EHM The Blue Line

Well we barely made it
The win against New Hampshire on game 33 has been crucial. So now we get our 2nd playoff run. Allready a great success - no superstars but a very deep danger roster. My 4th line is almost the same level as the first two. Stanley McRae is currently on the 4th line and has finished the season as the leagues 5th best goalscorer with 19 goals. My best scorer has been Layne Arnold with 37 points in 34 games. Pretty good.

First round of the playoffs send us against the Massachusetts-Lowell Riverhawks. We had a hard time against the #1 seed in the regular season losing two out of three games. They are similar to our team, no stars but a deep roster.



Well Levesque had a real bad game between the pipes, but luckily the same is true for their goalie and my offense has been firing on all cylinders. Nevertheless we were down 3-5 at the start of the third period, but this period we dominated the Riverhawks and freshman Giffen Ashton just had a lot of fun with them. 6-5 in overtime is not a usual playoff result.

In the finals we now meet Massachusetts Minutemen. A team against which all games are very close for years, but the Minutemen most often won the close games. We had won the last regular season game though.



A really close game, but thanks to our strong start in the first period we were able to beat them and win the Hockey East title for the first time in Vermounts history. Onward we go to the Frozen Four. Here we meet:
Army Black Knights
Bemidji State Beavers
Clarkson Golden Knights
Minnesota Golden Gophers
North Dakota Fighting Hawks

I am really looking forward to these games.

redrobert81 wrote:About the salary there is another issue i guess. and that's the currency. 2009 to 2014 you got betwenn 27.5 and 35 rubel for one $. 2016 you got up to 80 rubel for one $ and at the moment you get around 59 rubel. So if the paycheck is paid in RUB the salary converted to $ can change a lot in a small timeframe almost 1:3 from 2014 to 2016.

That should/would make salaries even smaller, but in EHM they're bigger than IRL & everything I talked about is this year/projected future (I'm not sure what 2009-2014 has to do with anything)

The 2016-17 TBL Rosters have the maximum amount for KHL salaries at over double the amount that the highest paid player currently gets - and it's even worse with the majority of players...currently in the KHL 99% of players make less than 2 million IRL (and their salaries are going to go down in the coming years, maybe as much as 43% - how does it look in EHM as the years progress? are there only a handful of KHLers making more than 2 million?)

Well i'd say it isn't far off. Here two finalists in 2022/2023



maybe a little too many as 33 players get more than 2 million at the moment of which Dadonov is the one who gets most at 5.9 million. SKA St. Petersburg has most of the highest earners and did not go far this season in the playoffs. On the other end there seem to be 90 players in the KHL who make less than 200.000$

An amazing season ended with an amazing result. The Vermount Catamounts won the NCAA Frozen Four in season 2022/2023 ... now we will have to try to defend the title.
The commitments for next season:

G Alexander Fitzgerald hybrid-style goaltender out of Uniondale, New York. Nothing special

LW/RW Andrey Yatsenko offensive playmaking forward out of Yaroslavl, Russian who scored 68 points in 103 MHL games so far. He looks to make an offensive impact and rarely has a bad game. Definetly needs to improve his physical abilities.

LW Arnold Fiset Power forward out of Lloydminster, Alberta 73 points in 223 AJHL games in his career. He is a strong two-way player who lacks offensive talent.

RW/C Daniel Yaremko goal scoring forward out of Ontario. Scored 108 points in 101 games in the SIJHL. He is a purely attacking player.

LW Dennis Martin defensive forward out of New York. He plays hard defensivly and brings his A-game when needed.

RD Joe Coburng A two-way defenseman out of Alberta. He plays a steady defensive game.

redrobert81 wrote:Well i'd say it isn't far off.....

maybe a little too many as 33 players get more than 2 million at the moment of which Dadonov is the one who gets most at 5.9 million. SKA St. Petersburg has most of the highest earners and did not go far this season in the playoffs. On the other end there seem to be 90 players in the KHL who make less than 200.000$

Thanks for the great feedback!

I agree, while it seems there's to many high earners the maximum's not at all excessive and overall it seems OK

I wonder what it's like after playing 10-20 years...I'm wondering from an editing perspective (I'm wondering what effect does more than doubling the maximum possible salary in a League via an edit actually have? anything?)

The salaries don't much matter. It's not that the KHL tempt players in EHM to play there. It's that because the AI is very basic, Riz has done something that's very common in Single Player games. He's removed certain restrictions/rules that the player has for the AI. Which is essentially cheating, but it's 100% needed to make low complexity script based AI work. For example the AI has an inifite budget (which comes into play in Europe sometimes as teams can overcap their salary budget by over 100% with loaned players and still have money left to buy players at May 1).

The same thing, as I touched on before, is true for AI owned RFAs. If you as a player have an NHL level talent go to RFA and don't offer them a good enough contract/any contract they file for salary arbitration and you either sign them on that wage or lose their rights. That way other NHL teams can swoop in. In real life you obviously also have Offer Sheets, since they are a non-essential part of gameplay (at least at a glance) the AI is not scripted to be able to do that. Because that would take a lot of time that Riz does not have.

