EHM The Blue Line

Thanks again, but still can´t see how this helps me actually keeping track of progression without designing a spreadsheet. I saw a couple users in this topic referring to using the spreadsheet or a spreadsheet (Shindigs f.e.), would be pretty neat if someone could upload one to use.

Whomario wrote:Thanks again, but still can´t see how this helps me actually keeping track of progression without designing a spreadsheet.

We're all volunteers, and Archi's a busy man (it's his site, and he's also the designer of the EHM Updater and EHM1 Editor and other tools, when he's not being a lawyer and husband and living his real life!...he'd be the one to fix file links, and not likely to quickly do so in the middle of the work week)

Whomario wrote:I saw a couple users in this topic referring to using the spreadsheet or a spreadsheet (Shindigs f.e.), would be pretty neat if someone could upload one to use.

I think Shindig's was just a spreadsheet with data entered

The Player Attribute Tracker has 5 tabs for data entry and one tab with summarized improvement/regression shown in green/red (using excel formulas).
So you enter the starting data and then you can enter the data monthly, yearly, after a certain number of games, etc & the summary tab shows the improvement.
Entering the name/position the first time on the first tab automatically enters it on the other tabs...the Attribute Tracker is the only spreadsheet "tool" that I'm aware of

Was not meant as an attack in any way, shape or form. I realize all you have pointed out, was just trying to convey that the export function on the EHM Assistant isn´t really doing much for me personally, maybe in hope of an alternate idea emerging Have a little time on the weekend, so might just try to create sth real simple myself.

Thanks again for the tips and pointers !

Been away trying to find a league that doesn't have any bugs that ruin the experience (harder than it sounds, if you don't like playing the NHL). Since I've swapped over to tracking in the 1-100 attribute system and noticed some really odd things about it.

1. Players gain attributes in chunks of 5 (same as 1 in 1-20).
2. Exception to the above rule is Teamwork which can gain less (had one gain of +3, which is 0.6 using the normal 1-20 scale), it is possible this was due to a natural loss of 2 followed by a training gain of 5. No way to know for sure.
3. Players sometimes lose attributes in uneven numbers, but generally lose in chunks of 5. My current hypothesis is that when an event of some kind causes a loss (like the one from the Swe-2 playoff bug) you have players lose nice even chunks of 5 (1 in 1-20). But when they decline naturally, like from age, they lose them 1 at a time. So a player with 64 (12) would need to lose 5 (1) before he actually drops to 59 (11), whereas a player with 61 (12) would only need to lose 2 (0.4) to drop to 59 (11). Meaning that some players will have bigger/smaller buffers of attribute to lose before you start seeing a loss using 1-20. Way too early to tell if this hypothesis is correct though. Only used this for 2 seasons so far, and more than half my team is younger than 16, so not a whole lot of decline by age to be seen yet.
4. The 1-100 scale ISNT 1-100. It's 1-99. This means that when a player goes from 19->20 they go from 95->99, making it look all kinds of weird in the stats. *sigh*

After having tried using the Tech, Tech2 and Phys schedules in the ECHL I've come to the conclusion that it simply does not work there. My assumption is that the higher amount of games being played has something to do with it. Since overtraining and exhaustion seems to be a thing. I have tried it in the EIHL again though, and can say that it works fairly well there. They too have a 52 game season starting in september and ending in march/april. So it seems that Tech and co. work very well for that game density specifically.

I'd need to brave the BS that is dealing with affiliate AI in the ECHL for way longer than my sanity permits to figure out the sweet-spot for the 70-80 games a year leagues. So I leave that up to some other brave soul.

Another thing to note is that poor performance does hinder growth a lot with players who aren't very high determination (hypothesis). I tried using these schedules for Kongsvinger Knights in Norway, they have roughly half the budget of the 2nd worst team in norway, and start about 150% over budget, so you have to sell your entire roster at the beginning of the season, and will then need to endure chain losing and praying you don't get FM'd in the relegation playoff until you eventually get enough budget to have a whole roster of raw prospects. Seriously, if you need a challenge in EHM, go play as them. Anyhow, I got a bit sidetracked there. The point is when you chain-lose like that most players will decline/stagnate even if they are young and should be growing. I have a large gray area that I cannot speak for, but players up to 12 determination got absolutely trucked by the experience, and everyone 18+ seemed to just learn from the defeats and move on with their careers. I had no one in between, so can't attest for the 13-17 range. And I am pretty sure there are a few hidden attributes that no doubt played into it.

On the note of what I use, I do manually enter attributes into a homemade spreadsheet. It does require some tinkering though, from time to time, so not 100% plug and play. But probably close to it. The trainer tab makes picking what trainers to hire so much less annoying, if you wish to use the 1-20 system there you actually need to change some formulas. Or anyone with the correct style/tactics for each role will just be infinitely better than anyone else, Based on my findings waaay back having the perfect style/tactics combo vs. just any old thing is about the same as having +10 (2) to the overall rating it spits out on the right, this is in the formula though, so no need to think about it. Just input the attributes of the coaches you have in mind and it will highlight the best of each sub-group of practice in green. Examples: "Style" would be Technique, General or Conditioning. "Tactics" would be Attacking, Defensive or N/A if they have no preference. I also have it weigh the actual coach forward/defender/goalie as IIRC 3x that of a mental for the score, this is just an arbitrary number that is big enough to make it so it very rarely thinks someone with only good "mentals" would make a good coach at something they have terrible coaching skill at. If there is a better tool out there, please do tell. I just use this cause I needed a tool, so I made a tool with what I knew at the time. Better than wild guessing at least.(barely)
Download
Some reference numbers:
an NHL 4th liner(?) like Luke Gazdic will have about 1k to 1.1k trainable attribute total, which is about the same as a top 3 Swe-2 player a few seasons in, with the inevitable power creep.
A solid 14 y/o British newgen will have about 500-600, add about 100 to that for a solid Swedish/Finnish/Canadian newgen, since they tend to be 16 when they gen.
The best 14 y/o newgen I've ever seen/owned had 825, by 15 he had 891. Projected to be about 1100 by his 18th birthday. Not quite McDavid levels, but he did have better mentals...
Connor McDavid has 1242 and Sidney Crosby has 1513 at game start.
Goalies will (obviously) always have slightly less, since they have fewer attributes than skaters; Henrik Lundqvist has 1247 for example, roughly 80% of what Crosby has, this is pretty much the standard goalie to skater Trainable Attribute Total ratio for players of somewhat comparable levels.

The spreadsheet only tracks the attributes that are directly affected by training (to my knowledge), and lumping the improvements together within each training sub-type. It's also currently made to be used with the 1-100 system. The only thing that really changes though is what arrow is shown next to the gain at the bottom of each player.

Also on the note of scouting. I'm working off incomplete knowledge, which is what scouting is. It's all about shaping an image of what kind of player you are dealing with based on what you do know. All I know is that using hidden attributes I can still find the exact kind of players I want for my team with no issue what-so-ever, and barring fairly rare exceptions they will do just what I expect them to, and have the attributes I expect them to. There will always be wildcards, especially when it comes to mentals your scouts are really vague, but they will always give you enough of an idea to know if their mentals are good. They will very often neglect to tell you if they are bad, or just very uninspiring. I rate everything in the 7-11 range as uninspiring, and everything below that as bad. Some attributes like Determination I am much more strict with, If I can avoid having anyone below 12. I will. The biggest thing about the scout snippets + traits is that they will give you a lot of clues as to what hidden attributes they may have. Generally something like "always brings his A-game" and "has excellent concentration and focus" are pretty hard to misunderstand, others are more subtle. But really, at the end of the day you want a player who performs day in and day out. WHY he performs couldn't be less imporant as a GM, all that matters is that he does. And having just come off winning the EIHL my second season with the lowest wage team and more than half my team being 15y/o british finesse forwards with almost all red (default scheme) technicals I feel pretty confident in saying that what I am doing works for finding incredibly talented players who perform reliably (read:has good hidden attributes). Does that mean I perfectly know what every single snippet and trait means? No, that would be silly. Does it mean I know which ones makes a winner when I see them? Clearly... But really that is just common (hockey) sense. And a bit of experience. I fail to see what is so controversial about using a game system for its intended purpose.


