Rocking Rackets

Intro - Players

The first thing you will have to do is to hire one or more players. You can then sign your players up for tournaments which will give them (and you) rating points (if they win).

Hiring players costs your manager rating points. The better the player the more points it costs to hire him. This section will explain what to keep in mind when selecting a good player.

You start with only 150 rating points so you will not be able to afford the most expensive players. Also you are only able to have two players at the same time, so take care to hire the right ones.

Player Stats

Wherever you click on a player name, the following table shows up on the right of the screen with information about a player.

Player features:
Blue: Trainable features
Red: Fixed features
Brown: Indirect features

Here, the player features are discussed that determine the strength of a player. They can be grouped as three types of features:

Trainable features

These features have most impact on the strength of the player, and can be improved when the player gains match experience.

Skill
Skill is the main strength of the player.

Service
The service skill is only used in games where this player is serving (half of the games). The higher this value the harder it is for the opponent to break this player's service. service is only slightly less important than skill. The basic strength is determined by skill+service when the player is serving and only skill when he is not. A high service skill also increases the chance to score an ace (unreturned service) and decreases the chance on a double fault (two consecutive services missed is immediate loss of the point)

Doubles
Only in doubles matches, 40% of the doubles value is added to the skill. In singles matches doubles is not used at all.

Preferred surface
When you hover over this field, it shows a popup with four percentages, eg: clay 55% grass 33% hard 15% indoor 0%. These are the bonuses given to the player when playing on this surface. 100% corresponds to 20 skill (1 tennisball)
This feature can be trained by playing matches on the surface you want to improve, but the total will always be 100. A maximum of 60% can be reached for a surface. If your player reaches a higher percentage, it will be cut off at 60%, in this case the total bonus is less than 100%!

Fixed features

These features can not be trained.

Strength
This feature gives the player a small skill bonus. 100 strength corresponds to 20 skill (1 tennisball)

Speed
This feature gives a bonus when receiving service. It weakens the service advantage of the opponent and decreases the chance that he scores an ace

Mentality
This feature gives a bonus on the important points like breakpoints and tiebreaks. 100 mentality corresponds to 30 skill (1.5 tennisballs)

Home Adv(antage)
This feature gives an advantage to playing a tournament in the player's own country. The home player always get's a 4 skill bonus and for each 10 home adv points he receives another point.

Indirect features

Talent
Talent does not directly influence the strength of your player, but the higher it is, the more experience this player receives for free each week. The player can use the points received from talent and from playing matches to train the trainable features listed above.

Endurance
Each match a player plays makes him tired. The amount at which they tire is relative to the number of points played in a match. The higher the endurance of a player, the less tired he will get. Players with a high endurance can play more tournaments than players with a low endurance and can get more experience and rating.

Player Stats - Age

An important feature of a player is his age. As players get older, their strength first increases and then slowly decreases. Even the strongest players will eventually be surpassed by younger players.
Players of age 15 to about 18-19 are on the rise and will increase very fast, but they will be relatively weak compared to older players. Players of 20-25 are the strongest players and after 25 they slowly start to get weaker.
Disclaimer: The author realises this is a very crude approximation of reality.

When choosing a player this should be an important factor. Players of age 24-25 can be the strongest so for immediate results these are best, but the younger you start to train a player, the stronger he can eventually get. So picking a 15 or 16 year old with a lot of talent is best on long term, but this means a lot of losses for the first several years (fortunately game time goes faster than real time).

Age affects the skill, service,strength, speed and endurance features. Endurance is affected even twice.

Doubles, mentality, talent and home adv are not affected.

Player Stats - Fatigue/Energy

You should pay attention to the energy of your players. If they reach far in consecutive tournaments they will get tired. When the energy bar reaches the red level, the playing strength will be greatly reduced.


When you open the detailed page of a player you can see the exact fatigue level. When it reaches 500 it turns red. Every day, the fatigue level is reduced with 50 points.

How much fatigue a player gets from a match depends on the number of points played. Also, the higher the endurance of a player, the less tired a player will get from a match.

Fatigue affects the skill, service,strength, speed, doubles and mentality features.

Endurance, talent and home adv are not affected.

Player Stats - Experience

When a player plays a match he gains experience. On top of that he also gains experience for his talent every week.

Experience is used to train the trainable skills. This can be done by going to the detailed information page of a player or through the "My Info" page from the menu.

The amount of experience gained in a match depends on the number of points the loser got in the match. So winning easily gives less experience than winning a hard match. Also, winning gives only 65% of the xp that the losing player receives.

Form

An important aspect to take into account when registering your player for tournaments is "form".

If you played too few tournaments in the past weeks your form is too low and you receive a penalty on your skill and service. If you play too many however you also receive a penalty on skill and service.

• For every match (singles or doubles) you play in a real tournament (not practise) your form increases by 1.
• Every week your form is decreased with 8%
• If your form is less than 15 you lose 0.1 skill and service for every point of form
• If your form is higher than 30 you also lose 0.1 skill and service for every point of form
• If your form is between 20 and 25 you have a small bonus of 0.1 skill and service
• If your form is below 15 or over 30 your player receives less experience per match

You can play on average roughly 7 matches in 3 weeks to keep your form under 30, so it is important to take this into account when deciding which tournaments to play. You can't play a tournament every week. Note that there is no maximum. You can play more but it means your form increases so you can only do this for a short period of time before you need to rest your player by playing practise tournaments.

If your form runs low you should play at least 3-4 matches a week to keep your form above 15.

Also, if you get far in singles it also might not be wise to play doubles as well (and the other way around).

You can play as many practise tournaments as you like since it doesn't affect form.

Tips - Players

Talented players of age 20-25 are generally the strongest. Young players however can eventually get stronger than those that you hire when they are old.

Since players age it is wise to have players of different generations so that one is at prime strength when the other is dropping.

Trainers

Trainers are retired veteran players who can be used to train your active players.

To get a trainer, you can convert one of your active players to trainer when he has saved up enough experience for this action.

The trainer's skill however depends on the skill, service and doubles skill of the player at the moment he becomes a trainer. This skill cannot change any more after becoming a trainer so don't make your players trainers too early.

The formula for the trainer skill is
(skill+0.75*service+0.33*doubles)/2.3
and uses the base values that are not modified by the age factor.

Training works similar to practise matches. Players gain xp and fatigue in a ratio slightly worse than close practise matches, but better than easy wins or very bad losses. The trainer is not affected by the training.

Retirement

Players do not keep playing for ever. Playing tennis is hard work, so at the age of 40 any player who is still not promoted to trainer will retire from tennis life. It is not possible to make him a trainer after he retires.

Any trainer will retire at the age of 60 or earlier when fired by his manager.