As a result if an AI team does not sign their RFA (which is common) that player is still "stuck" with his rights to that team. He literally cannot play in the NHL at all, no matter what, unless THAT team signs him. This is where a bit of a catch-22 with how the AI rates talent comes in, the AI based on my experiences in game has to put a lot of stock in players "reputation" value. It's the only way I can think of to explain why the AI always favor bad old players over young skilled players on their teams. Those old players have simply accrued so much rep and those young talents haven't got enough rep+talent and as a result the AI will decide that the old 4th liner is better than that young talent. But because the AI won't play the young player, that player can't gain enough Reputation to get high enough reputation to be played over that old 4th liner with more reputation. As a result they end up sitting in free agency, a player with as comparably high rep and former league experience (since leagues too have reputation values) won't be willing to play in a lower rep league. But over time as a free agent that player will slowly have their rep or the rep they require in a team/league drop until it becomes low enough for teams from lower leagues to swoop in. You can see this a lot when you play in Europe and have your eyes on a player you just can't quite sign. Wait until mid fall and they will be signable by you, you can always see when it happens to a player since like 5+ teams from the same league will send him offers on the same day his demands lower. This means that if you lower the rep of the KHL, he will just go to the SHL, if you lower the SHL he will go to Liiga or NLA. If you lower all those he will go to some other place. Because of how little money the AHL teams themselves have compared to big European clubs they will never go there. After enough years in the KHL/Europe a player will gain enough reputation from play there that he's just high enough reputation+talent for the NHL club who owns his rights to go "hey, that player is pretty reputable!" and sign something like a 31 year old Elias Pettersson from the KHL. Only to have him be their star player in the NHL for the rest of his career. Despite being at the same CA as he was for the last 8 or so years. Because the only way to get enough rep to be played by the AI in the NHL if you're not a 160+ PA player is often to go play in Europe until you get that rep and break the Catch-22

In my personal version of the db I drop the rep of all of Europe by about 1-2k to make it so the "right" players play in the "right" leagues. Because the stock db has most euro teams instantly drop almost their entire rosters to stock up on NHL free agents instead. They simply have too much rep and too much money. But in my db where I've dropped the rep and money in all leagues this RFA issue still happens, but the startup exodus does not. So the rep and salary budgets won't fix it at all. If you put the leagues low enough in rep and salary what will eventually happen is that the player will hit the roughly 1-2 year mark of being unemployed at which the game force retires the player (it takes a lot longer/shorter for different players, no idea why). So that won't work. The issue is that the AI doesn't have advanced enough scripting to look into the future and plan ahead at all. It acts 100% in the current second, it neither looks back at past events or try and make a call on future events (because again, that would take a lot of coding time that Riz does not have). As a result it just starts by signing the "easy signings" in the form of their bottom 6 older guys who will ask for a fairly low wage compared to the rep they have amassed over their career. Since the AI won't really try and haggle on these they will end up putting them against the cap. When that happens the AIs first go to move seems to be losing their starter goalie (which is a horrible place to start) in some form of dumb trade for nothing, or by letting him go as a free agent. This also means that the AI generally won't have enough money to sign its stars (because those salary discussions take longer, and thus by the time they get "done" there isn't enough cap space to make the contract happen). This is probably a partial cause of the AI waivering top 6 players a lot. It paints itself into a corner with those "in the moment" contracts, ends up way over the salary cap. But since it considers that player "untradeable" the only option left to fix the cap situation on the AI's decision tree is to waiver them. At least that's what I assume is happening there.

Until the AI becomes able to look ahead and plan the cap accordingly this issue won't be fixed. It's not the huge superstar contracts that really cause it either, so lowering the max possible wages won't help. I've never seen the AI sign a contract above 13m~ in the NHL regardless. The issue is that the AI starts at the wrong end when it renews contracts, and that the AI doesn't look forward to value the future worth of the prospect when signing them. The AI also takes past performance into account when looking at what a player is worth. This is part of how I could print 1st round picks with the Jets. My players all overperformed hard, it drove the AI's perceived trade value of them up and let me get 1st round picks for 3rd line players. On the flipside of this we have the catch-22 again. The AI won't give the prospects top 6 ice time over their aging stars who lost their legs 8 years ago but still keep on trucking due to the whole "older players get better when they lose their legs" thing. As a result someone like Nolan Patrick will play 3rd/4th line minutes with no PP and put up like 0.3 PPG on his entry. The AI will go "I'm not signing you on a 4-6M a year bridge deal", because they haven't performed to that level due to no ice time. So there are a lot of problems working together here to cause this situation, and until most of them are fixed this will still be a thing. Bandaid fixes won't really work because the root of the issue is something that at a glance shouldn't have anything to do with AI RFA management in the form of how the attribute decline doesn't work properly any more. Coupled with the ordering of the decision tree when signing players seemingly being wrong, and probably a plethora of other issues in the backend that we can't even see clues of as players. This game has a lot of math errors, typos and other such things that we can see. The only logical conclusion is that there are about as many errors in the backend that makes the game run. Some of these issues are "design issues" as in the AI's decision tree not being very well planned. But there are probably a fair few garden variety "bugs" in the code playing it's part here. But it's quite obvious this would take a hellish amount of time for a single guy to fix. Especially when his company has him chained to another project all year every year. Because FM has plenty of broken stuff that needs fixing too.

