Why should I care about CA and how to improve stats

[Areolys]

Hi guys,

It's really frustrating for me to find the information I'm looking for. This probably has been asked and answered a hundred times - if it has I'm sorry. Anyways, here goes...

Here's what I know (correct me if I'm wrong):

Each player has a CA that can be anywhere between 1-PA, whereas PA is a set value or range between 1-200.
Those stats are vaguely represented in game by the star rating, but the stars can be off due to reasons (human error).

 

Now here's where must articles and posts end and I'm none the wiser. Yeah, I get that CA and PA are kind of a thing, but why the hell should I care what PA my player has?

Shouldn't I just look at the stats of my players and go from there? As far as I've understood CA has no influence on the players performance so why is it there in the first place?

 

However, everywhere I go and try to find out more about improving my players everyone is talking about CA/PA. But what about the stats? How can I improve them and is there a limit to it? If there is how is this limit determined? Is each sat capped or is it a global cap?
I assume it's not possible to get a players stats from let's say 4 all the way up to 20.

 

 

Really hope to get some answers as not knowing that kind of stuff drives me mad 

Is there any resource out there that you could recommend me that has some more "scientific" approach to things and explains stuff in detail? All guides I've found so far are quite outdated and only vaguely touch on things - usually stop when it's just starting to get interesting for me. I'm new to FM and want to learn as much as I can.

[eple]

53 minutes ago, Areolys said:

Shouldn't I just look at the stats of my players and go from there? As far as I've understood CA has no influence on the players performance so why is it there in the first place?

 

However, everywhere I go and try to find out more about improving my players everyone is talking about CA/PA. But what about the stats? How can I improve them and is there a limit to it? If there is how is this limit determined? Is each sat capped or is it a global cap?
I assume it's not possible to get a players stats from let's say 4 all the way up to 20.

Hey

Each attribute has a value in relation to the players position. All those attributes add up to match the players current ability (CA).
Drop the CA with some points and the attributes will drop, and if CA increases the attributes will increase. 

So yes, there is a limit to how much you can improve a player attributes (or 'stats' as you call them) and that is potential ability (PA). It's more of a soft limit though, because you can train a player in one attribute or one selection of attributes and have them rise. His attributes will however always be equal to his CA.

Is that what you were wondering?

As for your first question you are absolutely correct. You should look for players that you like and that fit your team and style of play. However, higher CA usually mean higher value, while higher PA leaves room for improvement and much better performances and much higher value.

[phnompenhandy]

Quote

 

Why should I care about CA and how to improve stats

The simple answer is that you shouldn't care about CA (and PA) - that's why they are hidden values and play no explicit (or direct) part in the game. 

By 'stats' I assume you mean attributes - you absolutely should care about them as it is through them - in conjunction with stats like player form - that the game determines how they'll play in matches from moment to moment. 

However, let me give you an example of why I care about CA and PA (just me personally; I don't suggest you play the game this way) -

I'm a lower league manager who focuses on developing the youth coming through my academy, and never purchase players from outside. To help me with my assessments of my new youth intakes, I use an in-game utility to check their CA, PA and hidden values.

Last season I had 3 centre-backs come through, one of which my HoYD recommended as the best of the intake. What the utility showed me was that whilst his CA was higher than any of my current CBs and thus warranted putting him straight into the first team, his CA was actually just 2 short of his PA, meaning he would never significantly improve. The other CBs had low CAs but much higher PAs meaning than in the longer term it would be better for me to nurture them and give them first-team playing time rather than have the high-CA kid hogging a space.

Currently what I'm doing is if it's a tight game against good opposition I play the best CA guy, but if the oppo looks weak I play one of the lesser CA chaps. My overall strategy, however, is influenced by my knowledge of the players' CA and PA values.

But, as I said, the game is not supposed to be played this way, so if you want to play it properly, ignore those values!

[phnompenhandy]

2 hours ago, Areolys said:

How can I improve them and is there a limit to it? If there is how is this limit determined? Is each sat capped or is it a global cap?
I assume it's not possible to get a players stats from let's say 4 all the way up to 20.

Have you read threads in the Tactics and Training forum? There are up-to-date excellent explanations by a few superb posters, primarily Cleon.

Briefly, there is one attribute that can increase rapidly (in 4 months) from 4 to 20 in FM17. I regard it as an exploit but here it is:

By tutoring a player, the tutor passes on his Determination to the tutee. So if the young tutee had Det 4 and the older guy Det 20, the kid's rating will leap up to 20 in one round of tuition (often, not always).

