EHM The Blue Line

danny111 wrote:dabo, when would you like to give this game?

Not sure I understand what you mean but if you are asking for a release date, it is impossible to say.

care to give us your best guess for a year of release? This year (if all goes according to plan) ? 2012? 2015...

dave1927p wrote:care to give us your best guess for a year of release? This year (if all goes according to plan) ? 2012? 2015...

I cannot do anything but guess and that is something I rather not do. All I can say is if the development team does not grow further and we keep up the current pace there will definitely not be a release this year. In a coming blog entry I can list what we think would be realistic to implement this year; but that is it for now.

good enough for me. Thanks.

Better that you don't rush it too

Once we have gotten a bit further and decided what to include in the first version and what to leave out it will be easier to estimate when a release is realistic. I prefer to release a fairly basic first version and make sure it is stable enough.

Ok so I just had an idea, regarding the development of junior European players. And it is structured so to be db-driven (and thus easily editable).

A thing that EHM lacked is the move of junior players from minor countries to more developed countries.
So, my idea is that we should assign each country a value for the high level of its junior league.
Pool 1 = Sweden, Finland, maybe Switzerland and Austria (but this is influenced by Red Bulls' money)
Pool 2 = Russia (junior league here is one of the best in Europe, but there arent many foreigners, mainly people from former CCCP), Czech, Slovakia
Pool 3 = Germany

And so on.

Then at the end of the season we should force AI teams to loan their junior players to teams from the different pools. High PA + high ambition > Pool 1, and so on. Loans are to be kept yearly. On the other hand AI teams should scout in Europe every now and then, and be able to bid for loans of junior players.

In this way imho the game and the players development would be much more realistic. If we could even coach these teams, then it would be a paradise

What do you guys think?

I also think that ambition should play a bigger role in the game, than in EHM. And be tied with nationality patterns in some way. Italian and Swiss players for example are mostly low motivated and not ambitious, mostly they prefer being a big fish in a small pond than the other way around. In EHM there is not enough junior players movement, there are many bad things, for example, Russian players born in Moscow with 190 PA (regens) which move to Kazakhstan and then got drafted out of these teams, play in Kazakhstan till they are 22(!!) and then play directly in the NHL.

I can't see more of an unrealistic path. Big junior players in 99% of the cases play for big teams in their respective leagues, like CSKA Moscow, MODO, and such stuff. Perhaps the problem is a lack of couting activities from such teams? In any case, there is no chance in earth that first round picks players play in some obscure Russian third league or Finn fourth league. And no one would scout them there anyway.

Another example. Hasek's regen, thus PA rather high (I didn't check with a saved game editor and I don't want to). He starts playing in Strakonice (reasonable), Czech third league. Then he plays four years in Strakonice posting god-like numbers, then gets called into the first round of the NHL draft and is a #1 goalkeeper straight away (well the Caps had a terrible situation, but still).

My god ...

It should be (IMHO)

16 years: First year in Strakonice (nothing wrong about this, although players should born younger)
Then at 16 or 17 he moves to Slavia Prague, Sparta Prague, HC Pardubice, smth like that, spends 2 years in junior teams, maybe gets loaned to a second league team. Starts playing on the international stage (well, in EHM there is only U20 NT, this doesnt help)
At 18 if he had such a career he could be realistically get drafted, not in the first round though. Then what happens after the draft is another thing because it's up to the NHL teams or if he wants to play in the CHL.

Hey, I was wondering about two things that you may or may not have planned out yet.

1) How are you going to handle forechecking? It's a huge part of the game, especially in the NHL, so I was just curious as to whether or not you were going to make it an actual attribute, or if you were going to let players' forechecking ability be up to a number of different attributes such as aggressiveness, pokechecking, etc.

2) Was wondering if you had a rough idea of what you were going to do with CA/PA. I know you were thinking of scrapping it entirely, so what would you use in its' place? A potential cap on each attribute separately? And lastly, do you plan on making potentials mostly reachable, or are high potentials going to be common, but reaching them not always so?


Thanks.

Panfork wrote:1) How are you going to handle forechecking? It's a huge part of the game, especially in the NHL, so I was just curious as to whether or not you were going to make it an actual attribute, or if you were going to let players' forechecking ability be up to a number of different attributes such as aggressiveness, pokechecking, etc.

There is no one attribute regarding forechecking, but like you write I imagine during game simulations a player's ability to forecheck will be determined by several attributes.

Panfork wrote:2) Was wondering if you had a rough idea of what you were going to do with CA/PA. I know you were thinking of scrapping it entirely, so what would you use in its' place? A potential cap on each attribute separately? And lastly, do you plan on making potentials mostly reachable, or are high potentials going to be common, but reaching them not always so?

Yes CA/PA as we know it from EHM are not part of this project, with that said, I am still using values to keep track of current ability towards a player's potential ability. In short I have a set of these variables for each practice area and experience; the latter affecting non-practice attributes but rather those that are affected by experiences throughout a player's career. I plan on writing an article regarding this subject shortly which will consist of much more details.