Oh and on a final note to keep this Off Topic train rolling, even if you lower the rep and salary of every team it won't matter in the long run. EHM runs on an unsustainable model for both reputation and salary budgets, the game is in a constant state of inflation because every single team (more or less) gains budget every year. There is to my knowledge no way for a team to lose Reputation* so eventually given enough time every team in the game will get to the 10000 reputation cap. In the later years of my Jets save a lot of Aging NHLers were playing in the Norwegian GET Ligaen, because the inflation over time meant they had enough rep and salary budget to sign those guys. So no matter what we do to try and fix things in the db, the game will ruin them all over time. Because it's not a very well designed game, sadly.

*Because of a math error in the formula for Reputation gain you lose Reputation instead of gaining it when you gain Reputation while at the 10000 cap.

Finally, to get back on topic. I've started up the Pentagon challenge save. I'm starting off with the Edinburgh Capitals in the EIHL, because they have the lowest Rep and Wage Budget in that league. I then did a full purge of both the Staff and the Players. Complete clean slate. If you're familiar with the EIHL this pretty much happens from year to year with the players anyways in the bottom teams. In my classical European fashion I went for a team of only Youth players, because I love player development. Also it's completely and utterly overpowered since when you play in the UK all the generated youth players there become insane compared to when you don't play there. So my 15 year old British players are good enough to probably be depth players in the British national team. The rules in the EIHL allow for 14 import players (non-British), and I've stocked up on Swedish (and 1 Swiss + 1 Austian) talent. The average age of my roster is currently 16.23 years old. Pre-season was good to us, and this is the lineup I ended up with and the pre-season stats of our players:

Because I'm a bit of an idiot at times I forgot that you're allowed 14 import players, and instead aimed for 11 import players (you're allowed 11 non-EU players). So I will need to swap that lineup around a little bit. I've currently got my spare import players in farm leagues, juniors and out on loans. The eagle eyed will see that I've got Samuel Fagemo on the team. I always love when you have cross-over between your NHL team and EIHL team, it's entirely reasonable. This is a much worse, much younger Fagemo though. Our best game in pre-season was a 13-1 win against Fife Flyers, but pre-season and real season are two very different beasts with a team this young. I'm quite hopeful we're looking at a potential CHL challenger 4 or so years down the line once our talent has filled out a bit, or at least gone through puberty>.>

It's nice to get a whirl at Europe in a new db. In last year's db I have so much experience in Europe I essentially know of every single steal/hidden gem to get. It's fun to get a new slate with a tonne of players I've never had to deal with before. As well as some old faces being re-balanced for the new db. This is on a edited version of the 9.4db though, with all the budget and rep fixes I mentioned before. I can't be bothered to make them for 9.6

What is pentagon challenge ?

The board wants us to win the title again ... pretty hefty i think considering where we came from. But also the newspaper has our team as the strongest in the league. I am not so sure about that, I think we are not as good as we have been last season and even then we were not that great.

Preseason went nice though. I won all matchups against Hockey East. I did win 2 out of three matchups with the QMJHL and tied the third game. I won all three matchups against the OHL. I lost two games against the WHL and won one against WHL teams - a 12:3 against Seattle.

Among the top players of the league we have
Goaltender: Levesque (8th)
Defender: Butler (8th)
Left Wing: McCulloch (6th)
Center: Lafreniere (3rd)
Right Wing: Arnold (3rd), Ashton (8th)

Well that does not look exactly like champion material. Head Coach Charles Yates has to make the miracle happen again. He is in his 6th season allready and stands at 94-93-25.

Several important players are on their last season for me as well McCulloch, Leveque and Lafreniere are the best of those.

Filip Croatia wrote:What is pentagon challenge ?

In Football manager a Pentagon challenge is winning the European Champions League, South American Champions League, Asian Champions League, African Champions League and North American Champions League in the same save while starting as unemployed with all the lowest manager attributes, since starting unemployed in EHM doesn't work particularly well and you don't have manager attributes I start employed, but in one of the lesser leagues to win the CHL from, and with the team with the lowest rep and budget. Because we don't have all those continenal leagues in Hockey, I decided to just make my own version with the Champions Hockey League, Memorial Cup, Kelly Cup, Calder Cup and Stanley Cup. So I'm starting with the CHL in Europe and then I intend to go Memorial->Kelly->Calder->Stanley Cup after that, but the work market will decide the order of the middle ones. I'm saving the Stanley Cup for last regardless. In Europe I'm not using any special challenge rules. In the CHL and NHL I'll use slightly modified versions of the TBL Challenge rules that I use in my saves in those leagues. I've never really played the AHL but I'll essentially not be in control of what players I have there anyways, so doubt I need any special rules for the Calder.

Thanks for the feedback Shindigs

To be honest I'm not at all looking to understand/solve modern database problems or play issues (though I still find it very interesting, and do try to help out sometimes by offering feedback or gaining clarification and passing things on to Riz).

