Soccer (Football) Simulation Mathematics

[[mx5]Kris]

Hey,

I am writing a soccer management game and I am asking all those who have done so in the past. How did you simulate the match engine. Personally, I am doing this in VB.

Thanks,
Kris

[hqpsy]

There are several ways of doing this. First of, you could just write a soccergame with AI and no graphics and let two teams play against each other. This will take a lot of time to make look realistic though. I won't recommand this, but it's good if you want to make the player "watch" the match / replays / highlights.

Second solution: you can add some cheating to make it easier to develop and give better results. You have (a lot?) of properties on each player (speed, defence, accuracy, strength...).. Then you make a timeline of the whole game and simulate "realtime" during that timeline. Like if the ball is on team1:s side and team1 has a good defence and team2 forwards are weak then it is more likely that team1 can cut of the attack and and get the ball to the forwardplayers. If team1 has an aggressive player, it's more likley that he will get a yellowcard, but also more likley that he's team will retake the ball.. It might not be neccessary to simulate individual players against each other. Rather, divide the game in different zoones and calculate on the team1 vs team2 in that zoone.

It's not that much math in this solution. You just have to sum different values of a group of players and see who is more likely to win that situation and add some randomvalues. The hard part is to tweak the weight of the different values a player can have, so that you will win all games if you recruit a team with a lot of strength.

It's a lot of random values here, as is it in a real game for sure.

[[mx5]Kris]

Sorry major league bump here...

Would there be any other solutions?

[dave_]

Short version: Fake it

What you want to do is a simple rule based system that will combine the statistics of the team and some random element which is compared against its opponent result. These results can be used to look up into a table to produce either events/a score/something else.