NHL 11 HUT Producer Blog: Rammer Building a Foundation

[ezio]

Hey everyone…Rammer here again to talk about the most addicting mode I’ve ever played, Hockey Ultimate Team in NHL 11. Right now, the entire dev team (at least those not on well deserved vacation) are playing in the EAUHL and already we are seeing very different strategies for building a team. As we’ve stated before, this mode is all about YOU being the GM of YOUR team and building the way YOU want to for success against the rest of the world.

We’ve all heard Brian Burke’s philosophy for building a championship team. He wants six ‘white collar’ guys to put the puck in the net and six ‘blue collar’ guys to bang and crash so his team is tough to play against. We see other teams like Pittsburgh which were not very good for many years but during that time, they were accumulating top draft picks (like Crosby and Malkin) and creating a young talented core that grew together until they were ready to make a run for the cup. Once they were ready, management brought in some key free agents to play specific roles and that’s how they were successful in building their championship team. In a lot of ways, Chicago followed the same recipe of taking their lumps while accumulating young superstars (Toews and Kane) through the draft and building around them. They won the cup this year but as we’ve seen this off-season, they’ve had to retool their line-up because they couldn’t re-sign all of their players under the cap thus making it a lot tougher to build a dynasty.

There are so many different approaches to building your Hockey Ultimate Team that over the next week, myself and some of the other members of the dev team will be sharing their philosophies and documenting how they’re doing in our ‘dev team only” EAUHL.

I’ll start with me…With the addition of the CHL this year, my approach is to rack up as many top prospects as possible and build around a solid core of young superstars that I can keep together for a long time and not have to worry about the cap. The key for me is that the young guys have the most training slots, are a small cap hit and have the longest careers.

hall-and-fowler-chl-2

So…after earning a couple packs and making a crafty trade, I get Cam Fowler and Ryan Ellis playing D together. Both these guys played defense for the Windsor Spitfires last year so their chemistry is through the roof. Along the way, I earned several training cards so I decided that I was going to train up Cam Fowler first and try to get him up to a 90+ rating. I put 6 training cards on him and got him up to an 85. A couple games later, I tried advancing to play a game and was reminded that I had a player without a contract. Guess who…Cam Fowler. No problem RIGHT? I’ll just go put a 40 game contract card on him which I had waiting for use on one of my young players. WRONG! I could put the contract card on him no problem…AT TWICE THE SALARY!

GM lesson 101: When you try to re-sign an 85 rated player, he will cost more than trying to sign a player rated in the 70’s! LOCK UP YOUR YOUNG TALENT TO LONG CONTRACTS BEFORE TRAINING THEM UP.

I haven’t made that mistake again but what I began to notice was that I was using up games of my key players and my team was nowhere close to being ready to make a run. I want to build a dynasty and reign supreme for a long time. To do that, I want at least 6 young forwards and 4 young d-men who have all been trained up playing together for at least 35 - 40 games. I changed my approach once again.

Now I’m keeping all of my key young players on my Scratched Roster and in My Collection (instead of playing with them). This is essentially my farm team. As I gain good training cards and 35+ game contract cards, I’ve been applying them to these key guys (contract cards first including AN 80 GAME CONTRACT CARD). Hopefully, in the next couple of days, I can bring all of these guys into my active roster and start reaping the rewards of my patience. As other GM’s start to run into salary cap issues near the end of this season and the start of next season because they have to resign their players, that should be when I really capitalize with my approach. Stay tuned…

In the meantime, you’ll be hearing from some of the other dev team members and their experience to date in the EAUHL.

Enjoy,

~Rammer

Source - NHL 11 In the Crease Blog

[06woz]

Wish I could've got a bit more depth from that one. But hey, info is info. I'm still playing the waiting game, so anything helps.

[Levesque7]

What Rammer is doing is what I have been planning to do all along. I will suck for the first couple of EAUHL seasons, but I figure by December I should be ready to contend.

So if anyone is looking for high rated players, I will be trading them for young talent or auctioning them for pucks. lol

[Lubey]

Quote: Originally Posted by Levesque7

What Rammer is doing is what I have been planning to do all along. I will suck for the first couple of EAUHL seasons, but I figure by December I should be ready to contend. So if anyone is looking for high rated players, I will be trading them for young talent or auctioning them for pucks. lol

There should be an HUT trading thread. If there's any forum I trust it could be kept civil on, it would be the OS NHL one.

[msuhockeycj]

Does anyone know if chemistry will change throughout seasons. Rammer specifically stated he wants his young core to get 35-40 games together. If guys play EAUHL games together will their chemistry improve, or will it always be just real life chem?

[Levesque7]

Quote: Originally Posted by msuhockeycj

Does anyone know if chemistry will change throughout seasons. Rammer specifically stated he wants his young core to get 35-40 games together. If guys play EAUHL games together will their chemistry improve, or will it always be just real life chem?

They said the chemistry will not improve by playing together in the live chat the other day.

I think what he meant was, he wants to get all of his young players in the lineup at about the time where they will peak after they have been together about 35-40 games.

[JayhawkerStL]

I've pretty much ranted about HUT being a waste of time, mostly due to my experience with the Madden version. I'm still not convinced that the way EA wants o use UT to generate revenue won't eventually mess HUT up.

But I do have to say that the NHL guys have really outdone themselves. Despite my prerogative to dismiss this mode outright, what they have created looks fun as hell. Actually, the Madden team ought to be embarrassed that their second year effort is completely dwarfed by what what Rammer and the guys have put together.

I watched Rammer go through it during the USTREAM event yesterday, and I have to admit, I will definitely be trying this mode out. I still suspect that the online play will be kind of a cheesefest, and progression is still going to require cash money instead of being able to grind out a decent team. But I suspect I will have a fun time figuring it all out.

To be clear, I thought MUT was a lot of fun, and was disappointed that the mode was tuned so heavily to extract cash from out pockets. But what HUT is doing seems light years beyond what MUT had in terms of strategical team building.

[06woz]

Quote: Originally Posted by Jayhawker

I've pretty much ranted about HUT being a waste of time, mostly due to my experience with the Madden version. I'm still not convinced that the way EA wants o use UT to generate revenue won't eventually mess HUT up. But I do have to say that the NHL guys have really outdone themselves. Despite my prerogative to dismiss this mode outright, what they have created looks fun as hell. Actually, the Madden team ought to be embarrassed that their second year effort is completely dwarfed by what what Rammer and the guys have put together. I watched Rammer go through it during the USTREAM event yesterday, and I have to admit, I will definitely be trying this mode out. I still suspect that the online play will be kind of a cheesefest, and progression is still going to require cash money instead of being able to grind out a decent team. But I suspect I will have a fun time figuring it all out. To be clear, I thought MUT was a lot of fun, and was disappointed that the mode was tuned so heavily to extract cash from out pockets. But what HUT is doing seems light years beyond what MUT had in terms of strategical team building.

Agree 10000000 percent, seriously, MUT is embarrassing. There is actually NO way to progress to a 80-90 overall team without cash.