I'm wondering from an editing perspective & I'm looking at improving the 1974 database - ultimately I'm just trying to confirm whether the salary range editability actually works; the plan is there won't be a KHL or Russians playing outside of their country (or other nationalities playing in Russia) or RFAs or Salary Caps or anything like that in the 1974 database



P.S. In previous testing I did ALL of the NHL teams ended up with a Team Budget that allowed spending to the Salary Cap (within a few years every Team Budget was the same, and every team spent to the maximum) - if this is unchanged (I suspect it is) I think this might play a part in the issues you're noting (after the first few years basically every team in the NHL is in a crisis situation being up against the Cap every year/all the time)

Again "just from an editing perspective" I wonder if, without a Salary Cap. will teams follow varying Budgets or will they all end up at the maximum Team Budget for the League allowable according to the Editor? or....?

nino33 wrote:Thanks for the feedback Shindigs

To be honest I'm not at all looking to understand/solve modern database problems or play issues (though I still find it very interesting, and do try to help out sometimes by offering feedback or gaining clarification and passing things on to Riz).

I'm wondering from an editing perspective & I'm looking at improving the 1974 database - ultimately I'm just trying to confirm whether the salary range editability actually works; the plan is there won't be a KHL or Russians playing outside of their country (or other nationalities playing in Russia) or RFAs or Salary Caps or anything like that in the 1974 database



P.S. In previous testing I did ALL of the NHL teams ended up with a Team Budget that allowed spending to the Salary Cap (within a few years every Team Budget was the same, and every team spent to the maximum) - if this is unchanged (I suspect it is) I think this might play a part in the issues you're noting (after the first few years basically every team in the NHL is in a crisis situation being up against the Cap every year/all the time)

Again "just from an editing perspective" I wonder if, without a Salary Cap. will teams follow varying Budgets or will they all end up at the maximum Team Budget for the League allowable according to the Editor? or....?

I know there is one guy on the forums who plays/played with the salary cap turned off to stop the whole "Ovi and Sid being FA" issue. I think he posted in this thread about it, if you can get a hold of him he might know more. But yeah the actual salaries in the NHL don't matter because all teams have outlandish Fan support and market size values in the db, which will bring their budgets over the cap in a year or two. The same issues exist in the ECHL where all teams print money. But as I previously mentioned the AI doesn't actually have money, so not having enough budget to meet the cap shouldn't matter in theory. But it would be interesting to see how it played out from an editing standpoint I suppose.

The whole "getting players to stay in their own country" could possibly be editable in the db. Just no one's decoded that part yet. Because coaches won't go to certain countries regardless of their rep vs. team rep. For example you can't sign swedish coaches in Norway no matter how low their rep is. You also can't really sign canadian/american coaches in Europe (except britain, cause language?). European players also refuse to play in the ECHL in EHM even when they are low enough rep that you should be able to get them over there. On the other side of the spectrum decent NA players will ask for absurd wages to play in Sweden, when a team with lower rep in the ECHL can get them for dimes. But you can sign Swedish coaches in the ECHL, so it's not a blanket "no swedes" policy, it seems to be set manually. And I'm guessing Riz forgot to set it for that specific case. If that isn't hardcoded and the editor guy(s) could find how to edit that, you could probably apply that same thing to Russians refusing to go to America across the board and vice versa.

And to keep this post on Topic:
I'm currently just past New Year in the Pentagon Challenge, and we're doing a lot better than I'd expected in our first season. We do have a 16 year old goalie after all. We crashed out of the BCC (It's the hockey version of the FA Cup in Soccer) winning I think a single game in that? Because as it turns out a team with an average age of 16 doesn't do that well in a "playoff" scenario. But in the actual league we're flying!

For those not familiar with the EIHL (which is pretty much everyone alive) it doesn't quite work like a "normal" league. The league sorting is still like in the NHL with the two divisional leaders topping the conference (except it's the two conference leaders topping the league here), followed by the two #2 placed, etc. The kicker is that you only gain points for your conference standing by games played against other teams in your conference. Which is why there are two standings with different point totals. We're essentially in the "weaker" conference as far as I can tell, but Belfast who started at an alarming pace has fallen off the pace in the last 10 as you can see.

At one point I was quite tuned out and accidentally muscle-memory disciplined Anton Johansson, leading to him quitting the team (despite this being a pro league) which wasn't amazing. But I did have an extra spare Swede to take his place, so no real harm there. Overall we've been quite lethal offensively, the funny thing being that the only team we're having huge issues with is Manchester, just cause their goalie is being all hard to figure out. The others I've got more or less down to what shot targeting I need to use, but that Manchester goalie is a sneaky one.

We've had a lot of players do very well though, and the board already consider Marcus Collin (who is obviously Swedish with that name:S) to be an invaluable player. And to the surprise of me in particular our 16 year old goalie is the 2nd highest SV% and leading GAA in the league, so that's a thing:

The assist leader Oscar Öhman is our veteran Captain (which is to say he's 19 years old, making him our oldest player) and he's really centered that 1st line well. They are all 3 sitting around PPG pace. Samuel Fagemo is taking a run at the goal-scoring title from the 2nd line at 16 years of age and our top Offensive D Felix Dahlroth is making a splash on the assist charts. If this is how well they are going to play as a bunch of teenagers who haven't gelled with each other yet I'm thinking we might start seeing some continental hockey sooner rather than later. Which will bankroll our team pretty hard, pointlessly so I might add. I've played in the EIHL using mostly young Swedes once before and we ended up having like 4x as much budget as we could use by the mid 2020s. But it could potentially open up the possibility for affording some Europe bound ex-NHL goalie in the future, depending on how many years I need to get that CHL trophy.

