Indeed! they've genuinely revamped scouting this year. I'm still getting used to it myself, but it's a significant change from last year. Putting your Chief Scout in charge of scouting actually means something this year (although you can still set him guidelines for what you're looking for).
But yes, you have to buy scouting packages to get relevant knowledge of players all around your league/nation/the world now (like in real life), or else you're just relying on your coaches' knowledge. Those packs (and scouting in general) costs money now, so you need to keep track of that budget. So I could send a scout to give me a report on Harry Kane, for instance, but it'd cost valuable $$$ I just don't have to blow.
That's a very rudimentary explanation of it, I'm still learning it myself, but I'm enjoying it so far.
Another thing I've noticed, they mentioned they added a bunch of new stadium designs this year, which is great, but they are being almost comically kind to some of the Vanarama National teams. Here's what the stand behind the goal at our home ground looks like in-game... and here's what the stand at Damson Park actually looks like.
I've got one friend who is playing this non-stop since beta (he's already onto his 2nd game, first game was 2 seasons until he was sacked by Paris FC) and another who gave up on it almost instantly saying they just couldn't enjoy it. I still think I'll get it, it may be a Christmas time purchase though.
In the past I've tried to start really low down, but don't have the patience, so this time I might start as Parma in Serie B, as that's still somewhat of a challenge, but not too far down (like my Darlington game last year).
FWIW, I'm enjoying my time at Solihull so far, even if it's a sloggity-slog (my best MC has a Determination of 3, his backup has a Determination of 2, to give you an idea of what I'm up against).
A few more notes:
- Dressing room politics and what-not actually matter this year. I don't think, short of me actively attempting to infuriate my players, I've ever lost a dressing room in FM, but this year it feels like a thing you really need to manage and take care of. Lose your most influential dressing room players and you're boned.
- Injuries! Maybe it's because I'm a National League Semi-Pro side, but injuries are WAY up in this year's game. Not big ones, but those little, niggling ones. Tight Achilles tendons, gashed legs, strains, things that'll keep players out for a few days or even 2-3 weeks, but not major events. As we speak, quite literally my entire strike force (all 3 of them) is laid up injured, although in fairness, one came into the game injured already. I had seasons of FM 17 where I got away with 5 or fewer injuries all year long, and that is clearly gone. But it's a real balancing game. Too many games in a row increases the chance of injuries, but chopping and changing can obviously screw with your team, and match sharpness actually means something this year.
- I think you can really tell the differences in technical abilities between teams at different parts of the period now. Even last year, I would expect my Worcester team to have 70%+ pass completion at a bare minimum, but this year, the best team in the National League is at 74% through 8 games, with the majority of the league in the 60s. Meanwhile, in the Premier League, the best team is at 83%, with only one team below 70 (Crystal Palace, natch).
I'm generally pretty sanguine and easily pleased with these games, but I must admit, I am well-pleased with FM 18 so far. I went into it expecting minor-to-moderate improvements, and I feel like that's what I've gotten. It's not a huge change from FM 17, but it's enough of a change to have me feeling like this has been a solid use of my $50 already.
EDIT: Oh, and for shits and giggles, I made us a GWJ FM group on Steam!.
On the injury thing, do you have tackling set to hard? I found out a few years ago that it increases the number of injuries. I once had a big network game with some friends I lived with and, as Liverpool, Fernando Torres got injured all the time. I found this out and set his tackling to easing off and he had MUCH fewer injuries.
These reports are great. I think I might grab this sooner than later.
I mean, seek out some second opinions, if you prefer playing in 2D, apparently there are some serious gripes out there, and there are still a lot of those on-target crosses. But me personally, I am a FM fan who gives the game a fairly wide berth for quality (as I've noted in other posts, I only expect small-to-moderate improvements in annual release sports games), but I'm enjoying the hell out of myself, even in the shin-shanked hell that is the Vanarama National League.
...no really, you guys should see some of the chances I've seen sent towards the corner flag.