Other attributes can't increase so much or so rapidly, but you can still significantly affect them. This is where paying attention to training comes in. While time and playing experience increase the player's CA, the increases come randomly to attributes, i.e. not necessarily to the attributes he uses. What training does is redistribute those CA increases into the attributes you want to improve.  Thus, without bothering with tailored training, your striker might increase his tackling and positioning attributes. which don't make him a better striker. By choosing an appropriate training program for him, you can ensure the increases go into finishing, off the ball movement and so on.

 

[Areolys]

1 hour ago, eple said:

Hey

Each attribute has a value in relation to the players position. All those attributes add up to match the players current ability (CA).
Drop the CA with some points and the attributes will drop, and if CA increases the attributes will increase. 

So yes, there is a limit to how much you can improve a player attributes (or 'stats' as you call them) and that is potential ability (PA). It's more of a soft limit though, because you can train a player in one attribute or one selection of attributes and have them rise. His attributes will however always be equal to his CA.

Is that what you were wondering?

As for your first question you are absolutely correct. You should look for players that you like and that fit your team and style of play. However, higher CA usually mean higher value, while higher PA leaves room for improvement and much better performances and much higher value.

 

I see! So the more CA a player has the more total attribute points he has, but not necessarily in the right attributes, right?
What happens when CA = PA? Will he just not improve anymore or would stats start to get redistributed based on the training he's on?

24 minutes ago, phnompenhandy said:

Have you read threads in the Tactics and Training forum? There are up-to-date excellent explanations by a few superb posters, primarily Cleon.

Briefly, there is one attribute that can increase rapidly (in 4 months) from 4 to 20 in FM17. I regard it as an exploit but here it is:

By tutoring a player, the tutor passes on his Determination to the tutee. So if the young tutee had Det 4 and the older guy Det 20, the kid's rating will leap up to 20 in one round of tuition (often, not always).

Other attributes can't increase so much or so rapidly, but you can still significantly affect them. This is where paying attention to training comes in. While time and playing experience increase the player's CA, the increases come randomly to attributes, i.e. not necessarily to the attributes he uses. What training does is redistribute those CA increases into the attributes you want to improve.  Thus, without bothering with tailored training, your striker might increase his tackling and positioning attributes. which don't make him a better striker. By choosing an appropriate training program for him, you can ensure the increases go into finishing, off the ball movement and so on.

 

 

Perfect! Now I also understand why it would be best to have a balanced training and how increasing your attributes work.

Thanks guys! :-)

[phnompenhandy]

Right, so just to clarify your rhetorical question, when a player has reached his PA, you can still imrpove him with training since you will redistribute points from inappropriate to appropriate attributes. With an older player who will never reach his PA nor increase CA further, you can redistribute points to slow down his failing physical attributes, or choose to redirect them to his mental attributes if you want him to be a slow but smart playmaker in midfield.

[Ventricity]

You should not concern yourself with CA/PA. At least if you want to have a fun experience. The stats reflect how good a player is more accurately than looking at his CA/PA in the editor. So if you see a defensive midfielder that looks good in the game stats wise, but then you see his CA/PA in the editor are much lower than you world class winger. This doesn't mean he is worse. Some stats will eat more ability points than others. A ball winning midfielder with the right stats will be better than a ball winning midfielder without the right stats regardless of CA/PA. The only thing that might misrepresent this is the player's natural footedness. A player that can only use one foot will have higher stats normally than if he could use both feet.

CA never matters. PA matters if you want to cheat and find out how good a young player can become. Good scouting should still be sufficient to find talent regardless. 

[facman]

I used to care about CA and PA. in fact, I never used to do anything without consulting FM Scout back in the day. When I bought FM16 I made a vow - never to check CA and PA and to just use my in-game scouting system, accuracy errors and all. The result? A much happier player and a more satisfying game experience!

[eple]

OP said nothing about editors or other 3rd party tools. I assumed he meant the star ratings (and still do).

