X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

[Various Artist]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Aww no, that is a shame, but I'm glad I've accepted a friendly request from Zeugmaspor in that case. Looking forward to that on Monday, AE – with our respective defences' form this season d'you think we should arrange to play three or four halves just to give the spectators a chance of seeing a goal?

HO's DVs very interesting; 18 for keeper Barreto is outstanding. I don't think I've ever had an 18 at Mortis, actually.
Here's ours, anyway:

Not too much to complain about I guess, notwithstanding Snorrarsson's final-day deduction, but a few stand out for the wrong reasons. The two Glyns have never put on DV easily and this season was a case in point; Stockwell and Feeney were both give ample time today in a last-ditch attempt, to no avail. The latter to be fair hasn't played that many games this season, due to always seeming to be in poor form at the wrong time, and I'll probably look to flog him off after the CR and just develop Hulme instead. Am on a 30-day wait for a youth so have changed it to Midfielder and will see what I get in a couple of nights' time.

The other main reason for adding to midfield is that obviously founder squad member Jarvis Rowson is going to go over the hill once and for all now – and might well announce his retirement, although he's played all the time which'll hopefully mitigate against this at least. With several other veterans also at or near their peak it felt like this season really was my best and only chance to achieve what we have with something of a nucleus of our Season 1 side still intact, so it's been all the more gratefully received.

Big question next season is do I go back to developing a youth goalie if I can get one...?! Other youths in the team are coming along quite successfully; my two young strikers have chipped in with a few goals including the winners in three consecutive key 1-0 wins in late-season, so that's encouraging for the future. I don't know where we go from here: there's no manual for what to do now really, is there, especially when I thought this current team was as much of a work-in-progress as ever and so didn't expect to be challenging in the first place. Back to business as usual then, I suppose, and see if we can sneak a 4th-placed finish next season with another late run after everyone else has stopped trying, like normal...

[SouthdownRebel]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Hornville DVs:

Sophuk Phetsuwan - 34/10 - 10

Wilfred Roberts - 33/11 - 11
Andy Judd - 30/10 - 15
Özkan Sinan - 28/11 - 17
Mario Bahamonde - 23/9 - 15
Llywellyn Bird - 20/7 - 18

Krister Krenckel - 34/11 - 5
Emílio Beirão - 33/11 - 5
Edgar Veldman - 30/10 - 13
Clint Hosmann - 28/11 - 16
Arkaitz Etxebarrieta - 26/12 - 15
Ceridwen McCartney - 21/7 - 16
Christian Mancuso - 20/6 - 17

Asbjörn Kristensson - 32/12 - 11
Cameron Stoneley - 20/6 - 15

Happy enough with that - especially as Phetsuwan, Bird and Kristensson all picked up a precious extra point of DV in the final game. Problems in midfield though, as you might recall Beirão picked up an injury after I'd decided to prioritise his DV over Krenckel's, meaning both were ruined for the season.

[Wouter D]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Various Artist wrote: a now bonkers-looking Season 34

Yeah, that was the season where the Kneebiters ended directly in front of a team that scored a whopping 22 goals more than us. That is a goal per game! They also conceded 23 goals more than we did. Clear clash of styles, there.

[Wouter D]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Nieuwegein Kneebiters DVs:

Mateus Brites - 29/14 - 15
Walter Vreeswijk - 19/2 - 4
Ronald Doosje - 17/3 - 15

Janne Tuisku - 29/14 - 13
Neo Myhill - 25/12 - 15
Carl-Emil af Geijerstam - 21/8 - 16
Nat Osborn - 18/6 - 16

Jude Moss - 35/13 - 7
Boine Källqvist - 31/13 - 12
Eliseu Real - 29/12 - 13
Marciello Franco - 25/15 - 16
Ivan Porta - 23/10 - 13
Guillermo Bonatto - 21/8 - 15
Abel Edenborg - 19/6 - 16

Matthieu Thillaye - 27/12 - 15
Milton Wheelan - 22/8 - 15

Happy with that, except for Ivan. The goalkeeper situation evolved organically; Walter was just floating along for emergency situations, but Ronald showed up as a youth academy project late in the season. Since top-flight status was guaranteed after round 19, we gave Ronald full game time in the final three games of the season. Curious to learn whether that'll be enough for a single jump.

