Subject: Tactics

Has anyone yet found the ring of counter tactics for handball? i find my self struggling to get it right

I have no clue, but it might help out to check out the schedules of the teams that have been the most successful during the first season from the top list.

Pulling good players = wins.
Not pulling good players = less wins.

i think the best tactic is to pick and stick with one. its easier to learn than changing often.

There are certain tactics that beat others (it's taken me a season to figure most of them out) but i'm struggling to understand just what difference playing balanced/slow transition/fast breaks makes.

If you're playing against someone who uses separate players for offense and defense, you would want to use fast breaks more often to keep their offensive guys on the floor while you are attacking.

Slow transition would be the opposite. You want to switch from defensive players to offensive players, then you slow it down so your offensive guys can sub in.

That's how I think it works, but I know nothing about real life Handball

That seems like a good theory. Have you tested its applicability in PPM handball?

With that said, I think it would probably be a good idea to train offensive and defensive players separately instead of training one team of mediocre offensive and defensive players.

I too have no previous handball experience and from what i've read i've come to the same conclusions about fast breaks/slow transition but i've not really seen it have too much of a difference so far (tho saying that it's not the thing i've been monitoring closely)
My question is, what use is balanced? You play fast breaks if you dont need to change players, or you want to force the opposition to miss their changes. You play slow transition if you want to change your players. So why would you need a middle ground in the balanced tactic?

I've also read fast breaks are complimented by a team with good speed (makes sense) so if you have less speed in comparison to the opponent then you would play slow transition. But again, when would you play balanced?

Obviously we're still in the early stages of the game so players are all very much the same statswise. When managers start training them in different specialisations we might start to see certain styles of play becoming more effective in certain situations, but for now there's still a lot to learn. I've been given another head-scratcher from my friendly today which questions some theories I thought I'd pretty much nailed down already. But that's all part of the challenge I suppose!

I honestly think there's a lot of randomness to it though at this point. I had a game near the end of the season where the only change made at the half was my team increasing from high to very high. I was winning by a few points at the half and ended up getting creamed somehow (handball.powerplaymanager... ) >_<

Good luck to anyone looking for trends in the data at this point. I think we need a few seasons worth of data before we can really start analyzing.

Am I he only one who thinks their team plays worse on very high than any of the other match importance levels. ive even had more success with very low than very high

not sure about playing worth, but maybe there is some match fatigue involved as I noticed some crap 2nd half play

Yeah... I don't know exactly what intensity does. The only thing I've sort of noticed is that steals and blocks seem to go up the harder your players play. But that's the only substantial difference I've noticed so far.

I've also had some luck switching defense style depending on the teams shooting style. Like the guide says, I think certain defenses are definitely better against certain shooting preferences. I think players stats play a large roll though too (I wouldn't be surprised if a team with higher speed is required for the 3-2-1 to be effective while a team with lower speed and good blocking might be better in a 6-0).

This is all really just speculation though. And could be me looking for patterns that don't really exist lol.

All I have figured ut is that 6-0 is bad against fast breaks, you can't go too wrong with 5-1, and I still haven't figured out how to interpret the blocked shots and steal stats.

Blocked shots and steal stats seem to be most sensitive to how hard your players play.

While you'll probably start noticing some divergences (as teams that are increasingly good play against teams that are new and/or not good), it seems like most matches end with a fairly comparable steal/block numbers.

I thought they were based on passing.