[Areolys]

2 hours ago, Ventricity said:

You should not concern yourself with CA/PA. At least if you want to have a fun experience. The stats reflect how good a player is more accurately than looking at his CA/PA in the editor. So if you see a defensive midfielder that looks good in the game stats wise, but then you see his CA/PA in the editor are much lower than you world class winger. This doesn't mean he is worse. Some stats will eat more ability points than others. A ball winning midfielder with the right stats will be better than a ball winning midfielder without the right stats regardless of CA/PA. The only thing that might misrepresent this is the player's natural footedness. A player that can only use one foot will have higher stats normally than if he could use both feet.

CA never matters. PA matters if you want to cheat and find out how good a young player can become. Good scouting should still be sufficient to find talent regardless. 

 

I am trying to understand the system and since I kept stumbling upon CA/PA I thought it must have an impact. However, I never read anywhere what kind of an impact it had. But whenever I tried to find info on increasing abilities there was only talk about CA/PA which got me confused 

44 minutes ago, facman said:

I used to care about CA and PA. in fact, I never used to do anything without consulting FM Scout back in the day. When I bought FM16 I made a vow - never to check CA and PA and to just use my in-game scouting system, accuracy errors and all. The result? A much happier player and a more satisfying game experience!

 

Yeah, I know what you mean. I used to use an editor in another manager game and it took away the fun "unknown" part and got boring pretty quick. Where's the fun if you know your player will become world class. How many future world stars actually become real world stars?

However, I think using an editor isn't always bad. I like to know how things work exactly and what causes have what effects, so to be able to look things up and to see where things went wrong is always nice

1 minute ago, eple said:

OP said nothing about editors or other 3rd party tools. I assumed he meant the star ratings.

Mainly I was wondering why everybody seemed to be so obsessed with it and why nobody who ever talks about player development actually talks about abilites. But yeah, I wasn't interested to use an editor.

[facman]

39 minutes ago, Areolys said:

Yeah, I know what you mean. I used to use an editor in another manager game and it took away the fun "unknown" part and got boring pretty quick....

...However, I think using an editor isn't always bad. I like to know how things work exactly and what causes have what effects, so to be able to look things up and to see where things went wrong is always nice

I remember using an editor originally so that I could understand how the training system worked (I think that was around FM08 or something like that), because I found it utterly incomprehensible!

the problem was that I then couldn't stop using it for other stuff. So yes, I agree that using an editor can be useful for working out the nuts and bolts of the game.

[Cougar2010]

48 minutes ago, Areolys said:

I am trying to understand the system and since I kept stumbling upon CA/PA I thought it must have an impact. However, I never read anywhere what kind of an impact it had. But whenever I tried to find info on increasing abilities there was only talk about CA/PA which got me confused 

Players earn CA points from playing & improving.

Those earned points are then distributed to attributes via training which essentially just controls how many points go to which attributes.

Over time having unbalanced training will see points taken away from attributes that aren't being training and put towards those that are which is the re-distribution.

Each attribute has a ratio depending on how relevant it is to the player's position.  So for example it costs more CA points to improve finishing for a ST then it does to improve finishing for a DC.

[Areolys]

7 minutes ago, Cougar2010 said:

Players earn CA points from playing & improving.

Those earned points are then distributed to attributes via training which essentially just controls how many points go to which attributes.

Over time having unbalanced training will see points taken away from attributes that aren't being training and put towards those that are which is the re-distribution.

Each attribute has a ratio depending on how relevant it is to the player's position.  So for example it costs more CA points to improve finishing for a ST then it does to improve finishing for a DC.

 

Hmm... And what determines the player's position? Is this a fixed attribute? If it's cheaper for a striker to learn defensive skills and for a defender to learn offensive skills, wouldn't it make sense to train and play all denfenders as strikers and strikers as defender? same goes with DM and AM?
 

I think you mentioned in another topic that there's no position/role skill, but it's rather how well the skills work for that position/role, so this wouldn't be a punishment to play all out of their position, right?

Now, obviously this would probably take too much time to retrain each and every player of the squad, but maybe it would make sense to look past the role and look for players that have the specific attributes the desired role needs.

[Cougar2010]

10 minutes ago, Areolys said:

Hmm... And what determines the player's position? Is this a fixed attribute? If it's cheaper for a striker to learn defensive skills and for a defender to learn offensive skills, wouldn't it make sense to train and play all denfenders as strikers and strikers as defender? same goes with DM and AM?
 

I think you mentioned in another topic that there's no position/role skill, but it's rather how well the skills work for that position/role, so this wouldn't be a punishment to play all out of their position, right?

Now, obviously this would probably take too much time to retrain each and every player of the squad, but maybe it would make sense to look past the role and look for players that have the specific attributes the desired role needs.

