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Subject: »SLAMMMYS NEWBIE GUIDE

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2010-12-30 21:58:19
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Disclaimer:
This is an unofficial guide, and everything I (Slammmy) recommend is my own opinion.

This guide is intended to put beginners on the fast track of both short/long term success while limiting common mistakes. It explains the most important and confusing parts of the rules section, and gives suggestions of what I would immediately do if I were to start a new team.


FIRST:
Get familiar with the webpage layout. Read the following sections from the rules:
4. The players
5. Coaches
6. Training
11. The Match
12. League system
13. The week in Sokker
17. Skill and supporter levels


Sokker Time:
The game clock is based on polish time. Updates happen ~06:00 sokker time. I just memorize what time it is locally for me at 00:00 (midnight) and 12:00 (noon) sk time and do the math from there (eg 00:00 midnight sk time is 3pm California time, so 06:00 training is at 3+6= 9pm for me).


Money:
If you had millions of dollars right now you could buy yourself a great team right away. Unfortunately, you start out poor. Every move you make in this game should be geared towards growing your wealth, not wasting it. My personal financial style is to have as little week-to-week expenses as possible, avoiding running at a loss. This philosophy some managers may disagree with, but I swear by.


Skills:
See 17. Skill and supporter levels. Note they are given a numeric value. If you just remember excellent is 10 and average is 5 you can do the math from there to figure out other #s. Memorize the skill level order from tragic to excellent – those are what you will deal with at first.


Players:
In sokker, players MUST be well rounded to perform well in matches; a player with near tragic in any bolded or italicized skill is crap for that position. Keep in mind the following importance levels are only for the very beginning while your players aren’t that great yet – ie one day you may care about passing on your goalkeeper, but today is not that day.

Get used to these visual blocks the way I’ve put them; it will help you identify players quicker. Bold is most important, italics are semi-important.
GK:
Stamina Keeper
Pace Defender
Technique Playmaker
Passing Striker

Defenders:
Stamina Keeper
Pace Defender
Technique Playmaker
Passing Striker

Midfielders:
Stamina Keeper
Pace Defender (more for players who play in the center)
Technique Playmaker
Passing Striker

Striker:
Stamina Keeper
Pace Defender
Technique Playmaker
Passing Striker

To start out, shoot for your players being around solid(8) in every bolded or average(5) in every italicized skill.


TRAINING – what/who gets trained, factors of training effectiveness, rate of improvement, example
VERY IMPORTANT, MUST UNDERSTAND
what/who gets trained: read about it in the rules a bunch of times first. Every Wednesday night (in the states), training occurs. I think of it as the start of the sokker week, because right after training is when you have a clean slate of managing what and who gets trained.

On the training page, you pick to train one of the 8 skills for a given week, and you have to pick which position gets the training (GK/DEF/MID/ATT).

TRICKIEST PART: For every unplayed game on your match page, there is a link to the ‘Match Orders’ for that game. When setting your ‘Match Orders’, to the right of the player name you can set players as DEF, MID, or ATT; this correlates directly to the position picked on the training page. A maximum of 5/5/3 of DEF/MID/ATT can be set. You play two games in a week (Sunday league and Wednesday friendly which is hours before training), so you can train up to 10 defs, 10 mids, or 6 att in a single week. Make sure you understand this paragraph completely.
Exceptions:
Stamina trains every single player on your team regardless of whether they play or not. It also trains differently than other stats- it is capped at formidable (11) and generally increases once every training.
Pace can be trained by everyone who plays in a game, so up to 22 players from playing two matches in a week. Pace also trains slightly slower than other skills to compensate for its larger potential of players partaking in the training.
This means setting the position (gk/def/mid/att) doesn’t matter for training either of these two skills. All other skills follow the position-limited training.