Shindigs wrote: I know there is one guy on the forums who plays/played with the salary cap turned off to stop the whole "Ovi and Sid being FA" issue. I think he posted in this thread about it, if you can get a hold of him he might know more. But yeah the actual salaries in the NHL don't matter because all teams have outlandish Fan support and market size values in the db, which will bring their budgets over the cap in a year or two. The same issues exist in the ECHL where all teams print money.

Interesting; I've never known of anyone to do the editing/testing required (my plans are well beyond just turning off the Salary Cap)

The 1974 hockey world is so dramatically, massively different than the current situation they're not comparable; for the 1974 database Leagues can be set to be closed to imports period, Leagues can be made playable/unplayable, no CBA Rules, players mass edited so ALL from a country have 1 for Adaptability, etc - no one has done this for an entire database that I'm aware of, and why would they playing modern hockey? even the 1998 database is modern hockey compared to the 1974 database

Shindigs wrote:But as I previously mentioned the AI doesn't actually have money, so not having enough budget to meet the cap shouldn't matter in theory. But it would be interesting to see how it played out from an editing standpoint I suppose.

I don't know what it means when you say the AI has no money. With modern rosters all NHL teams have a Budget that exceeds that Salary Cap in a couple/few years...as I understand the problem, it's the AI doesn't "manage" the Cap and sign/trade/release/draft players accordingly, so the teams are all "up against the Cap" and can't sign key players that IRL would never go unsigned - am I misunderstanding?

My editing of money amounts is in a world with no Salary Cap; the money amount is supposed to be database driven (Hasn't been tested/confirmed to be optimally working) & for my purposes, retro databases, the Salary Cap is completely irrelevant

Shindigs wrote:The whole "getting players to stay in their own country" could possibly be editable in the db. Just no one's decoded that part yet.

It's not "unknown" (but aside from myself, working on a 1974 database where it's relevant, I don't know why anyone working on a modern database would care much)

nino33 wrote:

Shindigs wrote: I know there is one guy on the forums who plays/played with the salary cap turned off to stop the whole "Ovi and Sid being FA" issue. I think he posted in this thread about it, if you can get a hold of him he might know more. But yeah the actual salaries in the NHL don't matter because all teams have outlandish Fan support and market size values in the db, which will bring their budgets over the cap in a year or two. The same issues exist in the ECHL where all teams print money.

Interesting; I've never known of anyone to do the editing/testing required (my plans are well beyond just turning off the Salary Cap)

The 1974 hockey world is so dramatically, massively different than the current situation they're not comparable; for the 1974 database Leagues can be set to be closed to imports period, Leagues can be made playable/unplayable, no CBA Rules, players mass edited so ALL from a country have 1 for Adaptability, etc - no one has done this for an entire database that I'm aware of, and why would they playing modern hockey? even the 1998 database is modern hockey compared to the 1974 database

Have you tested the impact of 1 adaptability for being able to ship players over? I had the bum luck of having a very low adaptability Ovi regen (can't remember if it was 1 or not) in my Jets save and he came over just fine. Any time I changed anything for him his play went down the drain though, if I swapped him from one line to another his point production tanked. But apart from that, and it taking him about 2 years to learn basic English I didn't notice it do much. But the closed league would obviously do it.

nino33 wrote:

Shindigs wrote:But as I previously mentioned the AI doesn't actually have money, so not having enough budget to meet the cap shouldn't matter in theory. But it would be interesting to see how it played out from an editing standpoint I suppose.

I don't know what it means when you say the AI has no money. With modern rosters all NHL teams have a Budget that exceeds that Salary Cap in a couple/few years...as I understand the problem, it's the AI doesn't "manage" the Cap and sign/trade/release/draft players accordingly, so the teams are all "up against the Cap" and can't sign key players that IRL would never go unsigned - am I misunderstanding?

My editing of money amounts is in a world with no Salary Cap; the money amount is supposed to be database driven (Hasn't been tested/confirmed to be optimally working) & for my purposes, retro databases, the Salary Cap is completely irrelevant

What I mean is that rather than take the huge amounts of time to make the AI able to correctly and efficiently manage their budgets in budget driven leagues (like Swe-2 where I played 1700 hours) the AI effectively has Infinite money so it never has to take budget into account (which makes the AI much easier/faster to code, since it's less complex). I'll give an example. In my edited version of the db Vita Hästen of Swe-2 had rough a budget of 3.5M SEK per year. Because the SHL teams always end up with a few too many players on roster due to it being near impossible to get their wages and budget to match down to the level you need to stop them signing more players at the start of a save they will end up loaning out all the excess players. These players have too big wages to fit on lower level teams and the AI always make the team loaning the player pay 100% of the player's wage. The AI teams do not care about this however, since they have infinite money. So they just say yes to all loans. This lead to a situation where Vita Hästen had a total Salary of 18.5M SEK with a budget of 3.5M SEK. I also know from experience that by the end of year one with Vita Hästen you have about -1M SEK in the bank in my db version. This means that it's 100% impossible for that team to use money to buy players from another team when the season is over and you start building for next year (late april/early may). But they can still do just that, which means the AI has infinite money or no money depending on how you look at it (infinte so it never runs out, or none because it doesn't need to pay for things). So if a team doesn't have enough money in the db to be able to hit the salary cap it might still be able to just go over budget to hit the salary cap regardless. I haven't tested it so I don't know if it would work that way. But it certainly is a possibility.

nino33 wrote:

Shindigs wrote:The whole "getting players to stay in their own country" could possibly be editable in the db. Just no one's decoded that part yet.

