Long shots

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The long shots tactic (LS) is used to trade attacks through the middle and on the wing for long shots. All long shots created are shown in the match report, including any missed or saved opportunities.

LS could be a tactical option for a team facing a really strong defense and/or if you have a hard time scoring with your team using your middle/wing attacks. But it's useful only if you have decent shooters.

Effectiveness

When playing LS, your players are instructed to rather go for a long shot than playing the whole attacking sequence through. As a matter of fact, a long shot puts the shooter against the goalkeeper. In order to decide whether the shot from distance is transformed into a goal, the match engine compares the shooter's Scoring and Set Pieces skills with the Goalkeeping and Set Pieces skills of the opposing goalkeeper.

A long shot skips the usual criteria of comparison between the attack of the team who gets the chance and the defence of the team who wants to block it, in order to come to a result (goal or missed chance).

The formula for "probability to score a long shot" (P_LS) is the same of more generic probability to score P = Attack rating / (Attack rating + Defense rating) modified using only shooter and goalkeeper:

PLS = Shooter rating / (Shooter rating + Goalkeeper rating)

Shooter rating = 0.0643 * Scoring ^ 2.3808 * Set Pieces ^ 2.7720

Goalkeeper rating = 1977.4524 * Goalkeeping ^ 0.9 + 31.4827 * Set Pieces ^ 2.3262

You'll get a limited number of long shots (usually less than 3 and only in exceptional cases 4 or even 6) and, in order to get a higher number of long shots, your players need high Playmaking skill. In fact, ball possession has almost the same importance as the level of the LS tactic, since having more chances means, as always, leaving less chance to score for the opponent, but above all more chances of converting a regular chance into a long shot for you.

An additional condition to avoid defeat is to have a very good defense in order to prevent as much as possible the goals on the possibilities left to your opponent.

Benefits and drawbacks

The purpose of this tactic is to convert up to around 30% of side and middle attacks into long shots. The tactical level is an important factor to establish the number of the ordinary chances converted.

But you have to consider the counterbalance of tactic too: your wing and middle attack, as well as your midfield, get a little bit worse, with

a penalty of ~2.7% in attack ratings and ~5% in midfield rating.

As we have already said, primarily your players requires Scoring and Set Pieces, not only your Forward, but also your Midfielders and Defenders too. Secondarily they need Playmaking, once again not only IM, but all players on field. The Defending skill should not be overlooked too.

All these requirements leads us to the negative aspects of LS. It is quite difficult to get a good tactical level and you need a team made on purpose to get long shots and then to score them. The main disadvantage of this tactic is that a manager is forced to revamp the entire team with the sole aim of creating a new team suitable for tactics; and, since these players are expensive and rare on the market, the solution is usually to train them himself by upsetting the training program for seasons.

Another tactic benefit: if you don't need attack ratings, low confidence will no longer be a parameter to be afraid...

Counters

How can I fight a LS team? Usually when playing against long shots tactic you can neglect the defence, focusing on improving midfield and attack. When the opportunity is converted, a player on the pitch (interiors and wings are twice as likely) throws the shot; and therefore your goalkeeper is your only possibility to save the shot using his Goalkeeping and Set Pieces skills. A bit both skills are necessary, and it's better to have some of both skills than much of one.

Another solution may be playing Pressing. PR tactic acts different against a long shot, having the opportunity to block the chance twice: once when the opponent team gets the chance and once when your opponent succeed to convert the chance into a long shot (when an attack has been converted to a long shot, any defending team using the pressing tactic has a chance to steer off the shooting opportunity).

Besides, considering that the long shots are ordinary chances and they could result in counter-attacks if they are blocked, playing CA may be an idea.

Players

Relevant skills to determine the LS tactical level are your outfielders' Scoring and Set Pieces (with Scoring three times more important than Set Pieces). An empiric formula to calculate the LS level was discovered, but it works accurately only at top levels and is not precise with lower skills.

Level = ( 3 * SC + SP ) * 11 / 20 – 7.6
SC is the average of the outfielders' Scoring skill
SP is the average of the outfielders' Set Pieces skill
11 are players on field, 20 is maximum level in player abilities (Divine), 7.6 is a constant

Remember that the probability to convert into a long shot your first chanche (after the first transformed the probabilities of the following ones decrease progressively after each success) grows as a curve, so it's harder to increase after a certain limit. In other words: the higher the tactical ability, the lower will increase the probability of conversion to long shot. In this curve, at tactical level disastrous (1) the probability is 3.48% and at level outstanding (10) is 25.28% - almost 22 points more. Then the curve bends and between level outstanding (10) and utopian (19) there is an aumentare of less than 12% (from 25.28 to 36.26). Divine (20) is just less than 1 point from utopian!

