How to train your players properly after the update

[Der_Ryan_M]

Introduction

Hello guys,

So I waited almost 2 weeks after the GK fix update, that someone would come up with a thread like this. And like you already know, no one did. Maybe everyone is still angry at Nordeus because of the update. But they won't change it back. We need to adapt or quit... I wanted to quit, but I can't. So I will try to adapt and I need your help.
Tomorrow the new season starts and we all want to train our players at the beginning of it. Lets put something on!

Well, also the title is a bit controversial and exaggerated. This is not a thread, where I can explain to you every little secret. I wanted to share my experiences training different players after the update. And I want you guys to click on this thread, get inspired and try stuff yourself. And, of course, share your experiences as well. So that we understand, what we must do and how we can train the best way possible.

Also I want to give a shoutout to the 2 Youtube-Channels called "Top eleven Chanel" and "GrubiT11", who also made videos about the new training system and helped me understanding it better.

Lets get started!!


The Basics

What we need to understand with the new training system is, that Nordeus wants us to not only train a few skills and make mutant players. "Mutants" are players, who have really high values in "white skills" (also known as important skills, that affect the quality of a player on the position he plays in, in the simulated games) and low values in "grey skills", that don't matter for him in his position, but also count for his overall quality %.

So basically you could create players with 340% (maximum) in white skills and displayed 1% in grey skills (also negative grey skills actually, but that doesn't matter) while keeping their overall quality fairly normal. If you want to see such players go into the association top 100 and look at the top associations. You will find a lot of players, who are trained like this with the help of multiple accounts.

This is, in my opinion, still possible to an extend. But it is a lot harder to do. You will see what I mean when we get in detail with examples.

What is also important is, that when you train a drill on one specific player, which involves white and grey skills, the white skills will improve twice as fast as grey skills. This is really important and helps us training our players in a proper way after the update! And it causes the training to be less effective... We waste condition on training grey skills, that the player doesn't need. We so need more rest packs to grow him the same amount then with the old system.

Also important - When a skill reaches around 140-150%, you cant train it anymore when you only train that skill. For example: When you train a DC, who already has 140% in both marking and positioning the exercise "Hold The Line", he will gain very slow and after a few more % gain nothing anymore. It doesnt matter if you train hold the line 100x. He will not get any % in his attributes and you just waste your rests. This is why we need to mix drills.


First example



This a player from my squad. He was a youth player at the start of the season and I trained him only with the free condition he gets every day. I also refused to use GK training when it was still possible, because at the time he was learning his SA and it wouldn't have benefit him anyway.

The last days I trained him Hold the Line and Gym to improve his Marking and Positioning, as well as his Strength and Fitness. All of these skills are very important for a DC and are white skills.

2 Days ago he reached 140% in Marking. It then got a lot harder for me to improve his skills with "Hold the Line", I would have wasted condition. I now trained him "Press The Play", which, next to Marking and Positioning, also improves Tackling, Aggression and Bravery. Skills, that are far from hitting 140%. As you can see, on his drills he also further improved Marking and Positioning, while also leveling up the other skills.

There are a few things I don't know quite exactly yet - for example can I train Hold the Line again tomorrow when he looses a star and 20% in his skills? How far can I train Positioning and Marking when also train other Skills, that are white skills and get higher as well? I will test and I want to hear your experiences also.


Second example



Now, lets take a look at this guy. He is my ML since he was 18 years old and while only training his white skills, his grey skills decreased a lot over the course of the seasons. He is not a mutant by any means, but he is a very well trained player with high focus on his white skills.

When I want to keep developing him, I need to carefully select my drills. When I train "Sprint", which increases Fitness, Speed and Dribbling, he will not gain anything and I would just loose my packs. It would have been the best drill for him in the old training, but not now anymore.

