW.
That’s a minimum. It’s more than the roster minimum of 38, but realistic.
Some might argue about the 2 QBs, but a single QB gets tired at the end of the game.
Try it and then decide for yourself.

If you have still some players left, add players to the player heavy positions, like liner and backs and as last you should consider a 3rd QB, a 2nd K or 2nd Punter.

That's it. Almost.

Later Rework:
I highly recommend doing it as I described and play with that roster a few games, get a feeling for the game and all aspects, train your players and get them to the physical caps, at least for some skills.
Then, before the free switching period ends (check on one of your initial players detail page, near the position marker), do the evaluation AGAIN.
Some players might need to switch position and that is the last moment to do so for free.
After that period you can still switch a players position, but it will cost you team chemistry and moral.
Both do come back, but it will take some time and some games to do so.

By the way, don't bother too much with the switching tool in the players list, since it does not really switch players always the best way. It’s better to do that with your bare hands, since you get then a feeling for your team and players.
The tool does even suggest switching good build QBs to lineman because of some parameters. It happened to me on a test. I did not perform the switch ….

A better way to rearrange the players with some help is using the RZA Management Studio.
It’s a tool written by Peter himself and with your free supporter period you can use it the first few updates the best. I have to admit I never used it by myself, I did more like to create my own version on an excel sheet, but I heard a lot of good reviews from other managers, so give it a try. You can value some skills with your own weights and by that the tool will give you a hint for the best positions for your players, according to your weights.

Now you should have a quite OK sorted team, so it's time for (initial) training.

Kommentare bitte hier / Comments please here

Chapter 04 - Training your players
Version 1.1 - 23.06.2016

Training your initial roster is almost like training a matured roster with coaches and all other fancy stuff. The difference is only that you do train with slower pace on all positions and your players will therefore most likely not reach their maximum or at least high skill regions you would like them to have.
The priorities as a new manager with a bunch of no-good-players is also different at the start, since with a matured roster you get certain things for “free” or have them already, because those things were dealt with seasons ago or over season rollover.

Before I start with the real training issues, here a needed explanation up front.

The dependency between PC training on season rollover and TW
I monitored a bit the PC gains during the offseason and it seems the mechanism works this way that there is a gauss function with a max and min value on PC gain and the values do depend on the TW values with TW = 25 being the middle where the gain can be -5% to +5% during rollover and with each TW higher the gain values does add 0.5% and with each TW lower the gain value does decrease 0.5%.
Means
TW min gain max gain
5 -15% -5%
15 -10% 0%
25 -5% +5%
35 0% +10%
45 5% 15%
This is not 100% proven, but I think as guideline it works.

So that means with TW = 35+ you can be sure to not lose any PC during rollover and to gain some. Don’t count on gaining the max gain, it’s a value you will get only sometimes, if ever.

An initial roster is more like starting with a bunch of youth academy players only that your players do have all kind of ages from 18 to 30+ and you are forced to bring them up to acceptable levels with the goal to have at some point the aimed matured roster.

So I would like to treat the initial roster players like youth players from training point of view and will explain you the differences. In general the goal for a youth player and a player from the initial roster is quite similar:
- knowing the physicals
- s e l e c t a position
- train him into that position.

Youth player:
Assuming you get a 16 year old youth player you only know his fixed values already, means INT and TW and you know his current skill values, most of the time with no cap sign.
Assuming further you did chose that youth player, because his TW high enough. PC is not an issue until he gets a roster spot on the senior team or even a spot in the main depth chart)
It's best to train his physical skills and even without coaches, facilities and staff members the first goal should always be to find his caps. That means you would need to train SPE or STR at 90% intensity and you can decide to use the remaining 10% intensity on VIS or POS (my suggestion for youth players) or to train position specific A-skills (my suggestion for youth players which are quite certain regarding their career path; I will get to those A-Skills and B-Skills later, don’t worry).
With coaches, facilities and staff you will train him faster and might get around 10-12+ skill points on top of his skills at season rollover per season, without a coach and facility this is down to 6-8 points per season.
It’s best to have a good scouting staff (level 20) available to find the yellow caps early, means 5 skill points before red cap. This will give you the chance to switch the training early to find the other physical skill yellow cap (either SPE or STR) as fast as possible. When you have both yellow cap values, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth the effort to train him further and get to the red caps.
For example did you find the STR yellow cap at 31 (means red cap at 36 for strength) and you do switch him to SPE training. The player gets a yellow cap at 32 for SPE (means he will red cap at 37 for speed). It’s up to you whether a STR 36 / SPE 37 player is worth development, but my suggestion here is to cut him.
The situation might be different, if the player caps SPE at 45 for yellow, because a STR 36 / SPE 50 player might become a great WR, CB or SF or whatever you like him to be.
If you would have decided to first get his red cap at STR developed and then focus on SPE, you might have wasted a lot of training on a player not worth the effort. So better look for both yellow caps and then train them further if they are worth a shot.

Once you did find his red caps, at some age between 16 and 20, depended on his starting values and all the other factors which do influence the training, you can start training his other skills.
For youth players it can be wise to skip a total red capping on SPE or STR, if the positions are clear very early, but I do tend to find them anyway to make the best decision on all players of that class when they will specialize later, usually at age of 19 to 20.
Don't bother with training PC in the youth academy, because each season rollover he will gain some PC as bonus, based on his TW (if you did s e l e c t a player with high enough TW value, like over 35 ;-) ) and by the time he hits the senior team and gets a depth chart spot, he might be already at 100% or be almost there, for free!
Players with less TW than 35 will not increase their PC at season rollover as much or might even LOSE it, which is the reason to think about those twice. For one they train slower and at second they need extra training on top for PC. Still, some players with TW < 35 might be worth a shot, it all depends on his other skills, his future position and your personal approach on that topic.
I had and still have some TW 35 players.

Next, when the physicals are capped and the position is not clear at all, I suggest training AGI and VIS or AGI and POS, depends on a rough position plan you might want him to play, like offense (more POS) or defense (more VIS). The intensity can be split or favour the physical skill or the non-physical. Just remember that the skill value does influence the wage.
I do try to train my youth players in AGI, POS AND VIS up to 20 regardless of their future position until they have to get into senior team, plus the position relevant skills like TAC, BLO or CAT also to 20. But that’s up to you. Later you will see which approaches are possible from that point on.

Assuming you did the same, which is not a must, you now have a 21 year old player on the senior roster on a position with some capped physicals in SPE and STR and around 20 in AGI, VIS, POS and whatever skill is needed.