It's not "unknown" (but aside from myself, working on a 1974 database where it's relevant, I don't know why anyone working on a modern database would care much)

I never noticed the option in the db editor, so assumed it was one of the things that hadn't been decoded yet.

And to once again get back on topic:
The regular season is now over and I'm not sure if my goalie ended up the best goalie in the league or not. Technically Jackson Whistle is still better, but he's also been playing in Germany for months now. Not sure he really counts as the best goalie in the league when he isn't in fact in the league. It seems like that would be a somewhat important part of that title. Anyways, we finished the season strong enough (still can't figure out Manchester's goalie to save my life). This is what the tables ended up looking like:

Clearly there is nothing wrong with the power level of junior players in EHM *cough*. But we had a really weird thing going on for most of the year, Fagemo and two other guys were all tied for the top goal-scorer every single time I checked the leaderboards after New Year. This is what it all ended up looking like:

I really didn't expect us to do this well year one. I didn't build this team to be a year 1 team. It's a more long-term investment. Most prospects have grown quite considerably (for this level) since the start of the season, but with the brutal 2 game tie playoff setup they use here I don't expect much in the playoffs. A single goalie collapse and you're done.

Overall I don't really think I'll need to do much of anything this off-season, almost all prospects are working out. Filip Hasa is the one exception, as he really started the season horribly. But I think that may have been him just having trouble adapting to a new country+league+playing against men. Because he ended the season a lot stronger, but I am keeping an eye on it. Come to think of it the other 2nd pairing Swede Ludwig Lilja is also quite likely to be replaced. He put up 10 points in 52 games with a +1 rating. That's not what you expect from one of your import player spots at all. I'll also have to see if/when I start losing players to the NHL, as the draft is always a somewhat harrowing experience when you have a good young team in Europe. I don't think I have any eligible players coming up for this year, I have 3 guys who are expected to be picked in the CHL Import Draft though, the only expected "early" pick is Filip Hasa who is expected to go in the mid 30s, it was the mid 20s before his somewhat weak season.

how to sign players when you play in NCAA ?

Filip Croatia wrote:how to sign players when you play in NCAA ?

You can of course sign UFAs, I suggest you tick on Ask assistant to filter unrealistic targets as many players just don't want to play in college.
Then you can scout the junior and high school leagues for 17-21 year olds and offer them "a contract" - i would tick the same thing here as many good players will not be interested to sign with you or have signed a "contract" allready.

I would not sign any who played in Major Juniors. The game would allow that but in real life it is not allowed. Also i would not offer contracts for the junior players before 1st november, as the AI starts to offer from 1st november

Newyear again. This is probably the last year in this safe, I will make a new career with 9.6 after that as i achieved the NCAA win in the frozen four allready.

On 1st january the board is delighted, Vermount sits on 1st place with 33 points in 16 games with only 4 losses so far. Injuries are a big issue lately. My best scorer is Philippe Coffey - 9 goals / 9 assists. Goaltending is awful - Levesque only at 86.6 % saves. On the bright side we went from worst PK to best PK this season. 87.7 % Penalty killing this season, together with 25 % success on PP this department looks good.

This career is ended now

we did win the regular season before we lost against Boston University in the playoffs 0-1.

The next career will be similar to Shindigs. I will probably start out in the 2nd league of Belarus and try to win the Continental Cup. Then hopefully change to 2nd norwegian league and try my luck till the Champions Cup. If i see it possible to win the ECC with a norwegian team without making the league play boring i will do that and then change to North America. If not i will try to change to Finland or Sweden lower leagues working the way up there. After that NCAA is the goal and after that the CHL. I will not try to go to the NHL though.

The first season is now over here in the EIHL. In the first BO2 round of the playoffs we faced Dundee, their goalie Fallon is one of the guys we have the most figured out so it should have been easy. Turns out he's a pretty good playoff performer though. We ended up winning the game at home 3-2, and in the game in their barn we were down 3-1 at the halfway point. But two quick goals meant we tied the game and won the series 6-5 on aggregate.

In the next BO1 round we were facing Nottingham, again a team where we have been destroying their goalie all season, we didn't have the best goalie performance but still managed to pull out a fairly comfortable 5-3 win against them. Which meant we were going to face off against Sheffield in the Finals.

This was going to be a very poor matchup for us as their goalie isn't weak to any shot targeting. Those guys are very rare, but they do exist at all levels of play in EHM. We gambled on targeting his 5-hole as he was 50/50 against that, with one insane game and one sub .900 during the regular season. We ended up outshooting them 35-25 and forced 13 minor penalties from them, but it just wasn't enough. They ended up beating us 3-2 as their goalie completely carried them to the win. I can't remember if the UK has 1 or 2 CHL spots, but I think it's just the one. I also can't remember if it's the regular season winner or the playoff winner that gets the spot. So we may or may not be playing continental hockey next season. Regardless this first season has been a huge success under the circumstances. By next season we will be much stronger just based on players gelling, getting more settled in the country and having 1 more off-season worth of growth. Not to mention we won't have a team of all rookies next season. All that combined means we should have a good shot at the title next season, but in a BO1/2 playoff anything can happen.

