[Name the panel..]

Thanks

[Name the panel..]

Anyone know the name of this panel (the side panel below circled in orange on fixtures page). And where I can find it? Looked bloomin' everywhere!

 

[Confirm a selected option text colour?]

Does anyone know which line in settings.xml controls the colour text shifts to on the circled buttons below? I'm specifically looking for the colour the text shifts to once you've selected an option. (The button text starts of as a light colour, then when you select an option, eg e player's transfer status, the gae shifts the button colour to a more greyed out colour, which it uses to indicate you can now select/confirm. )

Hard to find the right phrasing to explain but in pics below the circled text looks greyed out. I want to change it to a lighter colour to better indicate that the game wants me to click it to confirm. 

[New Laptop/PC Advice -Please Read the Opening Post]

Do the challenges around getting your u23s into a league apply to the u18s as well? Just about to start a longterm save with a lvl8 club and would be very sad if my u18s never end up in a league.

[Best/easiest way to ensure fixtures for new competitions are spread out]

Solved - I just needed to tick and then insert a lowish value (I used 7) in "Initial max days for fixture move" under Fixture Dates & Rules > general. (I also set fixtures to dmestic cup - high in terms of priority)

[Best/easiest way to ensure fixtures for new competitions are spread out]

So i’ve Got a slightly different problem now. One of my new cup competitions has a league stage. It involves each club playing 3 league games. Problem is, even though there’s 3 months to get these games played, the fixture list seems to very often put the middle game either very near the end, or very near the start of that window. So for example I might have two games within a week in September, then the final game (correctly) in Dec. Or vice-versa. But never three games spread out over sept-Dec. I know how to set dates for the first and final games, but how do I get the middle fixture of the three to be more in the middle? I’ve tried setting specific dates in he advanced ruleswith no joy.

[Best/easiest way to ensure fixtures for new competitions are spread out]

So I've created 3 extra cup competitions played alongside the usual ones. Because I was keen I set specific dates for each round to be played on, a different night of the week depending which competition.

Prob is, this has resulted in some messy fixture weeks where I'm scheduled to play on say the Weds, Fri and Saturday. 

I can go back through and manually move the dates for each cup round so they don't fall in the same weeks. But I wondered is there a better way to do this whereby I can set some kind of general rule meaning fixtures should always say have a two day clear gap in between them, whatever the competition? So if the specific dates set cause a clash/a near clash (ie fixtures are too close together), one of them will get moved?

I see possible options to set 'offset dates' in various places in the advanced rules? Does this relate to what I'm after? If so, what is the simplest way to do this?

[Lower league local cup teams]

1 hour ago, krlenjushka said:

Why only one specific team?

Im not sure i understand your system in real life.

Sorry, explaining it poorly. What i'm trying to create is:

North-West Riding Senior Cup

32 teams from north-west yorkshire (centred around York-Harrogate) It's always a defined list of 32 teams which never changes. (I can do that part)

BUT to prevent some of the bigger teams (York City, Harrogate Town, in time when I grow my team (Harrogate Railway Athletic) too) winning it too easily every year then these 'bigger' teams should enter their u23 teams INSTEAD OF their 1st teams.

So there'd still only be 32 teams. A small number of higher rep teams would be using their u23s. The rest would be 1st teams.

I'd like this to be dynamic (that's the bit i'm stuck on - I could easily create a static version with 32 set teams, 28 being standard 1 steams and 4 u23 teams for say York, HarrogateT etc) but this would mean as my team got promoted it would always be my first team that got entered year on year, even when i'm in the Premier League. Whereas at some point as i move upwards through the leagues, I want it to switch to being my u23. Eactly as per the original poster above.I used to play a lowerleague db in fm12/13 that  had county/senior cups set up in exactly this way.

My current two issues are:

(1) the game dual enters teams. So from the team pool the game looks at my hiden secondary division with my 32 set teams (all first teams), takes 4 and enters their u23 teams. Great.BUT then takes a further 28 teams at random which means it will sometimes duplicate the 1st team and u23 team for a club. eg. It correctly takes York and enters their u23 team. (and does same for another 3 clubs) But then instead of ignoring these 4 clubs and picking the REMAINING 28 clubs. It doesn't ignore them and randomly picks 28 out of the full list of 32 to enter first teams for. So it sometimes might enter BOTh York City AND York City u23s (and to keep numbers at 32, then miss out another club as it's effectively entered York twice.) What I want it to do is pick 4 clubs, enter their u23s. Then ignore those 4 clubs, and get the other 28 clubs, entering their 1st teams. Can't figure out how to do that.