Initial Roster training (at the start):
On the Initial roster each player is for sure older than a youth player and he already has already some kind of position on the roster. Depended on your plan regarding your initial roster you might have already decided on most of their fates and you know which will play.
You will want to train the PC of the players destined to play up to 90%+ (if you did decide to NOT ignore them at all) and you might still have some players with TW < 35, but let’s assume you did train them already to that PC value of 90% + and you can now try to improve them further.

It's best to find his caps first as it was the case for the Youth Academy player. Train as non physical skill a position specific A-skills (my suggestion for players with fixed position) or VIS/POS (if that guy might change the position later).
Be aware that without a scout at level 20 you will see his yellow caps quite late, around 0.2 to 0.3 before capping! So it can happen that you train them directly to a red cap.

Once you did find his red caps, I suggest to review his position, since you might have found stronger players for the line or faster players for backs and so on.
Some players will need seasons to find their limits and it might be wise to skip a B-skill physical training in favour of the other A-Skills. For example it doesn’t make sense to find the SPE caps on your OL, if it’s clear he will stay OL and will play for a few seasons. It also doesn’t make sense to train STR, if your WR has some certain STR already and is a speedster.
The guys which should NOT play at the moment should not get PC training and instead should be treated like youth players and wait for the rollover bonus on PC, as long as they have TW of 35+. If they have less TW, it’s a gamble, but I still suggest to ignore the PC for now.
When SPE and/or STR are capped you should also try to balance the players a bit, training AGI at least to the value of the best A-Skill. But that’s up to you.

You do find here now the complete package for training, which is way more than needed as your first few training sessions do need.
But if you do look here for a tip or two for your initial roster, reed this guide on training as well and at any point were training gets more detailed with coaches and facilities, you need to remind you, that your training can do the same but will be at first as “no coach” and “no facilities” training, which means slower in general.

Training Physicals:
I know, the text above did end with all physicals capped, but there are some more things to talk about. The physicals are essential in this game and you have to understand that they are sometimes a bit confusing.
Overall SPE and STR don’t have wage impact, so try to train them to the max, which is a hidden cap. (red cap)
That cap can only be found by pushing them over that red cap or if you have a good staff, which does warn you up to 5 skill points before that cap appears, depended on your staff level.
AGI on the other hand does have wage impact and does also have a hidden cap, which means, on one hand you will try to keep the skill on the same level as you’re other A-Skills or B-Skills and on the other hand, they will cap between 35 and 50 at some point, unrelated to the players talent level. The staff will also show you the cap up to 5 skill points before the red cap.
PC as last physical skill has no wage impact and is measured in percentage and is always best to be kept between 90% and 100% for playing players. Prospects and Youth Players can have any value it won’t have a negative effect. PC Training does not add skill points like all other skills, but does add percent values, usually between 1% (without coaches, facilities and/or low TW) to 6% (good coach on that position, higher TW) and even more with facilities activated.

Here is a nice trick for your physical training:
You know already that the 3 physical skills STR, SPE and AGI do have hidden caps. Check.
A player always does have a minimum value of 35 in those skills and a maximum of 50. Check.
With a level 20 scout you can get a warning for the upcoming cap when you are 5 skill points or less from the hidden cap away.
This is normally named yellow cap, because of the yellow "!" which is shown next to the skill.
That means you have to watch out for the next full integer increment on a training and the integer value of the current value is the yellow cap value, marked with the yellow “!”. (means if the value is trained from 35.9 to 36.6 -> 36 is the yellow cap, if it is up from 35.4 to 36.0 -> 36 is also the yellow cap).
The red cap value is the yellow cap value +5.
If you train to that value or beyond that value, the skill is marked with a red "!", called red cap (in my example, the red cap would happen at 41, assuming a level 20 scout when the yellow cap appeared).
Did I say ‘Training beyond the red cap’? Yes.
You can surpass that red cap by 2 ways:

Method 1 - Train it like hell
If you put a lot of training into that already capped skill, it will still increase, slowly.
I don't have real live figures any more, but if I remember correctly, a 90% training on that skill would increase the real value by 0.1 every 5 to 10 trainings.
That’s not very efficient. Assuming every 5 trainings, which I think would need a really good AC and a best TW value, it would be 0.02 per training with 90% intensity and that would mean around 0.0022 at 10% every u p d a t e or every 45 u p d a t e a pop of 0.1. Best case.
I don't recommend that, but you are free to try.

Method 2 - Train them once over the top
Assuming you don't want to push them regularly over the red cap, but you still want the best available, right? A player with STR 45.5 is for sure a bit stronger than one with STR = 45, right?
You can have that quite easily.
First you need a level 20 scout (it also works with a few levels less, but level 20 will give you the best warning period) to know the exact red cap value. In this example the value is 45, first seen after a training, which did bring the player over STR = 40, marked with a yellow “!”.
Now train him further until he reaches the integer or a bit better BEFORE the red cap, in this example 44 to 44.5.
Now reduce the intensity of STR training and bring that player to .9 BEFORE the red cap, in this example 44.9.
Now increase the training the last time to 90% intensity training and wait for the update. In this example 90% STR training.
After the update, the player has a real value above the red cap, depended on coaches and TW between 0.2 and 0.5+ ABOVE the cap. In this example 45.5.

If you like to gamble and can calculate your expected training very well, you can try to even push near .99, which is a guessing game and might backfire. Adding then the last 90% training can even push the value to red cap + 0.6+ (in our example it would be 45.6) or more. You’re decision whether it is worth the risk. If this backfires, the player will hit red cap at the full integer and you can’t train him further without the described additional effort. From that point on, you can't do anything further on that skill except "Train it like hell" to increase it (valid for SPE, STR or AGI training).
My recommendation for that situation is to switch to a different physical if there is still one open to train. If that all is not possible or you don't want to increase the skill (so NO SPE, NO STR and NO AGI; that would be the case for AGI, which has wage implications or a physical with no real position impact, like SPE on OL), train 10% PC which saves you a lot of trouble during the season and it might be a bit of a waste of training, but is a much more laid back approach than managing already capped skills the best way to NOT lose any training.
Up to you, how to proceed.

Training Physicals which are not SPE or STR:
At some point in the game, the physical training will be reduced to AGI and PC training for your players on the senior roster (with the exception of some drafted players who needs still some capping on SPE and/or STR) and a wider range of physical training on your Youth Academy roster.

