Important Concepts

Before I'll start describing all of hattrick's aspects, I want you to read a bit about significant concepts that are required to understand my ideas. When I say "concept", I mean a certain point of view, or perspective, that the reader might not be aware of. I'll be a bit chaotic here, since I'm about to add new things as I stumble onto them while writing the guide.

Powergaming

Powergaming is a term used to describe a particular approach of a player. Powergamer tries to sqeeze everything that's possible from a game. When playing RPG, he'll use every possible method to gain character's experience, skills and equipment. Role playing, or simply having "regular" fun is not that important for him. When playing Civilization, he'll try to get as many points as possible, or finish the game asap, etc., instead of playing 'regularly' (having wars going on, playing a certain diplomatic strategy, playing around with governments). I remember playing Civilization III with my roommate (fiedziu, ZKS Masarnia, 2nd in Polish Ekstraklasa last season). I started off in much worse position (smaller and stretched island, fewer resources), was losing our first wars, but after I gained a certain tech level, I suddenly became much stronger than he was. After a while (I finally established an embassy) I found out, why was that. He had despotism as government (worst possible choice). I asked: "why the hell haven't you switched for all those years?". "I'm a Mongol leader... DIE, puny creature!". He got smashed, but right now I'm not sure who was a true winner...

There are several powergaming techniques in hattrick. It's up to you, whether you want to have: a nice time, a strong team or something in between. Just choose your way.

Obviously I can't tell you how to have fun in HT, so naturally most of this guide is about powergaming. About squeezing the last drop from hattrick. Well, (luckily, believe me) ht-staff has not provided us with precise values and formulas, so we, at least at this point, can't find exact best solutions for every situation. You'll have to improvise most of the time, that's the real beauty of this game. Usually all I can do is to draw you an image of certain mechanisms and a VERY comprehensive clues on what you could do. You might like and use some ideas and disregard others. That's exactly what I do. I'm trying to be 100% effective when it comes to training, but I don't daytrade or MotS-fire (well, the rules have changed by the time I published it -- now MotS-fire strategy is useless). In that Civ game, my friend was a Mongol leader and I was a French Democratic Technocratic powergamer. You decide who you want to be. Stop me, if I bring that crap up too often :D.

Values
Remember me talking about digits and formulas in the introduction? Let's come back to this issue for a while. Disastrous, wretched, poor, weak, inadequate, passable, solid, excellent... that's how you see your players' skills. By the way... do you know an order of all levels, too? That's so sick! You need a good therapist, too ;) . You might have heard about low-passable, high-excellent, etc. This is true, but might lead to confusion. In fact, there are hundreds of mid-levels. Let me give you an example (these numbers are hypothetical, I don't know actual values) -- disastrous is everything between 0 and 999, wretched - 1000 to 1999, poor - 2000 to 2999. That applies to almost EVERYTHING in ht. Skills, experience, form, (maybe) mental characteristics, team spirit, confidence, supporters' and sponsors' attitude, players' health (yes!), coaches' coaching ( :) ) skill (again, it has changed with HT 6.5, but old coaches are still not even within same levels), team ratings, players' performance evaluations (stars), and so on, and so on. Let's say that while developping the game, Bjorn (yes, I'll find this funny 'o' character in my spare time :) ) decided to make one skill of a player to fit in 2 bytes (that's what I would do). If it's like that, every skill can have 65536 different values (from 0 to 65535).

Keep in mind that distances between every next level are equal. So if disastrous is really any value between 0 and 999, than wretched would be anything between 1000 and 1999.

Here's one simple example: Terry Pratchett, your favorite winger, was injured during the game against Evil Elves. You see 4+ next to his name. Let's say that beneath that 4+ is a precise value of 4563. Terry is 24 years old (what a coincidence, so am I!) and you have 6 doctors hired in your team. Let's presume that there's a formula like this. Daily_healing = base_healing_rate * doctor_modifier * age_modifier (of course everything is highly hypothetic!). 5 doctors means that doctor_modifier has a values of 1.5 and the age of 24 means that age_modifier has a value of 0,6. Base value is... let's say 200. Daily healing is 180 (200 * 1.5 * 0,6) and that's how many injury points will be deducted during every daily player update. It was sunday when Terry was run over by the Elves. On monday, he had 4563 - 180 = 4403 points. On Tuesday 4223. Wednesday - 4043. On thursday it dropped to 3863 and that's when you saw 3+ next to Terry's name.
Notice, that sometimes it takes 5 weeks for your player to advance in a level, and sometimes it takes e.g. 6 weeks. Take a look at this example. Martin gets 195 points in his goaltending skill every week. He has just jumped to excellent level and currently has 7005 points. After following trainings he has 7200, 7395, 7590, 7785, 7980 and 8175. It took him 6 weeks to get to formidable. He keeps on training: 8370, 8565, 8760, 8955, 9150. Now it was only 5 weeks! So don't worry if your player suddenly trains for one more week - he should jump to the next level faster, cuz he starts up from not-so-low value in a current level. I hope that formulas used in hattrick in this cases don't rely anyhow on a random factor, cuz it would my thesis less-true (but still handy).