(2) I also want the game to identify the four best clubs out of the fixed pool of 32 and use those four best teams when it decides which 4 u23s to enter. (This is so that whilst my club is woeful to start, our first team will be entered. When i'm dominating the world, my reputation relative to the other 32 clubs will have increased, so the game should see me as one of those top 4 clubs and therefore enter my u23s) Currently this isn't happening and the clubs whose u23s it enters seem to be chosen at random.

Any advice very much welcomed, especially re/1. 

[Lower league local cup teams]

4 hours ago, themodelcitizen said:

what if you checked the box for "ignore teams" and had an entry for every OTHER playable team that can be in those divisions. Then tell it to get the best teams from the higher divisions (U23 team type) and then the best teams from the lower divisions (first teams)

I’m not quite sure I follow - all the teams are in one division and all of them should participate in the cup. It’s just whether the game chooses their u23 or 1st teams. 

I guess the real question is how do I get the game to decide to enter MY u23 team in this cup instead of my 1st team when I become the/one of the higher ranked teams? I guess if I could solve that question I could just permanently enter some team’s under23s instead of their first teams as they’re not that likely to go more than two divisions up or down. But how do I get the game to apply this rule to one specific team?

[Lower league local cup teams]

Just picking this post up again. I'm trying to do exactly the same thing as OP above - create a local cup that has the same 32 fixed teams (easy enough) BUT where teams in higher divisions enter their u23 teams rather than their 1st teams. And that this is dynamic over time, so if a team starts off naff, and therefore enters its 1st team, but 5 years later has shot up the leagues, in that year it will enter it's u23 team rather than it's 1st  team (and one of the others will drop back to entering it's 1st team)

I can get the game to select u23 teams for some of the teams BUT:

1. It sometimes picks the same team twice - eg from the pool of 32 teams it sometimes will enter both York City and York City u23s (and miss out another team)

2. It doesn't seem to be picking the top 10 teams by divisional reputation to enter u23s for instead of 1st teams. Instead which teams have their u23s entered seems random.

I have a team list for the stage set up to take the teams from a fictional yorkshire 'secondary league' (which has only these 32 teams in it - all first teams)

I'd thought i'd set the instructions under teams to then take the top 10 by divisional reputation, and use their u23 teams.

And then to take the remaining 22 teams.

But as above - it's not working. I need to be able to set it to take 22 different teams to the first 10 its already chosen, rather than choosing some of them again.

And to select the best teams (by divisional reputation) to use 23s for, rather than this being random.

Any help very much appreciated - been fiddling with this all day to no avail....

 

[Adding extra rounds to cups (in advanced rules)]

Scrap that. Figured it out. I'm such an idiot........ Was just clicking expandable down arrow by 'rounds' instead of on word itself, which then opens up the option......

[Adding extra rounds to cups (in advanced rules)]

So I'm wanting to add back in the Conference League Cup. It's marked as extinct in the editor. However in advanced rules it has lots of messy looking multiple stages so i've left it marked as extinct and am starting over.

I've duplicated another cup competition, renamed it the 'National Conference League Cup' and will use that as my base to re-create the Conference League Cup.

All going well except that I need to add in an extra round due to the 3 conferences having a total of 68 teams. (I need a small preliminary round of 8 teams first to reduce that to 4 teams, to then add to the other 60 teams in round 1 proper) But I can't for the life of me work out how to add in an extra round. The competition I duplicated already has 6 rounds, but I need 7. How do I add in the extra round?

[Making game harder at levels 6-10...]

So in reality, with some editting, starting at say level 8 or higher could be much harder than at level 9/10 or lower?

Seems to me that there are a few assumptions:

-computer match AI is largely rubish. Some tweaks eg the manager file and to reputation will impact it, but not in a way that will make things radically different. Therefore best way to make matches harder is for majority of teams you face to have much better players than you. So the mechanics of the game outside of matches is best way to increase difficulty of matches.