I do have one request for next year, which is that I'd like absolute assurance that allowing a member of my staff to take care of training won't ruin my players. I've always been a Tactical manager, not a training-ground guy, so I've always left it to my staff without the absolute knowledge that I'm screwing myself over. Like, if I hire a coach who's REALLY good at training, I oughtta be able to see those results!
But headed goals do feel SO much better this year.
On the injury thing, do you have tackling set to hard? I found out a few years ago that it increases the number of injuries. I once had a big network game with some friends I lived with and, as Liverpool, Fernando Torres got injured all the time. I found this out and set his tackling to easing off and he had MUCH fewer injuries.
Your assistants will actually mention this specifically in the game this year, that if you want to avoid injuries, you should tell your players not to go steaming into tackles like 1988 Vinnie Jones on coke, and that does make a difference, but again, there are WAY more smaller, niggling injuries introduced this year, and match load MEANS something.
For instance, I rarely-to-never used the Player Rest option in years past, because I only ever needed it when a player was Jaded, which honestly didn't happen that much. But now? I'm under 20 games into the National League season and I've started handing out rest to players, due to our comically congested match schedule down at this level (and we're only doing light match training, FYI).
Meanwhile, however....
The Journeyman: 2018 Edition!
Up, Up, Down, Down
Look at that, 14 games played, 32% of the season gone. To my eternal annoyance, my scouts had a VERY hard time finding me new blood to add to the squad, so it was a drag to find extra players. The team literally had no capable DMs or wingers, which I wanted to play my tactic, but we did (barely) manage to find a few. God help us if we have a injury crisis though, as I'll end up playing center-backs out of position.
We were riding high early in the season, going as high as 5th, before slowly sinking back down the table, with a run of disappointing results that included 3 straight draws from winning positions. At one point, while chasing three points, I had to watch my striker head the ball against the post from about 2 yards out, get the rebound, and then kick it straight into the keeper's chest. If you're reading this, next door neighbors, I apologize for the loud cursing that early in the morning.
Speaking of strikers, ours are... iffy, at best. Sure, my backup scored 32 goals in the Evo-Stik League, but he's been god-awful for us so far, neither holding up the ball or finishing or much more than repeatedly losing the ball. I'd like to find a new one, but our transfer budget is literally $0.00, so if he's not going to show up on a free, it's pointless.
Worse, our best CB is leaving in January. He's not getting transferred, his contract simply runs out in January 2018 and the schmuck wants $150K a year to stay. Considering that that would be literally a third of my payroll (and that the board began laughing non-stop when I pitched the idea to them), we're going to have to make do without him for the 2nd half of the season, and I'm trying to start to planning for life without his near-talismanic services.
EDIT: I should mention, this isn't THAT bad, since he thinks I'm a schmuck.
All of that makes it sound like things at Solihull are going down the tubes, but they're not. We had to play a hard-fought replay with Boreham Wood in the FA Cup 4th Qualifying Round that saw us get knocked out on a single goal (scored by their freaking CB, no less), but bounced back with a 5-0 drubbing of Guiseley that has us currently in 15th position. It's not great, and we're only 3 points off of the relegation places, but it could be worse. We could be Bromley, who currently have 3 points through 16 games.
Oh, and we've started to build Partnerships, another new feature in the game. I'm excited to see what (if any) effect it has one gameplay.
Nice report! It sounds like the second half of the season might be a challenge once that CB leaves. How is your salary situation? Do or will you have enough budget room to add some free transfers? Is that CB currently getting paid a lot?
1 - Crappy. The club's currently running in the red, but we're overperforming due to the free transfers I've brought in.
2 - We currently have $20K available for January. Considering that we just lost a backup's-backup CB to Boston United on a Nontract, in theory, we might be able to sign a replacement, the issue is quality. The CB I'm losing is a former Ireland international, and according to my coaches, is League 1 quality.
3 - Only $20K a year, sadly. So it won't free up a ton of space, nor do I think I'll be able to replace him with someone even close to his quality, even if he is a 32-year-old on the back-end of his career.
Still glad he's leaving though. He opposes me as head coach, and has ascended to "Team Leader", even though the rest of the locker room is fine with me.