Factors of training effectiveness
There are many factors that dictate how well players train after you select what they train in, which are: quality of coaching, players’ age, player’s hidden talent, and how many minutes they played in the designated position (gk/def/mid/att) for the week:
Coaching –see coaching section
Age – The younger the player, the quicker he improves. Every player ages at the end of each season (16 weeks long, so 16 possible trainings while at a certain age). Keep in mind at what point in the season it is when purchasing players.
Talent – even players the same age and coaches train at different rates. Talent is not explicitly stated on a players description, it must be observed by the manager training him.
Minutes – if they play in the position you train (ie corresponding set positions in the match orders screen and training orders screen) for 90 minutes in a week, the player will get close to full training, so shoot for 1 full game in a week (playing the same player 180 minutes doesn’t mean he gets double training, you will see little difference at all between 90 and 180min). See the rules for more info on the almost negligible technicalities.
See rate of improvement below to get an idea of how fast training should take.

Rate of improvement: How long does it take for people to pop (pop is common slang for increasing in a skill level)? All the training factors mentioned before matter.

How do you know if your player pops? You have three options: memorize or copy/paste player skills into word and compare before/after training, subscribe to plus (its pretty cheap, like $2.50 a month and you get a lot of other fun features), or download a secondary program to keep track for you. Because of all the factors involved, it’s hard to detail how fast pops should come, but to get a general idea of decent talent you can refer to this ( - indicates a non pop week):
17yo: weakaverage-adequate-good--solid--verygood--excellent
20yo: weak-average-adequate--good--solid---verygood---excellent

Example:
Confused? Probably. I’ll walk you through a detailed example showcasing some possibilities you may not have thought of yet:
-I choose to train defender for DEF. This means I need 10 players to train in this position, 5 for league match and 5 very young trainees for friendly matches.
-I want the 5 players I train in Sunday league to be young enough to train, but skilled enough to win games, so I buy players around 20yo to satisfy both of these needs. I decide for league match, the tactic I want to play is a 4-4-2 which is only 4 defenders, but I just set one of my inside mids as DEF too in order to reach the 5 DEF limit and max training potential for the game.
-In my Wednesday afternoon friendly, I choose to play my other starting center midfielder as DEF because it’s important for him to increase his defending, and then four 17-18yo trainees as my 5 players I want to get credit for defender in DEF training. In this friendly, I make sure NOT TO PLAY my starters from my league match who already played as DEF.
-Wednesday night, after having played two matches with 10 different players set as DEF, training update happens and those players get a full weeks training. I get the hang of it and repeat the process, making sure if there is an injury to one of these 10 guys, I cross train one of my wingers as to not waste training.
-Seasons later, 17yo and 18yo trainees are now 19-20yo with incredible defense and, after having bought them for 25k, I can either sell them for 500k or more if I did it correctly, or have them take the place of my original starters.
-I do this for 5 years on a gradually increasing scale of money and ability and end up hanging out with Slammmy in the Major League.

This is a player I bought this season for 75k and trained:
17yo
weak Stamina tragic Keeper
good Pace poor Defender
poor Technique average Playmaker
adequate Passing poor Striker

Now he looks like this after 8 weeks of training and I sold him for 625k, for a nice 500k profit after fees in only half a season. Every new user has the ability to do moves just like this one, or potentially even better:
17yo
average Stamina tragic Keeper
solid Pace poor Defender
poor Technique good Playmaker
good Passing poor Striker
Note how this midfielder didn’t have anything less than poor in the italicized skills. Poors in this case were alright because 17 is nice and young, but I wouldn’t suggest poor for 19 or older


Coaches:
Again, read the rules about how each type of coach (head, assistant, jr) works, I will only state coaching strategy here assuming you have read the rules. Opinion on coaching staff is the main difference between myself and other managers. I have saved millions by not having too expensive of a staff at very little expense of training performance – in my opinion people way overvalue the effects of assistants. Here is the breakdown of the coaching staff:
Head Coach – after you figure out what you want to train, the most important coaching factor is having a head coach with unearthly in the one to two skills you plan on training. A single unearthly skill coach should have a wage of ~10k per week.
Assistant coaches – these coaches amplify the main coaches skills, and assistants are based only on their general appraisal (ga). Have exactly three assistants. To start, I suggest a ga level of good-solid, wages under 4k each. When scouting, because ga is based on the average individual skill levels of the coach, search for everything good with the exception of keeper. Coaches with high keeper skill usually have higher wages, so if scouting for a coach always put keeper at minimum. Search parameters to use:
good Stamina unsatisfactory Keeper
good Pace good Defender
good Technique good Playmaker
good Passing good Striker
Junior coach – Don’t have one. See Youth Squad section below.