Nat is our freekick specialist defender who looks like he's going to be an absolute monster in seven or so seasons, but some context might be beneficial here. He double jumped last season, so his actual skill is exactly 5.5 right now. 16 DV is quite good for such a player, but I'll be more than happy enough with a single jump for Nat.

[Various Artist]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Cor, another 18 there for SdR!

Great work with young Ronald from such little time, Wouter – yes, I reckon you should be just fine with him this CR. From all I've seen, 15 DV for a 17-year-old equals just about 1 full skillbar – or very nearly – so I have no doubt he'll jump. By the same reckoning, Nat's 16 DV aged 18 should give him just about 1 full skillbar or maybe a little more, so from where you say he is now I think he's almost certain to land on 6.5 or 6.6. I feel he's about 70% likely to make the jump, perhaps, but feel free to ignore my gut instinct…

Um, right, I'll stop spamming the thread again now, apologies all. I've been rather busy lately so was aware I haven't contributed recently, and hence this evening represents a bit of an unblockage!

And there'll never be another today.

[Sits]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Well done Stev9e on the last minute assault on the D2 title and rotten luck to Noj, again. Definitely "bonkers", or "scenes!" as SDR would say.

In the Heineken I'm pleased and surprised to see the Old Spots are the strongest squad...
... which of course means Royal Atlantis and Starchaser will proceed to embarrass me.

[Sits]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Enjoyed the unblockage VA.

[Sits]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Swine DVs. Too many 15s or lower. Van Rijswijk in goal was at 18 two games ago, we keep a clean sheet away at the leaders, and 17 it is. Go figure. Automotive hybrid Austin Hunter was bought as a 17/5, and after an injury-riven season it looks like this is the one where he slips back onto the "standard" path. He's still injured now.

Ormerod was bought as the super-veteran then got so badly injured I had to buy Hardings, with the consequence that neither got anywhere near 10 even after I gave up using Ormerod.

[Sits]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Any thoughts on thread titles yet? How about:

X11 Season 45 - Mortis lock on the title?

[SouthdownRebel]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Various Artist wrote: Cor, another 18 there for SdR!

Yes, very happy with that, especially as Bird double-jumped last CR so is likely to be lower on the scale for a 20/7. Hopefully that will ensure he gains another skill bar - a double followed by nothing always feels like back to square 1.

I actually have 2 x 18 at AA-S and another on 18 at Angmering Park, though there's plenty of time left in the Golden League season for that to go wrong.

I decided to break with the conventional wisdom of training when a red arrow appears - now I train black arrows that show a drop on the form progression chart as well. Seems to be working so far. There's a risk it costs more econs of course, but most of the time it's just starting the training before the red arrow appears and the budgets appear to be holding up so far.

Sits wrote: Well done Stev9e on the last minute assault on the D2 title and rotten luck to Noj, again. Definitely "bonkers", or "scenes!" as SDR would say.

Guilty as charged, Trevor.

Sits wrote: Any thoughts on thread titles yet? How about:

X11 Season 45 - Mortis lock on the title?

Livin La Vita Loca?

[Wouter D]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

IKK goalkeeper Yoshikiyo Uchidate is on 19 DV right now.

[evilC]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Sits wrote: Any thoughts on thread titles yet? How about:

X11 Season 45 - Mortis lock on the title?

'X11 Season 45 - there's Mortis than meets the eye'

[Belhaven]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

It is still a mystery to me jow you get DVs in the upper teens. Do you keep them constantly in training? If yes, isn't that very expensive?

[Wouter D]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Belhaven wrote: It is still a mystery to me jow you get DVs in the upper teens. Do you keep them constantly in training? If yes, isn't that very expensive?

Not constantly, but whenever their form takes a downward turn I train. And yes, that is very expensive.

Yoshikiyo benefits from the "young player in a tough league" bonus. As you may know, DV is a combination of two things: average form (AF) and match experience (ME). AF is simple: it's just an average of the form notations a player displays throughout the season. For this season, Yoskikiyo's AF is 13. He went through 5 form training sessions this season, so that's 650k econ spent on a single player.

