Aggression vs Injury Risk

In my previous post, I mentioned that you should always keep an eye on the referee's strictness levels before deciding to play aggressive. However, that doesn't mean that you have to always play aggressively when a lenient referee is in charge. The more aggressive you play, the higher is the risk that one of your players gets injured.

I found the following figures from Leftblank's strategy guide, The Art of Xpert Eleven. C, N and B on the leftmost column indicate your aggression settings (careful, normal or bruise) and those on the horizontal row on top indicate your opponent's settings. The numbers show the percentage chance that any of your players will not get injured for the given settings. (The figures with the question marks are only guesses, and not confirmed.)

	C	N	B
C	95	60 (?)	85
N	60 (?)	80	60 (?)
B	80	60 (?)	40

This shows that playing bruise has the highest likelihood of causing injuries, not to mention that your players might also get booked and concede free kicks. I usually avoid using bruise settings even for very lenient referees. I prefer playing normal aggression for lenient referees (H = 1 to 3) and careful for others.

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How much do referees influence the game?

One aspect of tactics that many Xpert Eleven managers often neglect is the referee attributes. A bad referee could win the game for your opponents. (Ask any Chelsea fan and they will tell you how Mike Riley defeated them in their match against Liverpool recently.) This fact about football in general also applies to Xpert Eleven.

Referees in Xpert Eleven have two attributes which have values ranging from 1 to 9. You should always keep an eye on the referee's attributes before deciding to play offside or cheats in the tactics page.

• Skill (S) : The higher the S-value of the referee, the better he is able to judge fouls and off-sides accurately.
  
  
• Hardness (H) : The hardness or the H-value of the referee shows how strict he is. A referee with high H-value is more likely to book players than a referee with a lower value.
  

Aggression, offside traps and cheating should always be decided based on referee's attributes. Here are a few pointers on what to do based on the referee's skill and strictness:

• Use cheat for low skill referees. (S = 1 to 3)
  
• Use offside traps for skilled referees. (S = 7 to 9)
  
• Use "bruise" aggression if referee is lenient. (H = 1 to 3)
  
• Use "normal" aggression if referee's strictness is medium. (H = 4 to 7)
  
• Use "careful" aggression if referee is strict. (H = 7 to 9)
  

Remember that your aggression settings could also cause injuries to your players if you play bruise. Set it to "careful" regardless of referee strictness if you don't want to risk too many injuries.

What tactics do you use for different referees? Do you play "bruise" for lenient referees or are you a "careful" player?

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