Agility and PC will be always in a switching position and it’s up to you how to approach that task on your senior team.
Some teams do treat AGI in training blocks (means 90% AGI training on that block and 10% AGI or PC training an all other blocks), based on facilities active and maximum trained skill values in all other, non-physical skills. Some do train them on almost every training in a small portion (means 20% to 40%+ on every training) to avoid heavy switching (and with that, many intense reviews on the whole training setup of the roster).
Depended on your coaches setup, it can happen that most of your players get capped on AGI during their playing career by red capping or by a self-forced stopped training, because the AGI value did reach the talent level cap of all other skills and training it further would mean an increase in wages.
As example take a Talent level cap of 42.5. If your AGI red cap value is 47 you will very likely not like to train him further 42.5 in AGI until it’s known the player will retire at season end, because if he trains to 43+, the wage will rise based on that skill value, at 42.5 stopped training the wage will stay the same for the rest of the career.
When that happens, you can decide how to proceed with the physical training. Train PC on every u p d a t e with 10% intensity will save you some blocks of 50% or even 90% training blocks on PC during the season for starters. But it can also mean you do waste some training, because the backups do keep their PC at almost 100% over the whole season and you still train PC. You can also switch to SPE or STR again and wait for that tiny 0.1 pop in those skills over the next 1 to 2 seasons and might need to train PC once in a while during the season.

My approach is to train PC and take it easy, but I do know managers who can’t stand wasted training and do train SPE or STR.

Non-Physcial-Skills
For all other skills, the Talent level does decide the cap and that cap can’t be surpassed.

General:
The positions do have some skills they do profit of very much and some skills they do profit from not so much or not at all. For example will a WR for sure need catching, but punting is not needed, right?

Here is a list of positions and their skills, based on my experience.
QB: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 3)
A-Skills: INT, STR, PAS, VIS
B-Skills: SPE, AGI
C-Skills: POS, FOO, CAR

WR: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 4)
A-Skills: SPE, AGI, CAT, POS
B-Skills: STR, VIS
C-Skills: FOO, CAR

RB: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 4)
A-Skills: SPE, STR, AGI, CAR, POS
B-Skills: VIS
C-Skills: FOO, CAT

FB: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 5)
A-Skills: SPE, STR, AGI, CAR, POS, BLO
B-Skills: VIS
C-Skills: FOO

TE: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 5)
A-Skills: SPE, STR, AGI, CAT, POS, BLO
B-Skills: VIS, TW
C-Skills: FOO

OL: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 5)
A-Skills: STR, AGI, POS, BLO, FOO, TW
B-Skills: VIS, INT
C-Skills: SPE

DL: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 5)
A-Skills: STR, SPE, AGI, VIS, TAC, FOO, TW
B-Skills: POS
C-Skills: NONE

LB: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 4)
A-Skills: INT, STR, SPE, AGI, VIS, TAC
B-Skills: POS
C-Skills: FOO, CAT

CB: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 4)
A-Skills: SPE, AGI, VIS, TAC
B-Skills: POS, STR
C-Skills: FOO, CAT, INT

SF: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 4)
A-Skills: INT, SPE, AGI, VIS, TAC
B-Skills: POS, STR
C-Skills: FOO, CAT

K: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 3)
A-Skills: STR, VIS, KIC
B-Skills: INT, AGI
C-Skills: POS, TAC

P: (sum of trainable non-physical A- and B-Skills: 3)
A-Skills: STR, VIS, PUN
B-Skills: INT, AGI
C-Skills: POS, TAC

G:
Use LB, CB or SF

KR:
Use RB or FB

This has to be read this way:
A-Skills should be high and the player do profit from it in a big way.
B-Skills should be also trained in the med run and the player should profit from it in a good way
C-Skills can be trained in the long run and the player might profit from it a bit, maybe.

Especially Footwork is a skill which is highly discussed and it might be useful for many positions, a little bit useful for most, or maybe not.
Also some skills are discussed whether they are A-Skills or B-Skills, for example SPE on QB, because it might help big time to avoid Sacks.
In general this list will work quite well.

Now you know my standing on which skills should be trained, so it's time to discuss how to train in general in the long run.

Remember, short term the goal was to get PC up, finding the physical caps of STR and SPE and then start train the players in the wanted skills.

Long term is a bit different, but the basic rule is the same.

Remember we got that youth player example with all caps on SPE and STR found and trained in his A-Skills and maybe some B-Skills to 20. The initial roster guys will just be a bit older and might have some more skill points on some A-Skills. And Draft players do also come with some different setup, but in general, at some point you do concentrate on the non-physical skills.

You should concentrate on the A-Skills and train the B-Skills from time to time a bit up to get two effects.
1. you have a more balanced player from skill point of view
2. your players wage will not rise as fast as if you would train only the A-skills, because the wage is highly dependable on the two max skills (beside STR and SPE) and if you develop the B-skills from time to time, the max does not rise during that time.
At least not so fast.
Since you always have to train non-physical-skill and physical skill with a percentage of the total training, you cannot stop training physical 100%.
So while you train a B-Skill, you might train also AGI at 10% and it will rise, a bit.
Or you switch to PC training and avoid an eventually rise in the wages because of a higher AGI value.

I did see a lot of training tactics for players, but these are the most common ones:

General 2:
I do not often see players which don't have SPE or STR capped.
It happens that a player has only one of those skills capped, because it's the most important one, like SPE for WR or STR for OL.
The other skill is then ignored, which might be a good thing or not, depends on the point of views and training philosophies.
So my suggestion is to at least train one skill to the caps, my personal view is, that almost every position does benefit from both skills, so better cap both.

One-Skill-Wonders:
Every position has a primary skill that is needed most, like QB with PAS, a LB with TAC or a WR with CAT.
The player does need those skills and does profit the most from it.
A One-Skill-Wonder is trained primary on that one skill, sometimes to the talent max, sometimes to a certain level.
The pro of that technique is that the player gets good results out of this, quite fast, since he does benefit the most of that skill.
The con of this is that on higher levels, the other skills do work as deciding factors on the game engine, so a player with a more balanced approach might get better results even if the primary skills are not equal.
Think about an Engine decision where TAC, AGI and VIS are summed up and the tackle is successful if that sum is higher than the CAR, AGI and POS sum of the offense player.
At lower levels such a sum can be in favour of your one-skill-wonder, if that one skill is high enough to make that sum bigger than the balances skill sum of the opponent, like for example 40+15+15 > 20+20+20.
On the higher levels, the room to have a higher one-skill-wonder value than the sum of several high trained skills is slim and at some point, impossible, like for example 50+15+15 < 30+30+30.
Those example calculation is not real engine math, but does show the problem with high values on one value and small ones on all other against higher values in all skills.
Another con is, that the wage of the player will increase fast, because the wages are dependent on the two highest trained skills (beside STR and SPE).
It's quite clear that using this technique to the extreme will not help in the long run.
Wages will kill you and performance will suffer on the highest level.
What might work is a mixed approach of doing One-Skill-Wonder-Training up to a certain level (like 30, 35 or 40, up to you) and then focus on other skills.