-It's easy to make your first season or so hard - nerf the team, boost the other teams. But after a year or two things become easier as you pick up signings and as the coputer AI desn't maximise their potential. After a few years of struggleyou build a great team and shoot up the leagues. (Look at those doing Dafuge's challenge - the odd relegation prem to championship and championship to L1, but very rare to see anyone getting relegated before  that. Why? Your team eventually good enough to win VanNorth is good enough by default to fight at bottom at bottom of League 2. And by time you get there is by default good enough for top half. A season of cosolidation followed by promotion becomes the norm. 

-So why? Well it must be because of bigger jumps in player quality between leagues. The base game has following league reps: Prem 174 (team reps 9000-6250); Champ 128 (6100-5300); L1 102 (5500-4200); L2 82 4600-3500); VanNat 69 (4150-2600); VanN/S 45 (3000-2300) So a fair amount of overlap. As you go lower, leagues and teams bunch up more both in terms of league and team rep. So once you're good enough to win one league, you're de facto good enough to get promotion from next few above it. 

(Just typed all that and realised I'm effectively just repeating @WIGutie  ) So what's needed is spread. And as there's not much room to make the Premier League that much more reputable, and as we want to presumably keep the bigger jumps from L1 to Champ and Champ to Prem that Dafuge's saves show irl. So we have a straight choice of either spreading out the lower leagues as far as possible, or possibly better (?) pairing them? So you have not much difference Northern Premier Div1 to Northern Prem, but then a big old jump to Van North/South. Not much diff to Van Nat. Then another big jump to League 2? With a few teams (6-7) at top of each league with reps in middle of league above, to create the yo'yo type clubs, and mean hopefully they'll dominate those divisions. There's obviously a limit to how low you can go with this.

Does anyone know which effects Newgen quality more - league rep or club rep? Same question for signings from other leagues?

[What controls boardroom image?]

For anyone in future wanting more of a small club feel and wanting to change the almost always generated large boardoom to a smaller one I've got a rough workaround by:

-unpacking simmatch viewer via the resource archiver

-placing resulting simmatch viewer folder into your steam library for FM (mine is at: C:/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Football Manager/data

-in this folder open up environments/boardroom

-change filename of largeboardroom.sia and largeplayerkit.sia to something like NOTlargeboardroom.sia (you could just delete them bt likely you'll want to reenable these later as your club grows)

-copy the equivalent small (or medium) files ie smallboardroom.sia. And rename the copied version to largeboardroom.sia and largeplayerkit.sia

In game clear cache and it should now work.

(I'm no editor/skinner - this is a REALLY rough hack - game still generates the large boardroom for small clubs it's just when it does that you're making it display the small image instead f the large one it thinks it's displaying. You're doing the same to every club using a large boardoom eg Man Utd. But as you never see those screens for computer controlled clubs it matters not. To renable the default large boardroom image later just delete your largeboadroom.sia etc filesand rename the NOTlargeboardoom ones. Refresh cache in game and when you go back into boardroom screen the default image restored.)

Hatchet job. And maybe no-one else cares. But it's made my day  Thanks @wkdsoul for the pointers.

[What controls boardroom image?]

Also - to play with this effectively - am I right in thinking move the extracted simmatch viewer folder to steam library, FM data folder?

[What controls boardroom image?]

11 minutes ago, wkdsoul said:

same as you would to extract any.   Sports Interactive\Data 2020\simatchviewer-pc\environments

there are about 20 files that make up the render. 

Thankyou - happily fiddling...

Do you know when the game loads this stuff? When start a new game only?

[What controls boardroom image?]

11 minutes ago, wkdsoul said:

Its rendered from the 3d engine.  might have to check the mesh/texture files. 

How do I do that? Do you know if just rendered randomly? Is there something somewhere which controls which image it goes for? 

[What controls boardroom image?]

Or - does anyone have these, and the other, boardoom type images unpacked? If so id love to have them - I don't mind changing the image manually via the skin as I progress up the leagues.

[What controls boardroom image?]

Does anyone know what controls which boardroom screen the game displays? Very occasionally it picks a different one as in screenshot with red shirts below. You'd think it would display the smaller boardooms for tiny clubs. But for almost every club it seems to pick the top of the two images below. Not sure if this is a skinning thing/editting thing but I want a tiny boardoom...

