2016-07-08 12:05

Chapter 06 - Built and use Facilities
Version 1.2.0 - 03.07.2018

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 course 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

Non-Physical 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 course 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

Non-Physical 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. But the need that training only initially, a few every season likely and after a few games played with a wide spread range. Not all need as much as the training does offer and as often as others on the roster.
AGI: used by all, mainly by the 19 to 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, 40 to 65 players per update.

Non-Physical 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 19 to 20 year old youth players.
CAR: All RBs and FBs, 3 to 8 players, play eventually sometimes a youth player at age of 19 to 20.
BLO: All OLs, TEs and FB, which are 12 to 18 players, plus a few youth players at age of 19 to 20.
PAS: Only QBs, which are 2 to 3 playing, eventually a youth player at 19 to 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 19 to 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 course 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 were common, now it depends largely on your team ranking and your opponents ranking, could be 1% to some high double digit gain or loss) 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. Especially if you like to use the match of the year often per season (MOTY can only be used once in Supercup and League, but each time you will take a huge PC hit and the facility will help to overcome that faster) this facilities can be useful for you.

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

forward to Chapter 07 - Roster Management over the seasons
back to Chapter 05 - Manage your coaches and Coaching

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