Soccer Gaming Catch-All

IMAGE(http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l88/Matt19871/unsee.jpg)

Almost as harrowing as actual footage of Fabianski playing in goal.

So I'm onto my last new file before I eventually break down and get FM12 (hopefully with the Holiday Steam sale). Brought back my 4-3-1-2 from FM10 Leeds and took over Levante. After some horrible home form I added a defensive 4-1-3-2 for away games and it worked out well. We finished 6th in La Liga with some terrific results, including a home draw against Real Madrid and 1-nil win over a Messi/Iniesta/Villa-less Barcelona in the 3rd-last match of the season. Had I not lost to Valencia 4-nil in my next match I would have made it to 4th place.

It looks like narrow formations with marauding fullbacks are still king. Will be interesting to see if they fixed that in the 2012 edition.

I always hated playing narrow, must give it a shot one day.

I'm hanging out on a good FM12 Christmas sale. At least 33% off would be nice, I expect 25% off again since that was what it was a few weeks ago.

Prozac wrote:

I'm hanging out on a good FM12 Christmas sale. At least 33% off would be nice, I expect 25% off again since that was what it was a few weeks ago.

Well its 33% off for today, I just need to procrastinate for another 19 hours.

Grabbed it. Downloading the 5gb or so of Cut Out Faces Megapack as well, which may seem a waste since I'll primarily be playing LLM with clubs so crap they don't have players with faces, they can't AFFORD the FACES!

Let's make fake cut-outs and send them to these guys for Christmas.

So spent 35 minutes starting a game with ALL nations, ALL Leagues and ALL players (300,000) Loaded. My face pack has faces for 101,734.

I'm now downloading the 2.4gb Metallic logos pack and tweaking the picture of me that I'll use as my in game portrait.

IMAGE(http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/9040/bossrn.jpg)

Now that's the face of a tea cup throwing madman!

If only I had the technology to make it a PNG with a transparent background...

Is it member of local mafia? Is it a slightly mischievous vicar? Is it a douche? Is it a disabled person? Is it aeroplane? No, it's lower league manager!

Ahhh I forgot what a timesink learning a new LLM team can be. 8 hours in with a Croatian second division team and I've played 2 friendlies.

/starts ludicrous, enormously huge new FM12 game
//decides to run Argentina
///looks at Boca's squad, wonders why the hell River isn't in the top division
////double-checks
/////can't believe SI would make a error that glaring
//////starts to go to editor and "fix" the problem
///////remembers River got relegated
////////lulz

I'm still very amused at how FM just can't quite come to grips with what real-life Barca do. David Villa always has the vast lion's share of their goals, not to mention real-life RM and Barca have scored an avalanche more goals than in my FM game.

Here's a question for everyone that plays FM: Do any of you have trouble with the players who seem to always be nervous or complacent? I have a attacking midfielder right now that I cannot seem to get through to. He makes terrible decisions, and no matter how I talk to him, is always either nervous about the game, or complacent. I'd fire him, but he's the best player we have with the ball at his feet, allegedly, but he's pulling a 6.78 so far this year, which is a at least .2 lower than what he should be doing.

I don't play FM this year (STRONG WILL!) but a lot of attacking players used to be like that in previous games. Since he's the most talented player you can probably sell him for decent price and get somebody else to fill in.

Also, RE: FM 12. The team meetings. F*ck em'. Every single goddamn time I try to talk to my team, try to inspire them, any kind of reaction ends with the entire team's morale crashing. It's unintuitive, and because it's not intuitive, or realistic, or flexible, it's bullsh*t.

Example: My team has had a good first half of the season. I call a team meeting to say as much, and to assertively say that promotion is within our grasp. The reaction is muted, and one of my star players says that we can't get complacent. I agree, passionately, that that's exactly the kind of reaction I want. Which is what I would say in real life. No, don't get complacent, keep playing your tails off, nothing is given. Despite my intentions, team morale crashes like the Hindenburg. What the f*ck.

I can even understand that, telling myself "hey, there is some game logic behind that, so it's probably up to me to learn how it works", but the sheer number of choices available is a bit of overkill. I don't want to spend three minutes fine-tuning that stuff. They overdid it for no good reason, quantity doesn't necessarily translate into depth of tactical options available.

Who are you playing as?

Prederick wrote:

Also, RE: FM 12. The team meetings. F*ck em'. Every single goddamn time I try to talk to my team, try to inspire them, any kind of reaction ends with the entire team's morale crashing. It's unintuitive, and because it's not intuitive, or realistic, or flexible, it's bullsh*t.

Example: My team has had a good first half of the season. I call a team meeting to say as much, and to assertively say that promotion is within our grasp. The reaction is muted, and one of my star players says that we can't get complacent. I agree, passionately, that that's exactly the kind of reaction I want. Which is what I would say in real life. No, don't get complacent, keep playing your tails off, nothing is given. Despite my intentions, team morale crashes like the Hindenburg. What the f*ck.

I've noticed that the responses I get tend to be strongly influenced by my reputation as a manager. In my Everton game, we've had some real success (won the League in 2016, and made it to the Champions' League finals) - my feedback goes over more like what I'd expect. I also have a journeyman game (no starting experience, hire on with whoever will have me). In that game, I'm coaching a South African team, and my experiences are almost exactly the same as you describe - no matter what I say, it provokes a negative reaction. I'm assuming that it's intended to model a "who is this guy to tell us how to play" response, but since there's no good feedback in the UI about why a negative reaction happened, that's just speculation on my part.