40 CA (approximation) player outscoring a 95 CA player.

It all comes down to what the end goal is. For me at least, the end goal is figuring out what wins games, and to me something like limiting penalties is a big part of that, since a proportionally quite large amount of goals are scored on the PP. Say, for arguments sake, that "competetive" means 15+ dirtiness, this is illogical. But so are a lot of things in this game, also this is just a random example. What does that tell us? do we know the difference between 1 and 20 dirtiness? How big is it? How many minutes less per year? If we don't know the answer to this (and if you do, please enlighten me) knowing that a player has 1 or 20 dirtiness is useless information. Because if we don't know the scale and how it impacts the actual game, knowing which attribute has what value is utterly pointless, it's just a factoid at that point. Not an answer to any question.

On the note of scales, I actually revisited Slough Jets in NIHL South-2 (the lowest skill league you can play in EHM...I hope). I noticed a few things, the biggest of it being that scale is an issue in EHM, a BIG one. This actually helped me in scouting more efficiently, funnily enough. Since I now know you can ignore the skill level of a league a player scored a lot in, since that doesn't really matter (much) in this game assuming it was done AFTER the game started, all stats from before the 15-16 season are more than useless since the game can't make a player perform close enough to their real life potential for those numbers to hold any water, at least not reliably. This makes scouting before the 2nd season of any save much harder.
In the actual real life NIHL South-2. Slough Jets won the regular season in 2014-15, losing only a single game. They did this behind a 44 year old serbian man scoring 48 points in 11 games, out of a 20 game season. If you look at this season(15-16), their defenseman actually had to be their goalie one game. This should make it pretty clear that any professional hockey player stuck into this mess would score hundreds of points in those 20 games, seeing as players who just about made it in the 2nd tier of British hockey have previous seasons. So it stands to reason that IF(<--That is quite literally a BIG if) EHM could deal with the full range of playable leagues in the game, using its 1-20 scale, putting a player like Matt Reber in there would end in total annihilation? Wrong! He struggled to get 1 PPG. This made me realize that the point I was making about a 20 being too easily achievable was also correct in the inverse. That being; a 1 is far too good to represent the worst players avaliable in this game. In the NIHL South-2 you are dealing with players who almost all have 1-3 in the vast majority of their technicals...and mentals....and physicals...(slight hyperbole, but you get the point) But they still can keep up with, and even beat/tie a team with almost all players with key technicals/mentals/physicals in the 7-11 range. This means that the game is a very very poor representation of real hockey (not really news though, is it). Because clearly the difference between a 1 and a 20 isnt enough to encompass the leagues the game ships with unmodded. Which brings in the question, does attributes even really matter much? The hidden attributes seem to, the actual visible attributes I honestly generally see surprisingly little effect from. This is probably the most clear with goalies. You can, and will, have goalies with 15 gloves/blocker and 12+ in most all other attributes get completely smoked by goalies with 7-8 in just about everything across a whole season (it was this exact thing happening that lead to me accidentally winning the league for the swe-2 bug to ruin my whole team). If anything I'd almost argue that in some ways scouting got easier once I hid attributes, since the actual shown attributes don't really make a player good anyways. Just another set of smoke and mirrors, much like the 2D engine. Scout Report+History tab >> Attributes tab every day of the week.

I decided to edit out the rant that would have followed here, but the TL;DR is that I'm saddened at all the missed potential this game has due to it, in my eyes, being an unfinished product due to the limited resources given to the creator by his company. That this persisted past the Early Access stage is something that I personally find quite depressing. If they just had the ability to talk to all players/staff from FM in EHM it would solve so many of them. But that whole system is missing, which is what I mean by unfinished. Clearly the company agrees since they put it in their flagship game. Also the scout reports in FM doesn't require a Masters Degree in Footballmanagerology to decipher, unlike EHMs equivalent. And I used to play Shadowrun 1e, so I like to think my level of tolerance for unclear, verbose and generally confusing and unfinished game systems is higher than most

Did some more testing in a save i setup purely for testing purposes (still no editor used, I can't get past that I consider it a cheat, sorry). I took a team in Swe-2 IF Sundsvall. I saved right after a game that had all players, except the goalies and 1 player who wasn't played much, at low enough Con that they wouldn't cap at 100%. I then setup 17 practice schedules using different variations, I gave "Light" a numeric value of 1, "Medium" a numeric value of 2, and finally "Intense" a numeric value of 3. I then made 3 categories, one where all schedules had the total "value" of 13, this is where "Tech", "Tech2" and "Phys" fit in. Another with the total value of 14, and finally one with a total value of 15. The light con + light ska schedule from the 15 category is the exact same as the one from the 14 category, since you can't get more than 2x light + 4x intense. Thus only 17 schedules instead of 18.

Once I had it setup I started by checking if the con gained back is variable, it isn't. Player x will always gain back the same amount of con on the same schedule, barring outside influence. It's got a set value, not a range of values. This made testin a lot faster, since I only had to record the gain on each schedule once, rather than the planned 10 times, making it require 17 restarts instead of 170, which was nice.

What I found was that the effect of different schedules on con return from day to day is very limited. The most lenient schedule, named "13-S" short for 13 (the amount of total numeric value) and S (Slack), which looks like this:
Con: Lig
Ska: Lig
Tac: Med
Sho: Int
Off: Int
Def: Int

and the most extreme schedule, 15-E (Evil), which looks like this:

Con: Int
Ska: Int
Tac: Med
Sho: Med
Off: Med
Def: Med

was rather small, in fact all the 15 point schedules except the two most lenient had the exact same con return on all 20 players. And the only change in those two was that a single player gained 1 more con back in the two most lenient. The other 19 were totally unaffected by the difference.

The only place where a somewhat noticable change could be seen between schedules was in the 13 grouping, where the most extreme schedule 13-E, also known as "Phys" saw an average Con return of 5.1, whereas the most lenient, 13-S, which is the first one I typed out above showed an average return of 5.57 con per day. Which means that the difference was essentially that half the team got back 1 more con per day on the most lenient schedule, which isn't exactly a world of difference.

I still need to take it to extremes by testing a schedule with all training modes set to light, and ones with several set to "none", as well as the old Malhotra all "int" schedule. To see if there is any more difference there. If there is that means that training isn't a zero sum game as some have hinted at in the past. What I mean by this is that if you have all training set to "Intense" it means it will split the training even between all of them, essentially making all "lig" all "med" and all "int" perform nearly identical, whereas a schedule with 3 lig and 3 int would have the 3 lig on a lower level than that, and the 3 int on a higher level than that, the fact that the attribute gain of players is so different on "Tech" and "Tech2" despite the only difference being that i swap the "lig" in ska with the "med" in tac between the two heavily points towards it being said "zero sum game", the shuffling of them internally means that even the parts of the schedule you don't change gets their ratio of the total training altered. Since a "Med" in Ska takes up about twice as much as one in Tec it leaves less training for all the others, regardless of if they are set to "int", "med" or "lig", I'll try and explain why in the next paragraph.

