What to do with 21 year olds

[Liquefry]

What does everyone else do with their recently graduated youth players? Do you, like me, carry a big roster while they get good enough to make your senior team, or sell them young and just buy in mature players that are ready for the first XI?

Probably the best min-max approach, if you dont get attached at all to individual players, is to treat the youth academy purely as an income earner, and using the market to buy top quality older players that are still good but relatively cheap because they only have one or two seasons left at that level, and just rotating through. You would be able to afford quite good players this way since total wages would be low. I tried switching to this with my affiliate for a couple of seasons, and it did make the team a lot more competitive.

The problem is that this makes the team very anonymous - you are rotating through senior players that only stay for a season or two, so you need to have zero sentimental attachment. I found that if I can't recognise the players that the game becomes a bit boring, so I switched back again. Personally I get caught up in the story of the individual players too much for this. I love following their progress from youth pull through to the senior team, carefully training up various skills over time so they eventually become world class players. The problem is that this costs a bunch to get your home grown youths into the senior team - unless they are incredible, and/or you have a weak team, they probably wont be good enough for anything but cup games until they are like 25. So you end up with a youth team, a senior team, and a "getting ready for seniors" bunch of players as well. Kind of the worst of all worlds because you dont sell good players for a profit AND have a big wage bill, so you struggle to make ends meet!

Personally, I think the balance is slightly too much in favour of a TM approach, so I'd love a bigger discount on home-grown wages. But I guess I'm kind of playing a RP version of the game with individual characters that I follow, so I'm happy enough just plodding along mid table without a lot of in-game success. Anyway, what does everyone else do?

[GA-James018]

I have the same issue as you, where I just hold on to my players in their early twenties until they're good enough for my senior team. It's pretty clearly a suboptimal way of playing, but other methods like selling graduating youths and buying ready-made seniors as you suggested - or another approach is have a whole contingent of similarly aged players come through at once, play them in seniors and put up with temporary poor results for the payoff of an amazing team later - just don't feel right to me.

Without giving too much away, I can say that the admin team has been looking into ways to allow/encourage people to play players in that early 20s "dead" period. To me that seems a fairer solution than just shifting the game balance directly in a way that will upset people who enjoy their current way of playing. We've already made prior changes to that effect, such as the merging of senior and youth academies, that have been controversial enough.

[Cottonball]

Yeah I also agree this can be a big challenge.

Perhaps something that could make it easier for the managers who are developing their home grown squads, would be to have better boosts for home grown talents. This could be a percentage increase to a players' training each season they remain at the club, or something similar. Something that makes the players who have been with a club for 5+ or 10+ seasons seriously beneficial compared to the TM approach where you buy 29s and 30s endlessly.

I agree with you that a significant enjoyment of the game comes from the storylines and enjoyment you have with seeing names you recognise.

I am glad to hear of the Admin have been looking at how to allow/encourage players in their 'dead' early 20s to actually play. I think this would be a massively beneficial transformation in the game.

I also think a greater range of ages for the 'world class' players would dramatically improve the game. The FTP prime age for players is roughly 29yo. However, if we look at the top 10 world rankings for test batters and bowlers - only Pant and Rabada are close to this age. Similar for ODI, only Asalanka and Archer.

If we could have more variability in the speed that players grow or the rate they lose their skills, it would make the game much more unpredictable and bring new ages to the world stage of best players.

[Cottonball]

Another aspect that could contribute to making 21-25s more usable could be form having a more significant boost (or harm) to the skill summary. It is working okay right now, but really having players drop down 2-3 skill summary levels or boost up would dramatically change the managerial tactics and perhaps make some younger players more playable based on form. You could end up being better placed playing an inform spec spec spec instead of an out of form wc wc wc.

[boscorp]

I'm actually finding them quite useful for both my clubs. I've recently decided to fully upgrade my academies and become somewhat of a homegrown youth farm. It's very expensive to maintain so my plan is for the first 4 seasons to have my seniors on minimum wages competing in a low division and concentrate on developing my youth squad. As they mature I intend to slowly build up a young competitive senior side in the lower divisions selling of players at around 26 yrs. I'm getting a feeling there are still a good number of clubs giving this age group of players matches.
I don't think treating homegrown players any different to other players would be fair. I think the existing homegrown benefits are generous.