A-Skills first:
As you can see on my position list, most players do have around 2 A-Skills and 2 B-Skills to work with.
This technique does focus on the A-skills as primary goal and training the B-skills with less effort.
That means that you bring one A-Skill to the next level, like from 31 to 32 and then switch the trained skill to the next A-Skill.
Do that until all A-Skills have the same level, in this example it’s 32, then start again.
Once in a while you do train the B-Skills the same way, but their level stays behind the max level of the A-Skills.
How far you like to have that gap is up to you.
Some do prefer 10% (so A-Skill at 40 means B-Skill at 36), some prefer fix 5 points (so A-Skill at 40 means B-Skill at 35), some even 10 points (so A-Skill at 40 means B-Skill at 30) and some stop B-Skill training when they hit a certain level, like 20 or 25.
The pro of this is having a more balanced player, but progressing fast enough to get into the top level before he considers retirement.
Once he reaches his talent caps or a certain level you are fine with, the B-Skills can be trained further to catch up, or sometimes the C-Skills are trained.
The Con of that technique is also a quite fast increasing wage level.
With the new wage system of season 21 this approach might even be more expensive than the “one Skill Wonder” approach since at least 2 skills will have a high value here, while the “One Skill Wonder”-boy gets a discount with one high level skill and the next highest much lower, lowering the average of both skills.

Balance it out:
This is a quite easy one.
Train every A-Skill and B-Skill equally (some might even consider the C-Skills in that rotation), skill after skill from one limit to the next, like 30 to 31, and once you have all on the same level, start again.
If you reach the cap level before the player does consider retirement, you can start training c-skills also.
The pro of that technique is clearly the wage. The player will improve slowly and therefore the team wage overall will increase also quite slowly.
The con of that technique is that the player might never reach his caps or will reach a sufficient level to compete on the highest level, but that depends also on the coaches.

Best of all worlds:
Auf cause a mixture of those techniques is possible and is used very often.
Some do for example train the A-Skills first until they reach a pre-defined level and do than catch up with the B-skills to that level and then switch to C-skills. They do aim for fast progress at the start and a stable wage development later on. Remember that the wages get very high with max skills over 40, so somewhere between 40 and 50 every manager will have to make a business decision.
Some decide to train the player to the max, some do train them only in that way in their retirement year, some do train them that way as franchise player and once the contract is up for an expensive prolongation they are sold or cut, some do set a pre-defined limit and won’t go over that.

There are some tricks for training on a basic level:
- if a normal skill is near a cap, start training other skills and train the last few points when you train him PC during the season or a big training block of AGI is needed. This will reduce the lost training amount, since you can’t train over the cap.
Example: Your player caps in PAS at 45. You have him at 44.7, the next training at 90% would waste probably 0.2 skill points of training, because you might get 0.5 per update.
Switch to a different skill, like VIS and start training PAS again, once your QB needs PC training. Dependent on the need and your PC-training tactics, you train 50-90% PC in that training and train then 10%-50% on PAS.
The skill might not even increase much, but slowly the skill will increase over several of those trainings to 45, which is than a red capped skill.

- train PC only if the player is in your standard depth chart and does play regularly. If the player is a prospect and has high enough TW, the player will gain PC over season rollover, which will save a few trainings on PC-training and give more skill training on other skills.
Example: your young CB has 70% PC but does not play on your standard roster. He will gain some % on season rollover (have to look that up) and over time he will get to 100%, which saves around 3 to 4 trainings. 3 to 4 trainings can be in total 1 to 2.5 in skill value.

- if players need training on skills which are primary on other positions than he is at the moment and his current position assistant coach is not good or there is even non on that position, shift the player to that other position and train him on that skill on that position a lot faster.
But there are some things to consider: if switching period is over, each switch will let the player lose TC and Moral (50% of his current values). If the player plays in a game, he gets an out-of-position-penalty.
So it's wise to think about it twice and build up a strategy behind it, if you want to go that way.
Example: You have no TE coach and you TE needs blocking. You have a great OL coach, so switch him to OL and train his BLO skill with much faster progress than it would have had as TE. If he plays as OL, no problem, if he plays as TE, he will get an out of position penalty as TE.

Facilities
OK fine, physical training, check, regular training, check. So that’s it? No.
The training of a player is influenced by several factors.
TW does increase the trainings bonus, the more the player has, the higher the bonus.
ACs do also increase the trainings bonus. The higher the CP of the AC, the higher the bonus. No AC means simply no bonus from that part.
On top of that there is another bonus you can get when performing training, the facility bonus.
You can find more details on facilities in the Chapter XX for facilities, but to give a short overview, each facility does support training on specific skills and other parameters and you can activate 2 facilities per training update.
Each facility does multiply the training points granted by 1,1 (which means 10% bonus) if that skill is supported by that facility and the skill is trained. If both facilities do support that skill which is trained the factor is even 1,21 (means a bonus of 21%).
That’s big, especially if you do this over several updates per season, up to 24 time trained that way are possible, and you can do that over several seasons, which can be 10+ seasons.

The problem is that the facility does only support a few skills, normally 1 to 3 skills, so it’s impossible to train all skills on a single u p d a t e with all skills getting a bonus.
You need to focus or you need to build training blocks.

Focus on specific skills:
This approach makes you think about money, progress, needs, laziness and greed.
Money is a factor here, because you might not want to build and maintain all facilities.
Progress is a factor here, because if you cut back on facilities, which skills will never get a bonus on training? Those skills will simply progress slower on training, or in other words, you will need more training updates to increase them the same way as supported skills.
Needs are a big factor, since with less skills supported and therefore less progress you have to think about which skills are trained often and which are trained only sometimes or only for a few players?
A lazy manager might not like to switch training regularly, so he would like to have the most out of the least effort in controlling and changes training setups and facilities.
And at last, the greed is a factor for all of the above factors, since you always want the most or the least.
Take a look in the facility chapter, there is a list of the most likely used and trained skills, which will help you to make up your mind regarding this approach.
In general managers which do this more or less 100% will need try to get that 10% on those selected skills on almost every training, expect when they do train those skills which were marked as non-supported. Those positions, which do need those skills, will need a quite high TW value, which will compensate the missed bonus a bit.

