well darn, Vince. We woulda loved to have you with us.

We had our first training bump...a newly bought winger prospect

Aroldo Crotti from solid to excellent wing

Nice work, deacon! My goalie popped to excellent this past week too on the second team.

Really looking forward to this season to see how my first team does in the new IV. It's rated right now the 57 of 64 and according to the ELO stat I'm the best team in it.

I even switched out my old wretched leadership coach for a shiny new solid leadership coach just to make sure I have some good TS this season.

Lost to an ML team last season in round 7 or 8 of the cup and felt like I should have won it.

This season maybe!

Tell

Won my first game against the 2nd place team from last year.

My league started out as the 2 out of 256 series in V, so it is going to be a tough road. We dropped down to number 4 after this round of games.

It's always fun to get HTRF'd and lose your first home game of the season. It's doubly fun when you know it takes away pretty much any chance you have of winning the series

SI

What level do you sell your keepers at nowadays (when doing keeper training)? What's the sweet spot?

I am not sure, since I don't sell keepers.

But I would recommend capping them at about brilliant and then adding defense to make them much more valuable $$$ wise.

You may want to train defending first and keeper second. I am not up to-date on keeper training.

In other news, HT is down all day so I am not sure what I am going to do to pass the day.

Just bought a SN PM/SN winger to add to my attack. If all players are in good form, I may be able to put a divine attack on one side.

Still looking for an American born 19-21 TDF though.

Good luck with that. Those are darn expensive (TDFs)

I need to sell a 17.00 solid PM/inad pass (one of my best youth guys in quite a while) today but I may be out of luck :(

SI

Yea and they are rare, especially one that fits my criteria of American, SN+ PM, decent passing, and young enough where I can put some scoring on him.

Considering SN or Titanic just aren't that expensive wage-wise, why limit yourself to Americans? I don't really feel player wages until they hit ET.

It really limits your pool to draw from and saving $4K per week (20% on a $20K) wage is wiped out by the fact that you have to overpay for an American instead of shopping for the best deal.

SI

I could do that and I have looked into it. But I have a roster of all Americans (excluding my coach, who will be replaced at the end of the year most likely). I really didn't do it for the wage factor, more along of the lines that I just thought it was cool.

In other news, my V series is now ranked as the toughest V series in all of the US. I am not sure how HT does those rankings though.

I'm thinking of signing up for Platinum supporter to get some of the Hippos into the Hall of Fame quicker before I retire the team.

Any thoughts on what to do with a second team for a year? It's like an extra $10 a year so I would probably get that out of just tooling around with the second team alone. Any particularly interesting training ideas? Or how about countries or challenges to do?

SI

Still think it would be fun to have a division of just fofc teams.

Your second team can't be in the same country as the first, tho, right?

SI

Second team can be anywhere. It cannot be in the same SERIES as your first team, nor meet in any other official competition. So no Cup or qualification matches either.

Tell

An FOFC series would be fun. I'm a bit concerned that we'll just keep promoting out of there and it will just be bots but I could be open to it.

My other choice is to go grab a team in a small country. I've always wondered what it was like to be on the other side of flag chasing.

SI

I figure I'll decide this weekend at some point.

SI

We can do it another country. We would have to find a way to avoid autopromotion and have to through the qualifier, but I think it would be doable.

Still have the ability to do another team. How many teams are in the FOFC series in the USA and how many will actually still be down there in a couple of seasons?

SI

Just two, I think. Not sure who will still be in it going forward. My team is second season. Deacon's is in it's first season. We have one other team in the series as well who could probably win the series since I've not bothered to buy anyone other than two keeper trainees since inception.

Tell

I lost in round 10 in OT at home :(

I was really hoping to win and get that "advanced past round 10 in the cup" achievement

SI

I ended up creating a team in Angola, should someone need that flag. I'm going to try to get a bunch of the silly achievements (nice, nasty, honest, dishonest, veteran, youthful, etc) and see where I'm at.

Anyone know where to find nice and nasty squad members, for instance? There doesn't appear to be anything to search them in the transfer interface and I couldn't find any feds catering to that but maybe I just wasn't keying on the right words.

SI

There is a good chance that I will finish with enough points/GD to auto-promote, but not promote because I finished 2nd in the toughest V series.

Important win there, last weekend. I suppose you should believe in miracles and hope the series leader chokes on Sunday!

For the 3rd straight season since relegating, 2nd in III.5. Bummer yet again

SI

Leaning heavily on a 'magical' defense, anchored by our star player Gaylord Younger from the USA, we surprisingly struggled for a long time, still sitting in a relegation spot 3 games from the end. But Maassluis FC bounced back with a strong finish and even virtually ranked 2nd during the final round of games. It didn't last, so we finished the season in 3rd place, our highest finish in team history after three straight 6th place finishes in the VIth.