Values countinued...
Note that there seems to be some random factor. We need to make a research on this, but if there was no random number, it would not be possible for a guy to drop from 3+ to 2+ in 7 days and from 2+ to 1+ in 9 days while the circumstances are exactly the same. Training seems to be a bit random, too. But the random factor in these cases is not too big (as the regulatiry is visible), plus contradictory "departures" during particular updates may cancel each other out. I guess we'll never know :)

Go ahead and find few games where 2 disastrous midfields meet each other. One team might have a very high possession. Why? Because disastrous midfield of Team X might be 750, and disastrous midfield of Team Y might be only 250 (which is 3 times less... I guess possession would be 25% - 75%, but that's not for sure). On the other hand you'll never see even 60% possession when extra-terrestrial midfield struggles against supernatural... ("is it worth to invest 1 million Euro in one level better playmaker to increase my average possession against brilliant midfield by 1%? Or should I pump all that money into much better winger, so that my side-offence doesn't suck anymore?")

When calculating something, don't give 1 point for disastrous, 2 for wretched, etc. Instead, give 0.5 for disastrous, 1.5 for wretched, 2.5 for poor, etc. Or multiply it by 10, to skip commas (5 for disastrous, 15 for wretched). Why? Distances between adjecent levels are equal, right? If it's if disastrous is anything from 0 to 1, then on average it's 0.5. Average wretched (from 1 to 2) is 1.5. And so on. Here's a cheat-sheet for you:
disastrous5
wretched15
poor25
weak35
inadequate45
passable55
solid65
excellent75
formidable85
outstanding95
brilliant105
magnificient115
worldclass125
supernatural135
titanic145
extra-terrestrial155
mythical165
magical175
utopian185
divine195

There's one ultimate goal in hattrick. You play to win. You play to win the Cup, you play to be the National Champion, you play to advance to the higher league. There are two ways of achieving this goal. You need either the strongest team or pump sterides into your weak players' veins. Of course you need to be a good tactician, too, but it doesn't matter right now. You use long-term strategies in order to build up your team over seasons and short-time strategies to win while being weaker than others AND (usually) sacrificing your long-term growth.

Long-term strategies (growth over a long period of time).
A regular way to winning is simply having a stronger team. In order to have a strong team, you need as much money, as possible. Apart from purely tactical skills (and by saying that I don't mean just how you set up your team), money is the ONLY factor that makes your team powerful. When you have them, you can have good players. When you have a big weekly income, you can pay high salaries. How to earn money?

• Train efficiently. Training is by far the MOST profitable practice in hattrick. The following chapter is the biggest training guide ever written. Read it carefully!
• Win your games :D. If you win, you go further in the Cup (and earn on tickets), your sponsors are happy (and pay a lot), your supporters are happy (and come to your stadium, and come to your fanclub, increasing sponsors' income) and you get more bonus money at the end of season. Great tip, eh?
• Cut your spendings. It's a hard thing, since on one hand there's nothing really that you can save at, and, on the other hand, you always sacrifice something when saving. You have to figure it yourself where you might save. Want to buy one superstar for your team, because he'll boost your team just as two weaker players would do? Count pluses and minuses of both solutions. Oh... this superstar earns 50k Euro a month... no way! Sometimes it's just not possible. Till the very recent times, two most expensive players (keeper and playmaker) in Poland belonged to me. I couldn't give them up, because... I'm training wingers. Effective winger training has two serious disadvantages: a. your defense sucks, because you need to train your wingbacks (and you buy e.g. solid winger, passable defending guys). So I had to keep my cool 7,5* keeper. b. your midfield sucks, because you can not play a winger TM. So I need 3 well paid inner midfielders :/
• Treat every spending as investment. Or at least don't treat it as something that will cost you a lot in a long run. Buying a good player? Hmmm... you can spend 2M Euro on brilliant, but 32 years old guy or slightly weaker, outstanding 23 years old buddy. First one will play better, but in two seasons you might sell it for less money. In addition, he might get injured and never recover (and most your 2M goes to hell). Ask yourself a question: "who do I really want right now? Is slightly better guy really necessary this season?" When training general, do the same thing: "I'm in the middle of my league, what does better form mean to me?". One is for sure -- you won't earn on this week's training. But better form might help you to earn on Cup games, might help you win the series, or might save you the troubles of relegation. Consider every aspect of your every action.
• Train, train, train! This just has to be said twice :).

Short-time strategies
Some are straight short-time strategies, some rely heavily on exploiting hattrick's weaknesses. What they have in common is that all of them USUALLY (not always, I'll tell you a story at the end) make you weaker in the long run.