The Journeyman: 2018 Edition!
Fer Chrissakes
So, there's a great new stat they include in FM this year, Chances Created. It's not purely a measure of passes that lead to a goal (that'd be assists), these are passes (or dribbles, I believe) that lead to a goalscoring opportunity.
Over the last 5 games, our midfield has created a grand total of 3.
It's February in-game now, and boy howdy, have we come crashing back down to earth. We went as low as 22nd during the holiday run-in, a stretch that saw us get thrashed 3-0, 4-0, 1-0 and 5-1 between December 23rd and January 1. I went from disappointed to frustrated to screaming at the computer during that stretch, desperately trying to find a fix for our form without doing the kind of over-big changes that throw off the team's consistency.
Plus, there's the fact that Solihull is a Semi-Pro team who was expected to go down. We were going to have a rough patch, and it was up to me to figure out a way to get through that without losing the dressing room. We are, simply, not Manchester City here, so I can't be throwing a hissy fit because we're not winning every game 14-0. Hell, I can't even be that peeved that these players are playing like trash, they are literally just-promoted National LEague North players, by and large.
That said, January did see a turnaround in our fortunes. First, we managed to turn over 2nd-placed Macclesfield 2-1 in a colossal FMing that would've had me damn near tossing the computer out of a window if it had happened to me (they had a grand total of 10 clear-cut or half chances, scored none of them) while we scored from two set pieces. A proper Big Sam special, that.
The win was followed by three creditable draws, and then, finally, a 3-0 win over Dag & Red that gave me some hope for the future.
We still have a serious issue with the team, namely that our creative core, the midfield trio, simply aren't providing enough of a threat going forward, and I'm a bit lost as to how to get more out of them. We're playing a 4-1-2-3 DM Wide at the moment, which has provided a bit more defensive security, but we've just got frustrating issues going forward. Our strikers are unconvincing, and often profligate in the few situations where they get a sniff at goal, and my wingers are at best unreliable.
We brought in 4 new players during January, a new GK to challenge our first-team starter (who, to be fair, is a bit shit), a new right winger, a new DC to replace the international who left, and a new DM on loan from Ipswich. I'm trying to keep my hopes up, we are currently 19th after 32 games, but only 5 points off the relegation places and the club is $108K in the red. I feel safe in saying, if we go down, it's my ass, and probably deservedly so.
When Real Life Breaks Video Games, Part MCCLXIII:
In my game, PSG are 1st in Ligue 1 with 56 goals scored in 28 games.
In real life, PSG currently have scored 43 goals in 13 games.
For whatever reason, FM's always had a exceptionally hard time representing how dominant some of the top clubs are in Europe right now and the numbers the best players are putting up (again, in real life, Barca have scored 33 in 12. In-game, they've scored 59 in 28, a mark they'll easily beat).
To all in the UK, keep an eye on your local non-league team (or check hotukdeals regularly), as they've started selling the new FM at a heavily discounted price. It's the boxed version and needs to be sent, but I just snagged the new game for £21.75 from Gateshead FC!
Season review coming up soon! There has been a lot of screaming, for various reasons.
The Journeyman: 2018 Edition!
End of Season Review!
It became incredibly obvious to me, after the last update, that my goal truly should be to try to keep the team up, and then look to the coming deluge of Premier League cast-offs to strengthen my squad for season 2. Because, while I have found some surprises in this squad (one of our youngsters has been playing out of his mind as a DM, while both of our starting strikers have been completely overtaken by a 19-year-old backup who has been bashing them in (or, at least, not being utterly incompetent),
I mentioned it before, but SHEESH there's such a difference between our level and levels above us. I have seen a lifetime's worth of horrific defensive mistakes, bad passing, truly hilariously bad shooting, although our discipline has actually been quite good!
So, how'd the season finish? February was a utter horror show for us, we went 0-1-3, and slid into the relegation places again. I really had to keep myself on an even keel for this period, because my natural inclination was to start screaming and hollering at the players for letting me down, but I really didn't want to lose the dressing room. And BOY did I want to yell, when Solihull loses, we don't just lose, we look utterly worthless.