ME is much more elusive. It delivers a penalty or bonus on the AF in a quite opaque way, depending on age of the player, skill of the player, and relative skill of the player versus his opponents' skill. Basically, you can expect the DV to be derived as DV=AF+x, where x is determined by match experience. The older players in your team will probably require playing all matches of the season full time to accrue enough ME to let DV=AF+0. For players over 30, it is not uncommon to have x be negative, even if that players plays every second of the season. For players between, say, 24 and 30, you're basically doing a good job if DV=AF+1 or maybe 2. For younger players, you can have much bigger bonuses. For players under 20, you can accrue enough match experience to have DV=AF+1 by letting them play maybe a third of the season.

Yoshikiyo is 19 years old, and he is our only keeper. That means that he plays every minute of the season in the top flight of a very demanding league, where the opposing forwards and midfielders are significantly more skillful than himself. This blasted his ME bonus into the stratosphere. I have never seen this before in any of my teams, but for Yoshikiyo, DV=AF+6. And that adds up to 19.

In total, IKK players went through 62* training sessions this season, distributed over 15 players. That's 8M econ spent on training for the season, and still my forwards average a DV of 12.5. This may not be the best strategy.

* mean 4.13, median 4, mode 4, minimum 1 (Toru Kobayashi, AF 17, DV 17), maximum 7 (Yamaguchi Ichiro, AF 10, DV 12). These final numbers illustrate how luck is also a huge part of it.

[jdsx]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Four Candles' DV report:
(sorry if the formatting doesn't work)

Lientur Sarasua 26/8 13
Francisco Peixeiro 23/6 13

Christopher Ennis 30/10 14
Tim Moldestad 27/8 16
Alberto Riccio 23/7 14
Graham Souter 21/7 14
Forbes Law 19/6 15

Ted Ramsay 28/8 15
Drew MacColl 27/12 16
Ainsley Boston 27/11 16
Yiorgos Zografakis 24/10 12
Lyle Ramsay 20/5 6
Murray Armour 18/4 16

Imanol Gurrutxaga 31/8 11
Bailey Parson 24/8 13
Billy Hayes 18/5 16

I made the rookie error of buying too many players too late in the season. I was hoping for better from Zografakis - he only played in 8 games though so I suppose it's not too bad. Lyle Ramsay was a youth I promoted late and had to give up on. Parson was on 15 with four matches to go and got an injury which ruled him out of the end of the season.
Need to buy a veteran goalkeeper to keep the average age of my defence up, I think. Probably a forward to replace Bailey Parson and eventually a 22/8 or 9 MF to fill in the gap between Zogra and Armour. Then I'll be ready for the rigours (geddit?) of Season 45 in the giddy heights of Division 2.

[Sits]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

The rather average set of DVs I posted below for Berkshire Swine required no fewer than 119 training sessions. WHAT?? I've never added that up before, for any team.

Bloody hell, I thought I'd hit upon a really clever training model until this moment.

[Sits]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

76 for Kakanui KuneKune. Slightly reassuring, only one session per player more than IKK in rough terms. Still, food for thought.

[jdsx]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

I think I'd rather not know how much I spend on training. Is that a VIP thing? Or do you keep meticulous records....?

[Hot Orange]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

84 training sessions for Hideous, including the pre-CR training. The player who required the (joint) most training sessions has the cone. That shouldn't happen, should it?

[Various Artist]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Er, no, no it shouldn't!

Wow, that's some fascinating stattage, you bastards, just as I was going to try to steer clear of waxing lyrical again here today. Particular thanks to Wouter for expounding so eloquently (in his second language, or is it third, or fourth?) on the mysteries of AF+x = y, which is stuff I see occasionally thrown around in discussion in the game but have never got my head around.

I've always trained (instinctively, before I knew how any of this worked) anyone on a red arrow, and for some time now anyone on a black one too if their form graph shows a slight downward kink.

Jdsx, I assume everyone's just going to each of their individual players' pages, where it tells you how many form training sessions they've had this season (I don't think that's a VIP thing, is it?), and adding these all up.

At any given team I tend to assume we'll need to order pretty much one training session per day on average: e.g. four after one match and three after the other represents a fairly typical week. If you have a 'good' game where there's only one or two need training afterwards – or none – you tend to find it balances out swiftly enough with a bad one, where you'll get seven or eight red arrows and have to blow a million econs in one go to rectify things.
So as a rule of thumb I think it applies reasonably consistently. The exception perhaps is the 'official' leagues, where once you're out of the cup it's only one game per week, so the average will tend to drop a little there and hence it's easier to build up some econs in the bank there.

