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1983-84 NEW TACTICS AND LINES
I've decided to go with a tweak to my tactical approach this season. I hope it's both more offensive and more defensive! What I'll be doing is adding more goalscorers and removing my two-way forwards from Lines 1-3. So it'll be a playmaker flanked by a sniper and a shooter. And then Line 4 will be a shutdown defensive line, that's prioritized to take defensive draws, play against the opposing top line, and also play on the penalty kill.
I've noticed that the bottom lines don't really get enough ice-time to score all that much, so it's a bit of a waste to have goalscorers and playmakers there. They usually end up being minus players. So I've given the 4th Line a new purpose, and freed up the Top 9 guys to score more goals. Now the wingers are all focused solely on putting the puck in the net, so hopefully we'll be hearing Brass Bonanza more often in Hartford. The sniper/shooter combo gives a bit of a different attacking approach on each line, though I don't know how much that matters to the game engine.
The cool thing about my setup now is that the 4th Line is matched up against the opposing 1st, freeing up my other lines to match up against slightly weaker lines. My 1st is matched against their 2nd, 2nd matched against 3rd, and 3rd matched against 4th. So hopefully that'll allow them all to be better than the opposing players and score more goals.
For the 4th Line... we've picked up Gaeten Duchesne in a trade, Brent Peterson on waivers, and drafted Greg Gilbert in-house. They're all playing as backchecking forwards and have their sliders set to defend only. I've also tweaked their tactics a bit to dump the puck in, slow the tempo down, and play a less skilled game. They're there to prevent goals. We'll see how it goes.
I know I'm deviating from my original philosophy of no checking lines. But one should never be inflexible, there's always opportunity to adapt. I think because of how icetime works, there's a certain percentage of time in a game where you have to focus on defense... whether it's on the PK, against a skilled line, or a defensive zone faceoff. Plus it'll be fun to have 6 wingers all set to sniper/shooter and have the centers and defensemen feeding them.
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