Franchise Hockey Manager 3 - NHL & WHA Historical mode

[Habsfan18]

Now this may not be for everyone, but I still figured I'd bring it up anyways as I'm sure some will find it cool. I'm not trying to advertise for the game or anything like that, just passing it along in the hopes of even a few history of hockey fans taking notice as to how neat it is.

OOTP Developments has recently released its third iteration of its hockey manager: FHM 3. It's historical mode is actually pretty damn awesome and could be a fun little tool for hockey historians to play out past seasons and even simulate an alternate NHL history dating back to the 1931-1932 season to present day. I've been having an absolute blast. It's not perfect, as FHM is still a fairly new game, but it has improved leaps and bounds since its original version a few years ago. And I'm sure it will continue to improve every year with each new release.

Start date: You can choose any season dating back to 1931-1932. They may eventually add the earlier seasons, but for now that's the earliest you can begin. From there, you begin managing/coaching/simulating and the NHL will automatically evolve just as it did in real life. The league will expand, teams will relocate and scoring will change according to the actual eras.

Start-up rosters: When you choose a season as a starting point, you will have the option to either use the real-life rosters according to that time, or you can start fresh with a fantasy draft. That means if you start in say 1990, the entire league's player pool will be put into a draft for the entire league to pick from. It's a pretty neat feature.

Play style: You can play the role of GM, coach or GM+coach. Or, my favorite way to play..spectator/commissioner and just watch the league unfold.

Rookie's entering the league: After simming your first season, newer players will start being generated into the game world. You have two options as to how this will happen. You can either choose to have players appear on the teams as they did in real life - as an example, Mario Lemieux will appear on the Pittsburgh Penguins roster in the off-season before the 1984-1985 season - or you can choose to have players enter via the entry draft. Maybe in your sim the Minnesota North Stars draft Lemieux? Maybe the Calgary Flames draft Mike Modano? I personally prefer using the draft to see which players end up on which team.

Player development style: One again there are 2 options. For those who want to follow the NHL's real history in terms of specific player performances as close as possible, you should use the "re-calc" option. What this does is re-calculates each players ratings before the start of each season based on their real-life performance that year. If a player had a breakout season in real-life, expect to see a hike in his ratings. If he had a down year the next season, then you can expect to see a drop in those ratings. Or, as a second option, you can let the FHM development and retirement engine take over. This is for players who want to simulate alternate histories and to see how players perform in that alternate history. In my experiences, it still stays pretty true to form, but there can be some surprises with players either not living up to their actual careers, or players ending up as disappointments. I once had Bobby Clarke as the all-time leader in points - edging Gretzky by 200 I think it was. It's fun to see how the NHL's history unfolds when using this option.

I'll post some random screenshots to give you guys an idea of what it looks like. And don't pay attention to player numbers. They can be random but you can always go in and edit them.

Click to read more...

 

[BraveCanadian]

So like they have almost got what was promised in version 1 done now?

 

[ResilientBeast]

So like they have almost got what was promised in version 1 done now?

I guess, I bought the first one and felt burned so I bought EHM instead.

 

[Habsfan18]

The first game was a complete disaster. I was super disappointed. But like I said, the game has improved by leaps and bounds since then. Still not perfect, but trust me when i say the product is much better than what it was a few years ago. Still some small bugs and issues to work out (like all games) but the developers work hard to fix them and new patches continue to be released.

 

[ResilientBeast]

My problem is the only thing I'd probably like to do, is just start the game at the start of the NHL and hit go, and let the simulation give me an alternate history to date.

 

[tarheelhockey]

This just seems incredibly ambitious. How do they judge something like King Clancy's balance?

 

[Pominville Knows]

This just seems incredibly ambitious. How do they judge something like King Clancy's balance?

Well, they have researchers. Many i believe pro-bono. Obviously there are problems at hand with the real old players, but i guess if HFBoards top lists are worth anything, it can be done to some extent. Would not be surprised if they have spyed on us all along either lol.
But at the same time i cant really tell you much since i almost always starts playing in 1967. I have a hard time finding favorite players from 1931, at least so many that i get some variation in my squads.