Built training blocks:
This approach is also very simple.
Since only 2 facilities are active per u p d a t e and they might support only a hand full of skills, you will try to get the most out of every training.
For example you will set up training to get the most out of BLO and TAC with 10% bonus and you do train 80% of your player in those skills. You want the most out of POS with a 21% Bonus and you will train 90% or more of your players in that skill.
You do this mechanism over an u p d a t e or a few more and then you switch the training and you switch the activated facilities.
Almost every skill is supported for a bonus. If you like to you can do this with every skill.
The problem here is that you focus on a specific set of skills per u p d a t e and that leaves all other skills for that u p d a t e without a bonus. To stay in the example, if you train BLO and TAC you will for sure not train your QB in those skills. He will have to settle with some other skill, without the bonus. Same is valid for WR, RB, K and P on that example.
Another aspect is that this plan is not in synch with your player development strategy. You might be forced to train a B-Skill or even a C-Skill to get the most, and now you can argue about, whether this training does at the end help you the most, if your player does gain some skills quite fast, but does not get better with the same speed, because every skill increase on B-Skills or C-Skills do help only a fraction of an increase on an A-Skill.

Best of both worlds:
Most managers do a combination of both approaches, do limit their facility setup to maybe 2 to 5 facilities and do training in blocks based on need and other factors, like status of the season (because of coming contract talks) or already capped players.
Especially with a matured roster you will face an interesting situation.
As example we look at TAC. It’s needed for the whole defense, so quite a lot players. It’s even possible to get a 21% bonus with a 2 facility setup and activated. Great?
Not necessarily with a matured roster.
You will have several older player. Assuming 35 defense players and a wide spread range of age you will have easily have 4 to 10 old players, 28+ years old, high trained, many of them either capped on A-skills or forced to stop training on those skills because of wage issues.
That means from those 35 players effected, suddenly 4 to 10 are no longer in the mix, which does change the calculation of benefits of the 21% and slower training on other skills completely.
Some might argue that they don’t care, because the goal of training is to get the players on a high level and once they are on that level, training is not that important any more. Fine.
But if you aim for the biggest bang for your setup, this calculation DID change and maybe a different setup is needed.
This is the truth: You will find your training style and you will do it your way. This guide is only to show you ways to think about this topic. There is no BEST training, because with a matured roster there are so many factors to think about, that it’s getting hard to get the BEST per u p d a t e and still getting the BEST out of every player, given their different needs, playing times, amount of players on the roster and their individual parameters like TW.

Mathematics:
The formula for training is in the manual on the coaches page, so that’s transparent.
What I would like to add to that is a long term view on development.
As said, there are 3 factors on the training, TW, ACs CPs and facilities.
In general that’s true, but there are some minor factors, which can spoil the fun.
Your real training per u p d a t e does have a variation, every update.

Consistancy
There is the ACs Consistency, which does work this way: The higher the CON, the less wide the deviation of the normal training value. This is done by a random number generator based on the CON value. Each CON 0,5* is worth 5 points, as it is for the EXP.
If you look for the consequences out of the formula you get:
CON MIN MAX
5 0,9 1,1
10 0,91 1,09
15 0,92 1,08
20 0,93 1,07
25 0,94 1,06
30 0,95 1,05
35 0,96 1,04
40 0,97 1,03
45 0,98 1,02
50 0,99 1,01

So an AC with a low Consistency of 0,5* = 5 points will give you at one training a +/-10% deviation from 1,0 while a 5,0* = 50 points AC will give you a deviation of just +/- 1% from 1,0 on that factor.
At the end you can’t influence the outcome so it makes sense to ignore the outcome on a long term planning and calculate with 1,0. Just be aware that this deviation exists.

Experience:
There is also a factor based on the ACs Experience which does basically means, the higher the EXP, the more training you get.
A 0,5* EXP = 5 points in the math, a 5,0* EXP = 50 and you do have 0,5* steps.
Combined with the formula out of the manual you get:
EXP FACTOR
5 0,825
10 0,85
15 0,875
20 0,9
25 0,925
30 0,95
35 0,975
40 1
45 1,025
50 1,05
As you can see, the EXP-Factor does become only 1,0 with an EXP of 40 = 4*, otherwise it’s below 1,0!

Final longterm CP
Both factors are used for the training progress together as a product and are multiplied with the CP or the ACs. With ignoring the Consistency factor you get a quite simple formula
Final longterm CP = CP * Exp-Factor, which can now be used for training calculation.

Dealing with the loss of progress due PC training and injuries
There is another factor over the season. Players which do play a lot will need a lot of PC training, which will cut down his other skills development.

So you can assume to give up a certain amount of updates or parts of those updates to PC-training.
There are 24 updates per season and I did always calculate quite conservative with losing 4 updates on PC training. That’s really conservative, because normally you don’t train 8 times a season 50% PC and you also don’t train 4 times 100% PC (which could only be 90% anyway, so 10% are always real skill progress in that calculation). But I do also cover with those 4 trainings the next risk, which is injury.

And Injuries will keep your player out of training, as long as he is not healthy.
That does not happen very often and depended on your staff setup the player does also heal fast, but it CAN happen and it CAN also happen that the player misses 2 trainings a season because of this.
Feel free to use different numbers, I did calculate with 20 real updates since ages and it works quite well. The real accomplished training is a bit higher, but I see that as a bonus. For long term planning, it’s not really relevant, because I wanted to know how far my 20 year old player will go in 10 seasons and when he does exceed this after 10 seasons, I will not complain. But when he was 20 it did show me, whether he will be a player reaching an average of 35 in all skills or 40 and it will also show me how he will train compared to my other players, based on the same formula.

Long term calculation
But how to do that long term calculation?
You have the long term CP already, so the training value per u p d a t e can also be calculated.
The AC is a huge factor in this and the manual does offer the AC-Formular with being 1 for all positions without a coach and longterm-CP-40 for all others.
So as examples:
worst best
<=50 1 1
51 2,075 13,55
55 5,375 17,75
60 9,5 23
70 17,75 33,5
80 26 44
90 34,25 54,5
99 41,675 63,95

You can see, how big the differences can be.

