What to do with 21 year olds

[Nietherlands]

I really appreciate the mods taking the time to hear everyone’s thoughts on this topic. As someone who’s only been playing for the last two seasons, here’s my perspective:

Point 1. Player Timeline - what is the player timeline now as people see it?

I am fairly new and 3/4 of my teams are in Div 4, so I do not have a set player timeline right now. I tend to pick younger players as they are lower wage, are usable for my division, and can be sold for profit in the future. This may change in the future though at higher divisions where I will likely have to invest on older better players and will lose the charm of player loyalty.
For my NAT team I echo the sentiments of others where it is quite uniform where we end up picking players in the range of 28-31 more often than not that have followed a set training timeline.

Point 2. 21-24yo - What to do with them while we wait until they are 'better'?

I quite like the idea of having U25 competition or having player peak at different ages. I do not think implementing both is a good idea though as it will skew the game heavily in favour of players that peak early. If we plan to have the U25 competition I would not want YT20 to be scrapped as it is probably the easiest format comparatively for a newbie to climb up and get them glued to the game.

Alternatively, players peaking at different age is a solid idea and that will mean a good team can have a spread of young and old which makes it more realistic. Implementation-wise, I suggest showing each player’s potential peak range on their profile. For example:
“Youth peak: 17–19 years | Senior peak: 25–27 years.”
The actual peak age within the range would remain unknown to managers, creating some strategic uncertainty. Early peakers would train faster but decline sooner, while late peakers would train slower and last longer.

To keep youth balance fair, all players should graduate from the academy with roughly the same total skills. Some would reach milestones faster, others slower, but they’d end up around the same level by age 21. So, it would be the same way to reach 100 skills points at the age of 21 but some will reach 80 skill points at 17 years and then slow down to reach 100 at 21 years and others may reach 80 points at 19.8 years ending with 100 at 21 years. This change could begin with new youth recruits, while existing players could retain a standard youth peak at 21 and senior peak at 30. It would also make sense to remove physical training peaks around 25 and the “prodigy” talent under this system.

Another potential suggestion is younger players (16-18 and 21-25) are giving home ground advantage while playing at home if they are home grown players. This can offset skill difference with older players, and encourage managers to hang on to their players. The logic here being, the player has grown up playing in the conditions and is familiar with the surrounding. As they become more skilled and older/wiser they become good across conditions and lose the home ground benefit. Again, I wouldn't implement this together with the player peaks at different ages.

Point 3. Clone Builds - How do we not train the players the 'same' so there is more variety?

There are some great suggestions floating around for new skills and talents, but I think refining what we already have might be a better starting point. I would divide my ideas into short-term and long-term improvements:

Short term: Apart from players having inherent talents, there should be allowance to get them to train in passive and triggered talents. For example you may chose to train in Batting or get them to become a spin specialist or an accumulator. Obviously the time spent on training for the passive or triggered talent would be time lost in specialist training with the difficult part being maintaining the balance for both pathways. This will add some training diversity but overall skill aspect should stay the same.

Long term: I would love to see more depth in the skill system. For example, splitting Technique into separate Batting and Bowling components, or further breaking down Batting into performance vs. spin and vs. seam. A player with 8/20 vs. seam and 16/20 vs. spin could have an overall Batting rating of 12/20. Similar logic could apply to Bowling (new ball/old ball) and Fielding (catching/outfield).

Triggered talents could be expanded into a skill tree system (like Crusader Kings). For example, a spinner could choose the “Mystery Spinner” path (unlocking flipper and wrongun) or the “Accuracy” path (unlocking slower ball and arm ball). Again, choosing to train in this would limit how much they can train in specialist skills.

I didn't expect to write this much, but here we are. I am still new so completely understand if some of these have already been discussed and aren't doable. But having this discussion is a good start.

[GM-crowfan65]

Just moving this to suggestions as people drop in with their thoughts before we move it deeper

[Mike778]

Some more thoughts

I am leaning towards ingame talents being trained rather than from birth. This gives genuine training decisions, do you priority specialism over general skills training. You could allow multiple ingame talents to be trained eg a pacer could develop both swing and a bouncer (so 2 chances for one to be activated).

The tricky thing (from design) would be balancing the training cost. You dont want a meta training model that everyone follows.

So talents could be

1. Everyone gets one net zero personality trait (eg prefers home, consistent, inconsistent, early developer, late developer).

2. Everyone gets one training preference to try and encourage different training tendencies.

3. Ingame talents are trained.

Obviously the other problem is integrating existing players and aware many peoplr wouod rather prefer the status quo and development time may mean its unrealistic.

[vietd]

Some really interesting discussions here!

I'm interested in what people think the end goal should look like. Figuring out what the player timeline should look like will help inform the other points.

What do we want the timeline to be like?

Do we want the variety of RL cricket where players peak/perform well at different ages? Currently, they all peak and degrade conistently.
Do we want to see some 21-24 yos able to compete against the older players?