Simple Feature Requests

[weetabixharry]

I'd prefer that the simplicity of the game remained.
Don't want to see it become like Football Manager.

I agree with this. I'm not saying that all of those ideas are bad, but I would hate for Cricket Captain to become as over-complicated as Football Manager. All the interactions with the media, board of directors, players, coaches, physios, scouts, agents, etc are a huge chore. It takes hours to wade through all that nonsense and just play a few games.

I do quite like the idea of having a Career Summary screen (showing my win/loss/draw numbers etc). That would be very non-intrusive.

[bhagwati]

I'd prefer that the simplicity of the game remained.
Don't want to see it become like Football Manager.

Yes, I love that there is no clutter in this game & all the time is spent playing actual matches unlike FM.

[Lynx54321]

Modern day cricket seems to see more and more 'specialist' players emerging. I'm talking the players who are average first class cricketers but top end t20 players. The game seems to struggle to capture this at the moment from what I've gathered in the database threads.

I wonder if additional traits could be included alongside the batting preferences. I'm thinking a 'white ball specialist' or 't20 specialist' so you might see:

Average aggression
Strong spin preference
T20 specialist

In coding terms the t20 specialist could perhaps give that player a 10% or 20% uplift to batting or bowling ability when in t20s. This would allow Sureshot to rate these players lower meaning they perform to a lower standard in first class games but better in t20s.

[ZH8]

Chris Child Sureshot

• Different hand for different skills for newgens. Also make sure subcontinental nations produce enough newgen spin bowlers of various types, I dont see many SLA newgens in Bangladesh which is unrealistic.
• Separate colours for 4 and 6 in wagon wheels.
• Shot names and delivery names in commentary texts.
• Scoop shots in T20 (without adding animation obviously).
• Tour matches against "A" team and also "A" teams from various countries touring eachother once or twice a year, "A" teams mostly selecting top domestic performers and promising youngsters that are close to get internatinal calls.
• Domestic T20 competitions should not get clashed with hosting nation's international schedule, so local players who represent international sides are 100% available, for example if in a certain season Bangladesh has internatinal schedule in decembre-january they should arrange BPL after or before the international schedule.
• Home teams must get some advantage over touring teams, maybe with 10% boost in skills, similarly touring team might get 10% disadvantage. The boost/disadvantage might be only 5% if Asian teams are touring Asian teams.

I dunno if these features are simple or complex, so consider adding the ones that you think are possible to implement with ease and the rest you might think for the next iteration.

[LankyLanc]

I'd prefer that the simplicity of the game remained.
Don't want to see it become like Football Manager.

I still would keep the coaching allowances to the start/end of each season and possibly get rid of the monthly specialist coaching.
Instead of attendance you could have memberships which would be based off the previous years performance.
I find allocating the coaching a bit of a drag all the time. Or even the possibility to automate this.

I also think user made central contracts in International mode.
I don't like how the squads are basically picked at random in international each season for each game type.
You should be able to pick a core squad of say 25 players for the year but have the ability to play uncontracted players just like in real life.

[FineLegatron]

The general consensus in previous versions is that the specialist coaching makes no difference. I know that players can't always "take" to coaching, as in you can throw balls at a batsman all day and they're still rubbish, but for it to happen regularly on a large sample means that there is something not quite right. Especially as in three years time their space will be taken by a regen coming in full skill.

So how about a change where you keep the nets for form - but get rid of the coaching. Instead, you use this money to invest in a batting/bowling/fielding coach. You don't need names or anything, just like the budget screen is now except where it says "youth, coaching, physio" it reads "youth coach, batting coach, bowling coach, fielding coach, physio". The amount of money you put in dictates the net sessions, like it does now, but the amount of investment in a certain area raises the standard of the whole team's batting/bowling/fielding as they all benefit from that coaching investment throughout the year. Thoughts? I have no idea how hard that'll be to implement coding wise and it still has the problem of super regens, but may be a better way of handling coaching.

[weetabixharry]

I find allocating the coaching a bit of a drag all the time. Or even the possibility to automate this.

I was working on automating this in the unofficial editor. However, it's difficult to fully automate, as I don't think there's any consensus on what the best approach is for coaching (assuming you don't have any specific plans for specific players). I tend to put most of my younger players on general technique coaching and the older ones in the nets. However, I don't have any real justification for this ... and my definitions of "younger" and "older" seem to slide around a bit.

One option could be to save training selections to file, then load them again at the start of the next season. Then you just have to do it manually once, and make small modifications as you go along.

[Nath7490]

Sorry if its mentioned before but can players finally play a sweep/reverse sweep and run down the wicket without getting stumped 100% of the time?

[weetabixharry]

for it to happen regularly on a large sample means that there is something not quite right.

Can you tell me more about this? How large was the sample? Did someone write up any details?

I did some very small trials (a few tens of players over a few years) and measured a modest improvement on average when using general technique training versus no training at all. It has been on my to-do list for ages to somehow automate a test over some thousands of games and share some statistics on the effectiveness of coaching. The tricky part is automating it.

A lazy option would be to just have two savegames. In one, the whole squad undergoes the same type of training for, say, one whole season. In the other, no one is trained. Then, load each savegame a few thousand times and repeatedly play the same match, recording all the batting scores and bowling figures. There would then be enough data to draw some comparisons. There are a lot of potential problems with this lazy option (for example, the weather conditions could be totally different in the two savegames). Probably, weather could be edited to be the same, but there are a lot of other variables that would be too difficult to control. Therefore, you'd probably want to repeat the whole test a few thousand times. I don't have a supercomputer handy, so I'm not sure I'd be able to make any useful conclusions.