I noticed that a lot of schedules that were seemingly very different, had the same effect on con return. There were 9 schedules that gave an average return of 5.1 con, the two most extreme from the 13 category, the 3 most extreme from the 14 category, and the 4 most extreme from the 15 category. This means that, as expected, having Med/Int in Conditioning (and probably Skating too, an ingame hint points towards it at least) has a much larger inverse effect on your con return than having Intense on the technical/mental based training. It's close to, but not quite, 2x as taxing with training in the physicals as in the others. Due to my chronic illness I'm currently dealing with, doing math problems is a wee bit of a problem. So I didn't manage to find a perfect fit, but it was very close to having no overlap in the training difficulty ranges between the schedules that gave 5.1 and the ones that gave 5.14 when I used 2x value for all physical training, so Int went from 3 to 6, Med from 2 to 4, and lig from 1 to 2 in the numeric value.

Based on limited findings it did seem that having Int con + Lig ska = med con + med ska. There were two schedules in the test that got the exact same numeric values with the 2x physicals, the only difference between the two was one had Int+lig, the other had med+med. Making it likely, but far from guaranteed that it's "the same" for con at least, but from my earlier findings Int+lig gives more attribute gain than med+med does, making it a superior combination.

Note that all this means is that from a con perspective you can have much more taxing schedules than "Tech", "Tech2" and "Phys". It does not mean that using those more taxing schedules actually result in more attribute gain for your players. My current hypothesis, that this is one of the first steps towards proving, is that all players have a minimum and maximum amount of workload. If a schedule is below the minimum, the player will either stagnate or in a worst case scenario even decline. This explains those players who refuse to grow in the summer on the same scheule that had them gain tonnes during the season, it also explains (partially) those players that stagnate/lose if they don't get quite enough game time. They fail to reach their "floor value" since the low ice time+practice schedule doesn't add up to enough workload to satisfy them. On the flipside you have the player that simply will not grow at all on schedules with 2x "int" in the physicals, but grow just fine with 2x "med", but also decline with 2x "lig".

I had that exact player I describe above a few saves ago, Christopher Fish of VIK in Swe-2. When I had him on a 2x med schedule all was well, 2x lig and he lost attributes in everything. Not just con and ska based stuff as you'd imagine. And on 2x int he also lost from everything due to being overworked. It points towards every player having a "sweetspot" where they grow flawlessly, and the further you get to either side the worse it gets, just like if you play a prospect in a league above their level they won't grow (even if they score a lot of points and have a good rating), and if they are in too low a league the same happens. The same system seems to be in place with the practice schedules.

Finally another thing to note on Con return, it seemingly is only connected to the hidden attribute "Natural Fitness", Stamina seems to have no effect, I had a 70 (14) stamina player gain back 7 con from every single schedule, as well as a 49 (9) stamina player gain the exact same (7) on all schedules. I also started off the test by having a physio with relatively high judging player ability (just in case that matters) deliver physio reports on all players to see if it would give me any hints of their Natural fitness, it only reported back on their stamina, workrate and strength though. Based on my findings any player with 35 (7) or above stamina or workrate will be described as being able to do "heavy minutes" <-Stam and "works hard"<-workrate. The next cutoff is at 80 (16), where the return for workrate becomes "Big minutes" (which is really confusing since "heavy minutes" relates to Stamina) and the return for Stamina SHOULD be "Stamina worthy of praise". I say should because the only one who had 80 (16)+ in workrate, strength or stamina was my goalie. He had 81 (16) workrate, 85 (17) Strength and 34 (6) stamina. And he got the "Stamina worthy of praise" and the "isn't strong and it's having negative impact on his game" returned. Which means it's bugged to have it look at strength for stamina value and vice versa, at least for goalies. Can't speak to skaters since I had none with 80+. I've reached the point where I'm finding more than 1 bug per day in this game now, not ideal...


The anomaly at the 13-M schedule isn't due to a typo. One player simply got no con back on that schedule specifically. The number under the average con return is how many players were affected, if the same player were affected more than once he was counted once each time. The same player who had no return on 13-M gained back the same he had on 13-C when 13-L was used, and also got another +1 on 13-S. He had low Natural Fitness (only gaining back 3 per day).

Edit: Just ran the all int, and a few other variations. Results were more or less as expected. But not entirely, running int in both con and skating did indeed have a bigger con return hit than int everything, making it seem like training does indeed have an upper limit. If you have everything on "int", each one of them will be less impactful than if you had a mix of lig, med and int. There are only so many hours of useful training one can do per day, making the "all int" approach impossible to sustain in real life, which is why it's reduced to a possible maximum level of training. All makes logical sense really. It's with all med vs. only med con+ska where things get messy. Here you gain back more con per day on only con+ska than on all med. Which means that medium isn't in fact working out at 0, which I just naturally assumed it to be, it's less than 0, which means that when you are going "very medium" or whatever you want to call having medium in only two different ones, you get a % modifier to a negative value, making it a bigger negative value (duh). That's the only way it makes sense. because if we assume that medium is actually at plain 0; any multiplier to it would have no effect at all. If the modifier was a set number, we wouldn't see the decrease in workload either but rather an increase, so by process of elimination the change when not using all training types at once to super focus on one is a multiplier, which is good to know. So that's the end of that then? No, the freaking all light vs. con+ska light has the exact same con return for both. Which totally ruins that theory, unless it was because all the players hit their maxium possible con return per day (same as on resting) with both schedules, which after further testing is indeed the case. Yes, I should have tested that as the very first thing, but I forgot. This presumably means that if it were possible con+ska lig would return even more con per day than full lig. But that is an entirely theoretical discussion since your players hit a workload low enough to "cap out" their con return per day before that happens in practice (literally). What this means is that if you "need to rest a player" putting them on "resting" is wasting training, since you'd get the exact same con return with a more lax schedule. Exactly where that line in the sand is, I do not know yet, but with some brute force trial and error I could find it quick. I never ever rest my players though, so I don't feel particularly inclined to do so.

The big takeaway i got from all this is that the difference between going all out int everywhere, and going full resting, only results in 1 more/less con returned per day for all but the lowest of Natural Fitness players, I had one guy gain +2 going from 3 to 5 per day, which is still poor. The average in my tests was way lowered due to a few very low natural fitness players, as well as 2 goalies + 1 skater being at 100% con even after playing 3 games in 6 days. So there are always 3/20 players having a 0 gain from any and all schedules every single day. Since all I care about is the difference between the schedules, not the actual average, I didn't bother to cut them from the data. Since it doesn't have any impact on what I actually need to know anyways. The two important factors are: how much did the player who gained the most between the lower/highest workload gain? Answer: 2, how many of them showed any difference from schedule to schedule? Answer: to be found under each column. Generally slightly more than half of them showed any change at all between minimum and maximum for any schedule you would realistically use, which is really insignificant. Enough so that con should have no real impact on choice of schedule. I can't believe I missed that for this long. I just aimed at having a solid 6-8 return on all players, and hit that right away with my schedules (since as I now know, ALL schedules will have good natural fitness players in that range). This won't actually really change anything in how I train players per se, but it does mean I'm now a lot less paranoid about testing higher/lower strain schedules to find some more hidden gems. The downside of this is that I need to rebuild my training spreadsheet to allow for more schedules in use at the same time...darn it!