However, yesterday I chose to try "Piggy in the Middle", which trains him Fitness, Aggression, Passing, Tackling and Positioning. 3 White skills and 2 Grey skills. In 15 sessions (so in total 90 Piggys, costing 9% condition in average, so 15 sessions cost 135% condition = 9 green packs) he gained 2% in Fitness, 2% in Passing, 2% in Positioning, 1% in Tackling and 1% in Aggression. So he gained a total of 6% in white skills, which are by the way already really high, and only 2% in ineffective grey skills.

So in general, Piggy in the Middle is an somewhat effective training for a ML now after the update, when he has already high skills in most of his white attributes and doesn't grow with exercises like Sprint or Slalom Dribble anymore...


Need your help!

These are my experiences and things I picked up so far after the update. I hope, I could give you a little insight on how to effectively train your players after the update. Remember - training will never be as effective as before, where you could only train white skills and also use the GK training to help you. But it is still possible, to create good players, you just need more rests to get the same result. Or just lower your aim... Before I tried to push my new players to 120%, I doubt I manage to get them there now. I will try to aim for 110% next season and see how I get along with my green packs over the course of the season.

Please try stuff out yourself and post your results here in this thread! Together we will find out the best way to train our players after the bad, bad update.

There are many things I could not test yet or maybe I misinterpret so far. Feel yourself free to correct me.


Cheers and have a good start in your new season!

[nikolgiorgos]

What is also important is, that when you train a drill on one specific player, which involves white and grey skills, the white skills will improve twice as fast as grey skills.

That was before the latest update.
Now a grey skill of 40% gaining a double of a white skill of 140%.
If you have a new player with about equal skill, yes.

[GLFC]

Thanks for posting this. Like yourself and many others, I too have been trying to understand the new training systems and here are some thoughts.

Your first example (James Etheridge) suggests that training slows down a lot once certain skill(s) are above 140%. I believe this is more or less what some other forum members have been saying about their experiences. This is also in line with the old training system where a player's growth rate drops significantly once he reaches 140% (8*) overall quality. In your example, both Marking and Positioning are both just above 140% and you point out that training with Hold the Line has become much more difficult. The logical question to ask is, what if the skills being trained by a particular drill are a lot different from each other?

This takes us to your second example (Luciano Arnts). The 5 skills trained by Piggy in the Middle range from 25% to 275% with an average of 152%. He gained a total of 8% from 135% condition loss (9 greens), which translates to about 0.9% per green pack. Having looked up some of my old training data, this is very close to what an 8* FT under 21 used to get from training. I believe this gives credence to the theory that gains from training depend on the average (or perhaps a weighted average?) of all skills being trained under a particular drill.

If this is the case, then one thing you can do is train Arnts with Video Analysis, which covers his two lowest white skills (Positioning and Creativity) along with Bravery. In fact, this is what I have been doing these days. For a given player, I pick the drill that trains one or two of his lowest white skills along with maybe a couple grey skills.

Here is an example of mine after training everyone to death before the start of the new season:



I just gave him 14 sets of Skill Drill, so 84 in total for 63% condition loss. He gained 11% in Heading and 6% each in Dribbling and Creativity for a total of 23% gain, which works out to be an increase of about 5.5 Skill% per green pack. This is more or less equaled to what a 3* or 4* young FT would gain under the old system, despite the fact that this guy is actually 7*. Granted, the lone white skill being trained here is only at 115%, but I do plan to power train the team once the new season begins. In particular, I hope to get some data regarding training gains vs. the average of skills being trained.

In any case, at this point I am fairly certain that a player's growth rate from training is now independent of the player's overall quality.

[Der_Ryan_M]

That was before the latest update.
Now a grey skill of 40% gaining a double of a white skill of 140%.
If you have a new player with about equal skill, yes.

Nope, with Arnts and The Piggy In The Middle training I tested it. He got 1% in grey skills and 2% in white Skills. Even though Aggression (grey) was the first one that got +1%, before every other skill.