[Liquefry]

thanks for the replies. Glad to know I'm not alone in struggling with this one! I look forward to whatever tinkering the dev team comes up with, but as I say I guess I've worked out that I'm happy enough just plodding along with a low bank balance.

[eagles123]

I tend to play younger players in the T20 and give them SOD games wherever possible. And obviously MKMC early rounds is a good opportunity for experience. It can be difficult to make that choice between giving someone game time and going with a full strength X1, but that's the job of the manager!

[Mike778]

What does everyone else do with their recently graduated youth players? Do you, like me, carry a big roster while they get good enough to make your senior team, or sell them young and just buy in mature players that are ready for the first XI?

Probably the best min-max approach, if you dont get attached at all to individual players, is to treat the youth academy purely as an income earner, and using the market to buy top quality older players that are still good but relatively cheap because they only have one or two seasons left at that level, and just rotating through. You would be able to afford quite good players this way since total wages would be low. I tried switching to this with my affiliate for a couple of seasons, and it did make the team a lot more competitive.

The problem is that this makes the team very anonymous - you are rotating through senior players that only stay for a season or two, so you need to have zero sentimental attachment. I found that if I can't recognise the players that the game becomes a bit boring, so I switched back again. Personally I get caught up in the story of the individual players too much for this. I love following their progress from youth pull through to the senior team, carefully training up various skills over time so they eventually become world class players. The problem is that this costs a bunch to get your home grown youths into the senior team - unless they are incredible, and/or you have a weak team, they probably wont be good enough for anything but cup games until they are like 25. So you end up with a youth team, a senior team, and a "getting ready for seniors" bunch of players as well. Kind of the worst of all worlds because you dont sell good players for a profit AND have a big wage bill, so you struggle to make ends meet!

Personally, I think the balance is slightly too much in favour of a TM approach, so I'd love a bigger discount on home-grown wages. But I guess I'm kind of playing a RP version of the game with individual characters that I follow, so I'm happy enough just plodding along mid table without a lot of in-game success. Anyway, what does everyone else do?

Were you on stumped ? Name seems familiar.

This is my second time on FTP, the first time I quit it was because I was frustrated by the player development model. For me its a massive flaw in the game design. Both the player timeline and the 21 to 24 problem and the way players largely end up with clone builds.

The optimal move unfortunately is probably to drop the academy altogether and just buy 29 year olds but its not the most fun way of playing.

Ideally the player lifecycle would be adjusted so players get more of their training early on and players are closer to their peak early 20s but I dont know if there is appetite for that kind of change.

[GM-crowfan65]

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?

[Jujoh]

Player timeline:
16-20 in a team with a good academy going for youth success
21 sold off for scraps or kept in a large pen
21-25 in a team that is rebuilding or a new team. Some kept as pets
26-29 move towards teams that have a longer term strategy and income to pay for increasing salaries
30-32 move around trophy hunting
31+ shot for dog food

Point 2: U25 league instead of YT20, and/or U25 cup. Optionally start a national cup halfway the season, alternate between u20 and u25 every week (single round Robin) or introduce opt in competitions (choose from yt20, u25 and a national cup comp)
Increasing training returns for u25 could also work, with players staying at the level they get to at 27 i stead of still improving

No clones:
1 introduce a new skill (raw talent) to counter experience. Same ingame effect but decreases over time as players age past 21. The maximum could be reasonable for 16yos, increasing semirandomly to outstanding for 21yo and decreasing to ordinaryish at around 27.
2 new talents
3 add player roles and specialism(t20 ,sod) in which they excel and which they get better at during youths
4 ME tweaks to increase the effect of different alignments of primary technique and power depending on the game phase. Or just make these effects more visible because some of it is there

[GM-crowfan65]

so this raw talent could be the dreaded potential in a way

[Jujoh]

so this raw talent could be the dreaded potential in a way

Not sure what you mean by potential but it could be something that isn't known at 16. Could see it work as a known though. You wouldn't want it to affect youth games to much.
It could also work a bit more hit and miss than experience, not as a generic multiplier but more randomly. Making these players less dependable

Natural fitness could work too, with younger seniors playing at a high level of endurance and power, which decays if it isn't trained. Could even work with technique and fielding.