 

[MXD]

This just seems incredibly ambitious. How do they judge something like King Clancy's balance?

By using templates for MOST players.

Which is... probably the right thing to do in most cases. Some things are off however (example : G. Mantha's speed is good but nowhere near where it should be, considering he was considered the best skater in the league or so, but since he was mostly a secondary player for most of his career...)

Speaking from experience : Starting a game as the 39-40 Canadiens is a pain. You basically have one first liner (Blake), two second liners (Sands and Getliffe) and four third liners (Gagnon, Barry, Trudel and Drouin), with one of them (Barry) being incredibly tough to build a line around. You also have about three semi-competent guys on D (two of them, Mantha and Wentworth, a year away from retiring), and Mantha is actually a winger and gets there only because he's sortof fit for a rushing D-Men.

At least you can sign free agents, with some of them being Habs or future Habs so it's not gamey (Lach, O'Connor and Durnan; Lamoureux too even though he's nowhere near ready) or anything.

The drafting feature in Historical games, while I can understand why it's there, seems unappropriate (it's that or players enter in the league with the team they started with, which is.. not much better)

 

[decma]

Sounds interesting. Can anyone provide a little more basic information the game?

E.g., is there a card and dice option? Or computer only?

Is this similar to Strat-o-matic? What are the main differences and similarities?

 

[Habsfan18]

Sounds interesting. Can anyone provide a little more basic information the game?

E.g., is there a card and dice option? Or computer only?

Is this similar to Strat-o-matic? What are the main differences and similarities?

It's a text-based sports management simulation for the PC or Mac, in the same vein as Football Manager, OOTP Baseball, and Eastside Hockey Manager. Everything is run on the computer, so not really similar to Strat-o-matic. Think of games like this an an evolution to the classic Strat games. A lot of guys on the OOTP forums for instance grew up playing Strat-o-matic and are now hooked on OOTP.

It's not a fancy graphical representation of the sport like in video games. Think of it like a simulation tool where you yourself can manage teams if you so wish.

FHM 3 is even officially licensed by the NHL.

 

[MXD]

Sounds interesting. Can anyone provide a little more basic information the game?

E.g., is there a card and dice option? Or computer only?

Is this similar to Strat-o-matic? What are the main differences and similarities?

It's made by OOTP Developpments.
It's a little more "static" than the Sega/SI games (EHM, FM and Motorsport Manager, not that the first is anywhere close to the two others), yet a little more lively than Front Office Football if you ever played such.

All in all, it feels a bit like OOTP who had 3 years of developpement instead of 20. I prefer it to EHM myself, and the game certainly progressed more than EHM lately.

 

[Habsfan18]

It's made by OOTP Developpments.
It's a little more "static" than the Sega/SI games (EHM, FM and Motorsport Manager, not that the first is anywhere close to the two others), yet a little more lively than Front Office Football if you ever played such.

All in all, it feels a bit like OOTP who had 3 years of developpement instead of 20. I prefer it to EHM myself, and the game certainly progressed more than EHM lately.

The main reason I love FHM to EHM is the historical stat keeping. Let's say you start up a fictional league and sim from 1950 through 2000. If you want to look and see who lead your league in scoring back in 1975 you can do so. Want to take a look at the career stats of any player in your game world long after he has already retired? You can do that as well.

With EHM, players just..disappear after they're retired. For guys like me who are big on historical records and stat keeping, I just can't get into that.

 

[decma]

It's a text-based sports management simulation for the PC or Mac, in the same vein as Football Manager, OOTP Baseball, and Eastside Hockey Manager. Everything is run on the computer, so not really similar to Strat-o-matic. Think of games like this an an evolution to the classic Strat games. A lot of guys on the OOTP forums for instance grew up playing Strat-o-matic and are now hooked on OOTP.

It's not a fancy graphical representation of the sport like in video games. Think of it like a simulation tool where you yourself can manage teams if you so wish.

FHM 3 is even officially licensed by the NHL.

Thanks for the quick repsonse.

Suppose four friends want to do a keeper draft league that starts in 84-85. They can set up a draft from all available players in that season and sim a full season? (say 26 games against each player for a 78-game season).

