Youth Scouts - suggested new ability

[czukay]

I know the last thing you want to do is fiddle with youth scouts again but I really think that they need to get a bit more important as I can see nobody really bothering because of the other changes in the game.

With the advent of all cyclists training at the same speed until skill point 7 people are less likely to pull youths because it will take several seasons to find out if they're better than what they have. I used to give a youth 3 weeks to try and work out how fast they trained and if it wasn't fast enough they got sold.

I think I can see why you want the same speed until 7 as it will encourage more rounded cyclists and will level the playing field between those that map transfer values and those that don't or can't.

It means though that you are rolling a pretty heavy random dice through the core of the game as nobody knows if the cyclists they're training are going to pan out for their gameplan.

That's why I think youth scouts should have the ability to scout your current cyclists to find out their future abilities. Ideally you could specify the particular cyclist and the skill to scout and so as not to trash current youth scouts you could base the speed of scouting on the total skill points of the scout. You could put cyclists skills in a queue so that when he scouts one he goes on to the next automatically.

If you had a 20-20-20 scout he could scout 1 skill ability for 1 cyclist each day with it being progressively slower for weaker scouts.

I personally would then get rid of making transfer values visible as you'd have an in-game way of calculating potential and it stops the computer geniuses having an advantage down the line.

[lee1950]

Very interesting idea, czukay!

Something like this would make Youthscouts more interesting...I was getting fired up to hire a YS before Perception was made less powerful (don't disagree with the decision, just made YS lower priority for me).

Only negative I see: being able to exactly know all 6 FAs is too powerful from a gameplay point of view.

A similar approach, maybe more realistic and interesting, would be to allow teams to have their scout either pull a new rider, or scout one of the current riders on your own team.

Only one action or the other each week. Pulling a new rider stays exactly the same.

Scouting for potential would inform you of which skill had the highest FA, without telling you exactly the level of the FA.

So "Your Youthscout reports that John Smith is a Sprinter".

This would allow us to know each rider's specialty without knowing if it was FA12 or FA20.

Require that a YS have a minimum (of 20?) total skill points to scout a rider's skills, so a 0-0-0 YS can't do it.

20 is high enough to require some investment, but low enough that anyone who wants the ability can afford it within a season.

[goof]

I agree with you. I remember that youthscouts used to have an ability to scout cyclists on future potential, which was nice (I never had a youth scout). However, it's kinda logical that this ability has disappeared, because it's (irl) hard to predict how a cyclist will develop in several years in all stats.

But I find it a good idea that youtschouts should have an option to have a scout preference, so that they will scout young cyclists with a good potential for flat, mountains or hills etc. With the current system it takes too long to discover the talent off all cyclists, and that's a big disadvantage. You already need to be very patient with scouting new cyclists when your potential is still quite low. My potential is 7 and the youtscout hasn't found a cyclist yet.

I don't understand what you meant with the last sentence, czukay.

[Il Padrino]

I like lee's idea!

[lee1950]

Oct 24, 2011 22:30:30 GMT 1 Il Padrino said:

I like lee's idea!

My thinking was to make it balanced. You might see a way to improve on that.

(I can see hiring a 10-10-0 YS and using him to scout my riders while I train his Perception. You might view that as a potential exploit.)

I really think czukay is onto something interesting and fun here.


Also - a comment on goof's post here. His idea might be a way to give a bit more weight to the Current Ability of the YS. Maybe a 4% chance per Current Ability skill point that he will return with a rider who has the skill specialty you asked for? So it's never 100% certain he will find what you want.

Or, if you sent him out for a specific skill specialty, reduce his Perception as a small penalty, so maybe he doesn't find anyone (since you were picky about what you wanted).

[czukay]

Perhaps you could have two options for scouting potential. One where as Lee suggests you ask the scout to inform you of which skill a cyclist has most potential in or instead you could ask the scout where the cyclist ranks amongst your squad in terms of potential in a particular skill.

In terms of the total skill of the scout I think that rather than just have a threshold before you can scout you could have it where the scouts information isn't necessarily perfect but the more the skill points the more likely it is going to be reliable.

To scout a cyclist to find out their highest potential skill the scout appraises each of the 6 skills for potential and comes up with a number for each that depending on their total skill points could be out by x%. For a 20-20-20 scout the result should be quite close to perfect but for a 5-5-5 scout he could be out up to 10-20% say for each skill and so to be sure he's given you something reliable you might have to ask him a number of times/weeks.

