I haven’t talked about it in my previous post about player but another very important aspect of the game is to make sure that your player play at the best position available and that the coach show them the right tactic.

How to make you line composition efficient? The basic way to do it is too simply put the best player on the first line, the good but not good enough for the first line on the second and same thing for the third and fourth line.

You can leave the fourth lines empty if you not planning on using the fourth line.

Note that your player will be more fatigue if they always play 3 line. You can check Sam Hansen post on the subject of using 3 lines instead of 4 at succeed2k.

How to choose the right player for the right position, goaltender have their own unique goaltending attribute so you no1 goaltender should probably be the one with the highest value in goaltending (Duh!), but remember to train technique and passing to make your goaltender a better goaltender overall than one with 500 in goaltending and 10 in passing/technique.

For defenseman, it easy it’s their defense skill that important and their passing and technique afterward. For your forward it depend on their position, they all need high offense but center must have a high passing and technique while winger need to have a high aggression and technique. Don’t forget to train you player accordingly to and take account the quality of the skill too like we talked in the previous article. A good example of that is a player with the following stat (25(10)pas., 20(50)tec. and 5(88) agr.) is a good center at the time because of his current skill but with time it will become a better winger since he will train much faster in aggression than passing).

Side note if you have the pro-pack you can create different set of line, one for game you know are easy, one for big games and one for friend game.

I personally tend to keep the same line-up whatever the game but, when you are playing a team you are sure to win maybe it’s a good idea to put your rookie and bench some veteran. It will reduce energy lost on your main player and will build chemistry and experience on your youngster.

These are mostly beginners tips, if you want more advance tips on line check out another post by Sam from suceed2k on line

Related :

My article on the players

Succeed2k post on line

Succeed2k post on 3 lines vs 4

The arena it’s where everything come down to, if your team win and have decent players you arena will be full. And the more place in the arena the more tickets you can sold Ka-Ching $!

Include some snack bar and souvenir shops to increase the profit.

Be sure you can fill your arena because the arena come with a cost of maintenance that increase has you build more places and get a better Zamboni^tm.

Don’t forget to upgrade your facilities has well, a good training center will help player progress faster in their training, while the sport academy will help you get better recruits every week.

The takeaway point here is to always be upgrading your arena and facilities but always keep so cash at hand for your player and staff salaries. You don’t want to go in the red because if you do you have 21 days to fix the team finance or you lose the team.

You start with no staff at all but don’t worry, it’s probably better that way. Staff cost a lot of money and their salaries go up pretty quickly too. So I wouldn’t recommend going to the market either since the market is flooded with applicant and a staff member with a 100 attribute cost a whopping sometime 90-100k.

Instead check out the weekly applicant that come to the arena for a job, they are usually not as good than the one on the market (sometime their stats are mostly garbage) but they don’t cost the premium of staff on the market. You can train him in order to become better.

The staff member effectiveness is increased via your installation so incompetent lecturer with good installation may be the same has a good (but pricey) lecturer in bad installation. Since installation cost less and can always be downgrade for money, focus on the installation before the staff.

After 6-7 season our employees will skill will have greatly increased and so is their salary.

The salary seems to increase with the year in your organization and the number of points in each attribute. (I’m not sure but double check the forum) Note that has the attributes grow so grow the salary exponentially meaning that a staffer with a  high attribute and a low one (let say 100/0) will cost sometime 10 time the cost of a staffer with balanced attribute (like 50/50)

you can see in this image a coach with 30 point less cost 3 times less too.

The takeaway point here is focus on recruiting cheap staff and train both attribute equally. Has your team grows and the money come in you will be able to pays those big salaries later.

The player you start with are pretty bad, but they’re a good thing they got pretty bad salaries too. You might be tempted to go on the market and blow you money on 2 or 3 super star, but that completely useless since you don’t have decent player to complement them and a the arena to hold the thousand of fan to see them play.

before :

After :

Ok so what should you look for in you player ? You should check the quality of the attribute not the attribute itself. The quality of the attribute is the innate ability of the player to progress that attribute, the bigger the value the more responsive the player will be to training.

The takeaway point here is :

Quality of the attribute = good progress of the value of the attribute when you train.

Value of the attribute = good performance in game

Note that each position have there main attribute and their secondary one that depends on the position, they are all in the guide so go check the guide.

Now that you looked at you player, you should keep them for now. Once you start recruiting decent player in the academy you can get rid of bad one (by terminating their contract, not renewing it or placing it on the market).

If you want to recruit on the market that the subject of a whole other post but keep this in mind for now :

1- you are not making any money, start focusing on upgrading your arena first (more about this in a next post)

2- be careful the market is oversaturated with player that are not well balanced but have a big salary because of their over inflated overall

3- you need to wait 11 days (have 11 points to be a novice manager) to be able to bids on players.

4- do not exceed 40 players there a penalty for having too many player and you need the extra money now.