But! March came, and we got a desperately-needed 4-1 win over Maidstone that I'm willing to say turned our entire season around. We went on the best run of our year after that, going 3-1-1 in March and dragging ourselves away from the bottom 3 and back up into safety. Remember that 19-year-old striker I mentioned? Well, after fining the starter in February for putting up back-to-back sub-6.0 performances, the kid came on and scored 7 in 5, including the equalizer that got us a month-ending draw in February and a spectacular brace against Aldershot Town in March that featured a 30-yard run where he lost the ball, stole it back, had his initial shot saved and then headed home a cross after one of the worst clearances I've ever seen.
The end of the year was actually rather close at the bottom half of the table. While Barrow were god-awful (33 points, were relegated by March), the "Best" relegated team finished with 49 points, with 5 teams within 3 points of them above.
We managed to gel enough to finish 15th, which was a hell of an achievement apparently, considering we were largely considered relegation fodder. Yes, our goal difference was -18 and my best midfield player is a 35-year-old whose pace has dropped to a 4 (he's glacial on the field, it's insane), but we managed it.
Now, I get to let a lot of these guys go and basically try and rebuild the team from scratch. There is a single major issue facing me however though. As of the end of the season, Solihull is still Semi-Pro, while most of the other teams in the Vanarama National are professional, putting us at a competitive disadvantage. I really want to improve this club, but until we turn pro, it's gonna be hard. And that's before I get to the infuriating fact that Solihull has a apparent permanent affiliation with Birmingham City that means that we can never play in the same division as them. I wasn't planning on making Solihull into eventual Premier League champions anyway, but the utter inability to do so is also frustrating.
So my plan, at the moment, is to just stay here, try and get the team professional, try and get the team promoted, get my reputation up, and jump ship ASAP. Which the board isn't making easy for me either, I have the lowest possible coaching badge, which is preventing me from building my rep, my stats, et cetera, and the board won't sign off on me going for a new one yet. Basically, come January, I'm going to start sniffing around some new gigs.
Oh, and Liverpool won the Premiership by almost blowing it. They had a 5-point lead with two games left, and ended up winning over Arsenal on Goal Difference. I genuinely considered going in and making Klopp a permanent legend there (whoever does win the PL with Liverpool next probably will be considered one), but then he immediately jetted off to Real Madrid, who fired Zidane after finishing 12 points behind Barca in La Liga and losing to Atleti in the Champions League Final.
Yup. Telford's says playing in the same division will terminate the link. Ours literally says "the terms of this deal will prevent Solihull Moors from playing in the same division as Birmingham."
OK, I got this game via Gateshead FC and I think I've got the bug again. I've decided to take over Parma in Italy's Serie B - not too much of a challenge, but not too easy either. They've got quite a good squad and a decent budget, and I've managed to win my first 4 league games, the first one I was up 6-0 at half time! Rather than trying to just impose my own tactics on the team, I'm just trying to play everyone in their best position and then build instructions on top of that.
Parma actually have Lorenzo Insigne's brother, Roberto, on loan, and he's lethal on the wing for me, scoring for fun!
Prederick wrote:Yup. Telford's says playing in the same division will terminate the link. Ours literally says "the terms of this deal will prevent Solihull Moors from playing in the same division as Birmingham."
Heh. That can't be right, though, can it? You can't get promoted to the same league then? That's even a thing?
What happens if Birmingham were to get relegated to your league then? They stay up?
I don't doubt that's what it says, but it's such a crazy idea that I don't see how it could actually be right that way.
I don't plan to find out, but I'm wagering that, if Birmingham is in the Championship and we get promoted there, we're SOL.
Anyway, I haven't posted in a while, let's fix that.
The Journeyman: 2018 Edition!
New Season, New Frustrations
So, things went distinctly pear-shaped to start the year.
