Super Blood Hockey: Advice for Franchise Mode

First thing to realize is that the game only saves at the beginning of the day. if you quit at any point during a day, any and all of the changes you have made during that day will be reset to the beginning of that day. This includes any drugs you bought, changes to your roster, daily assignments for players, and game played. The drug dealer randomly has different drugs, so if you don’t like what he is offering, you can quit, reload, until he offers you what you want.

If you can’t afford to buy drugs from the drug dealer, play the match first on a new game day, then micromanage your team after the match. Don’t do daily player assignments until after you played the game, because the results of the match might change your plans.

Once you have stable cash flow for your franchise, the first thing you should do each day is check out the drug dealer, then give drugs to any of your players that need them in case they die. If a beloved player dies, you can reset without losing much work. After doing those two things, then you should play your game for the day.

When selecting a roster the most important attribute for all player types is Accuracy. You can manipulate every other attribute (except Robustness) through micromanaging your players. Accuracy only improves through playing games with minor increases from shooting and passing and major increases by scoring goals and assists. If your players have low accuracy, is very difficult to score, thus making it difficult to improve the attribute. Your players will miss open shots and one timers with low accuracy. Low accuracy is anything less than 80. The computer teams will improve much faster than yours so you will be playing against very good goalies by the end of season 1.

You can pretty much ignore Robustness. It is an important attribute for fighting, but it improves from fighting whether you win or lose brawls and it will improve at a decent pace as you play the game. Although, you are at a greater risk of a player dying while their Robustness is low.
For all player types, there is a Skating and Robustness +/- adjustment based on the players weight. (These are the +/- numbers in parenthesis next to the attribute.) You can change these through managing the player’s diet. Don’t worry about these numbers when selecting players.

Some players have bonuses on their attributes. Ignore the bonuses to Skating and Robustness since you will manage those through the player’s diet. But bonuses matter for Accuracy (Snipers), Power (Playmakers), and Brawling(Enforcers). These bonus will increase over time through player performance in game for each player type. You can get a jump on this bonus if you pick a character that already has one, but this is secondary priority to the Accuracy attribute. Robustness is arguably more important than this bonus too.

The Experience Attribute didn’t seem to matter at all. I think that it only affected the players value. For about 3 seasons, I was worried that if you maxed out this attribute the player would retire, but that doesn’t happen. A maxed out Experience stat calls that player a Legend and they will be worth a lot of money, which you probably won’t need by the time you max out that stat. Experience can increase a little or a lot depending on the performance of the player during the game; it’s not +1 per game played. Don’t worry about this attribute when selecting players.

You only need 1 goalie. You’re goalie can’t get injured and doesn’t retire when it reached max experience. The daily player assignments don’t matter much for the goalies performance. Try to get a goalie with the highest rating and lowest amount of brain damage you can find.

Snipers are bad. They get hurt very easily and they are useless without high accuracy. I don’t recommend getting more than 1 of these players if you decide to get one at all.

The majority of your team should be Enforcers (4-5 players) and fill out the rest of your team with Playmakers and maybe 1 sniper. (3-4 players). Select Enforcers and Playmakers with a minimum of 40 accuracy, preferably high 40s for Playmakers, and Snipers with a minimum of 50 accuracy.
I suggest start off with 3 Enforcers and 1 Playmaker for your first game, then build your team with the winnings after that. Or go with 2 Enforcers and 2 Playmakers if their aren’t enough good enforcers to choose from. You want your team to have between 8 and 9 players for most of season 1.

Goalies are easy to manage.
You only need 1 goalie. He can’t die from playing matches and won’t retire. You might be able to kill a goalie with an overdose, but there isn’t really a need to give drugs to your goalie.

Once you select your goalie, send it to the showers and set his diet to Feasting. Watch his brain damage stat every day until it reaches zero. When it is zero, switch the goalie to the any of the activities in the workout room (treadmill makes the most sense, but it doesn’t really matter which workout routine). At this point you want to watch your goalie’s weight. If the goalie is it overweight, then set his diet to Standard (or Meager if he is excessively overweight). Once the goalie’s weight is at a desired weight in the healthy weight range, you can either leave him in the workout room with a Surplus diet or send him to the showers with a standard diet if you need to save money. a Goalie’s overall stat will slowly increase overtime if you leave it in the workout room, but most of his improvement comes from playing and winning games.

The Showers manage a players Brain Damage. Setting the player’s diet affects how much the brain damage will be reduced, but the diet affects weight gain/loss.

• Feasting -3 Brain Damage +2 Kg
• Surplus -2 Brain Damage +1 Kg
• Standard -1 Brain Damage No Change
• Meager -0.5 Brain Damage -1 Kg
• Starving No Change -2 Kg

Combining the showers with Cannabis or Cutters are 2 ways to keep brain damage low.

There are 3 activities in the workout room and each affects a different player attribute. Treadmill increases Skating, Weights increase Power, and Hitting the Bag increases Brawling. They all work the same way for their respective attribute. The player’s diet affects the gain from the exercise and the weight of the player.

