tezcatlipoca665

It doesn't even make this much sense lol. The AI doesn't pay attention to squad status/agreed playing time. I've linked to my own thread about AI managers not being able to rotate, constantly looking to retrain positions, and not buying appropriately for positions (and in relation to their tactical preferences either) and some other issues. Hopefully combining these threads can help create an overall picture of what looks like a big problem. 6 seasons into my simmed save, and Real Madrid are playing Alaba as their constant first choice central defender ahead of Josip Sutalo. Alaba is listed as a Fringe Player at 37 years old and has very poor physicals (but a high average of 7.89 match rating in like 11 games, so idk what's going on there). Sutalo hasn't made it to the starting eleven in 9 matches despite being listed as a Regular Starter. Their squad is completely barebones. It's the same with many other clubs, but this is the one I was paying most attention to, to see how the elite teams maintain things as time goes on.

Yeah, even when I see FM streamers and content creators on YouTube, they're really insular and only pay attention to their own clubs. YT recommended a video to me yesterday of some guy showing how central defenders with poor finishing make great strikers, but he wasn't saying it as a criticism - he was just telling people that it was a great way to perform well in FM24 and that everyone should try it out. I don't understand how people use things like plug-and-play tactics and exploits and not consider them as game flaws. If you're constantly winning with mediocre clubs and making them world-beaters in less than 10 seasons, it's not because you're a great manager - it's because your competition is bad. Idk, I guess people really are happy just winning regardless of why it's happening.

If there was an option to remove absolutely all interactions other than pre-match, half-time, and post-match team talks, I'd use it. Sending the assistant manager to do press conferences is one thing, but the game has a metric for your media attendance, and interviewers for new management jobs point out how they're concerned with how you don't interact with the media much (if at all). I had to promise a club I'd attend upon acceptance of a job as a result. As a side note - a few days ago on a save, I was asked how I was coping with the failure of not qualifying for the Europa Conference League, and I mean, pretty well? Y'know, considering I qualified for the Europa League via league position and also won the Coppa Italia on top of that with a minus 10-point Juventus. Player interactions don't really do anything for me either. I don't really care about telling players 'you did well in training!' every week until it stops being effective and I'm their favourite person in the world for being nice to them for 2 months. Criticizing doesn't really seem to do much either. 'You're right, I need to buck my ideas up'. Yeah, see you again with the same complaint next week.

I only recently returned to the series myself after a long time not playing, so I haven't even seen how the previous two games were. If this is the case, and if this isn't fixed, this is legitimately the last FM I buy, and I'll happily skip the next generation of the games from FM25-onwards. I'm only interested in long-term saves and moving around from club-to-club - I don't want to dominate with one team after a few seasons pass by just because the AI managers can't figure out how to buy players for their tactics, find adequate cover for positions, nor plan ahead.

I got a reply in my thread saying that the issues were known and being looked into, so hopefully everything described both in here and in there will be fixed!

Okay, I think I'll make this my last post in this thread. I just simmed to the end of the transfer window, and Madrid didn't sign anybody other than an attacking midfielder they didn't need (Samuel Justo). They also sold both Endrick and Victor Kristiansen, so now their left back position is held together by Camavinga and Alaba - but Alaba is their first choice centre back based on appearances, keeping Sutalo out of the squad, despite being labelled as a Fringe Player. He's 37 years old, has 9 stamina, 9 pace, and 8 strength - but has an average performance rating of 7.89!! Fair play to the guy. Yusi is there in the leftback position too within the squad planner, but he shouldn't even be good enough to get on the bench for the worst team in La Liga. If Yusi is reading this: I'm sorry I was caught saying these things about you. In my defence, the Spanish FM research team did this to you. This is how the regular RM starting 11 looks 9 games into the new season.

lol, I didn't even realize. I'm gonna holiday it to the end of the transfer window later and at least give RM a chance there and see what happens. btw, sorry if the tone of these posts is coming off badly - I think some of these things are pretty funny. Brentford having two keepers out with cruciate ligament injuries and being forced to rely on some poor unexperienced 17 year old for almost a whole season was hilarious. The game itself is a massive improvement overall and it feels much better than FM23 did. I also really like how the Saudi teams are buying players that you'd actually expect them to want to sign, and I don't know if this is intentional, but I like that those players are leaving at the end of their contracts and (mostly) going to other leagues on free transfers. Seems like that'd be likely to happen in the future in real life for players that aren't really at retirement age. I think that some managers are retiring a bit prematurely at relatively early ages sometimes after they've left international management, and that was the case in FM23 too, but I'm not sure if that's worth worrying about. If I can have a long-term journeyman save game where I can see out manager contracts (provided I don't get sacked), move from team-to-team without having to completely rebuild with every move, this'll be pretty much perfect imo.