In the offseason I almost changed out the team entirely, as we brought in a grand total of fifteen new players in a bid to significantly improve the team. As you might expect, it's a bunch of former Premier League/Championship/SPL cast-offs. Among others, we picked up a midfielder from Motherwell, a Winger who'd last played for Colchester, a S{sexist slur}horpe cast-off, two dudes from Derby and a Left-back from Man Utd!
All either as free agents or on free transfers, of course, our budget is still $750K total. But still, I thought it was a great haul of new players and talent who I hoped could help us put together a great new season.
What I forgot, however, was that these new dudes need to gel. So despite a pretty fair preseason showing against borderline pub teams, we began the season atrociously, losing all of our first four games. Our youth is currently our liability (average age of the squad is 22), but we're eight games in and starting to turn things around. Our record is currently 2-1-5. Seven points has us 19th, just above the relegation places, but I promised the board a Top-Half finish this season, because I felt like being ambitious.
Unfortunately, we're kind of bad everywhere at the moment, but there are good signs. Our last three have gone D-L-W, and the loss was a proper FMing, where we outshot the opposition 3-1 but lost on a set piece. We were predicted to finish the season 8th, so we have every reason to believe we can make a big shock this year. It's just a matter of getting these schmucks to actually do it.
/hits continue
Oh look! A new message!
//checks inbox
"Your star Central defender has sustained damaged cruciate ligaments!"
///frowns
////frowns
/////begins applying for new jobs in earnest
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
It is, however, rather hilariously terrifying that they've crunched the numbers, and while they've increased the total number of injuries this year, it's still not actually realistic.
Update soon! A friend bought me a copy of Pillars of Eternity so that's been my life for the last week and change.
Update!
So I'm still kludging around at Solihull Moors. We're in my 3rd season in the job, having won promotion to League 2 last year, mostly because I almost entirely replaced my team with Premier League castoffs. We have the youngest team in the division easily (average age 23) but they were skilled enough to give us a 3rd place finish and we ended up winning through the playoffs, including a victory over Forest Green on penalties in the Semi-Finals.
Now, we're pretty solidly ensconced in League 2. This season has gone quite nicely, with about 8 games left we're 11th, and in theory could still sneak into the playoff places (just 5 points back!). But the highlight of the year has been our run in the EFL Trophy, that saw us soar all the way to the final (even after getting our butts kicked by the Manchester City u-23s squad in the group stage). There, we took on Oxford United, who helped us out as best we can by managing to have two players sent off within the first 30 minutes of the game, and we coasted to the biggest EFL Trophy final victory ever, 7-1.
There has been a single downside however, we're still financially "meh" at best, so I have only JUST gotten clearance to start studying for a National B level license. This is infuriating, because I haven't been able to get another job ANYWHERE (despite me constantly applying for every possible opening that represents a lateral or upwards move) and I'm pretty sure it's because I don't have the licensing yet. I considered quitting at the end of this season, but I'm going to try and get us up to League 1 and then see if I can get a new gig, because, as mentioned before, that's our ceiling. We cannot be in the same division as Birmingham, so if they get relegated next year and we get promoted, we're going but nowhere.
Massive respect for you lower league managers. I haven't got anyway near enough patience to suffer through so much mediocrity. In my current save as Arsenal I'm using tactics I downloaded and it's basically cheat mode. Already won the league cup ( do you carabao the carabao cup?) and are on course for a quadruple. It can get boring when you're routinely winning 15 straight, but that's the kind of power trip I'm after right now
1860 Munich - der Lowen on the rise
"Being the Singular Adventures of an Englishman in the Regionalliga Bayern"
(Apologies to my German speaking GWJ'ers, but I don't know how to put the appropriate umlaut over the o in Lowen.)
So, 1860 are down in the dumps - Tier 4 to be precise. I have an affectation for this bunch - once described as the "Man City of Germany", albeit in the sense of the old Man City ability to find disaster in the unlikeliest places, as they stumble from one disaster to another. Even their position in Tier 4 is a disaster - they were relegated from 2.Bundesliga on the last day of last season, then their major shareholder decided to express his displeasure by not paying for a licence for 3.Bundesliga - so they were transported down into the 4th tier.