• Feasting: +3 to skill, +1 Kg
• Surplus: +2 to skill, No change to weight
• Standard: +1 to skill, -1 Kg
• Meager: +0.5 to skill, -2 Kg
• Starving: No change, -3 kg

Weight management isn’t as obvious as the other attributes. Each of the player types have their own healthy weight range. The player’s weight affects the bonus for Skating and Robustness.

You may think that it is ideal to want to stay inside the healthy weight range, but it’s far more important to watch how the weight affects the plus/minus bonus to Skating and Robustness. I didn’t really notice any negative effects when a player was outside the healthy weight range, but I suspect that a player being at an unhealthy weight means the player is more susceptible to injury or increased brain damage- I have not confirmed this.

As the player’s weight changes, so to does the plus/minus to Skating and Robustness. These bonuses balance each other out, so as the bonus to skating goes up, the bonus goes down for robustness. When a Playmaker or Enforcer is at their maximum healthy weight they both get a negative impact to skating and a positive impact to robustness. Snipers will have a small bonus to skating and a small impact for robustness at the maximum healthy weight.

Each player type has a weight where there is no bonus to Skating or Rubustness:
Sniper: ~98Kg (Overweight)
Playmaker: ~100 Kg (Healthy)
Enforcer: ~100 Kg (Underweight)

This means that if you want to keep an Enforcer at a healthy weight, you will have to accept a negative impact to skating. And a Sniper will have to accept a negative impact to robustness in order to remain at a healthy weight. A fast Enforcer will be severely underweight and a robust Sniper will be severely overweight.

You can play with this bonus/minus to make a player better suited for a role. A heavier player will be slower and worse at scoring, but will be a much better fighter. A lighter player will be a better scorer, but suck at fighting.

Cutters and Gainers can be used to help manage the weight. However, there is little incentive to use Gainers since it’s very easy to gain weight from training and healing. Cutters will make the player lose weight even when the player’s diet is set to Feasting. Cutters can help heal brain damage quickly without gaining weight.

When should you pull the plug on a player in the infirmary? This can be a tough decision especially after you invested a lot into a player. At least there is an achievement for puling the plug – Profit over People. There is also an achievement for rehabilitating a disabled inmate – Back on the Ice.

If it’s a relatively new player, say goodbye. You haven’t invested much time or money, and they are easily replaced.

If the injury is more than 10 days, you definitely should cut them loose. They are going to fall so far behind the development of your other players. And when they are healthy again, you are going to have to spend a lot of time healing their brain damage in the shower and cutting their weight before you can even get them training again. I rehabilitated a player from an 18 day injury at the end of season 1. I couldn’t put them back onto the Ice until season 3 and they had barely caught up to the stats of the other players by the end of season 4. I should have unplugged this player, but I did it for the achievement.

If the injured player has accuracy less than 50, you should pull the plug. Either it’s a new player that is easily replaced or it’s a veteran that just can’t score for some reason. You’re better off finding a new recruit with 40+ accuracy and training them up for that same amount of time your now deceased player would have been stuck in bed.

If the player was assigned Meager rations when they got injured, you should send them to the dumpster. You cannot adjust your player’s diet when they are in the infirmary (they should consider fixing this with an update). The player is assigned to the showers while stuck in bed. They will heal brain damage everyday at whatever diet plan they had when they got injured, which also means you can’t manage their weight during this time. If they aren’t getting decent healing while they are stuck in bed for all those days, then you will have to spend even more days healing them in the shower with cannabis. You might even want to pull the plug if they are stuck on Standard rations with brain damage in the 80s or 90s.

There is a drug dealer out back. Each day he offers one of four drugs randomly. If you don’t like what he is offering, you can quit and reload the day as many times as you need to until he offers something you want, but you lose any other management changes you have already made that day.

You won’t be able to afford to use his services until you’ve won a few games to stabilize your finances.

Once you can afford it, you should start buying from him every day, but the Bulkers (Gainers) are pointless – you don’t need to buy these as already explained in this guide.

Steroid are good because they give a +1 to Skating, Power, and Brawling every day for a week. However, when you get all those player attributes into the mid 90s, you won’t need steroids anymore. You will improve those attributes from playing matches, and they cap at 100.

Cannabis is great for healing +2 brain damage every day when you don’t want to stop training, but Brawling will get -1 every day for a week.

Cutters will make the player lose weight every day for a week, which is great for either healing or training.

This achievement is awarded for overdosing a player.

Overdoses happen randomly when you administer performance enhancing drugs. A player at an unhealthy weight and/or with a lot of brain damage may be at a greater risk of an overdose than a player at a healthy weight – I have not confirmed this. It is best to give drugs to players at the beginning of the day in case they die from overdose. If you really didn’t want that player to die, then you can reload the day. If you do decide to accept the players death, it’s dead body will show up in the dumpster out back the next day.

It can be tough to intentionally trigger an overdose for the achievement. You can collect a bunch of drug and give them to the player all at once until it dies. It took me about 10-12 steroids and cutters in a row before I got my first overdose. After that, it happened randomly 3 more times as I played the game just from giving one dose to a player. It’s probably best to try this achievement on a player with a lot of brain damage.

Well into my 3rd season when all my players were at healthy weights with very little brain damage, it seemed like the drugs were very safe to use.