What to do with 21 year olds

[boscorp]

ok, so let's use this topic to discuss these things and see if we can't improve it.

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

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

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

1. I think the players timeline from 16-32 is adequately covered by a variety of managers for a good enough number of players to progress their career fully.
2. I'm possibly wrong but I thought div4 and div3 would really suit players in the 21-26 age bracket and the older players in the higher divs.
3. I have always been surprised that managers follow a standard training regime and don't explore more with some youth in trying to train special/different players. The match engine might respond well to a youth side with capable power or high technique. Unless that has all been tried.

I agree that improvements would be great but I don't really see a big failure in the progression. Is there a big shortage of game time for the 21-26 year old bracket?

[ArtisticFugue]

As someone who has only really been playing for about a season and a half, but who played previously for about 8-10 seasons towards the earlier days of the games life, it is quite apparent that not a lot has changed overall, which is both good and bad.

I have a few thoughts that may or may not be viable. Take with a pinch of salt as again, I've not been playing long enough for much of this to affect me yet.

For increasing player variety I'd probably look at replacing the 1 to 2 talents with something more like 3 or 4, and then increasing the pool of talents accordingly. There have been some really good talent ideas in this thread already, but a few that I have thought of include:

Big Game Player: gains some benefit to playing in front of a big crowd

Knockout specialist: excels in cup matches (another variant of one day/T20 specialist) - could also include mats, or not depending on power levels?

Wise: similar to some other suggestions, essentially skilled experience... Could also be just for youths much like prodigy is for training but maybe that would be too underpowered).

Catch specialist / runout specialist / boundary stopper: fielding talents that could improve a certain aspect of a player's fielding checks.

I can't think of a name for the last one but maybe something akin to finisher, only for batsmen who excel when they are in with the tail towards the end of an innings.

I do like the suggestion above about having talent "levels" and being able to train those to a point, with maybe the expense of playing games (and getting experience) or training attributes. Potentially this would have too much of an effect on performance vs. wage though so that would need to be considered.

Also very much for under 25s games or something similar in order to help bridge the 21 to 25 gap others are talking about. Potentially another thing could be some kind of mentorship system, where the older playing players could share their experience gains with a younger player in the squad, or something like that?

I can't really comment on training homogeneity too much as I'm not really at that stage in my squad building yet, but there is a general consensus is keep primaries equal to tech and build power later etc. which I can see leading to pretty homogenous players - whether that is actually he best course or not I don't know. There could be some consideration for having some player (or roles?) benefit more from certain secondaries. This could also be reflected in the talent ideas above (for example a player could especially benefit from having high power, or endurance, something like that which might incentivise training those physical attributes earlier).

That was probably a bit of a ramble but maybe there's something in there that could be of use.

All the best,

AF