Doing some other small time thinking leads me to these conclusions:
1. All the 5.14 con return schedules are potentially good schedules for players who have normal Natural Fitness (or w/e attribute decides how much workload they need to improve, I don't freaking know) this is the range where "Tech" is. So far this range only seems to work in 50 game a year leagues.
2. August Gunnarsson, who is the only player I've ever had who realiably, across multiple saves, grows on "Phys"; a 5.10 schedule, should mean that all schedules in that range are potentially good ones for players with high <insert attribute that requires high workload>, but based on the numbers I used to design "Phys" it might be the best of them. I'd consider trying to replace it with 15-E and pray nothing explodes, since Int for Off. Skill is very efficient, and Med for Tac stops it declining. And Phys has proven to not work too well for young players during summers. Nino, does Natural Fitness grow with age at all? I forget.
3. 13-L could prove to be the remedy for players who are too overworked on "Tech", knowing if someone is under/overworked will probably be down to trial and error. If someone plays a lot of 70-80 games a season leagues and wouldn't mind trying it out, It'd be much appreciated. Since that seems to be an environment where players don't grow well on the 5.14 schedules.

Shindigs wrote:Also the scout reports in FM doesn't require a Masters Degree in Footballmanagerology to decipher, unlike EHMs equivalent. And I used to play Shadowrun 1e, so I like to think my level of tolerance for unclear, verbose and generally confusing and unfinished game systems is higher than most

IMO there is nothing complicated at all (and I would make it "more complicated" not less)

Shindigs wrote:I decided to edit out the rant that would have followed here, but the TL;DR is that I'm saddened at all the missed potential this game has due to it, in my eyes, being an unfinished product due to the limited resources given to the creator by his company. That this persisted past the Early Access stage is something that I personally find quite depressing.

Wow.....it's a great niche game that many people love, that used to be dead and is now alive again...very reasonably priced, no false promises/PR, development continues (Riz addressed 17 bug posts on SI this week!)...each update fixes many issues...those are all good things (it certainly wasn't better when the game was dead!)

Shindigs wrote:If they just had the ability to talk to all players/staff from FM in EHM it would solve so many of them. But that whole system is missing, which is what I mean by unfinished. Clearly the company agrees since they put it in their flagship game.

I believe there are a number of much more important issues that need to be fixed/addressed first; IMO "the ability to talk to all players/staff like in FM" is not even close to a priority

Shindigs wrote:Finally another thing to note on Con return, it seemingly is only connected to the hidden attribute "Natural Fitness", Stamina seems to have no effect,

This is common knowledge, and it's exactly what the publicly viewable Attributes Guide says...

It's not the "hidden Attributes" or the lack of "researcher knowledge" that I think of when I read your posts.....I think wow you're sure spending a lot of time on something, yet you seemingly haven't made the effort to understand the basics first (I've still got my wall chart and two coil notebooks full of notes that I created when I first discovered EHM).


But in the end, to each their own/whatever makes you happy

Yeah, it just comes down to me forgetting all the stuff I read at the moment, it's pretty infuriating since I'm used to having had close to perfect recall, but that's gone now and I need to change habits accordingly, but haven't quite gotten there yet. It leads to me kind of rediscovering the wheel once every few weeks. But regardless, it was interesting to see just how little difference all the schedules made on Con return, I could have sworn I saw much bigger change between resting and using schedules back when I first started designing stuff, but I guess I'm misremembering that too, can't say I'm surprised.

Also with the "labeling issue" of what info is for 05/07/EHM 1 I just find it safer to test stuff out myself since something like the attribute guide seemingly still has references to things in older editions, making me a bit wary of what is up to date knowledge and what isn't. Sure I don't intend to revisit old tests to see if they still stand, but that is still a fairly good practice. However accidental it may be. Not to mention when you revisit the fundametals you often gain more insight into the building blocks needed to more adequately tackle more complicated things. That pretty much holds true for most fields.

And yeah, maybe I judge the game too harshly, but that's because I'm passionate about it. If I thought it was a bad game I wouldn't care what was missing/broken/whatever. But I do care, maybe too much. And that means I want it to be the best it possibly could, and when it falls short in certain regards that irks me.

The reason the "talking to everyone" thing works out so well isn't cause it's a brilliant system in itself. It's cause it lets the AI be a bit dumb without it screwing up your roster management too badly, if you end up in that silly situation where the board won't give you a tiny bit of extra wage to give your star player, you can talk to them. Rather than just watch him leave with absolutely nothing you can do about it. When your affiliate spam sends you their 3rd goalie in ECHL giving you an illegal squad due to having 21 players on roster. You can go tell them to *bleep* themselves/end the affiliation. When your head coach is insisting on not playing your hot prospect to instead play the 3rd choice backup older player that is going nowhere, you can go nudge him and say "hey maybe play this guy?". It's not that being able to talk to all entities is super fun and engaging or anything, this isn't an RPG. It's that it's a very simple catch-all way to make it so the AI doesn't need to be super competent, because making competent AI is hard. Making dumb AI that has the option for player input on the other hand gives it much more usability, without adding too much complexity. But that's just my view on that game system.

How do you set practices ? What categories do you put on intensive and what on medium ?

Filip Croatia wrote:How do you set practices ? What categories do you put on intensive and what on medium ?

I'm currently experimenting with a slightly different setup, keep in mind this is all done in leagues that normally start with the top players around 80-100 CA, and who play 52 game seasons. But for now I've replaced 13-C from the image above aka "Tech", with 14-L, which is the one with

Conditioning: Medium
Skating: Light
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intensive
Off. Skill: Intensive
Def. Skill: Intensive

It's too early to say, but at the first recording of attributes it did indeed out-perform 13-C aka "Tech". This is my personal "default", but some players will not grow well on it. My current hypothesis is that this is due to them needing a higher workload schedule, If I'm feeling frisky this means I'll swap to 15-E which I have replaced the old "Phys" schedule with, it looks like this:

Conditioning: Intensive
Skating: Intensive
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Medium
Off. Skill: Intensive
Def. Skill: Medium

But I've still to see how this has affected the players, I'll need more time before I can say if that was an improvement or not, there's a lot of trial and error involved with my way of testing this stuff. If it proves to be better, I'll then go all the way to the schedule with Intensive on all attributes just to see if that works even better for the players who don't like the "Tech" schedule.

But assuming that said player fails to grow on that schedule too, my fallback schedule that I use almost exclusively to slow down the decline of older players who already peaked is one that's actually missing from that image. The old trusty "Tech2", which looks like this:

Conditioning: Intensive
Skating: Medium
Tactics: Light
Shooting: Medium
Off. Skill: Intensive
Def. Skill: Medium

I've had a very select few young players show good growth on that schedule, in my findings it's mostly been useful to "freeze" attributes, it's rare a player gain much on it. But it's also rare they lose any on it. I've used it mostly on players on the wrong side of 30 who were declining every time I recorded their attributes, only to have them completely stall the loss for upwards of two whole years on this. Mind you there could be a million and one other reasons for this stalling of them losing their phys/tech. But it's what I personally use for that niché purpose, as well as some of the harder to please young players' development.

I'm currently testing out a new variation of that schedule as well, but I only have 1 old player in my current team, so I really can't comment on how good it is. But first signs are good, since he didn't lose a thing. But I need many more samples before I can say if it's better or worse than good old "Tech2", anyways this is what it looks like:

Conditioning: Intensive
Skating: Medium
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Medium
Off. Skill: Intensive
Def. Skill: Light

The reason for the changes was that I took a look at how much of the maximum possible attribute gain per period (assuming no one attribute would ever raise by more than 5 (1) per period. Which isn't quite true, players will sometimes gain more than that. But with the quality players I have in EIHL it isn't something that has happened yet. What I found was that on Tech2 there was a small loss in teamwork (tactics) and an above average gain in defensive attributes. So in an attampt to make the schedule more balanced I swapped them around, nothing more advanced than that. Again, still too early to tell if it's worth it. Especially since you need so many samples to get even halfway reliable numbers on tactics, due to it only affecting teamwork. Generally I won't see any change in the attribute for anyone in my team over a whole season. But then some seasons you get several losing/gaining at once, which skews the stats for years to come.

