Mana Games

[Thomas]

There is also an issue with the Puncher style. These players are often rushing the net down the line after a very average shot, they basically open the whole court for an easy passing which is quite dumb and unrealistic as even beginners don't act like that on a real court. I play with Incredible AI.

[manutoo]

Hello,

could you send me a Bug Report the next time 2 times it happens ? (HowTo => topic5-31732.php )

[RemainsR6]

This is a common thing for me as well. Players rush the net a lot, I had average players come out 60+ times on the net in 3setter. The only thing that prevents it is strategies, so Novak, Rafa, Thiem, and Fed won't do this. Also downloading Azoaks Mini Mod helped since he has custom strategies for 100ish players and they behave normally.

[manutoo]

RemainsR6,
what are their net win ratios ?
Could you send me a Bug Report the next you get such a result and your opponent is not a Volleyer, All-Court Attacker, All-Rounder nor Puncher ? (HowTo => topic5-31732.php )

[Remains]

Their win rates are 30-40% in most cases unless the opponent is stronger. The last tournament I played I had Fokina (defender) (Master - 10) rush the net nearly half of the played points. I will try to send a Bug Report ASAP.

[manutoo]

Giron & Simon are both All-Court Attackers, so they're playing as expected, especially on a fast surface.

If you meet another defender acting like Fokina, I'll check it though.

[Remains]

I have already sent you the IRL statistics of both players, Giron's 2.7% SnV and 10.1% net frequency in his career, and Simon's 1.0% SnV and 9.9% net frequency. In my set I have sent you, Giron had around 18 points on the net with less than 50% success. I wouldn't even be mentioning this if their approaches made any sense. Their first-serves have second-serve speed, and their rally net approaches are rarely strategic.

I think generally this behavior is very unrealistic.

[manutoo]

1) Player styles are mostly random in the player base. What style would you like to see for Simon & Giron ? I know just a little bit Simon, I guess I could be Defender or maybe Counter, but I don't know at all Giron. (I'll change the official base, but then you should ask the XKT Modders to change these in their player base)

2) The slow serves are not 2nd serve, but normal serves (instead of strong serves), possibly will slice effect, which gives time for the server to reach the net

3) If you notice a bad net approach during the rally, please send me right away a Bug Report so I can check what's going on exactly (you need to play without Mod or with the latest version of the XKT Mod, but with the Mod the match replay may desync, preventing me to check that point )

[Remains]

Okay, thanks for the reply. I did not know that styles are random. I will play some more today and try to send reports. Do you think there is a possibility in the future of implementing more strategies for each player as you have done for Rafa, Novak, Fed, and Thiem? I've noticed when I played with this mod (https://www.managames.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=34550&p=287489&hilit=azoak#p287489), which has custom strategies, that games are more diverse in playing styles, unfortunately, this mod is only for training club and has remapped attributes.

[manutoo]

Someone created these strategies and sent them to me. If someone sends me additional ones, I'll put them in the game, but unfortunately, I don't have the time to do it by myself.

[noys390]

The TE series is based on tennis of late 90s. So the game will not represent tennis in current era in terms of net-rush or ball-speed. In other words, cpu on most playstyles would take the net pretty often and once cpu takes it position there it difficult to beat it because the ball speed generation is not high enough for pass to go through. (On simulation cntrl it is risky to go for high speed shots).
Solution to reduce reduce net rush is one way by custom strategy but here individually all players needs to be done, a better solution is reducing the surface speed in court.ini, which will affect all the players.

[manutoo]

Remains,

your last Bug Report :

Here is another match that to me made no sense in this era of tennis. Out of circa 300 points played, deMinaur had 90 net points. I find it hard to belive that 1/3 of points are finished on the net in this day and era.

noys390 explained almost correctly, but I'll state it more clearly : TE is a tennis best of from the years 1990-2024. For this reason, volley is much more prominent than if its goal was to purely simulate 2020's tennis. However, strike speeds & spins as well as player stamina & run speed are like nowadays.

Thus say, I checked a couple of games from your match and I was also surprised by De Minaur rushing the net that much on what is supposed to be a slow surface in the unmodded game : indeed, the NewLine Synthetic, the surface for AO Slam has a Surface Speed of -0.75 (clay = -1 ; grass = +1), and thus you should see very few serve & volley's on it from the CPU, while De Minaur did plenty.

So I checked and in the XKT Mod, they completely changed the surface which has now a Surface Speed of +0.45, so it's seen as pretty fast for the CPU, but also changed its actual physics to make it almost as fast as an indoor carpet. To my knowledge, the AO Open still has a slow surface (a few years ago, it was labeled as slower than clay by some players !), so I'll let know Mystery about this to be sure it's wanted or not...

[manutoo]

Ok, so Mystery told me the court pace raised in the past years, and I checked and found this : https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comment ... ace_index/ (2nd pic)

I think the Surface Speed of 0.45 is still too high though, and I'd recommend a ~0.15 rate.

Here we can see the stats of the last final : https://ausopen.com/match/2024-jannik-s ... 701#!stats .

Sinner got 7.4% points played at net, and Medv got 15.9%. Sinner is likely a PowerBaseliner and Medv maybe a Puncher.

De Minaur in that TE4 match got 31% while being an All-Court Attacker. Lowering the Surface Speed to 0.15 should lead to something close enough to the reality of the court speed of 2024...

[Remains]

So what would be the solution for this issue?

Alter player styles to be more in line with 2010-2020s tennis? I guess that this will negatively affect all players before this era.

Implementing custom strategies (I have already linked a mod that to my experience did a good job representing players)? I also did not find a way to implement this into world tour save. My strategies only seem to work on training club. Maybe it's a different file?

Wait for XKT modders to reduce court speed? In my experience, I have not noticed that court speed and overall game speed are that fast.

[manutoo]

Remains,
1) should likely assign the correct play style to each player in the Player Base (it'd be long to do)

2) should lower the Surface Speed of each surface.ini in the XKT Mod ; less long, but still a bit tedious coz there are many surfaces, but you can do it only for your current tournament, so bit by bit, it should feel easy (backup everything before update the XKT Mod, though)

3) For the strategy, read "Coaching Strategy" here topic11-31376.php