After running all the numbers and looking at the various analytics stuff I use to evaluate players I'm looking at moving our captain Oscar Öhman and our 2nd line Dman Ludwig Lilja this off-season. Öhman was our 2nd worst center in pretty much all categories and Lilja was even worse than our britith 15 year old defencemen. The most likely candidate for the captaincy is our current Assistant Captain Lukas Enkvist. He's growing very nicely and was one of our most consistent performer in all categories. He's also a Center:Allround who plays a Two-Way game, which is my optimal 1st line Center. The huge amount of icetime Öhman was getting made it look like he was doing a better job than he actually did. The other possible candidate is Sniping Center Urban Klingberg, he's got the mentals to do the job and was our most efficient offensive performer both in the regular season and the Playoffs. I'm still undecided on which one of them will get the role. I prefer playing my Captain on the first line and with the manpower I have it might actually work out better with Klingberg on the first line and Enkvist on the 2nd line. Just because Enkvist had really good synergy with the other guys on the 2nd line, and not so much with the guys on the 1st line that he played with in the playoffs.

So the summer will be spent looking around Scandinavia for a 3rd line Center and a 2nd pairing two-way/defensive Defenceman. I had one Center lined up that I was considering buying during the season in Victor Groth of AIK in Sweden. I also haven't followed up on if Anton Johansson managed to find a new team after he left us. If he didn't I might see if he's willing to return after his little breakdown. Actually, just checked it out. Brynäs signed Johansson and he's now got a 57M SEK pricetag, so that accidental dicispline was pretty costly. I'll try and focus more next season to avoid any more mishaps like that.

I took over as the GM of Energija Elektrenai a lithuanian team playing in the Bealrus Vysshaya League. The board wants the title right away, something which will be difficult. we have a crapload of about 10 LW while only 1 C and 2 RW. And it is hard to get players to sign here yet. It will be interesting. I will keep the staff that is here for now even if it is worse than bad

That's one interesting career path. Going from NCAA to Belarus.

Summer update: Skellefteå signed Victor Groth one day before our trade window opened. I ended up parting ways with both Öhman and Lilja in favor of bringing in Danish top prospect Phillip Schultz and Swedish Defenceman Leon Lerebäck.

Schultz is a player you're probably familiar with if you've played in Europe a lot, he also shows up in the NHL draft from time to time. He's a Skilled Center with a Two-Way game, and to top it all off he's consistent and good in big games. His decision making still needs work, but he's 16 so that's to be expected. He's actually being compared to a poor man's Pavel Datsyuk by our NHL level scout.

Lerebäck is an Offensive Defenceman but with a Two-Way game, which is my favored kind of Dman for the Two-Way role in my system. He's Relaxed and Loyal but also has the same issues with decision making as Schultz, but that's to be expected with these young Two-Way guys. He's being compared to 1st pairing guys or a more talented version of those guys.

I'm waiting for a new batch of scout reports but I've seen two of my British prospects being compared to both a poor man's Mikko Koivu and a poor man's Pavel Datsyuk, to give you an idea of just how insane British newgen players become when you play in the British top flight yourself. When you don't play there yourself all British generated players are garbage (which is fair), not quite sure why they become godlike when you play there yourself. It seems a bit arbitrary, but it's happened both times I've played in the EIHL.

Here's our British Mikko Koivu:

British new gens are a bit funny in that they (unlike real british hockey players) can be very tall. British players are so short on average, and this guy is huge. To top it all off he's also got the Center:Allround, is a Two-Way player and is consistent. If these reports are correct he's a potential first rounder in the draft a few years down the line.

Shindigs wrote:

nino33 wrote:

Shindigs wrote:But as I previously mentioned the AI doesn't actually have money, so not having enough budget to meet the cap shouldn't matter in theory. But it would be interesting to see how it played out from an editing standpoint I suppose.

I don't know what it means when you say the AI has no money. With modern rosters all NHL teams have a Budget that exceeds that Salary Cap in a couple/few years...as I understand the problem, it's the AI doesn't "manage" the Cap and sign/trade/release/draft players accordingly, so the teams are all "up against the Cap" and can't sign key players that IRL would never go unsigned - am I misunderstanding?

What I mean is that rather than take the huge amounts of time to make the AI able to correctly and efficiently manage their budgets in budget driven leagues (like Swe-2 where I played 1700 hours) the AI effectively has Infinite money so it never has to take budget into account (which makes the AI much easier/faster to code, since it's less complex). I'll give an example. In my edited version of the db Vita Hästen of Swe-2 had rough a budget of 3.5M SEK per year. Because the SHL teams always end up with a few too many players on roster due to it being near impossible to get their wages and budget to match down to the level you need to stop them signing more players at the start of a save they will end up loaning out all the excess players. These players have too big wages to fit on lower level teams and the AI always make the team loaning the player pay 100% of the player's wage. The AI teams do not care about this however, since they have infinite money. So they just say yes to all loans. This lead to a situation where Vita Hästen had a total Salary of 18.5M SEK with a budget of 3.5M SEK. I also know from experience that by the end of year one with Vita Hästen you have about -1M SEK in the bank in my db version. This means that it's 100% impossible for that team to use money to buy players from another team when the season is over and you start building for next year (late april/early may). But they can still do just that, which means the AI has infinite money or no money depending on how you look at it (infinte so it never runs out, or none because it doesn't need to pay for things). So if a team doesn't have enough money in the db to be able to hit the salary cap it might still be able to just go over budget to hit the salary cap regardless. I haven't tested it so I don't know if it would work that way. But it certainly is a possibility.

