Following a discussion with some members of the forum on what would be the impact of retraining on the CA of a player I realized that there were opinions on the subject but little data.
So I decided to conduct a little test to clarify the situation.
The starting hypothesis was the following: when players gain attributes it will cost them CA points, that cost is not the same for all the players and is driven by their positions. As an example it is more expensive for a defender to train tacking than it would be for a striker because that attribute is considered by the game to be useful for the position while it is considered to be much less useful in the case of the striker.
There was therefore a theoretical possibility to exploit that by retraining a player for a position very different of his. For instance you take a striker you teach him tackling which is pretty much a free attribute for him and then you turn him into a defender.
For that test you are going to take a player put him in a position different than his with the editor while erasing his natural position to simulate the perfect training that we could have achieved (like a natural defender with striker stats) and then we are going to reintroduce a position familiarity in the striker role up to natural.
I took one of the striker from my AJAX save. Based on his attributes when he is playing as a natural striker with no other roles he has a CA of 125. When I erased the striker familiarity to 1 and instead puts him as a natural defender his CA is 103. There is no magic here this is just the application of the different weights for the different attributes and it shows that our starting hypothesis is valid.
Now this is what happens when I start retraining him as a striker
What you see in the defender/strikers columns are the position familiarity for the role.
The RCA is what the game would see as the new CA, if that value is above the CA of the player we have 2 options, either the player is maxed out in terms of PA and he will has to lose attributes to compensate until he reaches back his CA, if he is not maxed out it will cost him CA in term of developement and will not be able to reach the same level of attributes than he would have had he not been retrained.
The delta is the impact on the RCA of 1 point increase in the similarity when we retrain him.
I also did another simulation with another player with better stats and a natural CA of 144 as a striker instead of the 125 that we have in the first set of data to see if the move are consistent for different player ranges.
What we can see is that retraining someone up until 8 is free but then some costs start to appear for the better subject when we reach 9.
Then the cost of retraining is not linear with the bulk of the cost happening between 10 and 16 familiarity which means that is basically always worth it in a more normal scenario to retrain someone from accomplished to natural in a position as the cost for that upgrade is almost free.
We can also see that retraining someone with 2 opposite positions seems to take to worse of the 2 weights and not the average. It can be shown that when our subject was a pure defender he was CA103, a pure striker CA125 and when he was natural in both he was CA133. So retraining someone to an opposite position is never worth it from an optimisation point of view.
Also when you scout and you see players able to play different positions (even if they cant play them well) it will have an impact in terms of development vs someone that can only play 1. The more opposite the position the worse the impact will be. So for instance an advanced midfielder that can play as a striker will cost you virtually nothing, while a player being able to play as a DC and all the midfielder roles will cost a lot.
So the test clearly goes in the direction that some people had hinted to in their comments but at least now we have data to back it up
Following a discussion with some members of the forum on what would be the impact of retraining on the CA of a player I realized that there were opinions on the subject but little data. So I decided to conduct a little test to clarify the situation. The starting hypothesis was the following: when players gain attributes it will cost them CA points, that cost is not the same for all the players and is driven by their positions. As an example it is more expensive for a defender to train tacking than it would be for a striker because that attribute is considered by the game to be useful for the position while it is considered to be much less useful in the case of the striker. There was therefore a theoretical possibility to exploit that by retraining a player for a position very different of his. For instance you take a striker you teach him tackling which is pretty much a free attribute for him and then you turn him into a defender. For that test you are going to take a player put him in a position different than his with the editor while erasing his natural position to simulate the perfect training that we could have achieved (like a natural defender with striker stats) and then we are going to reintroduce a position familiarity in the striker role up to natural. I took one of the striker from my AJAX save. Based on his attributes when he is playing as a natural striker with no other roles he has a CA of 125. When I erased the striker familiarity to 1 and instead puts him as a natural defender his CA is 103. There is no magic here this is just the application of the different weights for the different attributes and it shows that our starting hypothesis is valid. Now this is what happens when I start retraining him as a striker What you see in the defender/strikers columns are the position familiarity for the role. The RCA is what the game would see as the new CA, if that value is above the CA of the player we have 2 options, either the player is maxed out in terms of PA and he will has to lose attributes to compensate until he reaches back his CA, if he is not maxed out it will cost him CA in term of developement and will not be able to reach the same level of attributes than he would have had he not been retrained. The delta is the impact on the RCA of 1 point increase in the similarity when we retrain him. I also did another simulation with another player with better stats and a natural CA of 144 as a striker instead of the 125 that we have in the first set of data to see if the move are consistent for different player ranges. What we can see is that retraining someone up until 8 is free but then some costs start to appear for the better subject when we reach 9. Then the cost of retraining is not linear with the bulk of the cost happening between 10 and 16 familiarity which means that is basically always worth it in a more normal scenario to retrain someone from accomplished to natural in a position as the cost for that upgrade is almost free. We can also see that retraining someone with 2 opposite positions seems to take to worse of the 2 weights and not the average. It can be shown that when our subject was a pure defender he was CA103, a pure striker CA125 and when he was natural in both he was CA133. So retraining someone to an opposite position is never worth it from an optimisation point of view. Also when you scout and you see players able to play different positions (even if they cant play them well) it will have an impact in terms of development vs someone that can only play 1. The more opposite the position the worse the impact will be. So for instance an advanced midfielder that can play as a striker will cost you virtually nothing, while a player being able to play as a DC and all the midfielder roles will cost a lot. So the test clearly goes in the direction that some people had hinted to in their comments but at least now we have data to back it up