Now the possible skill points per u p d a t e can be calculated and you have to remember that you can only train a fraction of the total value at non-physicals and the rest goes to physicals.
There is another random value between 25 and 40 in this training, which I suggest to ignore again for long term calculations, substituting it with a value in the middle which is 32 or 33. I did take 33.
For each player now has to be calculated INDIVIDUALLY (because of TW):
(33 + TW + AC-CP-Formular ) / 2 /100
That has already with that setup based on EXP and TW on a wide possible range a lot of values.
But as examples: (Worst lowest EXP, best highest EXP)

no AC with TW = 1
worst best
0,175 0,175

no AC with TW = 50
worst best
0,42 0,42

Best AC with TW = 1
worst best
0,378375 0,48975

Best AC with TW = 50
worst best
0,623375 0,73475

As you can see, TW does have a great influence, as does the AC and the EXP.
For long term calculation you should now take your value per u p d a t e and multiply it with the amount of updates per season (that was 20 updates for me) and multiply that with the amount of seasons the guy can have.
I do calculate always up to the season he turns 30, because with 31 he might retire. But Chances are good the player plays longer.

Now you have a life time skill value amount you can put on his current values (and don’t forget to add the remaining updates of the current season) and you can see, how high he can be trained as base value.

But that’s not the last step!

scale on facility impact
You can now multiply the lifetime skill value with a factor between 1,0 and 1,21, based on your facility setup and training plan. A value of 1,0 would mean no bonus from facilities and would be very conservative, a value of 1,21 would be the best you could get, if you only train him in skills which are supported by 2 facilities and getting that 21% bonus every update, every season, which is unrealistic.

My personal factor is a bit lower than 1,1, because sometime you can’t get the 10% on every training for all trained skills.

That’s it. If you do that on an excel sheet you can use that for your roster and for the draft prospects, even for free agents. By that you can actually see, whether that 21 year old draft player is worse than the 20 year old one you prefer because of age. It might be that over time the 21 year old not only gets better, he might even get there faster.

And at last we have the age factor. Older players will need more PC training, which will also lower the progress on the other skills. But that is really a minor factor and I did decide to ignore that for long term planning. The old guys are usually almost capped anyway, so it doesn’t matter that much at that point. That’s why I left that out of the calculation.

Training on certain formation:
If you want to speed up your training on some positions which do need many A- und B-skills one possibility is to ignore some skills and focus on certain roles and from there forward on certain formations.
TE: They do block and catch.
FB: The do block and rush

If you focus on one of the needed skills and ignore the other one, you get some limits, but maybe also a better player ON that role.

Blocking TE:
Almost every formation does include a TE, but if you focus on a blocking TE, you do restrict yourself on those formations for rushing and passing has to happen out of the WR only Formations.

Rushing:
Flexbone (RB, FB, WR)
Wishbone (RB, FB, WR)
Shotgun 4WR (FB, WR)
Singleback Spread (RB, WR)
Big I (TE, RB, FB, WR)
I-Formation (TE, RB, FB, WR)
Pro Set (TE, RB, WR)
Goalline O (TE, FB, WR)
Shotgun 2WR (TE, FB, WR)
Singleback Big (TE, RB, WR)

Passing:
Flexbone (RB, FB, WR)
Wishbone (RB, FB, WR)
Shotgun 4WR (FB, WR)
Singleback Spread (RB, WR)

That will give only 4 formations which can be used on both options and those don’t use any TE at all.

Catching TE:
A catching TE is used on passing situations, but you can’t use him in blocking situations. So basically a WR.
So all TE using formations can’t be used for rushing. On the other hand can all formations be used for passing.

Rushing:
Flexbone (RB, FB, WR)
Wishbone (RB, FB, WR)
Shotgun 4WR (FB, WR)
Singleback Spread (RB, WR)

Passing:
Flexbone (RB, FB, WR)
Wishbone (RB, FB, WR)
Shotgun 4WR (FB, WR)
Singleback Spread (RB, WR)
Big I (TE, RB, FB, WR)
I-Formation (TE, RB, FB, WR)
Pro Set (TE, RB, WR)
Goalline O (TE, FB, WR)
Shotgun 2WR (TE, FB, WR)
Singleback Big (TE, RB, WR)

And the end you come up with the same formations for rushing AND passing, again, they don’t use a TE at all.

Blocking FB:
Many formations do use the FB only as blocking Back. This can be a bit confusing, because the back might work as a lead blocker on rushing plays also can work as pass blocker on pass plays. If you focus on those you have a smaller selection of formations to choose from. You can use all formations for rushing and passing, but if you do like the extra blocker in pass situations, avoid the formations without a FB.

Pro Set (TE, RB, WR)
Singleback Spread (RB, WR)
Big I (TE, RB, FB, WR)
I-Formation (TE, RB, FB, WR)
Flexbone (RB, FB, WR)
Wishbone (RB, FB, WR)
Singleback Big (TE, RB, WR)

Rushing FB:
There are not many formations for a rushing FB and you have to keep in mind that this guy can block, so in pass plays you should eventually avoid formations with FB.

Rushing:
Goalline O (TE, FB, WR)
Shotgun 2WR (TE, FB, WR)
Shotgun 4WR (FB, WR)

Passing:
Pro Set (TE, RB, WR)
Singleback Spread (RB, WR)

There is no formation for both play types.

Overall it looks like a limitation, if you decide to not train one of the A-skills of a TE or FB, but there might be some tactical issues which do help to give this a second thought. Beside the training bonus there is not only also the recruiting issue (you might find easier fitting players) but also a surprising element if you try a play NOT designed for such formations and roster setups.

I hope you got some inspiration for your training setups and strategies.

Kommentare bitte hier / Comments please here

Chapter 05 - Manage your coaches and coaching
Version 1.0 - 11.04.2016

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.
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. 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 ONE AC with the same CP configuration and shift all players on that position.
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 that ONE AC based on his supporting skills (see later in that chapter). A DL AC would be a good one, or a LB 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 the first step in your coaching strategy 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 do 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 don’t 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.
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.
That way it can be wise to have a HC a few CPs points higher than the 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 cause 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:

QB: STR, SPE, AGI, PAS, VIS, POS, CAR
WR: STR, SPE, AGI, CAT, VIS, POS, CAR
RB: STR, SPE, AGI, CAR, VIS, POS
FB: STR, SPE, AGI, CAR, VIS, POS, BLO
TE: STR, SPE, AGI, CAT, VIS, POS, BLO
OL: STR, AGI, FOO, VIS, POS, BLO
DL: STR, SPE, AGI, TAC, VIS, POS, FOO
LB: STR, SPE, AGI, TAC, VIS, POS, CAT
CB: STR, SPE, AGI, TAC, VIS, POS
SF: STR, SPE, AGI, TAC, VIS, POS, CAT
ST: STR, K, P
(I never tested SPE, VIS, POS, TAC, CAR 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.