And then to deal with incoming players for the 85-86 season, all new players for that season could be drafted? Or assigned randomly? And players who retired for 85-86 would automatically be removed?
And then the 85-86 season could be simmed?

And so on all the way to 15-16?

The four players could do trades too?

Is there a way that they could manage two or three teams each instead of one?

And if the players opt for GM+coach instead of just GM, they would get to set lines? What other decisions would they make?

And the sim can be done in chunks, or even one game at a time to allow for coaches/GMs to make trades, re-set lines, check the stats, etc.?

 

[Habsfan18]

Thanks for the quick repsonse.

Suppose four friends want to do a keeper draft league that starts in 84-85. They can set up a draft from all available players in that season and sim a full season? (say 26 games against each player for a 78-game season).

And then to deal with incoming players for the 85-86 season, all new players for that season could be drafted? Or assigned randomly? And players who retired for 85-86 would automatically be removed?
And then the 85-86 season could be simmed?

And so on all the way to 15-16?

The four players could do trades too?

Is there a way that they could manage two or three teams each instead of one?

And if the players opt for GM+coach instead of just GM, they would get to set lines? What other decisions would they make?

And the sim can be done in chunks, or even one game at a time to allow for coaches/GMs to make trades, re-set lines, check the stats, etc.?

Sorry decma, but I don't believe the game is equipped to support multi-player or online features yet. Right now, at least with FHM 3 (there's obviously no ruling it out for the future) it's strictly a single-player experience.

I suppose the one workaround would be if you guys were all in the same house playing on the same PC and game file, you can play in "commissioner" mode which gives you a ton of editing options. For example, you can manage one team yourself and enter commissioner mode to let your friend "take control" and make edits to another team (trades, line changes etc..) but that would seem like way too much work and obviously isn't a true multi-player experience.

For the game, you basically take over a club and depending on the role you choose, you make trades, set your lineups and line combinations, re-sign players etc. In historical mode, there's no minor league system yet so you also deal with which players are sent to and called up from the "reserve rosters" when injuries or poor performances hit your club. Meanwhile, you receive in-game emails (news) letting you know of great performances around the league, trades, injuries, player of the week or month etc. You can check out league-wide stats leaders and standings. You can "watch" games which sees in-game text describing the action and you can look at box scores. Simming days can be done however you want. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or even years at a time if you want to just sit back and let your league generate years of history.

All in all it's a fun single player historical experience IMO, that will only improve over time.

 

[decma]

Thanks again. I'll check out the company website for more information.

 

[Habsfan18]

I ran a 1992-1993 simulation featuring a league wide draft to generate the rosters. I didn't take over a team, I just simulated the season.

The New York Rangers defeated the Vancouver Canucks in 5 games to win the Stanley Cup. The Rangers were lead by a deep group of forwards that consisted of Teemu Selanne, Ron Francis, Keith Tkachuk, Gary Roberts, Keith Primeau and Joe Murphy.

Award winners:

Hart: Joe Sakic
Art Ross: Wayne Gretzky
Norris: Chris Chelios
Vezina: Dominik Hasek
Maurice Richard: Mario Lemieux
Selke: Sergei Fedorov
Conn Smythe: Chris Joseph
Calder: Teemu Selanne
Plus-Minus: Mark Messier

Some random screenshots:

And then the results to the 1993 expansion draft that took place after the season:

 

[Habsfan18]

Ran another 1992-1993 season simulation , this time keeping the original rosters. As you can see, the results are different. Each sim will be different for players based on linemates, injuries, team performance etc..

 

[TomTorres]

Honorable Mention:
Active & passionate modding community for historical mode (jerseys, logos, facegens)

 

[Habsfan18]

Honorable Mention:
Active & passionate modding community for historical mode (jerseys, logos, facegens)

Absolutely. Haven't checked out the facegens yet, but the historical jerseys are fantastic.

 

[KnightAttack]

This just seems incredibly ambitious. How do they judge something like King Clancy's balance?

