Jonthedon26

I have started my FM save with Birmingham City during the Beta for the past 4 or 5 years. I, like you, only get limited time to play so I only every get about 5-8 season in game completed per year, which I am fine with as I only really like it with real players. Of those 4 or 5 years, there was only 1 year where I had to restart the save due to a bug whereby after gaining promotion to the Premier League, the board wanted me to basically win the league, win all the cups and go unbeaten all season and gave me a budget of about 15mil. Besides that, all other years have been fine to carry on with.

As always, Birmingham City. It might be a little less stressful this time around now that we have been taken over and actually have a few quid for once

I have noticed this in my Birmingham City save. I am in season 4 and just starting my 2nd in the Premier League after avoiding relegation last season. I have always been strict with wages and the maximum wage a player in my team has is £40k but the rest of my squad are around the £20k to £30k region. Now all of a sudden because I have £25mil left in my transfer budget and a decent amount left in my wage budget I am getting a load of players kicking off saying they deserve a better contract and demanding £70k per week. It is ridiculous.

This is very much like Out of the Park Baseball. You get your own scouts ratings of your players, plus a neutral league rating of the players, but they are just their personal ratings from them, and at the end of the day it is up to you who to pick based on the multitude of stats available in the game. I like this approach as it makes it feel a little more realistic to me.

Happens all the time and it is incredibly annoying!

FM is moving to a new engine - Unity, as of FM25, for anyone that is interested!

This is what I always thought it was.

Yes

I used 442 wing play with Birmingham City and it has worked really well for me, although I did change a few things here or there.

Yep happens every version of FM, extremely annoying!

Ye this is a very good point! If a player is signed with the squad status as fringe player or emergency backup or whatever you would hope the fans judge that player against that squad status, rather than just looking at the player and scratching their heads wondering why you have signed a player not as good as your star man!

Would love to know this too! All I ever see is the same players over and over again in the scouting centre.

I know that AI squad building has been discussed many times before on these forums, however it still baffles me how often I see instances whereby the AI buys one of my players for a decent fee (in this example Levante bought Bacuna from me at Birmingham City for £11m), never plays them (literally not one game) then puts them on the transfer list for a much lower fee 6 or 12 months later....crazy! Is this the same in everyone else's game or is it just me?

I play 442 get it out wide and hit early crosses and my Target Man is doing pretty well. I don't do anything fancy such as float crosses or aim for X, I literally have cross more often and hit early crosses with my full backs overlapping as well.

Pluck a number from the top of your head and that's how it is calculated! For premier league players add a few more zero's to the end.

Yep, happened after I got promoted to the premier league with Birmingham City so had to let half my staff go.

I second this. I got promoted with Birmingham City in my 2nd season, finishing as the leagues top scorers and creating loads of chances. I started the PL pretty well, scored 3 against Arsenal, 2 against United and went unbeaten in my first 6 games. Since the update my team literally has like 4 shots per game and has blanked in 3 of my last 4 games. I am tinkering with my tactic to try and fix it, but I play an extremely basic 442 get it out wide and cross it and there isn't really much you can tinker with that and I don't want to rip up my style and start again. I agree it is very frustrating when you find a tactic that works for your team/players then it seems to go to pot post update, but going to keep persisting as I have signed some really good younger players that I am looking forward to seeing develop.

I do commentary only nowadays (like the old days) as I don't have the time to play through matches with highlights or actually watch it in 3D.

100% this! I didn't realise the update was out and I was playing yesterday and I blew two 3 goal leads and a 2 goal lead in three games! My tactic is usually pretty defensively sound so wondered what the hell has gone on...this explains it 😂

My team I was there at Wembley when we won the cup then there when we got relegated! Was a fantastic season though in the championship and playing in the Europa league at the same time! It has been downhill very fast ever since, now we are a shambles!

I noticed the other day that my U23s team had like 1 league game per month for 2 straight months and no friendlies had been arranged...was ultra annoying having to do it all manually

I scored some screamers in my time playing football and I was nowhere near 8th tier standard

A lot of the time I look for teamwork, work rate, natural fitness and stamina as well as personality type in all my players.

Same, they have worded that horribly if that is the case! I have always thought it was better to have no line rather than the "poor" one. You learn something new every day!

That is great, thank you. I will give that a go!