Tactic is probably the most confusing thing in powerplay manager.

There so many things to set up that I need to split this in two  post to cover each section.

Today we focus on the 4 first point: Game importance / Style of play / Power plays / Penalty killing

Game importance

The importance you give to each game will have a direct impact on the energy level of your player. If you play very high most of your game your player will lack the energy to perform during the playoff.

Here a table that shows how much you lose energy when playing a game:

This can change a lot depending on your situation, you have a team that have better average than most other team, might make sense to start at low or very low and adjust it mid season. You are one position of making the playoff, might be good to pump it up to high or very high to increase your chance of making the playoff. You against a team that you have ultimately no chance of winning, perhaps the best option is to drop everything to low to manage your player.

More info : http://www.succeed2k.com/ppm-hockey-articles/ppm-new-tactics-explained-dp1.html

Style of play

Some tactic depends on your team but universally each tactic is strong against another tactic and weak against a different tactic. This rock paper scissor kind of setup is called  “Ring of Counter-Tactics” and here what it should look like: Normal > Defensive > Offensive > Forechecking > Counterattacks > Breaking up > Normal

So if we do a table we have (first column beat  X) :

You can read more about it at : http://www.succeed2k.com/ppm-hockey-articles/tactics-countertactics.html

You can check the full analysis for this ring of tactic on this site.

Power plays / Penalty killing

This one is tricky, because I’ve still not found what the ring of counter for that one and that even if you’re using the counter if your player never played with that type of power play or penalty kill they won’t necessarily do well vs a team who well trained with that tactic.

First you want to at least get the % of your team on that to 33% in each or 100 % in one.

Why would you like to have them up to the same value ? so you can them switching depending on what the opponent is playing.

Note the following table is incomplete it’s mostly come from some player told me and my personal experience (My team is 100% for Shooting from the Point & Active box)

Power Play table :

Penalty kill table:

I will fill the table when I got more info. Sorry about that. I’ll try to track when I score in PP and when I get scored in PK to see is there a correlation.