Making a Legend

There are lots of ways to play Hattrick. You can win your league and move up on the league ladder, you can discover greatness in the Youth System, you can focus on winning the your nations Cup, or you could create a Legendary Player. The making of a Legendary Hattrick Player can turn your team into a trash dump in the lower divisions, or done properly you can survive and excel in the other aspects of Hattrick. My aim is to suggest a path where a Legend is made whilst your competitive team stays intact.

The very first question you want to answer is: “What kind of Legendary Player do I want to make?” and the follow up question, “Can I commit myself to 10+ seasons of training this player?” Because, honestly speaking, time invested + persistence is all it really takes to make a Legend. Investigate the best performing players at the position you want your Legend to rule. FTW? GK? WTM? OIM? DIM? What are the primary and secondary skills your player will need?

Let’s take the OIM (offensive inner midfielder) position for example. The primary skill for an offensive Inner Midfielder is Playmaking (PM) and lots of it. The secondary skill is Passing (PA) and again plenty of passing. It’s the passing that makes the IM more than useful to the NT, but a necessity to the NT.

Look up your players contributions here:
(http://wiki.hattrick.org/wiki/Hattrick_-_Skill_positions)

For an OIM:

+ side def 10.2% of his Defense (Def)
+ cen def 21.6% of his Def
+ midfield 94.4% of his Playmaking (PM)
+ side attack 21.4% of his passing (PA)
+ central attack 48.3% of his passing

Really there are only three useful markers for an IMo: PM, PA, and Def in that order. So we know what skills we need, but how much of each and in what ratios? Here is where your work is laid out. For IMo the main skill, Playmaking, has to be quite large, while for a FTW or a WTM player the main skill and secondary skills are much closer together. So we’ll set a reasonably high main skill of Magical. The best way to gauge what your players main skill maximum is or should be is to evaluate the current NT players and shoot for that. Feel free to ask on the forums or the NT coach in the off season.

Using my favorite training speed tool (feel free to use one of your own instead):
(http://ht-box.ru/training.php)

I can find out that a 17.0 solid PM player trained in Playmaking from the start can be magical at 23yrs, amazing! That’s it right? That’s it if you want your team to be the laughing stock of Div VI where a single player consists of 50%+ of the teams wages. There are quite a few other things to consider and we’ll go through them one at a time.

First up is the specialty on your player. Each position in hattrick has a specialty that is more useful than the others or no specialty at all. Ask around for the opinions of your NT coaching team, but generally head and quick are useful everywhere, while technical, powerful, and unpredictable are only occasionally useful. In the case of an OIM head, quick and technical would all be decent choices. Make sure your Legendary Player has the specialty that the position needs or else he won’t be legendary.

Second, a naked (no secondary skills) magical playmaker is interesting, but not that useful as an offensive IM. The wages of a Magical PM are around 150K per week and that will bankrupt your team before your legend ever plays regularly in the NT arena. So let’s map out a path that is somewhat more reasonable for your team.

The first thing to notice about training plans is that there is a lot of variation. Inevitably someone will post a training plan that differs from the one I’m about to lay out and say “It’s better because….”. Not to worry, everyone has an opinion and that’s fine. The trick is, you need a plan and one that allows your team to not only survive, but to flourish while enjoying your legendary player. The number one reason teams have to sell these kind of players is wages. Either the wages will bankrupt a team because the team is permanently stuck in the lower divisions or the manager of the team sells the legendary player in order to free up wages to be more competitive in league or cup play. Understand that the main cost of owning a legend is the legends salary.

With the knowledge of salary in hand we turn to the actual training schedule. Recently the game has been modified to reduce a players skill not only based on that players age, but also based on a players skill level. What this means is that every week a player has a high skill level that player loses some of it to attrition. To create a legend we want to minimize the amount of skill lost to attrition, which means leaving the training of the players highest skill levels until later in the players lifespan. This has the bonus side effect of not burdening or killing your team with salary until later when wage decrease due to age takes place. Skill loss based only on skill level begins after titanic (15) and becomes a serious problem somewhere around mythical (17). The obvious training schedule is to train main skill to titanic or extra-terrestrial (16) and then to round out the players secondary skills as appropriate, finally returning to main skill training for the final push. This is optimal training.

As an example, with our OIM player we train our prospect (with perhaps head specialty) from age 17.0 (17 years and zero days) to Titanic (~20.50). Then we focus on secondary skills until coming back to main skill training for the duration. This can be the tricky part. What levels of secondary skill do you train before you return to complete your players main skill training. Older players are slower to train and a players skill begins to decrease at age 27. I like to work backward from age 27, with our example player I want him to have Magical PM skill at age 27 and then to continue training PM for the rest of his life span. Using the training speed tool I find that if I start training a player from titanic to magical and I wanted him to be Magical at 27 I would have to start training PM at 24y.21d. This leaves us the time between 20y.50d and 24y.21d to train secondary skills.

Training secondary skills is where the fun begins. Training speeds below formidable have been increased and there is a lot you can do with your player. The main thought is to get all useful skills up to the range between solid and formidable and then the B skill as high as possible before the switch back to A skill training. Looking at our IMo player the A skill is PM, the B skill is Passing (PA) and the C skill is DF. If we started with a player 17.0 with head, solid PM, inadequate passing, and weak defense. How could be train him up to be a Legend? First we could train PM to titanic and he would be 20y 50d with a wage of around 40-45k/wk then we could raise either his defending or passing. Let’s raise defending to solid. This would take about one season of training and he would be 21.21 with solid defending. Now lets see how far we can raise his passing before we go back to PM training. We could get supernatural passing before his age hit 24y21d . The it’s back to training PM until he’s the best in the business. Your legendary player would be ready at age 27 with PM-Magical, Passing-Supernatural, and solid defending. ~28 Utopian-PM, ~30 Divine-PM

The final problem I have left for last. How do you keep your team competitive while also training a legendary player? First know your priorities, Legend first, team second, then know your training schedule PM->titanic, DF->solid, Passing->Age 24y.21d, PM->”the moon”. With this training schedule you know that you will need to build a cash cushion for the period when your legend is costing you major wages of 100k+/wk This will happen for the seasons where his age is 26-29 after age 29 your player should be on the NT and getting a wage discount as well as his wage dropping due to age. I like to have 100k/wk*16wks on hand or about 1.6m per season which is a cash cushion of around 4.5-5.0M. This cash can be generated by training PM on players along with your Legend and then selling them at a profit. Training PM can also create very competitive squads.

***note of the editors: above article was written before the wage reduction was announced

Escrito por kensail (4578140) a 03-07-2011.