Even if the highest scoring rate of a long shot is reached by the Forwards (thanks to better Scoring skills), the probability to receive a LS is higher for an Inner Midfielder (19.44% of the cases) and a Winger (17.00%) rather than for a Central Defender (8.82%), a Wing Back (9.23%) or a Forward (8.17%). So let the players with the highest Scoring skill be your IMs.

Ideally you want to have some Scoring on all of your players, since it determines the level and the probability of scoring a goal from LS chance. Midfielders are more likely to get a long shot though, so it's better to have higher Scoring on them. Therefore the best secondary skill for a Defender is the Playmaking skill and for an Inner Midfielder is the Defending skill. On Wingers the most important skill is the Playmaking (and of course, a decent skill of Scoring and Set Pieces, to help in the LS tactic level).

Passing skill is never important.

Specialty

You will need to score goals to win! Special events will give you more opportunities, so you need to make yours those chances as well. Anyhow, make sure that you always play with at least five Headers, since this event occurs most often.

Ideal LS Team

Unpredictable Quick or Head Head Head or Powerful Head Quick or Head Quick Head Head or Powerful or Unpredictable or Support Head Quick

The main reason why it’s quite impossible to build a decent LS team consisting of youth players is that you don’t have enough youth players with nice specialties, let alone players that also differ only one season in age.

For both Inner Midfielders and Defenders the best specialty is Head (for Corner+Head SE), followed by distance by Powerful (Powerful Defensive Inner Midfielder event breaks up attacks and players gain +5% in the rainy weather).

The best specialty for Wingers is Quick to get the Quick SE and score it. You can play an Inner Midfielder as a Winger Towards Middle (as usually you'll give up on attack ratings, Passing skill is not important). It would be nice to have some Defending skill. The Scoring skill is also important in order to score the Quick SEs.

You may consider exchanging one Head player with one more Quick player (defender), to stop Quick SEs of your opponent; or two Powerful instead of two Head players as well, just for Pressing (in case you face an opponent who outruns your midfield) or as Powerful Normal Forwards for the "rebound" special event after a long shot missed chance (remember that pure forwards are not required, but if you really want to have them, you can try).

Lineup

Since you don’t have the time to train the Passing skill of your players all your team force is used for defence and midfield, so the most indicated coach is the defensive coach. In these conditions it’s essentially impossible to play with two or three decent attack ratings.

You might need 10 outfield players lined up in a 5-5-0 formation, all proficient in Playmaking, Defending, Scoring and Set Pieces. This is true on the most basic level, but this way you'll become very predictable. To avoid that, smart managers are also capable of playing LS with strong attacks and 2-5-3 or 3-5-2. LS teams are very strong also with 4-5-1, perfect with a powerful neutral forward over there.

To be less predictable you can field one strong wing attack (Offensive Wing-back, Offensive Winger and Forward Towards Wing). Naturally a lot of managers will play an "All Offensive" strategy against your LS team, so you may want to scare them off now and then with a stacked wing, but that’s your call.

Training

Following up on that, no matter if the formations you can use are quite a few, you'll have loads of options in training:

• Defending training with 5-5-0 (or rarely 5-4-1): All your team needs that and you can train 10 player using the Inner Midfielders as Defenders in the friendly matches.
• Defensive positions with 5-5-0: you can train at maximum, 22 players/week, but less effective than the Defending training.
• Shooting with any lineup: you'll train the Scoring and Set Pieces skills, very important for a good LS tactical level.
• Set Pieces with any lineup: the most used training by a LS team.

• Playmaking with 5-5-0: in the official matches you can train your IMs and in the friendly matches your Defenders.
• Through passes with 5-5-0: 100% efficiency, 20 trainees/week, rarely used.

Crossing (Winger) and Goalkeeping training are not the very best options, but definitely you can do that if you want.

Buying 26-27yo players and train them a few more won’t give you much satisfaction, since you can only play LS at a high level for a couple of seasons. Another reason for not picking this option is that you don’t have much to choose from: a LS player are rare on the transfer market, especially with the right specialty. The best, but slower, way to be successful with this tactic is to train your own LS Dream Team.

To build such a squad requires a tight schedule. How would you build a training schedule for a team like that? Would you train five IMs in scoring first, then buy defenders and training all ten players in defending, playmaking and set pieces equally? Your choice!