Also where can I find these images for boardroom, press conference etc? I've unpacked a fair number of the folders via resource archiver, but can't find where these images are hidden. I can see the code to display them is in client object viewer but can't seeanything there telling the game which image to use.

[When can I assign squad numbers?]

In the english leagues I start with squad numbers already assigned and can only assign numbers to youth etc. When is the first window when I can reassign current numbers? Is there any way to be able to assign them from the get go?

[[WIP] [FM20] England down to Level 11]

@lionel messi quick niche question - any idea how to make levels 7 and lower use squad numbers? I got lvl 5 & 6 doing this via selecting it both in the database entry for those competitions and also ensuring the tickbox under nation rules in the advanced rules was ticked. But same thing doesn't seem to work for levels 7 and below? (even though sae set of national rules in your file covers everything from vanarama north/south down? (Conf rules 2?) It works in conference north, but not below that. Any ideas?

[Most rural lower league stadiums represented in FM (in England)?]

1 hour ago, Gross_Ballon said:

Matlock town looks neat with the hill behind it 

In-game? When I load it up I get the same generic stadium backdrop 80-90% of clubs have? Big warehouse type buildings and the odd tree

[Most rural lower league stadiums represented in FM (in England)?]

So, I'm looking to find a club in tier 7-10 in England which has rural scenery backdrop around it's stadium (as I understand that whilst you can edit stadium size, you can't edit the backdrop). I'm looking for trees and hills, even coast if any have it? Not tower blocks and industrial estates. 

Anyone know of any clubs in FM with this kind of backdrop?

[[WIP] [FM20] England down to Level 11]

17 minutes ago, lionel messi said:

The file on page 1 makes League 1 return to 24 teams after the 1st season.

It also has other promotion & relegation tweaks, Northern counties east league division 1 now has only 3 relegation places.

Swapping teams into different leagues might cause problems espcially if the correct numbers are not there, also it could mess the cups up as well.

Thanks - fantastic news re/NE Counties League relegation places. Made my day

Re/swapping teams - if I get it right and am just literally swapping two teams over, checking the leagues still have the same number of places etc, do you think still likely to cause issues with cups? I thought they were set to either take all teams between certain levels of from certain leagues? So the identity of the teams in the leagues wouldn't make any difference?

[Making game harder at levels 6-10...]

So, I'm starting a new save somewhere between level 8-10 I'm wanting to make the game as tricky as possible, without doing something that makes it feel super-unrealistic, - really fighting against relegation from say level 9 whilst living in fear of the might of the footballing giants of my world - Lancaster City, Bishop Auckland, and the rest.

The way the sub-level 6 databases work means they populate clubs with regens which are all abysmal due to those leagues' low reputations. This can have the effect of making the game easier - as once you sign a few folk it's easy to sail up the leagues (New star striker with pace of 7 is going to leave those defenders with pace/acceleration of 3-4 for dead...) So it's only a challenge the first half season or so until you have your new team in place. I could change the reputation level of the league/the clubs in it to push the game to generate higher quality newgens. As well as manually editting plenty of players in to my rivals whilst decreasing my own. Worried if i increase the rep of the league (and necessarily those above it) too much though it might have unforseen consequences which make things too easy for me in other ways?

I love signing players, so don't want to do a youth intake only type save. But could join my club once the league starts, having created an unemployed alt first for pre-season to allow my rivals to snap up all the good free transfers and loans. And start with a low wage budget which is currently tied up with utter deadwood with 1 for pace and longterm injuries. Low morale too. And obviously Sunday League with no badges for myself. And likely using Majestic's improved Manager (but not coaches etc) AI file.

Ultimately I want a situation that, over a few hard seasons starts to be recoverable from and with the potential to then slowly grow in the usual way. But with each league to feel like a separate new challenge on the way up which requires multiple seasons of squad building to move from newly promoted and fighting against relegation the first year or two post-promotion,to eventually moving forwards. Any thoughts from anyone on how to shape/edit things to make it a challenge in similar way to above? I'm imagining a mix of db edits and setting/play choices.

Also let me know if this should be in the main forum rather than editor's hideaway.