[Lynx54321]

Can you tell me more about this? How large was the sample? Did someone write up any details?

I did some very small trials (a few tens of players over a few years) and measured a modest improvement on average when using general technique training versus no training at all. It has been on my to-do list for ages to somehow automate a test over some thousands of games and share some statistics on the effectiveness of coaching. The tricky part is automating it.

A lazy option would be to just have two savegames. In one, the whole squad undergoes the same type of training for, say, one whole season. In the other, no one is trained. Then, load each savegame a few thousand times and repeatedly play the same match, recording all the batting scores and bowling figures. There would then be enough data to draw some comparisons. There are a lot of potential problems with this lazy option (for example, the weather conditions could be totally different in the two savegames). Probably, weather could be edited to be the same, but there are a lot of other variables that would be too difficult to control. Therefore, you'd probably want to repeat the whole test a few thousand times. I don't have a supercomputer handy, so I'm not sure I'd be able to make any useful conclusions.

I'd be fascinated to see the result of any sort of test like this. However I wonder if Chris Child could shed any light on what sort of increase the coaching should drive based on what is coded?

There was a 2019 thread where he summarised some bits.

Couple more ideas from that thread actually:

A quick win would be having a tab within the coaching and physio page that lists all the improvements made during the season

It would be nice to be able to choose how intensely a player is coached as well. Perhaps "intense batting technique coaching" could result in some really significant improvement but whilst on it a player would be too tired to play much. Just an idea similar to stacking two coaching slots on one player.

[Cricstarz]

[*]Tour matches against "A" team and also "A" teams from various countries touring eachother once or twice a year, "A" teams mostly selecting top domestic performers and promising youngsters that are close to get internatinal calls.[*]Domestic T20 competitions should not get clashed with hosting nation's international schedule, so local players who represent international sides are 100% available, for example if in a certain season Bangladesh has internatinal schedule in decembre-january they should arrange BPL after or before the international sched.

These 2 points especially are massive, I would love to be able to control or atleast select u19/a tours which happen regularly.


Also International fixtures clashing with 20 over competition is a MASSIVE issue where local international players should be available for all of their domestic 20 over completion regardless.

[LankyLanc]

Is it possible to separate the 100 from the T20 stats?
I believe the 100 is a totally new format and should get it's own player stats

Batsmen
Matches - Innings - Not Outs - Runs - Highest Score - Average - 100's - 50's - 0's - Strike Rate - 4's% - 6's%

Bowlers
Balls - Dots - Runs - Wickets - Avg - Strike Rate - Best - 5i - 10m - Runs Per Ball - Catches/Stmp - CPM



Also, coaching for your county needs work while the 100 is on. Every time it crosses between the challenge trophy and the 100 coaching is allocated to players I would never allocate coaching to.

[bobbyb]

- Better pre-defined fields (have these changed in over a decade?)
- An animation that involves running down the wicket that doesn't result in being stumped
- Seamers in real life (in FC cricket) only really bowl around the wicket to bowl short stuff at batsmen, yet too often AI does it and LBWs from that angle are way too frequent.
- I feel like generally there are far to many wickets that are bowled in first class cricket, not enough caught in corden
- Setting the bowler to bowl full balls results far too often in two or three short balls an over. There should be more options regarding lengths (but I appreciate this is tricky) but right now I feel like the best way to bowl a fuller length is just to leave it on standard.
- Does bowling short actually get people out with short stuff? It'd be nice to have an animation/setup that actually involves being able to bounce someone out.
- More in-game guidance on coaching. I feel like the player development is happening, so it's less of a new function and more of having more words/history over what a player does well and how effective coaching is. The game gives us options to give wicket-keepers fielding training, yet there's no real indication how good they are already. Same goes with fielding training in general.
- Also, I know it's a function of the game, but does it not feel a bit silly you can't give every player training?
- "Physio" another feature grandfathered in but I'm not sure what the point of this one really is? Could we maybe tweak this to something like "hire strength and conditioning coach" or something to that effect. Or at least could the game better explain what this functionality does. Again, it feels odd that this manifests itself as "extra physio" slots. As some have said, the process of assigning coaching/physio feels a bit arduous particularly without much feedback of how effective any of it is.
- Is it just me, or does the slow run up of medium pace bowlers really annoy anyone else?
- Would it be possible (I generally only play county stuff, so not sure it'd apply elsewhere to other formats) to be able to make player signings mid-season? Would that completely break the game or could there be a free agent pool mid-season if you needed one? Would make overseas players a bit more dynamic.
- (County stuff again) could the player have any kind of control/influence over what players get promoted from the second teams mid-season? The option to call up more etc...
- Could second XI games be incorporated in with scorecards? Right now I feel like we can see everything else but (I'm not sure if the game actually generates scorecards for these games or just individual performances - but would be cool to look at.

Appreciate some of these probably aren't simple (then again, I've seen some pretty complex ideas in this thread!) but just a mix of ideas I've had coming back to the game after a couple of years. Would love a few new animations for the next game, even if it's just some tweaks rather than a load of new ones.

[Lynx54321]

The physio point is an interesting one. It's only really useful after injuries. I do think player fatigue in general should be more pronounced. At the moment there isn't any reason I couldn't play the same 11 in every single game which isn't very realistic.

[giantshank]

One thing I'd love to see is the opponent team's captain in the lineups. The AI selects captains anyway, so it would add to the immersion.