OK, Ok guys! I’m going to write a quick guide on ppm because I made the mistake of not reading the guide when I started and now my team finance is a mess. If you’re like me the first thing you did when you started playing it goes look at your players and go around the interface a bit. So before going anywhere read the official ppm guide here, it contains all the basic you need to know about the game.

I don’t know why but I had a hard time finding where the guide was, I was easier to find it via google go figure.

Note take time to read the faq and rules just to be sure you won’t make the mistake of naming your team an inappropriate name or trolling the forum.

I promise guys, that’s the last time I’ll use that image

You start with no staff, a few player (enough for 3-4 line) and a very small arena.

Don’t worry Rome wasn’t build in a day and so is your team of super stars.

In the next coming part of the guide, we will talk about the three cornerstones of your team:  your players, your staff and your arena

Most say that they’re not more important that one or another, the player need the staff and the arena to train, take care of injury and play, the staff need the arena infrastructure to do its work and the arena need the staff to be taken care of, finally these player wills bring the crowds, glory and cash that goes with it to pays all this nice mix.

Part 2: Players

Part 3: Staff

Part 4: Arena

You guys know I like good hockey manager game, I’ve already talked about Cyberpuck and Senior Hockey League.

I’ve been playing for a while another hockey manager called power play manager. It’s probably one the best hockey manager that don’t use real player (NHL) out there.

Powerplay Manager puts you in charge of your very own hockey team, not only as General Manager, but as Coach, assistant coach and president all wrapped into a single user-account. Your goal; to battle it out in leagues against other people just like you to gain promotion to high leagues, more rewards and better team growth.

What I really liked about this game is that you have to manage and build your teams infrastructure, including arena, staff and economic stability and train your team and work to win your local league, where you play against other users just like you. Most game (like cyberpuck and shl) tend to focus on the train your team and win game part but Powerplay hockey manager really shine in the way you can customize (if you have the money) your arena the way you want, recruit staff, build better infrastructure to increase the training of your team and staff. You can even customize your team shirt, puck if you pay for the pro pack.

I’m not very good at the game, the fact that it’s yet another game I have to login everyday unfortunately drive me off it. I try to login and play from time to time not to lose the team (after 30 day they cancel your team). I’ll try to come up with some guide, meanwhile you can access the one they made in game it’s give you the basic.

It been awhile since I haven’t wrote a blog post and they’re actually good reason for that. It actually because I recently joined a game company has a programmer lasts august, note that it’s not koram by the way but I still like what they do and love TKO and CoK.

I still waiting for legal approval to see if I can still write here, however I might be a little biased now that in a game company but since they do mostly console it should be safe.  I just want to say I’m still surprised that there still a lot of regular visitor that come each days even If I haven’t updated for a while.

There the other thing that I kind of regret the name of the blog, I should have try something less generic or more three kingdom or mmo rts specific, I’ll try to find something cooler and easy to remember,

What I’ve been playing a lot of new game recently, there a lot of web and social game that I want to reviews.

A good load of them are on Facebook but other are an unique niche (web hockey) that I wanted to build a similar game like them but now I can’t because of legal engagement so that great for you, you get to read my analysis.

Here the list of web game I played recently (note I play console and pc game too but that not for here)

Facebook

CivWorld: I like the idea they did but it feel too much like a farmville with boring minigame.

(actually it mabrute.fr but the english version is mybrute) you send you brute to fight other brute, you can recruit other poeple and gain xp from them. the fighting, specially against your friend but got bored pretty quickly after that

A my brute clone made by Koram with boost and stuff you can buy.

I was a sim fan and my wife too when I was younger so we joined and played together. My wife actually got bored first.

Cafe World (zynga) & Restaurant City (playfish) : I had a idea for a restaurant game, basically wanted to check what the big name did for that and well I’ve haven’t work on it since then.

Aviator and Airport city: I wanted to check if there something like Koei areobiz airport city somewhat have some similar feature that aerobiz used to have but it’s not has compelling.

Garden of time: Puzzle game not much to say.

Not a web game but a online one, I like the concept of collecting the monster like Magic the gathering.

Played via a applet or you can download the client, play various puzzle to build your pirate hideout, boat, get a familiar.

Web hockey/simulator : there a lot of them and will probably go on a next post for the description but here the main one: (click on the image for the game and my referral, even if most referral are useless since I only get a bonus if you spend money on the game.)  

Old hockey simulator from back in the days were all game were made with php, they didn’t changed it at all. I used to like it but once your in the top league if you don’t pay money your doom. (weird that remind me of some other games…)

Cyberpuck is a hockey web simulator where you get to create the player instead of owning a team. It a interesting approach, you can buy stuff and own a team instead. I shamelessly plugged my referral link there, I won’t make any money though just some useless cyberpoints.

Power play manager the last one I tried is probably the best so far, you get to recruit not only the player but the staff too and you own the arena.

I Keep posting don’t worry, but it should be not more that 1-2 time week.

If you have any suggestion of game to try feel free to post it in the comment.