My general thoughprocess behind these catch-all schedules came about when I just compiled all the stats from all the schedules across something like 8 seasons in Swe-2 with the same team. Players age ranged from 16-36. Some went on to play in the NHL, some in the SHL. Others ended up in Swe-3 after being dropped by me. So there was a very diverse group of players that made up the statistics. Based on the average gain from each category (conditioning/skating/etc.) on each different setting (intensive/medium/light) I first put together the schedule that had the highest possible average gain (based on my numbers), without making it too high workload. Since then I've learned that what I thought was too high a workload wasn't. I just misremembered some early findings and it made me do incorrect conclusions. But I also made another one tailored towards not the highest gain, but the most balanced gain, while slightly favoring technicals, since the players i like to bring in almost always have better physicals than technicals. Meaning they won't need to work on that as much. This lead to the "Tech" schedule, the one where I just went for max gain without applying any of my own thinking lead to the "Phys" schedule. After some playtesting I realized that some players needed a schedule with a bit more skating than Tech offered. This lead to "Tech2" which just had me shuffle the light in skating and the medium in tactics. By happy coincidence this schedule ended up doing a good job at keeping my old players sharp, it certainly wasn't what I made it for. On the flipside it didn't work particularly well for the players I first tailored it towards. I'm still working on how to get those inbetweeners to reach their full potential, and it's not going great.

Another final note is that almost all my players will be very offensive minded, and mostly of the finesse variety. This will no doubt skew the results, but no matter which schedules you start with you should always track your own players' progress and make changes accordingly. It's a process, and there is so much more than just training that goes into a player growing. If there is such a thing as "the perfect schedule", which I highly douby. It would still only be perfect for some players, not all. Because it seems like different players have different needs.

But the general trend I've been seeing is that these schedules are "good enough" that most my players will start to stagnate between 21-25 (probably due to approaching their PA) with this, then beyond that point they tend to only grow much if they have some outside influence. Like winning an award for example. To help them push their CA a bit higher. But this often seems to decline back down over summer. Not always though. And it's not like they stop growing entirely at those ages, but they will very rarely, if ever, reach the double digit increases you see at a young age while recording attributes every 4 months beyond that point.

Small new finding that still needs to be more thoroughly investigated. I've found that the number 7 seems to be quite key when it comes to training. Still too early to tell if it's a fluke. But players that ended up "stuck" at 93 con (-7) during summers showed the biggest gain, and players who regained 7 per day on their schedule during seasons also showed the biggest average gain. This might be the sweetspot to aim for with schedule intensity. So far it seems that all players I've checked who did well on the fairly lenient "Tech" schedule had a base "Rest return" of 8 con, and stayed at 8 con per day with the schedule, presumably if I tweaked it to get them to 7 it would work even better. Though I did record a new record in the off-season with one 16 y/o player gaining 25 TAT over the 4 month off-season, with multiple technicals gaining 2 or even 3 each, never seen anything like it before. The players who did well on the more strenuous "Phys" Schedule all had a "Rest return" of 9 con, but on "Phys" they all ended up gaining 7 per day, right on the potential sweetspot. This is still very early, just kept seeing that 7 on all players who did well so I'm going to try and aim for it on purpose and see what happens for a few seasons in the WHL, since my standard schedules almost never work across the pond, I figure if this works it's a more universally applicable method to get the training right for the NA players too. Not to mention it requires a lot less guessing and time than the dialling between phys/tech/tech2 to find each player's correct schedule, worst case scenario that dialling can halt a players development for a whole season (or more) which is never a good thing. This should eliminate that problem (if it actually works).


As you can see, not only did the ones who ended up at 93 have the highest average. Every single one of them gained attributes during the very short window from 2nd of July (early start date) and 1st of August (beginning of my pre-season). Some of them actually were here even shorter than that due to being traded and still showed reasonable gains. Stránský got those 6 points (3 shooting/3 Skating) in about 20 days.

Edit: Update after the first 4 month period using the "lucky number 7" system, I've never seen this stable growth on as many players ever before. Even players my scouts unanimously say have reached their max potential are growing. Heck, even the players who were out with 3 week injuries, or ones that got no playtime saw growth. So early signs are "heureka!" levels of good. But let's not get too carried away just yet, still need to give it at least a few seasons before I can be sure that this is where it's at. But it sure looks like it at the moment. A surprisingly large amount of the gain was in technicals too, normally when you see large growth in young players it's cause of physicals taking large leaps due to them hitting a certain age, but it was quite evenly spread here.

This new system seemed especially effective for defensemen (who get more reliable ice time), making it easier to avoid them hitting "exhaustion" that we discussed a few pages back. Because at the beginning of the season I had a truckload of injuries (just one of those seasons, not due to low condition) making my forwards really overworked. This forced me to drop almost all of them to the lowest workload schedule until they finally managed to creep their way back to 100 con, at which point I could ramp up their training again until they hit that 7-8 sweetspot. The reason I now say 7-8 is that some players will still regain 8 on the highest possible workload schedule you'd realistically use (int, int, med, int, int, int). That is higher workload than all Int btw, since the med in teamwork allows slightly more time spent on all the others, making the much larger con hit of conditioning and skating training take a slightly larger part than in all int. At least that is the current hypothesis I'm working off, and it seemed correct in my earlier con tests that i shared in this thread. For the record I currently have 9 players on the lowest workload schedule, 5 on the medium one and 8 on the highest workload one. Some might still need to be shuffled a bit now that they are out of exhaustion. But as you see there is a very similar need for both very high and quite low workload schedules within the same team.

Edit2: Trying to keep your players around 93 con all summer does NOT work at all, results ranging from poor gain (+3) to large losses (-5). Since con works in such a different way during summers it's really hard to figure out just the right workload.

The late season (december-april) results of maintaining at 7 was a lot less impressive than the early season ones, but that is to be expected since most players gained +1 in all their favored attributes (ballpark) for their player roles the previous 4 month period, due to that it only makes sense to see a smaller increase the following period since they are "starting from scratch" on gaining the next +1 in those attributes. At least that seems to be how it goes for all but the most superb of prospects (who can get over +10 multiple 4 month periods in a row, but that is rare). I'm just about to start a new season, will see how things pan out this time around.

It's also possible that since all these players are so young they hit their "maximums" for their age bracket. Don't know exactly how that works but it seems to keep happening over and over that players get their core technicals to a certain level, then cannot gain any more in it until they hit a certain age. This is most commonly seen in "raw" defensive defensemen, since they normally have 1-4 in all technicals that don't concern strictly defending, but upwards of 15 in their core defensive technicals, but normally defensemen (barring super talented ones as per usual) will not grow beyond 12 in these at all until they hit 20-23 y/o, at which point they tend to simultaneously gain +1 in all of them. This will then repeat every few years.

I had 3 nearly identical defensive defensemen who were with my team from age 16-24 who had 3 completely different training regimes (1 played a lot in the first team, 1 played in U-20, 1 was out on loan) but they all had vitually the same core technicals and all grew at the same age intervals. It was pretty cool to see. Same thing normally applies to forwards too, just trying to find a sub 18 y/o player with over 11 wristshot is a pretty good marker, they kinda don't exist outside of superstar prospects. However ones with 10-11 are not that hard to come by, and ones with 8-9 are a dime a dozen.