Here's one for international team building. A newgen called Aitor Marin is now part of the Spanish first team at 19 years old and has 4 caps, but he's only had 6 games in total for Juventus (3 starts, 3 sub appearances). He was playing in La Liga 2 before this, and then Serie C with Juventus's B team for a season until those 6 first team appearances.

I'm just gonna post here any time I realize/notice something about this save. I also took over Inter in this sixth season test save to look around, and I can confirm that a lot of the issues with AI squad building is that they're retraining players for other positions. That's why Rodrygo and Fati are playing as full-on strikers, and neither Barcelona nor Real Madrid are buying for those positions. It looks like a combination of two things are happening: 1) The AI managers have a big, big preference for players that can play multiple positions, and don't like players that play one position extremely well. 2) The AI managers are absolutely determined to retrain players for other positions. I mentioned Victor Osimhen joining Bayern Munich for £86 and being used as a backup striker in that thread I linked above, which was 3 seasons in. From the fourth season on, he's now a first team regular, because Bayern retrained him to play on the left wing. I got this notification during the first team meeting. Diego Simeone (who was Inter manager before I pushed him out) was retraining Martinez and Thuram as Shadow Strikers. Simeone doesn't even use people in the AM position to utilize this role in his tactics!!! lmao

Do you have a lot of leagues running at once? This happened to me in FM23 in my last save where all of my matches stuttered during play, and it was really difficult to watch. It wasn't the GPU that was the problem - it was the processor (I'm using a Ryzen 5800X, 32GB RAM, and an AMD RX6900XT GPU). I'd just wait until my processor fan died down before clicking on the 'Tactical Meeting' button to start my match, and it'd run smoothly after that because the background matches had already been processed. I thought I could load a lot of leagues at once with those specs, but it didn't turn out that way tbh. Probably the best way to test is wait about ten minutes before clicking 'Tactical Meeting' and seeing if your match experience is suddenly smoother, or just do a quickstart save with one league loaded and test a friendly match with it.

I simmed another 3 seasons forward and created another thread with some more of my findings. I really hope they fix this, because I'd love to do a proper journeyman save and be able to move into a team that's already got at least some kind of structure as multiple seasons go by, regardless of whether I agree with the direction the previous manager went in or not. I just want squad transfers, team building and rotations to at least make some kind of sense.

I took over Real Madrid from Graham Potter just to see if I could pinpoint any issues, so I used his 4-2-3-1 formation that he used for five years at the club already to get a better view of squad depth and how the team has been formed. There are a lot problems. For one thing, they signed Nico Mantl as their first choice keeper after selling both Courtois and Lunin. This guy is really, really not even good enough to be a backup keeper here. There's no reason for either Raya or Costa to not be playing here instead of both of them rotting on PSGs bench. -If you check the CB screenshot, Sutalo is the only proper CB in the squad (apart from Ceesay, who's 20 years old and still has a long way to go to be any good). The 'depth' around him is made up of multi-position players that are more suited as DMs or fullbacks. -In the LB screenshot, you can see that the supposed best leftback in this squad is Camavinga - ahead of two actual left fullbacks (though Alaba is falling out of favour due to age and should be replaced with an actual signing anyway). Nice time for a pun here: Yusi is yusi-less. 23 years old and in the B squad, shouldn't even be considered in this depth analysis. -RB position is shocking. They have one player - forget Alfonso, he's 18 and in Real Madrid B. -STC position shows depth with only two actual strikers (Evanilson and Endrick) and Rodrygo, who's still labelled by the media as an 'elite winger' and has Inside Forward as his considered best position. I think this is the last I'll test simming seasons to see how squads are built by AI until the full game is released. As things stand, If this is the level of competition to expect from AI managers - and if this is how elite clubs shape their squads - journeyman saves really aren't worth doing.

I posted some other findings in the thread here after 3 simmed seasons too.

One thing to note is that Brentford and Chelsea have something in common - two goalkeepers that were loaned out at the beginning of the game (Kepa to Real Madrid; David Raya to Arsenal). Not sure if that helps.