The players position is what is shown on the player > tactics screen with his positional ability rated from 1-20 in that position (As a user you see it as natural, accomplished, competent etc).  I know that natural is 20 while I think accomplished is 18 & 19, other than that I'm not sure.

I would presume the more "natural" a player is in a position the higher the ratios for those relevant attributes will be.

Doing what you suggest and playing people out of position to benefit from the lower ratios I would probably class as exploiting the game but it also has drawbacks as well.  Natural DCs are unlikely to have high attributes to play as a striker and if you retrain them then they will automatically gain some positional ability therefore increasing the ratios anyway.  Playing a player in a position where he has no ability also will reduce his decision making attribute for that match (Won't be visible).  If his other key attributes for that position/role are good he'll still be able to do a decent job but its not something I would recommend long term, more suited to short term cover in the cases of injuries etc.

[santy001]

5 hours ago, Cougar2010 said:

 

[santy001]

Well, that post is dodgy above, cannot delete the quote, cannot put any text in it. Anyway, to try this again...

The games weighting system for attributes is far too clever to manipulate in the way you'd hope these days. It was possible once upon a time, but not really anymore.

You can try it, but you'd more than likely ruin any player than you'd get any degree of success. In the most basic terms I guess you'd have to consider it a kind of hybrid tax, if you try and build a player up as this brilliant defensive/midfield/attacking player without specialising in much of anything you just end up creating a player who can't really attain much of anything. The game draws on far too many factors now though to make it this simple, there might be a sweet spot still because no system is ever perfect, but it'd probably need some computer simulations run to uncover it rather than even a methodical testing process. 

[sporadicsmiles]

In the end, CA tells you have many "points" a player has to distribute to his attributes. So theoretically a perfect 200 CA striker will have a perfect distribution of CA to make him a wonderful striker. This is why Messi and Ronaldo are so good in the game. A lot of points, meaning they are excellent at many things.

The problem with looking at CA is that you do not need a player to be good at many things. A player can specialise in a few things that makes him excellent. For example a player with low CA but most of those points in tackling, marking, heading, anticipation, (and a few others) can make an excellent centre back. 

So when signing a player I look at his attributes first and foremost. If he fits into my system I will sign him regardless of what scouts say. I currently have a 2.5 star defender who is excelling due to his excellent anticipation stat (which fits in perfectly with how many teams play against me). I could sign a player with better CA but would not necessarily get a better performance. 

The second thing I look at is PA, which tells you how good a player can be. If there is a large difference between CA and PA (which is the difference in the two star ratings), there is a chance  that - with the correct training - I can stick more points into desirable attributes. It does not always work, but a decent player with a high PA cap can be made into an excellent player with correct training.

To summarise, initial results are based on attributes, future results on the PA and training.

[phnompenhandy]

2 hours ago, sporadicsmiles said:

The second thing I look at is PA, which tells you how good a player can be. If there is a large difference between CA and PA (which is the difference in the two star ratings), there is a chance  that - with the correct training - I can stick more points into desirable attributes. It does not always work, but a decent player with a high PA cap can be made into an excellent player with correct training

IF he is a young kid.  Beyond 24, CA isn't going to increase much although training will redistribute points. Age is fundamentally important here.

[herne79]

"Why should I care about CA" is the title, and the short answer is you shouldn't.

PA is simply a mechanism in the game to prevent all players maximising all of their attributes.  It's a ceiling.  CA is the calculation of where those attributes are currently at to make sure they aren't exceeding the ceiling.  That's all it is.

The issue becomes that people know this and start to focus on CA/PA in order to game the system - "must get high PA players and make sure I don't waste CA" is how they start to think.  They lose sight of attributes and scout/coaching reports, which are far more important.

eg., you could have a defender with a massive CA/PA, but if his tackling attribute was low along with advice on his coach report that he is very inconsistent, injury prone and hates big matches, he could actually be very bad at doing his job.  But some people will just focus on his high CA/PA and then wonder why he doesn't perform.

My advice is to forget CA/PA, focus on player attributes, scout/coach reports and the star rating system.  The star ratings show you how your scouts/coaches think of players in relation to other similar players in your squad.  So someone with 4 star current ability should be an indication that he may be a very good player for you in that position - but again that is just an overall summary and should be used in conjunction with your own assessment of their attributes and other report information.