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 higher 10 low level ACs (<=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, 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 and it's quite unlikely a high talent player will reach his talent cap on all A- and B-skills.

All I need is money:
It's similar to the first option, only you hire not only 10 cheap ACs (CP =90, CP = 90), 1 big time AC (CP >= 90, 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.
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.
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 progress in tea-strength each season, until you start losing the 1st few better players, which could happen after 8-10 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 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)

worst best
0 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.
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 expierence.

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Chapter 06 - Built and use Facilities
Version 1.0 - 15.04.2016

The facilities will help you to get training bonuses.
You have to buy / built them and once they are available, you have to activate them to be a part of the training calculation.
You can only have two facilities active at the same time, so choose wisely, since you want the best effect for your players, right?
Build and activated facilities will cost you 100% of the maintenance costs per update, deactivated facilities only 75%.
Still, calculate costs and time for your facilities, depended on your training plans, it might be a clever choice to even demolish a once used facility to avoid maintenance cost.
Normally you will find a few combinations you like the most and will keep them and use them.
There are managers who even only have two facilities built at all, and of cause they are active all the time. Others do have several built and do switch from time to time their training to get the most out of their training.

It takes 7 days to build a facility, keep that in mind, while looking for the best training plans long term.

Skill-View:
Here is a view on the skills and which facility will help you here:

Physical Skills:
SPE: Wind tunnel
STR: Weight room and Wind tunnel
PC: Mountain and Swimming pool
AGI: Wind tunnel

Other Skills:
TAC: Weight room and Red Zone practice area
CAR: Mountain
BLO: Weight room and Power Sled
PAS: Target centre
CAT: Target centre and Deep Ball Field
PUN: Kicking centre
KIC: Kicking centre
VIS: Video room and Target centre (only for QB)
POS: Video room and Red Zone practice area
FOO: Power Sled

Other Parameters:
MOR: Players lounge and Swimming pool
TC: Players lounge
INT: CAN'T BE TRAINED!
TW: CAN'T BE TRAINED!

There are several viewing points to approach the best combinations and I will try to tackle them the best way:

The best bonus per skill:
If you did read the manual, the facilities do not ADD bonus if both active facilities do support the same skill, they do MULTIPLY it.
That means a regular training with a facility and a supported skill does give you 10% bonus on that skills (Training value * 1,1). For example if you do kicking training and do have a kicking centre active, you get 10% on whatever training your get on that skill on top, regardless of the position the player is on your roster.
Now if you do train a skill which is supported by more facilities, like STR for example, and do have both facilities active, you get 21% (training value * 1,1 * 1,1) on top, which is a nice boost on that skill.
Of cause there is a catch in this.
Assuming you do so, the facilities do only support a small number of skills and all other trained skills which are not supported on that day don’t get any bonus at all.
Let’s look at the STR example and get a bit of details.
STR is supported by Weight room and Wind tunnel. The Weight Room does support also TAC and BLO, the Wind Tunnel does support SPE and AGI on top. Now your main goal is to train STR with the 21% bonus and you will also very likely train it to 90% intensity. But there is 10% of training left for non-physical training. If you look in the supported skills it is clear to get the most out of it, all defenders will need to train TAC and all offense players should do BLO.
But QBs don’t need BLO, also not the RBs, not the WR. So that’s a few players with no BLO and TAC training, doing which ever training is needed without a bonus.
There are also youth academy players, which might not even have a hint for their future career path. Should you train them TAC, BLO or something else? Which might be more useful?
And in a mature roster, STR might not be really needed for most of the players, but very useful for the youth academy players, so you might switch in that case for almost every senior team member to AGI or a few might still need SPE training, maybe with a different intensity, maybe 10% only on physicals and suddenly the TAC and BLO training gets very important.
That’s the scenario with every of those double trainable skill combinations.
Possible skills for this approach are:

Physical Skills:
STR: Weight room and Wind tunnel
PC: Mountain and Swimming pool

Other Skills:
TAC: Weight room and Red Zone practice area
BLO: Weight room and Power Sled
CAT: Target center and Deep Ball Field
VIS: Video room and Target centre (only for QB)
POS: Video room and Red Zone practice area

That’s quite a lot.
But what are the resulting training configurations for all supported skills then?
Weight room and Wind tunnel: STR with 21% and SPE, AGI, TAC and BLO with 10% each
Mountain and Swimming pool: PC with 21% and CAR and MOR with 10% each
Weight room and Red Zone practice area: TAC with 21% and STR, BLO and POS with 10% each
Weight room and Power Sled: BLO with 21% and STR, TAC and FOO with 10% each
Target Centre and Deep Ball Field: CAT with 21% and PAS and VIS (only for QBs) with 10% each
Video Room and Target Centre (only for QB): VIS with 21% (only for QB!) and VIS, POS, CAT and PAS with 10% each
Video Room and Red Zone practice area. POS with 21% and VIS and TAC with 10% each

Most players benefit:
Having this, it will help to put a different view on the facilities. Maybe it makes sense to optimize the training based on how many players do profit from a bonus at every single u p d a t e the most.
As an example I take that combination Video room and Target centre, which will give your QB a nice bonus on VIS training, but the rest of your entire squad has to settle with 10% bonus on VIS, POS, CAT or PAS (which doesn’t make sense at all, because your QBs do train VIS already). With 3 QBs maybe on the roster and a maxed out 70 people roster overall and a maxed out youth academy at 22 prospects there, 89 players will have to settle with a 10% bonus at most, even worse if they have to train some other skills, especially the physicals which are normally the focus on the youth players.
So maybe that’s not a good combination.
But which is?
For that you first have to group your players on numbers and skills.

Physical Skills:
SPE and STR: mostly needed for Youth Academy players between age of 16 and 19. That can be 16 to 22 players per update. You might have a few senior players which do also need training on that skill, normally draftees, 2 to 6 players are possible.
PC: used by all, mainly by the league depth chart, which are up to 55 players per update.
AGI: used by all, mainly by the 20 year old youth academy players and almost all senior players, minus the oldest once, which usually do have either capped AGI values or stopped training the skill because of wage and talent issues, 55 to 65 players per update.