Another example of two first choice keepers. Don't worry anymore about that 17 year old newgen thing I mentioned in the post above. It turns out it happened because Matheus and Flekken both got damaged cruciate ligaments together (seriously) and were out for 6 and 7 months, so Brentford had to use a 17 year old newgen for the season, lol.

Yeah, it's stopping me from wanting to bother playing a long-term save. I have no idea what's actually been fixed or what's meant to be different here from FM23. I simmed three seasons to test, and the squad building is seriously awful. It might even be worse than FM23, and that was pretty bad. I checked Real Madrid to see what's going on there - they haven't even attempted to sign a striker since Joselu's loan period ended, and now have Rodrygo only in that position. Only 20 players in total in the first team too. Alvaro Rodriguez is 20 years old and played 8 first team games as a sub (16 starts and 14 sub appearances in Real Madrid B, so not really even doing well enough to be anything other than a squad player in their reserves). Endrick has 25 games in the latest season - 3 starts and 22 sub appearances. He's the only natural striker in the squad and should really be getting ahead of Rodrygo. If the AI has deemed Endrick too young (at 19 years old), then it should try to sign somebody older with a high ability to slot into the first team until he's prepped and ready to take the role. Barcelona just straight up didn't try to replace Lewandowski with anybody after selling him for £24 million to Al-Nasr. Ansu Fati is just their main striker now, given the number 9, and that's that, despite primarily being a winger (see Rodrygo above) and being out-of-favour until that point, used as a squad player with 8 starts and 16 sub appearances before Barca decided he was great enough to be their main goal scorer. Victor Roque is their number 10 but has 6 starts and 19 sub appearances. 'Wonderkid' Fabio Miretti has played a total of 10 first team starts in three seasons. No loans. He was getting sub appearances in the first two seasons (32 in the first, 31 in the second). In the latest season? 1 first team appearance and 7 appearances off the subs bench. He was injured for 3 months that season until the winter, and since then he's been on the bench, but rarely ever put on the field. He just rots there now. Oh, and Bayern signed an in-form Victor Osimhen for £86 million, and in his first season, he had one first team appearance and 19 sub appearances. Second season - 11 starts, 9 sub appearances. No major injuries at all; he's just backup to Kane and not being used. What a signing. Winger Samuel Chukwueze is Milan's main striker now (????). As with Barcelona and Lewandowski, Milan didn't bother trying to replace Giroud with an actual striker after his retirement. This happened in FM23 where the AI managers would try to fit wingers into makeshift strikers, instead of looking at the overall squad and thinking 'what positions are we overstacked on?' and 'what does the team actually need?' It seems like the AI can't differentiate between natural positions or something, and sees players that can play multiple roles and think 'that's great!' instead of looking at it as something that it can fall back on if it ever has to (eg., your three actual out-and-out strikers are injured and you need somebody to play in that position). This happened in FM23 too and made journeyman saves really frustrating, because any time you'd go to a new club, nothing would've been built before you got there. I remember Real Madrid replaced Karim Benzema with Datro Fofana (who previously couldn't get a look-in as a winger in the squad before Benzema's retirement) - the AI Ancelotti just used him for a few seasons instead of buying a replacement. He had a 12 finishing attribute to top it off. Zaire-Emery is currently in PSG2 at 20 years old. He's been marked unavailable for loan and is barely getting near the first team. It's actually gotten less likely he'll get on the first team as time has passed - he was given 7 first team appearances in the second season, then 0 first starts and 4 sub appearances in the third. Gavi's had a mixed experience where he was given 15 first team appearances along with 16 sub appearances, then he was suddenly considered first team in the second season with 31 appearances (only 1 sub), and now he's back to the way things were in the first season.

In the same way you can add club badges, logos, kits, and player images etc. - all of which follow specific database IDs - it'd be great if you could do the same with crowd sounds for clubs to replace the generic crowd sounds (general ambience, boos, goal celebrations, and the others). There can be the usual generic crowd for whichever teams haven't been assigned mp3s/wavs/whatever format. The level of volume could just depend on something simple as home team vs. away (home team being louder, obviously). I feel like this'd help a lot with immersion in the match engine. I doubt this'll be possible to implement even with a patch for FM24 for modders to utilize, since I imagine it'd take a lot of recoding how the sounds currently work and assigning IDs for them, but maybe something to consider from FM25 onwards?