Get yer pennies ready for summer, FM fans....

http://www.fmscout.com/a-football-ma...

I was skeptical about this until the 3rd line, and the mention of Tommy Svindal Larsen....blimey, how many times did I sign him ? And how many times did I regret it ?

Is it just me, or does anyone else have FM-binges now? Like, I won't play for two weeks, and then i'll play for 10 hours straight.

Apparently I can gift a copy of FM12 on Steam for the princely sum of £5. Anyone interested let me know (prob need to friend me on Steam as well, same user name as here).

Before Friday 6pm GMT, I should add.

Sent

Just picked up Pocket League Story for 50 cents for my Samsung Galaxy S2. reminds me of an old game, Ultimate Soccer Manager. Pretty addictive little thing but geez it chews up battery.

I loved USM back in the day when FM/CM had a number of rivals (almost all of which I bought, natch). In fact, I can see a USM 98 box from where I'm sat.

I was thinking about picking up FM Handheld from iPad for last couple of years but from the looks of it they didn't even bother to upscale the interface. I'm hoping that one day they decide to port one of earlier FMs (or something approaching it in complexity) into portable devices.

Anyway, time to delve a bit more into FM12 (I've played some but not on my machine) thanks to Dave.

New Star Soccer has released a mobile version of their game. I haven't played with it much, but it's basically the same game as New Star Soccer 5, but turn based in-game rather than live. We'll see if it sticks.

Oh, and finally picked up FM12. Let's see if I actually play it.

Y'know what I wish? I wish FM did what OOTP does and allowed me to keep a savegame from year to year. Because i've got another really fun St. Pauli game going, and the idea of losing it in another four months and having to start again isn't exactly what i'd call "endearing".

Yeah, I was thinking about that for some time. Actually, I was thinking about it ever since I started playing CM, but always arrived at conclusion it's just plain impossible. Nowadays I'm not so sure. However, I think it introduces main problem for the series - once you introduce that sort of compatibility it's a standard you can't dispose of. That means all of future installments of your game have to be designed around that principle. Before long you're in situation where you're devoting more resources to keeping integrity between games than trying to innovate.

But yes, I'd love that. Every year I end up with huge save game where I'm like five years in and still don't feel done.

BTW, I'm playing So'ton in my BRAND NEW FM 2012 BROUGHT TO YOU BY DAVE, got promoted to Premier League and doing very well (Europa League, here I come!). Seeing as they're top of Championship right now you might think I took the easy route, but when they employed me in Nov 2011 they were rock bottom with 11 pts from 11 games. I'll try to write short update soon as i developed some new tactics for that team and generally got few new ideas on how to play.

Southampton update: three seasons in, finishing 2013/2014

IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/soton1.png)

Hard-working, highly determined team seems to be the trick. They're not as good as other 6 top teams, but they make up for it with focus: I don't remember last time I had team playing so regularly, sometimes they won't be able to kill off game but in general they just don't have off days.

Spent around 50 million spread over two seasons on getting new players but my wage budget is 27M, compared to 70-90 of other big clubs so club is going to make at least over 10M profit for next 3-4 years.
Three big transfers:
Arouca (8.5M):
IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/soton3.png)
Samir Handanovic (6.5M):
IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/soton4.png)
Yiadom Boakye (6.5M):
IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/soton5.png)
All three of them worth the money I'd say. Apart from that it's one to three million team players and a lot of loans.

Here's the team shape:
IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/soton6.png)

usually I try to control possession with short passing, but I often end up counter-attacking through the middle against better teams. Two CMs act as a cover and rarely go forward (2 goals between two of them all season), so goalscoring chances are down to constant movement of front four. Which means a lot of tweaking of personal instructions: sometimes AMR will cut inside and play through balls while AM wanders forward, sometimes I just spray the ball to flanks and try to stratch opposition.

Random bits and pieces:

* It's my first game with single CF as Target Man. As you can see from his stats he has all the attributes, but I'm still unsure whether ticking him as TM in team instructions is beneficial to the team.

* Notice how average ratings are distibuted thorough the 11. It clearly shows which players work for the team and which just bring the goals. CDs have great average ratings thanks to high number of corner goals.

* On that note: having someone with high corner ability and good technique gets you a lot of goals. How many?
IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/soton7.png)
That many. (That's after 29 games, mind you) I find that in-swinging corners at near post work the best but YMMV.

* I'm also considering setting my free kick distribution for more crosses. I scored something like two free kicks all season so they're a bit of waste as it stands.

* corner/free kick suggestion: have short, technical player (that every squad has) lurk outside area. Shots like that often get deflected into goal or for corner.

* I'm still unsure about cover/stopper division in FM, but found it works well, because Mangane, who plays cover, is so aggressive, that covering role means he won't give away so many fouls. Which goes against the game logic, because obviously it recommends to play him in stopper role.

* I use short ball distribution ('defender collect' set to one of full backs) since all defensive players are comfortable on the ball and it gives me more possession, but that's a setting I change the most: when you're getting pressed by better opposition you should just lump it long and hope for a quick break. Fortunately the easy way to monitor this is checking stats screen and watching FBs' passing stats.