The Author's Starter Guide

What to do when you join

If you have just joined, start by browsing the free agent market. Outside your core player, usually only two or three of the squad you inherit are worth keeping.

Releasing an initial player costs nothing. Once you sign someone yourself, releasing them still means paying out the rest of the contract.

A trade system is coming, so you will have somewhere to dump the bad deals.

Player ratings

• The ratings this game shows you are not exact — two managers looking at the same player see slightly different numbers.
• The better you know a player (training, games, sending a scout), the closer those numbers get to the truth.

The free agent market

• Once you make an offer, the player weighs their own ability, market value, the money and the contract length at each daily settlement, then decides whether to sign.
• The longer a player sits on the market, the lower the offer they will accept — buy early and enjoy them, buy late and get the discount.
• If nothing is agreed, the player tells you what they made of the offer, and you can adjust it.
• Players shop around, so even one who likes the money may not sign straight away. Throwing more money at them speeds it up.

Scouts

Scouts do two things.

Finding players

• Anyone you find goes onto the watchlist, and you can sign them at the end of the season they turn 18.
• Finding players is cheap. Keeping them gets more expensive the more of them you hold.

Investigating players

• Apart from the squad you inherit, every player takes time to get familiar with before their real talent and ratings come into focus.
• You can point a scout at the free agent market, at players you have found, or at an opponent.

Finances

• There are budgets you can push up. Do not max them out — you will go broke.
• Budgets pay off on a long-run average. Cramming right before it matters will not do much.

Your core player

• A fully developed core player lands somewhere around the 99.9th percentile.
• A second-generation core should end up stronger still, if you bring them along properly.

For a bit of fun, release the core player on day one and go find a successor.

How training works

• Natural growth — players improve along the lines of their own talent (roughly 70–80% of it).
• Assigned training — the direction you choose (roughly 20–30%).

Height changes how fast a skill trains: some skills come faster to tall players, some to short ones. (Equal ratings play the same on the floor either way.)

Training results depend on the club's coaching budget and on minutes played. A player rich enough will also hire their own training team — if the club is broke, pay the player and they will sort it out themselves.

Traits

Traits do not swing much yet, and they will be filled out later — new traits are coming, and the engine balance will be revisited with them.

Tactics

Tactics work much as they did in v1, with a slightly cleaner interface.

There are five minutes dials for pushing particular players onto the floor more, but during the game the coach still reacts to what is in front of them — the coach is trying to win. Put a dud on the highest setting and they still will not see many minutes.

Open the advanced panel if you want the rotation controlled precisely.

Injuries

• Players get hurt playing basketball.
• A knock lets them keep playing at a small penalty; a serious injury keeps them off the floor.
• Injuries lower health, and a player whose health hits zero is forced to retire.
• The medical team reduces how bad an injury turns out to be. If the squad is full of glass, it is worth paying to protect them.
• Health also falls with age, and falling health speeds up a player's decline.
• Injuries are random, so nobody can promise a player will last to a given age — but broadly, the healthier they are, the longer they play.