[Der_Ryan_M]

I just gave him 14 sets of Skill Drill, so 84 in total for 63% condition loss. He gained 11% in Heading and 6% each in Dribbling and Creativity for a total of 23% gain, which works out to be an increase of about 5.5 Skill% per green pack. This is more or less equaled to what a 3* or 4* young FT would gain under the old system, despite the fact that this guy is actually 7*. Granted, the lone white skill being trained here is only at 115%, but I do plan to power train the team once the new season begins. In particular, I hope to get some data regarding training gains vs. the average of skills being trained.

In any case, at this point I am fairly certain that a player's growth rate from training is now independent of the player's overall quality.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing your experience. I will power train 2 players tomorrow. One of them being Etheridge, the other one being another DC/DMC, who has really high strength and fitness already due to GK training I used on him when it was possible.
Also, I'm gonna test with a few other young players in my squad. I will not continue training Arnts, as he will be 22 next season and develop a lot slower. He will be replaced the season after anyway.

I will also share my data tomorrow.

[Der_Ryan_M]

Thanks for posting this. Like yourself and many others, I too have been trying to understand the new training systems and here are some thoughts.

This takes us to your second example (Luciano Arnts). The 5 skills trained by Piggy in the Middle range from 25% to 275% with an average of 152%. He gained a total of 8% from 135% condition loss (9 greens), which translates to about 0.9% per green pack. Having looked up some of my old training data, this is very close to what an 8* FT under 21 used to get from training. I believe this gives credence to the theory that gains from training depend on the average (or perhaps a weighted average?) of all skills being trained under a particular drill.

If this is the case, then one thing you can do is train Arnts with Video Analysis, which covers his two lowest white skills (Positioning and Creativity) along with Bravery. In fact, this is what I have been doing these days. For a given player, I pick the drill that trains one or two of his lowest white skills along with maybe a couple grey skills.

I just used alle the condition left to train and experiment a bit more. You were right about video analysis. It is unbelievably effective for Arnts. Did not think about that before.

Also regarding your player again - Training skill drill doesn't make much sense. Think about it, with it you improve more grey skills (4 x 0.5 = 2) than white skills (1 x 1 = 1), which is bad. Because you increase nothing but the overall % which is just a number. You dont increase the value of the player in his position...

When you train 3 grey skills (3 x 0.5 = 1.5) and 2 white skills (2 x 1 = 2) it would still benefit the player. Everything beyond would damage him more than he gains from it. I hope you understand what I mean with it.

[Der_Ryan_M]

This is the updated Etheridge after giving him about 180 rests. Imagine all his skills from the picture in the first post -20%, because he of course lost a star.

I trained Hold The Line, Gym, Press The Play, Stop The Attacker and a bit of Defending Crosses. You easily will recognize, when its not worth training a drill anymore, because progression gets very slow.

[TropikThunder]

This is the updated Etheridge after giving him about 180 rests. Imagine all his skills from the picture in the first post -20%, because he of course lost a star.

I trained Hold The Line, Gym, Press The Play, Stop The Attacker and a bit of Defending Crosses. You easily will recognize, when its not worth training a drill anymore, because progression gets very slow.

So Etherisge was at 103%/(270), dripped to 83%/(270) when the season restarted, then you trained him as described and he increased to 110%/(277)? That’s impressive! So it’s nice to see players still able to gain skill points even when they are at 6 stars.

Similar, has anyone seen a decrease in skill points from playing games? I played 3 friendlies last evening ahead of the restart and got a grand total of 8 skill points (3 games, 33 player-games, 8 skill points). Same from my cup game this morning, dominated a much weaker team 9-0 and only got 4 skill points for the 11 players. At the end of last season I was getting 15-20 skill points per game with some players getting 6-7 skill points themselves. Anyone else see this and have ideas?

[GLFC]

I have done some more testing to understand the relationship between training speed and the levels of the skills being trained. Here is my test subject:



I got him from auction on the first day of the season and trained his SA with repeated sets of Lv4 6x Sprint (I have maxed out my training level, so all drills are Lv4). He gained exactly 2 SA points from each set, which translated to 5.3 Skill% / rest (2 x 4 x 15 / 22.5).

