The game hits the store tomorrow and I thought I would give you all a bit of an overview of the team development system in season mode. It has not received a lot of coverage in the news so far, and is arguably a little different than what people might expect to be present in an a SimArcade sports title.
What is the purpose?
To improve the players on your team! In season mode, all the players on your team have decent skills, but they can be improved over time.
How do you do it?
There are multiple components to it:
– Staff which are available for hire
– Staff which you have hired
– Modifiers provided by staff
The first step is to hire some staff. You can do this from the “My Team” section. As you play the total number of staff members as well as their quality increases. You will want to hire staff which:
1) Provide good modifiers that your players can actually use
2) Provide modifiers with benefits you feel your team needs (extra speed, more power, etc)
The staff you can hire changes after every season game. Some will go away, some new ones will show up. If you keep firing staff, people are not really going to want to work for you anymore and fewer people will be available for hire.
Once you have hired some staff, you need to assign the modifiers they provide to players on your team. Just hiring the staff member without assigning the modifiers will not have any positive effects. You do this by selecting a modifier provided by a staff member and pushing “X” to assign. Every player has ‘slots’ to which you can assign modifiers. The ‘slots’ are the icons with C, T, S, and G on them. You can assign one modifier to one slot. Every player can have at most 7 slots. They slowly unlock as you play more and more season games.
As you play season mode, you will level up. As you level up, you unlock access to new modifiers, the ability to get better staff, additional slots on your players to which modifiers can be assigned to and the total number of staff members you can have increases as well. When you first start playing, you will notice that you level up quite quickly, this is going to slow down. Don’t be afraid to experiment early on, you won’t really do any lasting damage if you do something wrong.
Once you complete a season, the team that you improve this way will persist. Say you play as the Sirloins and you manage to level up your account to level 20 and you have hired a set of staff which improve your team a bunch. When you start your next season with this team, you will continue where you left off in terms of how good your team is. The leveling system goes up to level 99, so there is quite a bit of room for your team to become very good.
Whats the strategy?
– Keep your attraction rate high! This ensures that the staff pool will contain new potential hires after every season game. Your attraction rate goes down if you fire a staff member whose contract has not yet expired.
– The contract length of a staff member is the minimum time a staff member would like to be with your team. You can keep them for as long as you like though.
– As you play, you will want to replace staff you have hired earlier. Staff members with better modifiers will always become available.
– Check the new staff members available after every game. You never know when someone with *really* good modifiers shows up!
– You can freely move modifiers around between players. You can continue to experiment and shuffle them around without penalty to try and optimize your teams performance.
– The ticker at the top of the main season mode lets you know about new staff and actions you should consider.
– Looking at the back of the player cards in the “My Team” menu gives you quick overview of how much your team has improved. The black lines indicate what a players base skill level is.
– You can filter all the views, to look at only a subset of your players, depending on whether they could actually use something provided by a staff member.
– There are different views available when hiring staff. One lts you see if you have any players which could actually use a staff member (good when first starting out), the other view lets you compare your existing staff to available staff (good once you contemplate replacing existing staff members).
– In the “My Team” menu, if you go to the “List” view and highlight a modifier, you can see the effects it has on the player
The intention is for this mechanic to add quite a bit of long term depth to the game. Some of you might recognize what other game genres some of the ideas have come from. Let me assure you, you can agonize endlessly trying to maximize the skills of your team in an optimal manner. If you are planning on dominating the leaderboards, you will need both incredibly reaction time to play the game at high ego and optimize your team as much as you can via modifiers. If you enjoy continually working on and improving your team, hoping for something just a bit better to become available I think you will like this part of the game.
Keep in mind that I just kinda scratch the surface here, there are lots of little mechanics which you will have to figure out
Have fun everyone!
12-15-2014, 05:49 PM
