bthf

The Battrick Helpfile is an online resource for gamers playing Battrick, the online cricket team manager game.

To submit content to be published on this site, BTmail to keggut, manager of Liverdance (1158).
The majority of the content on this site has been obtained from the BT community and the knowledgable folk helping newbies on the Sledging forums - sincere thanks to all those who help to make BT such a great online game :)

Newbie guide (below), training speeds updated to align with Talent Finder, youth academy info including academy condition deterioration.

A fantastic tool created by Wombat!
Season planner is an Excel spreadsheet that displays your fixtures for the entire season in an easy to read table format.

It allows you to enter the ranks of your opponents and can then indicate which games may be easier and which games may be harder, allowing you to plan when you can rest players to save PFL. It also gives you a rough guide as to your expected gate takings each week, allowing you to quickly identify any weeks where your finances may be stretched. If you are thinking of expanding your ground, then this information can be very useful.

Season Planner: btSeasonPlanner.xls (150kb)

Jargon has kindly allowed me to post links to his tools here. I should point out that they remain his, and I won't be making any updates, etc to them.

FA-Helper: FA-Helper.xls (36kb)
This spreadsheet is for maximising your interest income, based on your current balance, and the number of Financial Assistants (FAs) you have. It also works for negative balances, although we're still not quite sure of the percentage values for interest expenditure. Contact (Jargon) in game if you have some values you wish to share. Insert your current balance, insert the number of FAs you currently have, and read the result from the blue box. Everything else is just extra information!

PR-Helper: PR-Helper.xls (26kb)
This spreadsheet can help you maximise you profit from Sponsors' Income. Simply enter the number of members you had at the last update, and this will tell you the number of PRs you should have. The spreadsheet only currently works for ecstatic sponsors' confidence.

Welcome to Battrick.
Here's some brief advice to make your first season or two more enjoyable.

General tips:

• Money management in BT is of utmost importance. Managers that make more money, and waste less money, will generally do better than their competitors over time.
• Try to understand the ramifications of any decisions you make, BEFORE you make those changes.
• The biggest newbie mistake - spending money. A few bad decisions now can cripple the growth of your team well into the future....
• Don't go into debt. Paying interest on the overdraft balance is a waste of your hard earned money!
• With player skills, Stamina is important. Don't buy players with bad stamina.
• Use the BT forums, particularly if you need advice.

Training & buying trainees:

You only have a limited amount of money - and money will be very scarce in your first season - so you will need to buy cheap trainees (less than $20K, hopefully more like $5-10K).

Try to buy 3 batting trainees. You need to look at guys 17-18yrs olds with feeble + stamina as you will not train stamina on batting trainees just yet. Competent Batting and Mediocre+ Concentration is recommended.
Put each of these trainees on 1 batting net. This should hopefully allow you to have possibly 3 respectable batsmen by the end of the season. Guys that will be around your team for a while.

Bowlers need higher stamina, but that costs a lot more money, so you have to use our nets a bit more wisely.
Try to buy 3 bowling trainees. You need to look at guys 17-18yrs olds with as much stamina as you can find, as you will not train stamina on all bowling trainees just yet. Once again we are looking at Competent Bowling and Mediocre+ Consistency.
Try and buy 3 different types of bowlers to give your bowling attack some variation and be able to take advantage of all types of pitches. I would suggest looking for 2 Fast/Fast Medium/Medium bowlers and 1 spinner.
Try and get at least one of the trainees with competent stamina as you will not have enough nets to train stamina properly for all your trainees.
Your bowlers' nets should be bought like this. 2 stamina, 2 fielding, 3 bowling.
You can rotate the 2 stamina and 2 fielding nets between these 3 players so they all improve at a similar rate (though focus on getting the lowest stamina players up to the same level as the others first).
This means that all 10 net sessions you have are now occupied. At this point all you can do is wait till the end of season and then revaulate the training program then.

Staff & coaches:

If you follow the strategy above, the staff numbers you should be employing are:

3 Batting Coaches
3 Bowling Coaches
2 Stamina Coaches
2 Fielding Coaches

You will also need to employ other staff to help with training of secondary skills (concentration/consistency) and increasing sponsorship monies.
I would employee to start with are:

4 or 5 Sports Pysc's - these help increase the secondaries (concentration/consistency) of players.
3 PR officers - these will help increase the sponsorship money you get each week.

Ground:

When you get your stadium, it is unfortunately not in the correct configuration to maximise your income. To fix this a small upgrade is need almost immediately (after buying your trainees).
You won't have much money to upgrade more than this initially. Once you are getting capacity crowds regularly, you can upgrade it again.
Your initial upgrade should be something like:

Standing room: 0
Uncovered seating: 1,400
Covered seating: 770
Members seats: 180
Total: 2,350

The total cost of the upgrade will be £96,100.00 and the maintenance cost will be £10,724.00 per week.
This allows you to make a total of £51,450.00 when your stadium is full, as opposed to the £28,750.00 you would make before the upgrade.

Youth Academy:

Unfortunately, you should probably not invest in this for the first season at all. It is better to save your money and buy the players/trainees you want than invest in the Youth squad lottery.
The players you will 'pull' from your YA will be of such a low standard at this point, it's not worth the money - your best source of players when starting out is the transfer market.

By the second season, you can start investing as much as you can afford (which means whatever doesn't put you at a loss each week), so that by the 3rd season you can start pulling youths out of your squad.
You will need about $240K to upgrade your youth squad to superb, and there are no guarantees you will get someone good, so do think long and hard before deciding to jump in early and invest.

(Special thanks to howzat for this guide)