Edit3: Okay season 2 finished (except the memorial cup) won the whole darn thing and the players kept on growing. Really the whole needing to swap back an forth with schedules was mostly a thing season 1 (except with new signings, naturally). This season we had a more lenient early season schedule for matches and I didn't get my top 2 RWs injured for 4 months (both UCL Tears) in the pre-season games. I pretty much just stuck all players on a schedule with all intense, except tactics on medium. The top 6 forwards who would drop to low con I'd swap over to a med, med, med, int, int, int schedule until they hit 80 con again, to make sure they gained back their 8 con a day and didn't have any intense physicals workout while at low con to minimize injuries and risk of exhaustion. The result is in very broad terms a 50% increase on what I was seeing using my european schedules for euro players in 52 game a season leagues. And pretty much can't be compared to what those schedules did when I tried them in the americas, since they did nothing. It does seem like there was a stealth patch recently, I saw it due to there being a weird text string in preferences saying there was a version 1.1.1 (<insert numbers and stuff> Match Engine). Around the same time I started seeing some new plays in the 2D engine that I'd never seen before (players actually take breakaways now, rather than dumping the puck when they break away etc.) at the same time I've started noticing that players sometime get career ending injuries, like in FM. I never really saw that before. Also players with a decently long injury now seems to show a decrease in attributes in that period a lot more. So I can't say for sure something has changed with training and injuries. But it does look like it. I've had two players who were scouted to be 5 star potential and growing at multiple periods in a row get injuries that they just never recovered from, they just lost attributs after that no matter what. One was a 4 month UCL tear, the other two back to back 3 week injuries. The interesting thing was that as the players came back from these injuries, despite still doing decently (0.5 PPG roughly) they both went from being counted as 4 star value in trades to 0 star value. So the AI apparently knew before I did that these injuries were career ending ones, both players have just gone down the drain since and won't be on my roster for their final overaged year in the WHL. Tough times. This should mean that there is actually a reason to not play "orange injury" players with 90 con, since you risk aggrevating their injury and potentially ruining them forever. Before this at least, when letting the AI coach handle the roster it would always play those half injured players, even in games with nothing on the line. And over 8 seasons of my coach doing this in the EIHL I saw a single aggrevated injury because of it. But this was before the patch so that player was totally fine. He even gained attributes while being injured twice for 3 weeks back to back, that doesn't really seem to happen anymore (thankfully) but it's a bit early to tell since I haven't seen any patchnotes (not that i've looked, but steam normally tells you about them in the news feed) relating to any such change.

On the note of goalies, which I haven't really touched upon. It's so hard to get any real solid numbers on them since you only really have 2-3 at the time outside the NHL, and of those only 1 will recieve a lot of game time. But the only schedule that seems to have a fairly reliable gain, both in europe and the US is very similar to the default goalie schedule.
Con: Med
Ska: Lig
Tac: None
Sho: None
Off: None
Def: Lig
Goa: Int

I've seen goalies both gain and lose teamwork with the "none" in tactics, just like I've seen them gain (but never actually lose) stickhandling and passing with "none" in off skill. Adding in more con/ska than this seems to just remove too much time from the "pool" to spend on goalie training that you end up with goalies that gain little to no more con/ska attributes than they would on a more intense schedule while gaining next to no goalie attributes, which is just not what you want most the time. This generally gives you about a 8-16 gain to trainable attributes per season with most goalies in the skill brackets i play for the 1st goalie and maybe half of that for the backup. Sometimes the backup will grow just as fast too though, depends what kind of player you are dealing with I guess. It's really hard to see much of a pattern with goalies since their gains always appear quite erratic and connected more to age than what you're doing with their training. The only time I've ever seen mindblowing growth in a goalie was with one loaned out to my youth team that had a quite high PA or a very early peak for a goalie. Don't use the editor so can't tell which. But his gains were roughly twice what you'd see on a schedule like this. Which is why I normally have a "throwaway" backup goalie and have my prospect loaned out instead, assuming you loan him to a league of the correct skill level for him to grow in it, it will be a lot more effective than anything you can do for that goalie in training. But if your avaliable loan options aren't working out for him, you're better of with him warming the bench and training together with your 1st goalie than having him play in a low skilled league, that will at best give him really good physicals, but will do nothing to further his technicals. Worst case scenario it will even tank his technicals, whereas I've never seen a decrease in any key goalie attribute (other than from old age obviously) using this, presumably an injury would. But so far I've only had 3 goalie injuries in over 700 hours of gametime. So that doesn't happen enough for me to worry about it.

Edit 4: Tried using this in the NHL for a season too now. Worked very well indeed. I played as the Edmonton Oilers, McDavid grew enough to surpass Eberle within the first season, and by december season two he will catch up with RNH if things stay the same. The think that really struck me as odd was that I have only 2 players on the almost all intense schedule in the NHL, almost everyone does better in the Med, Med, Med, Int, Int, Int schedule. The only one who actually played much that was on the intense one was Darnell Nurse. Nail Yakupov wouldn't grow on any of the standard schedules at all. So had to actually use the "ML Finesse" schedule that i've never needed to use before to make him grow (Med, Lig, Med, Int, Int, Med) which saw him take off. Taylor Hall and a few others needed to be on the ML Normal (Med, Lig, Med, Int, Int, Int) schedule to grow nicely. Overall I was surprised to see that those 10 extra games a season over the WHL was enough to make dropping almost everyone to a lower workload schedule better. Connor McDavid also needed a lot of micro management, he would get exhausted so much. If I hadn't missed it twice due to not checking condition enough he probably would have won the Calder by a mile, Panarin snubbed him despite 10 less points, less playoff points, and lower rating for some reason. At 30 games into the season McDavid was at 30 points, but around this time he got hit by exhaustion without me noticing due to all top 6 players struggling to reach 100 con between games, he was the only one to get exhausted by it though. During the exhaustion periods he scored next to no points, which is pretty standard for exhausted players. They always underperform. As soon as I rested him back to full again he was back to his scoring ways, but me not paying enough attention cost him in the range of 10-20 points his rookie season. Moral of the story being to always pay attention to if your star players get exhausted. This can be hard at times, but generally if a player who you know is susceptible to getting exhausted has dropped sub 80 con 3-4 games in a row without getting back to 100 con in between them, you can assume that he needs to be rested the next 1-2 games (however long it takes him to get back to 100). I also had McDavid get exhausted in the playoffs despite us sweeping the first two series, giving him extra time to rest. After we went out in the Conference finals it took him about a week of sitting on Resting at 99% condition before he finally got back to 100. He had been on the verge of exhaustion for so long that it took forever to get that last little piece back.

Edit 5: The schedule Yakupov was on was actually horrible. I just found a new and exciting bug that I need to report. The attribute tab in the practice screen showed more than half of yakupov's attributes as green, and none as red, despite him having gained no attributes since the save started and having lost a few on that schedule...*sigh*

is putting different categories on intense and medium on another game because ive cant see that anywhere

MasonCooper42 wrote:is putting different categories on intense and medium on another game because ive cant see that anywhere

You have to select a schedule from the dropdown menu in the top right to actually see the settings for each, I posted a quick video where you can see how it's done here.

How long does it take for the schedule to take effect and you start to notice the differences?

Dokuxe wrote:How long does it take for the schedule to take effect and you start to notice the differences?