I was thinking about playing again and started poking around after I logged in to keep my zombie team active. I'm shocked at how expensive supporter is now. Close to $90/yr for the gold level which seems about equivalent to the package before they moved to the three tiers. That pretty much killed my interest

I still have a team there. Logging is once in a while not doing much.

My team has been in the race for a division championship in the VIth series this season, but a couple of 1-0 up late qualiser games have done us in and we're out of contention going into the last round.

I haven't looked since they bumped up the price. That said, I've been sputtering around, thinking about quitting and it sounds like when my supporter runs out is a good time to do it.

SI

I am auto-promoting from the 106th ranked series in V. I average 80 stars ( D-29, M- 35, A- 16). I play a regular 3-5-2 since I haven't cared enough to read-up on the current state of the game. My plan was to take my money on hand and see how far I could get before topping out or going broke.

What are my chances to stay-up in a IV series? I still have $71 million banked but the new finance stuff could really curtail my efforts, though I haven't really figured out what they entail.

I haven't read anywhere about the specifics of the new finance stuff but if you wanted to make a strong team then now is probably the time to go buying because it sounds like they're really going to clamp down on anything above $20M. I suspect it will be some sort of mechanism where your money goes into the bond system and only $1M per week or something like that can be released back into your standard money pool.

SI

Oh wow.

Just got my Mod and CHPP admin hats removed which is about right as I haven't done anything for Hattrick backstage activities for about 2 years. Thing is, this will remove me my free supporter platinum package. I am still logging in every once in a while to keep the team alive, but that's just about it.

That was nice while it lasted.

Ugh, lost in the first round of the cup. :(

Hippos plow on but Damian Edelmann did not have a single goal :( Each of the last 3 years, he's been a statistical freak, piling up huge goal totals in the first few weeks of the cup. He finished just outside the top 10 last season, first the year before that, and second the year before that. I realize there's some really odd luck involved there as I wasn't making particularly deep cup runs. But it always made for a fun early season story.

My Angola team is one-and-done. BTW, if anyone wants an Angola flag, let me know.

SI

Nice game I love it. Been here since 2008 or so and seems that this year finally I could push for a series VI champion.

It took awhile for my team to get to IV, but we are humming along now. We played the second best team in our series and beat them 4-2 at home while posting a 404 rating. This is with us pulling back at the end as well as not PIC'ing.

That was the third highest rating in all of US Division IV. The team I beat posted the 5th.

I am not sure if we will promote to III or not. I have a couple of upgrades I need to make but don't really have the money to do it.

We unofficially won our series yesterday. We are now up 4 points with one game to go and thus can't be caught.

We are above the auto-promotion line. We go into next week with a home match against the third place team. We have PIC'd the last two matches, so TOS is in great shape.

We will probably go for glory and MOTS that game and just try to auto-promote. It is a bit risky but I don't know what our chances would be like in a qualifier.

Yeah we got our auto-promotion to Vth Spanish division after an easy rout 3-0 playing MOTS against the 3rd qualified! Now is time to turn the corner on some veteran players and buy their replacement, how do you do that man? You are creating your own players from the academy? Or do you use step, or trading?

Well, we did it. We had a late flick-in in the 81st minute to send us through. We are going up to III.2. It will be a serious challenge to stay in that league. But we made it to III.

I was on an academy kick for awhile. I was training FTW and developed several good players. I kept a couple and shipped the rest off for profit.

Now I am training defensive midfielders. This season, we pretty much exclusively trained playmaking. Next season, it will likely be defending.

The key is to just always have some sort of long-term plan for your team and how you are going to finance it. The team I have now doesn't really have a chance of getting into II, so I will have to blow it up at some point and try again.

I am also not sure if I am seeing a worthwhile return for training DMs. While they make your team better, it seems difficult to make much money off of them because the talented prospects are expensive and they don't really sell for much more money down the road.

It sounds a really good strategy, I am going to train basic midfielders for a while, I am in the V.58 now and it´s a hell of a group.... I will be lucky if I resist here one year meanwhile trainning new midfielders and replace the forwards... :banghead::banghead::banghead:

My team is now officially owner-less. I haven't logged into hattrick for 7+ weeks.

Congratulations

yeah, the same

Still going strong here. Although I was late to the party compared to y'all.

Today my Maassluis FC pulled a miraculous victory in the 4th round of the national Cup (mind you, not one of those consolation cups), after beating a team 3 divisions higher. Next up is a 5th round clash against a team in Eredivisie. I think that's pretty awesome for a 6th tier club. :banana:

Congrats! Keep pushing! !

We bowed out, 2-0 loss at home, against their starting 11 (http://www93.hattrick.org/Club/Match...dReport=False). Oh well, it was fun while it lasted!