Well, they have researchers. Many i believe pro-bono. Obviously there are problems at hand with the real old players, but i guess if HFBoards top lists are worth anything, it can be done to some extent. Would not be surprised if they have spyed on us all along either lol.
But at the same time i cant really tell you much since i almost always starts playing in 1967. I have a hard time finding favorite players from 1931, at least so many that i get some variation in my squads.

Well, most of the Research for Historical has been done by our Producer, Jeff Riddolls who is an avid long time Hockey fan.

By using templates for MOST players.

Which is... probably the right thing to do in most cases. Some things are off however (example : G. Mantha's speed is good but nowhere near where it should be, considering he was considered the best skater in the league or so, but since he was mostly a secondary player for most of his career...)

Speaking from experience : Starting a game as the 39-40 Canadiens is a pain. You basically have one first liner (Blake), two second liners (Sands and Getliffe) and four third liners (Gagnon, Barry, Trudel and Drouin), with one of them (Barry) being incredibly tough to build a line around. You also have about three semi-competent guys on D (two of them, Mantha and Wentworth, a year away from retiring), and Mantha is actually a winger and gets there only because he's sortof fit for a rushing D-Men.

At least you can sign free agents, with some of them being Habs or future Habs so it's not gamey (Lach, O'Connor and Durnan; Lamoureux too even though he's nowhere near ready) or anything.

The drafting feature in Historical games, while I can understand why it's there, seems unappropriate (it's that or players enter in the league with the team they started with, which is.. not much better)

I can't say for sure exactly what Jeff uses, but if you feel there needs to be a tweak somewhere, let us know. We're always updating and looking at different things and if you feel there's an argument to be made, I'll glady bring it forward.

(I am the Community Manager for FHM).

And yeah, the draft didn't exist until I think it was 1963, but since our Historical game currently doesn't have minor leagues it's the only way really distribute players fairly. Even at that, having and differentiating between all the different leagues and different types of contracts is going to take a substantial amount of time for our small team to do. Do we want to do it? Eventually it is absolutely a goal to be historically accurate, but it's very early in the planning stages at this point.

 

[MXD]

I can't say for sure exactly what Jeff uses, but if you feel there needs to be a tweak somewhere, let us know. We're always updating and looking at different things and if you feel there's an argument to be made, I'll glady bring it forward.

As I said -- templates are really the way to go in historical mode, and "individual" tweaks to players can be made over time.

And other than some very specific , individual cases of players who SEEM (notice use of "SEEM" instead of "ARE") "mis-templated" or mis-evaluated at first glance. I'm not sure whether it's really relevant to mention players here, and frankly, I didn't find that much.

As for the 39-40 Habs start : Well, I wanted a tough start, and I was not disappointed!

 

[pappyline]

This may be something I am interested in but I have some questions.

Does it work well on a mac? Are there any special memory or os requirements? What is the difference between the steam and esellerate versions. I don't have steam on my computer so would i download the esellate version?

If you simulate a season with the actual roster and don't manage a team or make any tweaks, what results would you get. Would you get the same results as the actual historical season or would it vary. For example, for 1956-57 would Montreal still win the cup, would Howe still win the AR, and would Chicago still miss the playoffs?

These are probably dumb questions but I just want to be clear about it.

 

[MXD]

This may be something I am interested in but I have some questions.

Does it work well on a mac? Are there any special memory or os requirements? What is the difference between the steam and esellerate versions. I don't have steam on my computer so would i download the esellate version?

If you simulate a season with the actual roster and don't manage a team or make any tweaks, what results would you get. Would you get the same results as the actual historical season or would it vary. For example, for 1956-57 would Montreal still win the cup, would Howe still win the AR, and would Chicago still miss the playoffs?

These are probably dumb questions but I just want to be clear about it.

Humm...
There is no definite answers to this.

The players are rated based on... well, ratings, instead of stats. Now, stats obviously influence ratings. If it's not clear enough, for the 56-57 season, Beliveau isn't rated "33 goals, 51 assists, 105 PIMS". He's rated according to attributes, which in turn influence the game, and his general attributes are probably in the "16-14-16-16" range (that is very good, by the way). Attributes are divised further too (into skater attributes). Beliveau would probably have very high all-around attributes in everything but defense, while his defense attributes would be above-average).