Likewise if he's asked to rank a cyclist for potential within a squad in a particular skill - he has to look at each cyclists mountain skill say and he could be out by x% for each guy depending on his total skill points and so the ranking of the cyclist won't necessarily be spot on.

[xtremespooky]

and why not just leave the Youthscout as (s)he is, and introduce the (grown up)scout to scout cyclists from your team on their FA?

I do like the idea above that you choose a skill and that the system gives you the cyclist with highest FA for that skill (with a % chance of returning nothing based on skill of scout?)

[Schizm]

If this gets implemented (Lee's idea of scouting a cyclist for its highest FA-skill), you could use one of the scouts skills (CA ?) for accuracy, 2% off per skillpoint below 20 : f.i. a 8 on the skill would mean he would name one of the skills in the range of 76% to 100% (100-(12x2%)) of the highest skill. (When scouting on a skill this would mean he names one of the cyclists who is in that range).
Another skill could be used to determine how many races the cyclists must have enterered, before the scout will be able to make a judgement on him (I suggest a minimum of 4 for a 20 skilled scout, and for every point below 20 a extra raceday). f.i. a 13 would mean 4+7= 11 racedays.
The last skill (perception ?) then could, like suggested, be used to determine the chance that the scout returns his findings.

[lee1950]

Oct 25, 2011 10:23:04 GMT 1 Schizm said:

If this gets implemented (Lee's idea of scouting a cyclist for its highest FA-skill), you could use one of the scouts skills (CA ?) for accuracy, 2% off per skillpoint below 20 : f.i. a 8 on the skill would mean he would name one of the skills in the range of 76% to 100% (100-(12x2%)) of the highest skill. (When scouting on a skill this would mean he names one of the cyclists who is in that range).
Another skill could be used to determine how many races the cyclists must have enterered, before the scout will be able to make a judgement on him (I suggest a minimum of 4 for a 20 skilled scout, and for every point below 20 a extra raceday). f.i. a 13 would mean 4+7= 11 racedays.
The last skill (perception ?) then could, like suggested, be used to determine the chance that the scout returns his findings.

Nice!

[kingstown]

It's not completely on-topic, but i couldn't find any other topic, so here it goes:
Anyone else notices that pulls from rather averages scouts have really high skills? I've seen level 3 riders regurlarly and even level 4 with the CA not even close to 20 and total skill counts of 11-12. As i recall (please correct me if i'm wrong) the max. for a new rider is 12 skillpoints?

Seems really profitable to have a YS this way compared to other "new" riders on the tl. What if the YS have maxed their skills?

[goof]

Nov 19, 2011 16:20:21 GMT 1 kingstown said:

It's not completely on-topic, but i couldn't find any other topic, so here it goes:
Anyone else notices that pulls from rather averages scouts have really high skills? I've seen level 3 riders regurlarly and even level 4 with the CA not even close to 20 and total skill counts of 11-12. As i recall (please correct me if i'm wrong) the max. for a new rider is 12 skillpoints?

Seems really profitable to have a YS this way compared to other "new" riders on the tl. What if the YS have maxed their skills?

The skill points are 120+CA, so the maximum=140. Afterwards, this is divided by 10. The maximum skill that a new cyclist can have is 4 and it can be higher if the current ability skill is high. An average youth cyclist has about 13 skill points and a 3/ 4 skill. But since perception isn't added to the skill pool, the maximum skill point should be 6 and not 7? The transfervalue of my cylists with a current ability of 7 is about $116-$117K.
And it isn't very profitable to have a youthscout yet, because the most new cyclists have very low secondary skills.

[kingstown]

goof said:

And it isn't very profitable to have a youthscout yet, because the most new cyclists have very low secondary skills.

Uhm....if there is a 500k bid on a rider with 4 steering and 1 balance or 250k on a 0/0, my guess is that for the sellingprice the secondary skills aren't that much of an obstacle.

The primary skills are so interesting at this point that if they are distributed nicely a YS can be very profitable atm.

[goof]

Nov 19, 2011 17:02:23 GMT 1 kingstown said:

goof said:

And it isn't very profitable to have a youthscout yet, because the most new cyclists have very low secondary skills.

Uhm....if there is a 500k bid on a rider with 4 steering and 1 balance or 250k on a 0/0, my guess is that for the sellingprice the secondary skills aren't that much of an obstacle.

The primary skills are so interesting at this point that if they are distributed nicely a YS can be very profitable atm.

Yeah, they may be an improvement for your 'wallet', but not really for your team.