My mission - to get them out of there.
I will admit to having used the editor on 2 occasions. They start with zero cash and a wage bill over budget, so I transferred a player who couldn't be registered (non-EU) to Bayern. For £120m SUCK THAT, RUMENIGGE !
I was also short a striker who could, like, score - so picked up James Wilson from Man U's reserves for £5m.
Going OK so far - I'm top by 2 points going into the halfway break, but I'm pretty sure that it's only 1 up into the playoffs for 3.Bundesliga (there are 5 regional leagues at present in this tier), so the heat will be on until the end.
So suddenly rich foreign owners and an attempt to piss off Man Utd. Wherever did you get the idea, Dave?
Which one ? My understanding is that the Abu Dhabi fund looked at a number of teams, but chose City because they did have a strong supporter base, but a lot of it was to do with the fact that they had a very new stadium which could be expanded, rather than an old crumbling one which would need to be replaced (cough *Goodison* cough).
Unfortunately for 1860, their version of this experience is a negative one. They were supposed to share the Allianz Arena with FC Arrogant, but financial mistakes by their owners meant that they had to sell out their share for peanuts (I think €30m or so). Certainly when I visited the Allianz in 2005 there were few signs that 1860 shared it - I think we asked about 6 people before finding the 1860 club shop...which had no shirts in stock as the team did not have a main sponsor the week before the season kicked off.
Then of course, their foreign main investor Hassan Ismaik has not only failed to invest in the club, but it was his refusal to pay the 3.Bundesliga licence fee that has put them into the Bayern Oberliga.
As to how I found 1860 - my cousin served in the British Army over there, married a German girl and lived over there for a number of years. He's a City fan as well, and mentioned that squaddies often started following 1860 because of BM's close resemblance to Man Utd, as well as them playing in sky blue and being generally unlucky. Unfortunately, their renaissance is somewhat behind City's.
That changes now (at least in FM world)
I do quite enjoy the scouting in the game now, once you get to an actual level, the occasional scouting updates are a bit fun, along with actually having to manage a budget.
So, this one will be a short update. We built on our great first season in League 2 with a promotion push in Season 2, that saw us in a ding-dong battle for the title with Crewe for basically half the freaking season. By my count, we switched 1st and 2nd place a ludicrous seven times before we managed to establish a firm five-point lead with four games remaining, eventually winning the title by six clear points.
It was a wonderful achievement, and I had enjoyed my time at Solihull Moors, but as I mentioned before, barring a miracle where Birmingham gets relegated and we get promoted, this is as far as it goes for us. And so, in the last half of the season, I went application-crazy, desperately trying to get a new gig and lo and behold, Championship-relegated Rotherham decided to take a chance on a twice-promoted young manager who had only JUST started studying for his National B license.
So, to the great dismay of Solihull fans I'm sure, off I go to Rotherham. The expectations are high, sure, but they've got the budget, and if I can clear out some of the dead weight, I can probably bring in some serious talent for cheap and I'm willing to be ambitious and try and take us back up at the first attempt.
At uni me and my housemates had a big 5 player Network game, which was so good it sort of killed FM for me, as I slowly dropped out of enjoying the game.
Two of them live in London and I went to see them at the weekend. One of them was telling us about how his mate at work has a Network game in Serie A going with a few friends and it’s increidbly tight. He said he was actually excited to get updates about it.
Anyway, after a few drinks, they turned to me and said “we’re doing it, we’re bringing back Network, are you in?” Where we’ve went wrong trying to do Network in the past is organising it whenever, this time we’ve said 2 hours every Monday unless we reach an agreeement otherwise on a week by week basis. Plus, it’s only three of us, so fewer people to please.
I’ve opted for AC Milan, and I can see why they’re not doing well this season - the team is fairly unbalanced! But, I’ve got them off to a great, free-scoring start, winning my euro cup qualifiers and first league game.
So, hopefully we can carry on, I think we should, I’m hoping playing this with my friends will make me get a bit more familiar with the more expanded elements of the game now.
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