It depends on a lot of things. Primarily what the current ability, potential ability, peak age and current age of the player is. Most of this is hidden, making it very hard to gauge it. But I normally record attributes 4 months apart. So far in my NHL experience you'll see about 7-14 gain in young players with growing left to do. In 18 y/o draft prospects you can see closer to 14-24 gain per 4 month period. I've had players show their first +1 in some attribute in as little as a few days and as much as 6 months. It's all about finding the right schedule for that player, and sometimes you just wont. In my Oilers save Yakupov is completely ruined and just will not grow no matter what I tried. Meanwhile McDavid has caught up with and passed Taylor Hall in 2 seasons, despite starting with 30 less attributes than him and Taylor Hall growing 9 attributes in the same time. But generally speaking if you have the right schedule you should see the first gain in about 2 weeks. Keep in mind that things like playoff performance often is far, far more imporant than what is done in training. A young player doing well in the playoffs can gain +14 attributes just like that (Darnell Nurse did this my first season, scoring 13 points in 10 games in the Playoffs), whereas he only gained like 3-4 from the pre-season and early season combined. On the flipside a player who does awfully in the playoffs can lose 14 attributes just like that (Teddy Purcell did this in my first season, 1 point in 13 games in the Playoffs).

So generally speaking the schedules are imporant and should show gain fair quickly, but performance and playing at the right level for that player to grow is so much more important. I managed to trade my way to Pierre-Luc Dubois after the 2016 draft, he won every award there is in QMJHL and scored 106 in 67 but didn't gain a single attribute point in that 2016-17 season. Because although he performed incredibly well, the league was so far below his current skill level that he learned nothing from it.

Another thing worth noting is that when you send a player down to an affiliate, they will be on the same training schedule that you had him on in your team before you sent him down. But this does not mean "the same exact schedule", this is EHM after all. It just means he will be on the same SPOT in the list of schedules in their team as he was in yours. So say you use custom schedules and replace "Fitness" with "MM Normal", this means that after you send him down he will be on the default "Fitness" schedule at that affiliate, if you're not careful with this you can mess up your players' chance at growing.

My fix is to add 2 GMs to my AHL and ECHL team at the start of the game, setup the best coaching setups I can, put in the same schedules I have in my NHL team at the same spots in the list for both those teams, that way when I send a player down he will be on the exact same schedule as he was in the NHL with the most competent coaches I can muster at AHL/ECHL level. As soon as I'm done with the setup and hiring depth players for both teams with their own cap I just send both those GMs on vacation for 1 season. The other upside in doing this is that due to you having setup their squad and picked a head coach with your preferred play style, your farm teams will perform well. Both mine have won their respective regular seasons twice in a row, and since good performance helps growth, this has made some 0 potential players who I dumped into my ECHL team into 3 star NHL players in just two seasons (most notably Kyle Platzer, who was awful at the start of the save).

Just a heads up, in the off-season NHL teams/AHL teams will come in for your best coaches. Make sure to re-hire new ones in the off-season. And when you go on vacation, set your assistant GM to only renew ending contracts, not accept any trade requests or putting bids for any players, or they will go out and get a bunch of players that will steal your prospects' ice time. Even if you do this your AHL Assistant GM will pull up players from your ECHL team when injury hits and then just never send them down again. Check in on your AHL/ECHL roster as often as you care to remedy this by sending those player back down again. I personally do it like once or twice per season, because I don't care that much about what my 1-2 star "prospects" are up to. If they happen to become remotely useful down the line that's just a bonus in my eyes, but I won't lose sleep if they don't.

I want to ask advice. A while ago I decided to take control of my teams practice schedules. I read and have been using Malhotras training guide, but it is mainly designed for EHM 2007, not EHM 1. Some of my players have developed quite well, but schedules are starting to tear them and I see many players whose condition never returns back to 100% during the season, in some cases it doesn't reach even 90%. So I want to hear what kind of practices have you guys found successful but still not too heavy for players in EHM 1.

Kiekkomestari wrote:I want to ask advice. A while ago I decided to take control of my teams practice schedules. I read and have been using Malhotras training guide, but it is mainly designed for EHM 2007, not EHM 1. Some of my players have developed quite well, but schedules are starting to tear them and I see many players whose condition never returns back to 100% during the season, in some cases it doesn't reach even 90%. So I want to hear what kind of practices have you guys found successful but still not too heavy for players in EHM 1.

What you're talking about there is exhaustion. It doesn't actually mean that schedule is "wrong" for that player. If he's growing on it, it's the correct schedule. But in the 70+ regular game season leagues you will have instances where a player is dropped below 80% condition, doesn't get back to 100% then goes back sub 80% again. I don't know the exact number of times this has to happen before exhaustion kick in. It also seems to be tied to some attribute, probably natural fitness, since some players can go through the exact same thing as many times as another player and not have both get exhaustion.

I'll use my 1st line in Edmonton Oilers as an example. I ran Hall, McDavid, Eberle on it. They'd all get their con dropped and not back to 100 as many times as eachother. But only McDavid would ever get exhaustion, probably due to the other two having higher <insert attribute that does this>. The remedy isn't to change to another schedule, assuming the current one has the player grow at a rapid enough rate. The solution is that as soon as you see that a player doesn't go past a value lower than 100, which sadly requires you to flip into the practice or roster screen every once in a while. I wish there was an icon the player got when they hit exhaustion, but no such luck. When you see that they get stuck at 97% or whatever. Just let them get up to that new "cap" value, 97 in this case. And once they reach it, put them on the resting schedule and if you have a game; rest them from it. Exhausted players tend to do quite poorly so you'd likely not want that player dressed anyways. As soon as the player hits 100% again his exhaustion is "cleared" and you can put him back on whatever schedule you found worked best on him. If he was only exhausted for a short while this should only take one day of resting. But sometimes players will get long term exhaustion, but you won't be able to tell since they never have enough time to reach their cap between games in the first place. When this happens I've had it take as much as 2 weeks for a player *cough* McDavid *cough* to get from 99% to 100%. Normally if a player that normally scored a lot stops scoring a lot and also has had a lot of games lately you can deduce that he's suffering exhaustion. But sometimes you just miss it since there is no clear indication for when it happens in-game.

Note that at the start of the season, namely after the training camp + the exhibition games thereafter you need to make sure to have at least about a week gap before your first real game of the season. The training camp+exhib games will give almost all your players exhaustion like clockwork. If you don't clear it before the season begins you'll be in all kinds of trouble. Since this will be a very short term exhaustion, a single day on resting is enough to clear it. But make sure you do it or you will have a much worse chance at doing well in the early season.

As for what schedules I use, I've now tried these in just about every type of league there is in the game and they work very well in all of them. There are some players that simply will not grow, I don't know why. A good example is Nail Yakupov, so far I've never seen him grow in a save. He was ruined in my save, and he gets ruined when the AI has him too. He still scouts as 5 star potential though, so you'll rip your hair out trying to get him to grow. Maybe this only happens sometimes, maybe he has some marker making him a dud. I don't know. But every single player except him (and arguably Ryan Nugent-Hopkins) did grow amazingly for me, McDavid caught up to Hall in 2 seasons, and Crosby in 3 seasons. Similar but less extreme results were seen on Draisaitl, Nurse and Reinhart.

The default schedule that seems to work on most NHL/AHL/ECHL players is the one I named MM Nor. The MM stands for Medium in both Conditioning and Skating. The Nor stands for Medium Tactics, Intense Shooting, Intense Off. Skill and Intense Def. Skill.

The reason Tactics is on Medium is that on low it slowly declines, on Medium is slowly increases, and on Intense it STILL slowly increases. It seems like you're more likely to have players gain teamwork from what they do in games than what your training is. The gain is so slow wasting Intense on it will just slightly hamper the effectiveness of your other training fields for a gain that is so small you will not notice it.