Part 1

To figure out how the current level of an attribute affects its training speed, I gave him repeated sets of 6x Wing Play. The reason I chose Wing Play was that it trained precisely one of his white skills (Punching) and nothing else. I thought this was the simplest way to determine his training speed as a function of skill level. I knew beforehand that gains would be high at first and then gradually slowed down before coming to a near halt around 140%. I also knew that training speed under the new system was independent of a player's overall quality, so I did not bother recording it as the experiment went along.

Here is the result:



The second row indicates the amount of % in Punching gained per set of 6x Wing Play, and adding it to his starting % in the above entry in the first row gives the current % after the set. The main takeaway here is that his training speed slows down each time he has gained 20% in Punching. For instance, he averages 6.7% per set when Punching is between 60% and 79%, and 5% per set between 80% and 99%. The gain per set has slowed to 1.3% after 140%, and I decided to stop at 150%. To summarize,



Note that this table agrees with Al Svanberg's guide under the previous training system (see post #59, divide the last column in the table above by 15 to get his chart):

https://forum.topeleven.com/tutorial...ng-system.html

Part 2

The problem with Part 1 is that none of the training drills cover only one skill for outfield players. For the other ten guys, each drill trains at least 2 attributes. To address this issue, the next phase of this experiment involves repeated sets of 6x Slalom Dribble. I decided on this because it trains one each of white skill (Fitness) and grey skill (Speed) and nothing else. This way, I can at least determine training speed as a function of the average of the two skills being trained.



Rows 3,4 and 5,6 are similar to those in the first tables. Row 1 gives the average of the two skills being trained and row 2 is the total Skill% gained from each session. As you can see, training gains drop each time the average of the two attributes have increased by 20% just like in Part 1. Again, to summarize,



This table agrees with the second table up to sampling errors (The first rows for 60%-79% differ from each other more due to small sampling size). The key message here is that training gains depends on the average of the skills being trained. More precisely, training gains slow for each 20% gained in the average of the skills. This is my player after the above two series of training:



Part 3

The last question is: how to train players under the new system? I do not have the best answer here, but I can share what I have done and plan to do in the near future. After training my test player with the above two sets of drills, I did 1-On-1 Finishing, GK Training and One Line of Defense to cover the other nine white skills that had not been trained yet.



I kept the average of the skills being trained by a given drill under 140%; otherwise progress would slow down considerably. I stopped when his overall quality went just above 120% like I did when I power-trained by my players before the new update. I used about 300 rest packs from start to finish, which would more or less be the amount I needed under the old system. In fact, his skills would probably be more or less the same had I trained him under the old system.

The main issue now is that for the past few seasons, I have picked up one 18 y.o. per season and planned on keeping each player for 11 years. As the seasons go by, I can see how it would be increasing difficult to train a player’s white skills. As the white skills have gone above 140%, I would have to train him with drills that cover both white and grey skills like I did with Slalom Dribble in Part 2.

Conclusion

If you want to know how fast a player trains, ignore his overall quality. Instead, treat each individual skill as having its own star system (60%-79%=4*, 80%-99%=5* and so on). When a drill covers multiple skills, take the average of the skills being trained. Just like before with the star system, the more stars the skill average has, the slower your player will train.

[Der_Ryan_M]

Conclusion

If you want to know how fast a player trains, ignore his overall quality. Instead, treat each individual skill as having its own star system (60%-79%=4*, 80%-99%=5* and so on). When a drill covers multiple skills, take the average of the skills being trained. Just like before with the star system, the more stars the skill average has, the slower your player will train.

Chapeau, Monsieur! This is exactly what I have also found out when training 2 of my players at the start of the season.Thanks for putting all the tables together, so that other people can also understand the new system, I didn't have time to do it yet...

Fact is, when you train a drill, do it until the average % of the drill are on 140%. Thats why selecting the order of the drills is quite important...
And also I think, that training up 4 star players is now more valuable than ever before. Because with low white skills they gain a lot at the beginning and they are better skilled in young age. And low grey skills help you pushing some white skills over the top with the right drills.

Thx for the awesome overview!