• extensive general training. Before we start, you should know a bit about form. If you don't, read the chapter about players' form (not ready yet... if you can read it and there IS a chapter about form, message me, because I forgot to remove this note :) ).
  As you probably know, form is extremely important. Players in solid form play almost twice as good as those who are in poor form. It is possible to keep most of your squad in excellent form, but you completely sacrifice training and lose a lot of money this way!

• lowering training intensity. First, let's see what official HT rules have to say about it:
  Significantly decreasing intensity can provide a 'one-time' boost to the team spirit of a team.This issue is a bit strange... either everyone has missed it while reading the rules, or it has been added recently. Very little is unknown here and I can't really give you exact impact on TS. Note that your TS will drop when you rise intensity back to regular level, so it's extremely short-term strategy. You could use for example before the qualification games, before the last league game or before the re-match in Cup's final (preferably if your country has 10920 teams or more, because you will not have any competitive games afterwards... if you don't play in qualifications :) ). The level of intensity affects form, too! So you would get a TS bonus, but the form of your players might drop. Again, very little is known about it, too.

• buying old players. They're less expensive and generally have high experience, which makes them play better (both when we speak about impact on ratings and special events). But in a long term it's risky and might hurt your wallet. Risky, because those guys heal slower and bad injury may put old players out of the sport for a loooong time (or infinity for very old folks). In addition to that it might be a bad investment when purely financial aspects are considered. Why? When you buy a 21 years old brilliant playmaker you can safely predict that you will not lose too much money after reselling him when he's been in your club for 3 seasons. But what if you get a 32 years old guy? Nobody pays much for 35 yo grandpas. And if he gets injured, most (if not all) invested money goes to hell :(

I don't say it's not good to use those strategies. They're more attractive, for sure. But paradoxically they may also be beneficial in a long term! Next are two stories about teams using short-term strategies (I think that short-term strategies were beneficial in a long run in the first case, Clan of Grandmas).

Clan of Grandmas (78295)

Babcia (the manager, my friend as well) got his team during the 9th week of season 16 in fifth league. Some of you probably don't know the situation back then. It was not so long after one of hattrick's reforms, one that was (and still is) considered by many as a bit unfortunate. While previously new teams stared off with 1600 supporters and one star player (I sold mine for 1,25M ?), new teams had to struggle with 500 supporters and lousy players. Babcia decided to buy many old and cheap players and went for few quick general trainings and he got to fourth league (after penalty shots in qualification game :) ). Continued training general and started using MotS-fire strategy (fireing coaches made TS reset until season 19 I believe, so some teams played for example MotS in the Cup, then fired their coach to reset TS, then PiC in the league and MotS again... it was very dangerous for teams playing regularly) and advanced to semi-final of Polish Cup, beating up many stronger teams on the way... and my team was the one that beat him in the semi-final :P. He advanced to the third league back then, switched training to goaltending and is doing fine ever since (2nd in III.2 season 20). If he didn't use those short-term strategies he would probably still struggle with a weak team in fifth or fourth league. He earned quite a lot of money, attracted many supporters, became famous (lol... I've just gave this text for him to ask if I can publish it and he said "I'll be famous&quot) and financially stable.

ZKS Masarnia Miesiw Pcin Dolny (32310)

Here's a bit different story, which begins back in season 15. My roommate Fiedziu started playing in third league. Didn't feel like switching training (it's general in the begining), didn't feel like changing anything at all (he was inactive for the first few weeks). When he finally started playing, he kept general training and bought few non-trainable players. Advanced easily to the second league, came second at first and advanced to Ekstraklasa during his second season there. I thought he's gonna go down very quickly, but the power of short-term tactics revealed itself. The begining of the first season in Ekstraklasa was terrible - Fiedziu didn't log in at all and gave 3 walkovers. 0 points, 0-15 goal balance. Then started using MotS-fire, which was a really powerful exploitation of the system. Somehow managed to finish as 5th team and won qualifications. Next season (the last one when MotS-fire was possible) was truly astonishing. He ended up as second in Ekstraklasa (only 1 point behind me) and lost the Cup in the final! It was all achieved by a guy who barely ever logged in, had total players' value 4 TIMES lower than I had. Success? Well, the next season (20, the one which has just ended) was a catastrophy - 8th place. Fiedziu has NEVER trained anything but general (lol) and now is the time to pay for it.
EDIT: Season 21, same tactics (old farts in excellent form, probably 1-2 levels worse than his competitors)... Fiedziu has... WON the second league easily and came back to Ekstraklasa without having to play in qualifications. I'm really confused and happy for him :)

I told you about pretty amazing successes of people that used short-term strategies. But don't be misguided... firstly, we are still a young country. This season was practicly our 6th (there are no older teams). Secondly, both stories wouldn't be remembered if MotS-fire wasn't used. This extreme powergaming strategy is no longer possible and you can no longer count on winning against stronger opponents few times in a row. I just wanna tell you that short-term thinking might be beneficial for your team, but only if used for short time :) (and usually it's not worth doing so even then).