Some players will either not grow on this much at all, or will even lose attribute points in either conditioning based attributes or skating based attributes. If that's happening, you swap them over to II Nor. II stands for Intense on both Conditioning and Skating, Nor is still the same (Med, Int, Int, Int). This is normally going to be used by very physical younger players, in the Oilers Darnell Nurse and Leon Draisaitl were the two biggest gainers on II Nor. Justin Schultz was on MM Nor until halfway through season two where he became old enough that he needed II Nor to maintain his 17s in his Acceleration, Speed and Stamina.

Note: In Europe due to the lower amount of games, almost all players you'd have on MM Nor in the NHL will instead be on II Nor, it's the combined workload of gametime + training that makes a good training regiment. Not just one or the other, a player who did well on MM Nor on the first line will sometimes need to be on II Nor if he drops to the fourth line. But far from always.

For some other player you will see little or no positive change on either of those, but no drop in Conditioning or Skating attributes either. For them you need to use ML Nor. The ML is Medium Conditioning, the L is Light Skating. The Nor is still the same (Med, Int, Int, Int). This schedule is only useful very rarely in the NHL/AHL/ECHL, I used it on only three players: Taylor Hall, Ben Betker (ECHL) and Brendan Davidson (I think that's his name at least:S). The issue with this schedule is that if you use it on a player that shouldn't be on it. It will make them lose attributes guaranteed. And if you accidentally leave Nail Yakupov on it for a whole Off-season, well he'll be ruined as a player after that. So use it with care, in Europe I use it almost exclusively for very young prospects (sub 18) since they tend to get so much physicals for free with just growing that you can focus almost everything on technicals in the training. Why Taylor Hall needed this schedule to grow? No idea, he just did. Trial and error finally got me there (I say finally, it took about 2 months).

Also note that some player will need a different off-season schedule and regular season schedule. It's not particularly common, also generally a player will gain about half as much on a schedule in the off season as he would on that same schedule in a season, there are exceptions. Also mentals tend to grow a lot in the summers, but that isn't due to training so I ignore that. An example in my current Swe-2 gone Swe-1 save with Mora is Simon Hellholm, during seasons he needs to be on ML Nor to grow at all. The other two do nothing at all. But during the off-season, and sometimes once or twice in the season he will lose 3 points in skating (1 acc, 1 bal, 1 spe) due to the Light skating. Swapping him over to II Nor for a week or two gets these points back, then he goes onto ML Nor to grow his technicals again. Player who are that finicky are quite rare, but they do exist and require a more watchful eye than most other players.

So just to wrap up, the three schedules are the following:
MM Nor "The Default"
Conditioning: Medium
Skating: Medium
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

II Nor "The Backup/The European Default"
Conditioning: Intense
Skating: Intense
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

ML Nor "The very rare one/The European Backup"
Conditioning: Medium
Skating: Light
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

Actually there is a fourth one, but I've only had to use it once or twice in Europe...

IL Nor "The JESUS CHRIST WHY WONT YOU GROW!?"
Conditioning: Intense
Skating: Light
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

...which incidentally works amazingly well on some young prospects. I recorded a 25 attribute point gain over an off-season with this one. But I'd say that was less down to the schedule and more down to how age gating of attributes seem to work in this game, and pooling of "experience" when you surpass it due to very efficient schedules etc.

What do the practice area percentages do exactly?

Shindigs wrote:

MasonCooper42 wrote:is putting different categories on intense and medium on another game because ive cant see that anywhere

You have to select a schedule from the dropdown menu in the top right to actually see the settings for each, I posted a quick video where you can see how it's done here.

ive a five season save and ive never spotted this, this has probably going to become a game changer for me. yowser

also thank you

I'd like to propose an idea to atleast test to Shindings, and it's that an AI Team will generally develop prospects faster, but never better, than any configuration with a human GM. I have about 800 hours in EHM but I only have one save in regards to any testing, and it's in regards to the piddle-poor quality of the drafts from 2021 to 2025. But, something I have noticed through actual playing is that while the AI Develops young players consistently faster than humans, humans develop older players consistently better.

Shindigs wrote:[...]
So just to wrap up, the three schedules are the following:
MM Nor "The Default"
Conditioning: Medium
Skating: Medium
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

II Nor "The Backup/The European Default"
Conditioning: Intense
Skating: Intense
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

ML Nor "The very rare one/The European Backup"
Conditioning: Medium
Skating: Light
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

Actually there is a fourth one, but I've only had to use it once or twice in Europe...

IL Nor "The JESUS CHRIST WHY WONT YOU GROW!?"
Conditioning: Intense
Skating: Light
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

...which incidentally works amazingly well on some young prospects. I recorded a 25 attribute point gain over an off-season with this one. But I'd say that was less down to the schedule and more down to how age gating of attributes seem to work in this game, and pooling of "experience" when you surpass it due to very efficient schedules etc.

Thank you for your detailed explanation of your training regimes. I highy appreciate that you put the effort into this.

I'm also playing the Oilers (as well as Bakersfield) and I've been running an all intense schedule so far (I'm in the 2021 offseason right now and have won the 2020 and 2021 Stanley Cup). Additionally I'm also using the "New Position" to develop secondary (for D-men) and tertiary positions (for forwards). Whenever a player hits goes below 90% I put him on a all resting practice until he goes back to 90%+. I can report that in my save Hall did also become a great player at 180/180 (CA/PA). And I can also confirm that Nurse, Klefbom, McDavid, Reinhart and to some degree Lagesson developed very well. Anyhow, I'll mix things up now and will try to implement your practice schedule.

As I have taken control of the Oil Kings (WHL) now aas well, I'll think about using ML Nor or IL Nor for that roster, as you stated that these work well for very young players (is that correctly interpreted?).

So we have Shindigs' plan, and we have Malhotra's old plan.

Does anyone else have a practice schedule that is working that we could try out with all of the updates as of now? I heard that Malhotra's wasn't working as well, but I just started a new game and I would like to have some choices and try the different schedules out. Thanks to anyone who can help

Shindigs wrote:]
So just to wrap up, the three schedules are the following:
MM Nor "The Default"
Conditioning: Medium
Skating: Medium
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

II Nor "The Backup/The European Default"
Conditioning: Intense
Skating: Intense
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

ML Nor "The very rare one/The European Backup"
Conditioning: Medium
Skating: Light
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

Actually there is a fourth one, but I've only had to use it once or twice in Europe...

IL Nor "The JESUS CHRIST WHY WONT YOU GROW!?"
Conditioning: Intense
Skating: Light
Tactics: Medium
Shooting: Intense
Off. Skill: Intense
Def. Skill: Intense

I've used these for a while. They work on some prospects but on some they don't (I assume they've already reached their PA). I wonder which one to use on veteran players who are 27 years of age or older? Maybe II Nor? That would make sense so they don't lose any of their physical attributes.

Hey Everyone,

It has been a LONG time since I've been involved with EHM however I feel it necessary to just inform everyone that Malhotra's practice guide was not created by him. It is in fact my own guide that I created many years ago and provided to the community at the behest of one of the original moderators (who's name unfortunately escapes me -- it has been a LONG time). Anywho, I am not trying to be petty (which im sure this sounds just as that) however I believe that credit should be where it is deserved.

Moving on, I do hope to get some time with EHM soon and provide an updated Practice guide.

Regards,

Now there's a blast from the past! Welcome back.

I have updated the original thread with your name. I can see from a forum search there is mention you wrote it. I suspect that it was just a mistake when it was uploaded owing to the passage of time between when you wrote it and when it was added to what was then a new downloads database.

When looking at the practice screen under the attributes view, what's the interval at which the green and red colored attributes numbers reset (showing grey again) ?