Roster Management AI is a challenge to program and EHM could use improvement, that I wholeheartedly agree.....but for me using what was formerly an unplayable really low League and using it as "representative" of the game AI or coding I'm not comfortable with myself; Riz has already noted that the AI for all these formerly unplayable Leagues is going to be the most basic there is (created for Leagues that played no games and had no League rules/etc).....so the actual AI roster management that's in game and needs improvement for the top leagues (that have always been playable) is not what you experienced playing Swe-2 (or the NCAA)

I think Riz has been trying to tweak things a bit for some formerly unplayable Leagues, like the NCAA and some "lower Elite Leagues" (top Leagues in "lower" countries)...I don't think anything's being looked at for Swe-2 though (I don't see Swe-2 mentioned much)

Okay we got a few new players after all

C Edvin Stankevic 19 year old center, awful player but a center

C Petras Stankunavicius 19 year old center, just as good as Stankevic

C Pavel Korepanov a 40 year old russian. Lots of experience so should help us

RW/LW Jan Kubista 32 year old winger from the czech republic. Has enormous experience in various czech leagues and should help us big time. He has been a 4th round draft pick by the Bruins 14 years ago. Good teamwork

RW Roman Petroc 31 year old speedy winger from russia.

RW/C Daniel Bogdziul a 22 year old versatile forward. Lithuanian star of the future - or so. Has had some experience in junior leagues, namely MHL and finnish A-juniors.

The newspaper ranks us on 3rd place ..we have a budget problem currently though as our salaries amount to 256.000 per year while our player budget is 199.990. We have a few Topplayers mentioned

Goalies: no one
Defenders: Aliukonis (3rd), Nauseda (10th)
Left Wing: Bendzius (10th)
Center: Korepanov (5th), Kulevicius (8th)
Right Wing: no one
prospects: Baltrukonis (1st), Fiscevas (9th)

Will be not an easy season i think. Just the thing i want

Turns out there are 2 teams from the EIHL going to the CHL this season, so we're in!


And nino, the default db has Swe-2 in it. So that point isn't valid. If Riz put a league in the base game without giving it proper AI support that's pretty bad.

Even the AI in huge budget AAA titles is lazy, simplistic and taking the easy way out. Why assume a small one man project's AI wouldn't take that same path? It makes no sense to me. At least Riz has an excuse for it being that way, the AAA studios don't.

Shindigs wrote:And nino, the default db has Swe-2 in it. So that point isn't valid. If Riz put a league in the base game without giving it proper AI support that's pretty bad.

Sounds like it's my error, as I thought Swe-2 was a "lower league" two levels below HockeyAllsvenskan (I thought it was one of the TBL added Leagues)

Shindigs wrote:Even the AI in huge budget AAA titles is lazy, simplistic and taking the easy way out. Why assume a small one man project's AI wouldn't take that same path?

I think I'm not assuming anything, and that includes drawing conclusions about the game AI from testing done in lower Leagues

I know there are differences in AI depth for different Leagues, and I know the game itself is NHL centric...I don't think lower level European Leagues are representative of the AI; I agree that the Financial/Roster Management AI needs improvement, but I suspect that non-Elite pro hockey Leagues are not high on the priority list



For myself, with things as complicated as AI, when it comes up as an issue in my discussions with Riz I try to just tell him #1 what is wanted/what I think would be best and #2 what I see happening via testing (and/or see many posting about); I do sometimes "guess" as to why, and make suggestions (and I've been wrong sometimes because I didn't understand how the coding worked, as it wasn't at all what was expected); I never start from a position that I think I know/understand, I never bring up other games and how I think they're done. When Riz tells me how things work on something, and I test it and validate it, I'm satisfied it's true; when the testing shows issues I point them out to Riz

I might look into testing the Financial AI a bit with my 1974 database when it's ready for the new EHM, but I doubt it, as my interest in testing has really waned; I think an entire database has to be "set up" before effective testing can be done (I believe effective/helpful testing needs to be aware of/deal with variables...there's a lot of editing that can be done to an EHM database that can change the effect of those variables IMO)

New year ... the season is going okay-ish
After 30 (out of 44) games we are sitting on 4th place. Energija is playing very inconsistent. We are sure to reach the playoffs, but we are not in a real contender-shape. And we are allready in serious debt. The board allready is a little disappointed, so i am not sure i will be the GM here next season as well.

Mauras Baltrukonis is our best scorer (22 points) and also leading the team in assists (19). Alvaras Bendzius is our best goalscorer (11). Daniel Bogdziul the future star has scored 9 goals and 12 assists.