[GA-James018]

Potential is the idea that some players train faster or have a better "maximum skill" than others. It's been implemented in other games and really helps with the player variety problem, especially if different skills have different potentials. But it is a controversial idea mainly because it makes the youth system even more luck-dependent: everyone prays for that super high-potential player that may come twice in a season or not for 5 seasons.

A variant of the idea which came to mind is perhaps what if players had different "development speeds," for want of a better word? Like, some players could train extremely quickly at a young age to the point where they can be senior standard even before the age of 21, but they then slow down training drastically and may even start declining earlier. While others improve more slowly and steadily and might take a while to make the grade, but as a trade-off can remain a top-level player well into their 30s. That could liven up squad management since every player is reaching their peak at a different age.

Another option to address player homogeneity could be to just remove or lessen the existing game elements that encourage training every single player the same way. Things like ME penalties for gaps between primary and secondary skills, the slowdown of training after outstanding, and the exponential increase in wages at high skills. Getting rid of some of those might incentivise people to train different kinds of players, particularly taking into account their talents or starting skills.

Moving to how to address the lack of game time for 21-24 year olds, I do like the idea of a U25 competition. I think replacing the YT20 league would be the way to go, personally, as I'm not convinced youths need 2 games per week, especially when the better ones might be playing in U25 anyway. Not opposed to the idea of a cup, though. An alternative might be to have a second XI competition that runs concurrently with the main league. For example, on Fridays you could have senior OD games and second XI games. Main downside here is the logistic pain of making sure no player can play in two games on the same day.

[CoachKnapovic]

Massive no to any potential ideas. Youth pulls are already frustrating enough as it is.

A competition for players between 21 and 24 would be great and you could easily have that played on a Wednesday. League format so players are guaranteed X amount of games and you could run a cup on the Saturday. FC cricket is an option too. Only problem then is maybe people don't want that many extra games. Replacing Youth T20 would also be an option.

Adding specialisms would be good. T20 specialist or OD specialist for example and they could be considered as being in the same category as opener, seam specialist etc as a passive skill.

Increase the maximum starting level a youth could have a skill in. At the moment it is reasonable I believe, raise that again to capable.

Talent trees. Each talent (trigger or passive) has three levels with each level providing a performance boost say currently the opener talent starts off at a 5% boost to batting in the first 5 overs for level one. Level 2 gives a 10% boost for say, 7 overs and then level 3 a 15% boost for 10 overs. Each level would take a season to develop and that would be in place of regular training. That way there has to be some kind of negative to training the level up to the maximum point. So a player that could have been world class/world class only ends up spec/spec for example but has that level 3. I'm not saying these should be the exact numbers but this is just an idea. These levels would not apply to something like prodigy or later bloomer (an older player trains faster). Oh and you could also have the option to add a second talent but then each talent is maxed out at level 1.

Giving players extra training sessions. This could be something that means another player in the team does not receive training for example but a bat you really like gets 2 batting sessions per week instead of 1. Perhaps a counter to this would mean that while he is on double sessions he cannot play games.

Increase speed to which players gain experience or lower the bar from outstanding being the main level for consistent performance to reliable or accomplished.

Lower penalties for power and technique gaps.

[Mike778]

Ok.

Timeline
For me, its straight forward. Increase starting youth skills. Increase youth training. Slow down senior training. Ideally I would have players coming out of the academy relatively usable (maybe 70% of their training at academy) and pretty much done (95%) by 24.

Training
I would scrap the whole physicals train faster at 24 thing. This is part of the problem. With every player its train fielding, train primaries and tech keeping them balanced. Then physicals at 24 or 25. You want more training choices and options not to follow a set path.

Clones
Currently everyone follows the above path. You have 5 skills endurance, primary, technique, strength, fielding. Ideally you want people to be able to follow different routes. Different players are better at different things. For example a medium pacer playing a containing role could have max technique and no power. Players with high endurance are better at OD, a 2020 specialist might not need it. Everything seems to be summary, summary, summary. I would try and find ways of making different player builds viable and it not just be everyone strives for balance.