So Beliveau could absolutely win the Art Ross in the game (he didn't in real life), and is probably too good to flounder badly... but he could end up quite far from the mark, if, say, the AI do not use him in a way that would lead to winning the scoring title, or just how he was used in real life. Montreal could absolutely win the Stanley Cup (as they did in real life), and are probably too good to miss the playoffs, but they aren't automatically winning it. Bernard Geoffrion isn't scripted to miss a half-season either. Gordie Howe can win the Art Ross, while, say, Norm Ullman probably cannot.

The same way that the Hawks could make the playoffs. I'm not home, so I can't tell how good is their lineup, but that would probably be a challenge, since they were not that great at this point. I guess Pierre Pilote and Elmer Vasko probably aren't in their prime but would develop in subsequent years. From personnal experience, bad historical teams tend to be REALLY bad, though that assertion mostly comes from my dreadful 39-40 Canadiens squad (and the Amerks are barely better) who were, actually, dreadful.


You have the choice between yearly auto-recalc of attributes or using the developpement engine. Auto-recalc would bring something closer to reality, while developpement might bring slightly bigger outliers (it wouldn't change much for a guy like Beliveau). I'm not sure the players' rating are hurt if one had an off-season in real life while in middle-of-prime. KnightAttack is probably better placed than me to answer (I didn't even play the game that much).

I must say that, the further you get from the starting point, the more things start to be different. Because :
- Draft, unless you chose that players start with their original team
- Moves and Trades.

 

[pappyline]

Humm...
There is no definite answers to this.

The players are rated based on... well, ratings, instead of stats. Now, stats obviously influence ratings. If it's not clear enough, for the 56-57 season, Beliveau isn't rated "33 goals, 51 assists, 105 PIMS". He's rated according to attributes, which in turn influence the game, and his general attributes are probably in the "16-14-16-16" range (that is very good, by the way). Attributes are divised further too (into skater attributes). Beliveau would probably have very high all-around attributes in everything but defense, while his defense attributes would be above-average).

So Beliveau could absolutely win the Art Ross in the game (he didn't in real life), and is probably too good to flounder badly... but he could end up quite far from the mark, if, say, the AI do not use him in a way that would lead to winning the scoring title, or just how he was used in real life. Montreal could absolutely win the Stanley Cup (as they did in real life), and are probably too good to miss the playoffs, but they aren't automatically winning it. Bernard Geoffrion isn't scripted to miss a half-season either. Gordie Howe can win the Art Ross, while, say, Norm Ullman probably cannot.

The same way that the Hawks could make the playoffs. I'm not home, so I can't tell how good is their lineup, but that would probably be a challenge, since they were not that great at this point. I guess Pierre Pilote and Elmer Vasko probably aren't in their prime but would develop in subsequent years. From personnal experience, bad historical teams tend to be REALLY bad, though that assertion mostly comes from my dreadful 39-40 Canadiens squad (and the Amerks are barely better) who were, actually, dreadful.


You have the choice between yearly auto-recalc of attributes or using the developpement engine. Auto-recalc would bring something closer to reality, while developpement might bring slightly bigger outliers (it wouldn't change much for a guy like Beliveau). I'm not sure the players' rating are hurt if one had an off-season in real life while in middle-of-prime. KnightAttack is probably better placed than me to answer (I didn't even play the game that much).

I must say that, the further you get from the starting point, the more things start to be different. Because :
- Draft, unless you chose that players start with their original team
- Moves and Trades.

Thanks MXD

That is kind of how I thought it would work. I picked 56-57 as an example as that was the season that got me following hockey in a big way, Detroit, Montreal and Boston were the 3 big teams so I would expect one of them to win. Chicago finished a poor last so they should miss the playoffs. Howe, Lindsay and Beliveau finished a close 1-2-3 in scoring so one f them would likely win the AR (though I guess someone like Geoffrion who missed a lot of games could upset them).

 

[JAK]

if i wasn't burnt so badly by FHM and FHM 2, I might consider buying it again,

but just so burnt from the disappointment from the first two...