History

LS tactic became available to the public in the beginning of global season 38. Before the LS tactic, long shots already existed as special events (SE). In 2009 the HTs released LS as a proper tactic and long shots were modified, in order to make them part of a tactic: not randomly created match events, but appearing when someone call for them, playing LS tactic.

Hattrick announces

Long shots tactic ready for use

13/01/2009

The long shots tactics are now ready to test in friendlies. We're including it this week already as a last beta test on this new feature. When the new season starts in two weeks you can use this tactic in all your games. Long shots is an attacking option for teams who have problems scoring on regular side/middle attacks, but it could also be a tactical option for any team facing a really strong defense. How the long shots tactic works can be found in the manual. There are currently no teams in Hattrick which can take full advantage of this new tactic right away (and deliberately so), even though teams with good set pieces skills are in a better starting position than other teams. With time, we hope to see managers build their teams with good shooters.

The non-tactical long shots disappeared for two years. However, they made their come back in HT on 17 May 2011, at the beginning only in the youth academy matches. At the end of August 2011 they return on senior teams as well.

Final Tips

How a team that plays LS is going to score? Obviously, by long shots and one think is for sure: the more Set Pieces you have, the better! Remember that with the shooter's SP lower than the opponent's goalkeeper, a long shot will never go in!

So you may still be looking for alternatives to score a goal. The indirect free kicks are also important and again Set Pieces is precisely what a LS teams must be trained for.

Also the Special Events will be welcome and you need a team specialised in converting them.

Anyway, they can score from ordinary chances too. Although it happens very rarely, since their attack ratings are usually very low, if it's your lucky day they can succeed. This makes the battle for winning the midfield even more important.

The following contents are based on the opinion of Hattrick users — which means that their veracity and accuracy have not been confirmed by any official statement, and consequently they do not necessarily reflect the game reality. Please take this into consideration!

What is the best balance between the skill? Do you need senseless Defenders with brilliant Scoring? May not be so! Not enough: if you have a team with an average of SP 20 and Scoring 2, the LS goals will remain in your dreams! This is because the tactical level will be too low (attack counts three times SP) and will prevent you from realizing the chances created.

We need to establish a simple relationship: to get the same tactical ability when a Scoring level is missing, we need a player with three more levels of Set Pieces. But SP is easier and faster to train!

Different player / Same contribution

	Player Type 1	Player Type 2
Scoring	Passable (6)	Inadequate (5)
Set Pieces	Excellent (8)	Brilliant (11)
LS tactic level with 10 identical players	1,66 x (6) + 0,55 x (8) - 7,6 = 6,76	1,66 x (5) + 0,55 x (11) - 7,6 = 6,76

Whether the oustanding tactical ability, as we have seen, ensures a 25% chance of converting an opportunity into a long shot, then the question is: is it worth increasing it further? The answer may be no, but let's see why.

Let's take these 2 players as an example: Type 1 and Type 2. As you can see in this table, they give the same contribution to LS; Type 1 will do better as Forward; but let's move on to analyze the probability of scoring against a goalkeeper with Goalkeeper 7 Set Pieces 7 (for simplicity we don't consider loyalty and experience of anyone).

The first to shoot is Type 1 with a probability of realization is 9.25%.

In this case of Type 2 the probability of scoring rises to 13.78%, 4.53% better, not bad.

Type 1 and Type 2 are interchangeable for their contribution to the ability, but Type 2 is more likely to score a long shot; Set Pieces is the most important as regards the probability of realization. SP is known to train faster and with 22 trainee you can also make cash. In summary: it is economically and tactically preferable to focus on SP and neglect the Scoring of your LS team.

From a managerial point of view, with reference to the ratings on field, buying a defender with high Scoring implies giving up some level of primary or secondary (PM or cross in the case of full backs). This, however, negatively affects the defensive, midfield and offensive ratings, for the sole purpose of increasing the tactical ability, regardless of the probability of scoring.

LS can be another arrow in your bow, but can't the only one. We must not neglect the attacks, which remain the main resource to score. A classic defensive and renunciatory formation like 5-5-0 (or 4-5-1), they can be abandoned in favor of a more balanced 3-5-2 that can increase the chances of score.

Therefore, invest in primaries, above all, as always, the Playmaking, may be the right move; if necessary paying more or buying older players. Even in case that the probability of scoring through normal chances was low, i.e. around 30%, during a season this percentage would guarantee an interesting and perhaps decisive loot.

See also

• HTs on Global/Long shot tactics

External Links

• Tactic Long shots Calculator (the formulas referred to have never been verified)
• Long Shots Federation (93046)