Other Skills:
TAC: All defense players and the Gunner if you like to, so half of the roster 30 to 40 players, plus eventually a few 20 year old youth players.
CAR: All RBs and FBs, 3 to 8 players, play eventually sometimes a youth player at age of 20.
BLO: All OLs, TEs and FB, which are 12 to 18 players, plus a few youth players at age of 20.
PAS: Only QBs, which are 2 to 3 playing, eventually a youth player at 20.
CAT: This is mainly for WRs, TE and RBs, summed up of about 10 to 15 players, plus a few youth player at age of 20.
PUN: Normally only the P, if you play a P/K Hybrid, that guy needs it. Overall this shouldn’t be more than 2 to 3 players on the whole roster.
KIC: Normally only the K, if you play a P/K Hybrid, that guy needs it. Overall this shouldn’t be more than 2 to 3 players on the whole roster.
VIS: Normally an A-Skill for all defense and QB and P/K, a B-Skill for offense, which makes this a skill useful for at least half the roster, depended on your take on B-Skills even the full roster does need this. This includes the youth players.
POS: Normally an A-Skill for all offense except QB, a B-Skill for defense, QB and P/K, which makes this a skill useful for at least half the roster, depended on your take on B-Skills even the full roster does need this. This includes the youth players.
FOO: Normally useful for all liners, eventually also for all positions with huge tackling impact. Depended on your take on that skill, around 15 to 25 players need this for sure, eventually almost the entire roster at least as C-skill.

If you now take a look on that numbers it’s clear that some skills don’t make sense to be the focal point in training, since it will take away many bonus training progress on the rest of your team.

Sorted by pure impact it would look like this (a bit clustered):
Almost all players benefit:
PC, AGI

More than 30 players benefit:
TAC, VIS, POS

More than 10 players benefit:
SPE, STR, CAT, BLO, FOO

Less than 10 players benefit:
CAR, PAS, PUN, KIC,

If you value B-Skills a bit higher, VIS and POS will be in the Almost-All-Players cluster also.

That makes the most wanted facilities from that point of view:
Mountain and Swimming pool (PC), Wind tunnel (AGI).
If B-Skills important: Video room (VIS and POS) and Red Zone practice area (POS). Target centre is only for QB for VIS, which are not many players.

Next in line would be:
Weight room and Red Zone practice area (TAC) and the B-Skills facilities for VIS and POS for sure on that level. Target centre is only for QB for VIS, which are not many players.

As third level it would be:
Wind tunnel (STR, SPE), Weight room (STR, BLO), Power Sled (BLO, FOO) and Target Centre and Deep Ball Field (CAT)

As rest there are:
Mountain (CAR), Target Centre (PAS), Kicking Centre (PUN, KIC)

And now you can think about which are worth the effort of building and maintaining in relation to the regular training and the switching on the different skills. Because you don’t train VIS all the time, you don’t train POS all the time.
You do switch between several skills. For example for a LB you might train him AGI, TAC, VIS and POS regularly, with a ratio of AGI 10 of 10 times with an intensity of 10%, TAC 4 out of 10, VIS 4 out of 10 and POS 2 out of 10, all of them with 90% intensity.
That means you need to switch the facilities regularly and you need to coordinate that training with all other players on the roster.

The financial view:
That brings me to another view on the facilities, the financial one.
Each does cost for building the facility, which is compared to the income and as one time cost not too much. But each does also cost for maintenance and over the season this can become a million dollar expense. So having ALL facilities doesn’t make sense, if you don’t use them regularly.
That’s the reason, why many managers do optimize their facility setup based on bonus optimization and least maintenance costs, reducing the amount of build facilities down to 2 to 4 facilities as maximum.
It doesn’t make sense to have a look on the cost in detail, because if you start training your players based on the maintenance costs of the facility and their supported skills, you will end up with a quite strange roster. Feel free to do so, but that path is a weird one, be assured.
But what makes totally sense is, to reduce the amount of facilities to a minimum while training the most of your players on the most needed skills.
To decide which will help you the most is on one hand easy, based on the number above, but on the other hand it’s hard, because there are several other factors which do influence the desired training on each individual player.
His max skill values is one because of upcoming contract talks, his lack of a specific skill as B-skill, which has to catch up a bit to have a better all-around player might be another. A certain amount of already skill capped players who only need B-skill or even C-skills training, while the rest of cause still needs the full training can switch priorities. Or just the simple need to increase the physical skills as fast as possible in the youth academy to sort out the bad apples as fast as possible can make the priorities different.
To have a complete view, which combination does help you the most, you would need to have a tool which does show you the best combination for every desired skill, based on your current roster size and the amount of players in each position and their actual skill values. That’s possible, but a lot of work for initial setup and a lot of work on managing the facility and training setup.
Some managers do not see the huge benefit on that approach and take a more laid back approach, do have only two essential facilities and do change their training as needed for the individual player, ignoring training blocks and do except a smaller training progress overall in gain of less stress.

A word regarding the other parameters and PC training:
MOR is supported by 2 facilities (Players lounge and Swimming pool) and that can be a major bonus or a waste of money.
MOR does rise automatically by wins and decreases by losses (10 to 12% each plus or minus) so as long as you win you don’t need a moral boost and if you lose you can get better in that area by the two facilities but do also suffer on training, because you don’t get a bonus on most of the trained skills.
These facilities can be very helpful after a loss and before a very important game, like playoffs or divisional rivals, so don’t forget about them. Some managers do ignore the facilities because they just don’t need them often enough and have in case of MOR boost a better staff and live with a small gap to 100% in that case.

TC is boosted by the Players lounge and that might also be a big help if you need to integrate a new player quickly, but normally you don’t have many players to integrate, unless you are a transfer market manager. TC does come automatically by each regular season game and income relevant friendlies, so if you can wait a bit longer on a 100% TC value you can just let that new player play in some friendlies and in very-sure-win-Supercup-games and you don’t need the facility at all.
PC is supported by the Mountain and Swimming pool and the reason why I bring the skill up is that a good planning and a deeper bench can save you the need for such boosting facilities on PC. It’s easy to keep players on a level of 90 to 100% in PC if you train them without the facility a few times a season. As new manager with an initial roster the priority might be totally different and one or both facilities will speed up the process a lot. It’s a decision which has to be made and for sure you need the manager status where you can build a facility and you also need the spare money.
My personal take on that skill is to avoid it, but it’s up to you.

Whatever your approach might be, be aware that the facilities are buildings which can help you big time and will increase your training progress dramatically.

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