I've never actually added up the damage for a season, though, so let's see – if my supposition above is a good guideline then I'll have ordered about 7 x 11 weeks = 77 sessions over the course of this latest OTF season, for example...

...and totting up my whole Vita Mortis squad's individual totals, they equal 83, so that's just about par for the course! Was going to say that's almost identical to HO's, but the difference is I've not ordered any pre-CR training at the end of this season as I needed to hang onto all my econs for the final push.
Worst offenders were Arnor Gunnlaugsson, Jarvis Rowson and Glyn Feeney with 8 each, for rubbish DVs all round as posted on the last page. Best were midfielders Kenny Carfield and Hank Hulme with 3 each – neither of whom has the Hard Trainer quality, so it seems to be down to either luck or an invisible tendency toward that quality even if they don't technically possess it.

That latter point is something I often wonder about in the game mechanics, i.e. whether there's a hidden 'continuum' for each quality rather than a simple on/off switch. Some players seem to err towards certain qualities even when they don't have the icon on their profile – for example, some rarely need training even if not Hard Trainers, some get injured a lot even if not Fragile, some appear to score quite a lot more regularly than their profile suggests while others seem to do so quite a bit less than you'd expect, some (like Gunnlaugsson above) get booked rather a lot without being officially either Tough or Mouthy.

[Etienne]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Amwythig had a horrible season for form. With the one exception of Idris Mawr, everyone seemed to have consistently low form, and our training costs were obscene. I've just counted them as a brutal 105 sessions. We didn't even get decent DV out of it. Been a very frustrating season.

[steveeeeeeeee]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Not to sure how good the end of season DV is for the massive crew. As has been discussed previously, I tend to play on the app and DV is reported in single figures there.

[Various Artist]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Etienne wrote: Amwythig had a horrible season for form. With the one exception of Idris Mawr, everyone seemed to have consistently low form, and our training costs were obscene. I've just counted them as a brutal 105 sessions. We didn't even get decent DV out of it. Been a very frustrating season.

Ouch, I hate to add up any of my other teams now in case 83 proves a relative low. 'Even' that equates to about 7.5 sessions per week, and since 1,000,000 econs ÷ 130,000 = c. 7.7 it's already sucking up essentially the entirety of my sponsor cash. Anything above 85 across an 11-game season puts you into deficit there.

I'm actually wondering how my teams ever stay afloat now. I get a PR out every week for a bonus 200k, which covers two-thirds of the academy funding as it's virtually always at 300k. That leaves any extra training, the remaining 100k per week for the academy, all win bonuses, all scouting and any transfer purchases – ignoring for a moment the whims of random financial events – needing to be covered by the proceeds of sales, the fairly negligible monthly sponsor bonus of 250k, end-of-season prize money and whatever sponsor cash can be put away in preseason... where it's likely to be hoovered up though by preseason training costs.

Crikey. It really is an expensive business, this running a football club lark.

[Various Artist]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

steveeeeeeeee wrote: Not to sure how good the end of season DV is for the massive crew. As has been discussed previously, I tend to play on the app and DV is reported in single figures there.

Is it?? God, the app is bloody weird.

Broadly speaking stev9e, if you compare with what some of the experienced managers have already posted you'll see 15s are certainly solid, 16s are very solid, 17s are very good, 18s are once-in-a-blue moon and 19s are like the proverbial hen's teeth – I've had one ever.
"Good" DV varies by age, as younger players find it easier to get higher DV scores – so, 14 for your teenage defender is truthfully rather under-par (at his age a DV of c. 15/16 would enable him to put on one full level of skill at the Change Report) for example, 14 for your 24-year-old midfielder is still a bit under-par, but 14 for your 30-year-old striker is extremely respectable. Getting 17s for those two 28-year-old midfielders is terrific.

[Wouter D]

X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

Various Artist wrote: Particular thanks to Wouter for expounding so eloquently (in his second language, or is it third, or fourth?)

Cheers! Second, but my German is improving.

Liebe Grüße aus Leipheim!