Your Playing Philosophy
The tactics page is your command center. Here you decide how your team performs. The settings directly influence the match simulation — every decision has consequences on the ice.
Mentality — Defensive, Balanced or Aggressive?
Play defensively and your goalie stands safer while you take fewer penalties — but your offense suffers. Aggressive brings more shots on goal, but also more penalty minutes. The golden middle is balanced. Your choice depends on the opponent: against an offensive top team, a defensive setup can be clever.
Forechecking — Hunting the Puck
With high forechecking you hunt the opponent in their own zone — that brings puck recoveries and chances, but costs energy. Deep forechecking is more conservative: you pull back, wait for counters, and keep penalties low.
Neutral Zone — The Control Center
Three variants: Standard (solid middle ground), Trap (you build a wall — few chances of your own, but the opponent barely gets through), and Pressing (early attacking, high risk). The neutral zone is the switch point between offense and defense — here you win or lose the transition.
Physicality — How Rough Should It Be?
Controlled: few penalties, few injuries — your players stay healthy. Physical: your team checks anything that moves. That intimidates the opponent, but the penalty box fills up and injury risk rises sharply.
| Play Style | Penalty Risk | Injury Risk | When to use? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🧊 Controlled | Very low | Very low | Against aggressive teams, with a thin roster |
| ⚖️ Balanced | Normal | Normal | Standard for most games |
| 💥 Physical | High | High | In decisive games, with a deep roster |
Rock-Paper-Scissors — Tactic Counters
Tactics have built-in counters: Defensive catches aggressive — the opponent runs into a wall. High forechecking against a trap defense bounces off. Pressing in the neutral zone breaks through deep forechecking. Watch your opponent and adjust to them!
In the match analysis, you can see after each game which tactic counters were effective. Use this info for the return leg!
Power Play and Penalty Kill
Your power play style (man advantage) and penalty kill style (short-handed) are separate tactical decisions. Aggressive penalty kill provokes more opponent errors — but if the opponent breaks through, it gets dangerous. A safe box PK minimizes goals against but generates hardly any chances of its own.
Pulling the Goalie
In the final minutes when you're trailing, you can automatically pull the goalie for an extra skater. That brings more pressure forward — but an empty-net goal against is then just a formality. High risk, sometimes the last chance.
Match importance
Before each match you decide how important it is for your team. Very low spares energy, important or very important costs more but brings out the last percent of performance. In decisive games – like the playoffs or the relegation battle – a higher importance is worthwhile, while in meaningless games you are better off with low.
Controlling line usage
You can define how strongly your lines are weighted across the periods. That controls how much ice time your top lines get and how much you spare your lower lines. Automatic rules can additionally tie the distribution to the current score.
Automatic rules let you bind many settings to specific scores. That way your team automatically plays more defensively when leading and more offensively when trailing – without manual intervention.
The fine-tuning
Besides the base values there are numerous details you can adjust individually: mentality, forecheck pressure, neutral zone, physicality, goalie behaviour, power play and penalty kill. These settings are especially worthwhile for fine-tuning against a specific opponent. In most cases, however, a preset that sets all values at once is enough.
Keep an eye on the automatic rules: they overwrite your base values as soon as a certain score is reached. Too many rules can interfere with each other.