Tactics:
Where to begin about tactics… this feature makes sokker the best game out there.

Tactics are the one thing you can actively work on any time that immediately improves the performance of your team in matches. If you and I played each other with the exact same players, but it was my tactic vs. yours, I would win 9 games out of 10 easily. New players tend to get bored with the pace of this game; I suggest investing your time by learning how the match engine works.

If you don’t have plus, you can watch national team matches to see better tactics. Find a national team that plays with the same formation you want to use, and try to mimic it exactly. Break down watching games second by second (you can pause a replay of a match) when you get scored on and see if you can figure out how you could have prevented it. Don’t always assume just because someone in a higher league than you that they are great with tactics, I laugh at a lot of things even my fellow Major Leaguers do.

Get a feel for how individual players perform given their skill set, see for yourself why I said players have to be well rounded to play well. Defender fumbling a ball right to a forward in front of your goal? Crappy technique. Midfielder hold on to the ball too long? Crappy playmaking. Forward getting dispossessed from behind very easily? Crappy technique. And so on.

Contact me if you want to take tactics seriously and ill point you in the right direction and give you feedback on your games.


Youth Squad:
Don’t get one.


Stadium:
I suggest you do not upgrade your stadium until you have a full roster of trainees, and are content with your team, which shouldn’t happen until you are a mid table B league team. With the new ability to change ticket prices, if you are selling out, just increase the prices. If you start selling out your new stadium at about $12-15 per seat, then you may start with adding some cheap terraces, as they are part of the cost of building seats/benches later on anyway.


General tips/tricks:
A few smart tips:
- Play your weekly friendly match against a team much better than yours at THEIR stadium. Actively seek very good teams out for friendlies and you can be making an extra 20k per week from tickets.
- Save money right away by firing or selling all the crappiest players on your team; this will probably save 10k per week in salaries to start. Remember that if your player is YOUNG you should think twice before firing him.
- Train stamina until you decide what to train and have the training scheme set up.
- You may accidentally play 6 mids in a game and get the message that you will be punished by not receiving training. Train stamina when this happens because stamina training will still work.
- When selling someone, the bidding ends exactly 2 days after you list them. Because the majority of managers are in Europe, consider transfer listing at a time they will actually be awake. 18:00-21:00 is a high traffic time. I take it a step further and list people exactly at a rounded hour like 18:00.

Outro:
Hopefully you’ve gained an idea of what you need to do. What to do immediately:
-Find a mentor. Go to the USA forum and ask for one
-Decide what you want to train and start looking for players to train on the transfer market. Due to the need for wellroundedness of players, strikers are generally thought of as the easiest outfielders to train, plus you only need 6 trainable players if you are training striker specifically.
-Sack/sell any of the crappy players you start with
-COACHES: Dump your coaching staff and get and get three assistants good(7) under 4k wage and find a head coach with magical-unearthly in the skill you want to train for a few seasons for under 10k wage (see coach section of this guide)
-Make an attempt of creating a tactic. Check out youtube for sokker tactics. Keep in mind people who have been playing this game for years can still be awful at tactics.
This game is a lot of fun once you get the hang of it, but it is much better when you get a bunch of your buddies playing it as well, so tell your friends to sign up, or at least get involved in the forums. Good luck!
2010-12-30 22:00:19
before you feel like commenting, ive asked dio to close this subject/bump it periodically once he is online because i dont feel like debating anyone about the content. feel free to make your own guide instead =P
2010-12-30 22:55:49
you bored? :D
2010-12-31 02:18:10
As someone from the old guard (since 2005) this is an excellent write up.
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