NineCloudNine

Am I the only one who gets grumpy when an OP doesn’t come back to the thread they started to acknowledge the people who took the time to answer their question?

Looks like one of the most boring games of football ever played. Did it get any better in the second half?

Whatever the intention, it is absurb that my Liverpool scouts apparently have no knowledge of any Man City or Arsenal players until I have them individually scouted. Apparently my scouts don’t even watch Match Of The Day .

Only thing I can think of is that the TIs are set high for these and that even though the PIs dial them down for those players, they still end up being higher than suits those players’ PPMs. That’s not to deny that the UI there is silly. I’m just trying to work out how the algorithm managed to throw up something so confusing.

It commits you to maintaining whatever their agreed playing time was before they got the injury. Personally I just do the console/encourage bit. No benefit to making a promise, which is what the playing time option does.

It's not obvious to me why that should be an option and not (off the top of my head) homegrown player quotas, the minimum age for international transfers, the number of subs, TV money, sponsorship rules, VAR, promotion playoffs, the way Colombia organises its championships, FFP, the seeding for the Champions League and the very existance of B teams, all of which I would like to change to play in my ideal fantasy world.

There are three Rafus brothers in Spain. All three of Marcelo Gallardo’s sons are in the game. Jurrien & Quentin Timber. IIRC they have another brother too. Arnau & Marc Tenas. Marcus & Khephren Thuram. Teun & Peer Koopemeiners. Enzo, Luca, Theo & Elyaz Zidane. Kylian & Ethan Mbappe. Luciano & Emiliano Rodriguez. Lucas & Theo Hernandez. Sergej & Vanja Milinkovic-Savic. Inaki & Nico Williams. Granit & Taulant Xhaka. Romelu & Jordan Lukaku. Three Hazards until Eden retired. IIRC there are several Ayews. Thiago & Rafinha (Rodrigo is a childhood friend, not a relative as is sometimes stated, including in past FMs).

I tend to think ‘flipping’ means buying and selling quickly, if not in the same window then certainly within a year. So a normal buy - develop - sell on approach wouldn’t be ‘flipping’.

Great stuff. Fun fact: I'm thousands of hours deep in FM and your post here is how I learned about the secondary options screens in your first two examples !

I am as sure as I can be with zero inside knowledge that SI are hoping something AI-ish will enable them to solve the press conference & player interaction problem, rather than putting hundreds or even thousands of hours into re-writing it with people power.

In addition to this practical point, the idea that a release with a brand new engine would come earlier than usual because "they've been working on it longer" is so wonderfully, delightfully naive and sweet that I almost don't want to be the person to tell that poster what the real world is actually like.

No need to wait. You could do that in the pre-game editor in about 3 minutes.

You’ve got 5 players attacking tbe same narrow area around the edge of the box and the other 5 sitting back defending. Your wide players aren’t Wingers they are Inside Forwards, so basically wide strikers, not creators. You have no-one providing width and no-one linking defence and attack. Suggestions (without knowing your players: * turn one of your IF into a Winger * make the FB on the opposite side to your winger either a FB-A or a Wing Back * put the Mez on the same side as your Winger, not the side of the IF * play your other CM as an AP, on support for most games or attack against weaker teams

Just to add some statistical context here, in 31 completed English Premier League seasons the average goals per game has only three times dropped below 2.5 and 2022-23 had the most goals ever (1,084) at the highest average (2.853): https://www.premierleague.com/news/3490140. The games in the screenshot @XaW shared average 2.73 goals per game.

My default is (left to right): Nothing - Nothing - Half - Normal - Double Only fresh players train hard.

Yes agreed - this is why you are a mod and I am just a bloke on the internet. I have no knowledge of or insight into SI's developer process or team. It would have been better had I illustrated my post with a more generic example rather than specificlly using SI/FM. That said, I am old and grizzled enough to have seen what I described above far too many times to count. I believe I can reliably spot a bloated Frankenstein's monster of module tagged onto workaround onto module onto tinkering onto workaround onto module. So while you are correct that I don't know first-hand that this is what FM has become, I'd be willing to bet multiples of Real Madrid's transfer budget on it being the case.

Thanks! I’ll add a bit if I may. Very specifically, technical debt is the extra work that will have to be done in the future as a result of a time-saving shortcut now. So under time pressure an SI developer working on a new feature will bolt on a new module and use workarounds to connect it to the existing code. At some point in the future another developer will be tasked with making changes to that module and discovers the workaround used by the original developer, who has now left. The extra time that the new developer has to spend understanding the workaround is technical debt, which now has to be paid off. Of course, this extra time was not factored in to the their project schedule so either the changes are delivered late, extra resource has to be found, the work canned or a new workaround has to be found, adding more techical debt for some poor future developer to discover. Do that across a dozen or more game systems for an annual release of a game whose original code may now be decades old. You end up with code that literally no-one fully understands and where changes are far more difficult than they should be and may have unpredictable and unexpected knock-on effects on what should be unrelated modules. Given enough time the accumulated technical debt (the time/money it would take to fix the problems) is less than the cost of building it all again from scratch. That seems to be the point SI has reached with the ME, hence Unity. What isn’t clear - because SI aren’t saying - is whether this is also true of modules like player interaction, AI squad building, transfers, 101 other elements and the interface in general, all of which have clearly accumulated so much technical debt that it is questionable whether SI can ever fix them while being committed to an annual release cycle in which new features are considered mandatory.

You’ve used the phrase ‘technical debt’ a few times in this context. That will be familiar to anyone who works in software or possibly project management, but perhaps not to a wider audience. It’s a really interesting concept which IMO explains many of the frustrations expressed here. I’m happy to expand on it, but as it was your phrase and clearly something you have a professional understanding of, you should go first if you wish to .

Just on this, if you mean by “random” that the schedule should not include clumps of similar blocks of fixtures or back-to-backs, then you’re falling into a common cognitive trap. Did you know that ‘shuffle’ features on music players are not random? They used to be, but then people got three tracks in a row from the same artist, or two from one album, or repeats, and complained. So now shuffle doesn’t allow that sort of repetition, so it’s no longer random (because what comes up next is influenced by what came before and what is due to come after) but people think it is. Getting what you seem to want a ‘random’ fixture list to look like actually takes a lot of planning - which is why all those fixture scheduling options exist in the editor. Deducing whether the output is in fact random (insofar as the fixture plan allows) is a pretty difficult task that needs a lot more than a handful of odd examples posted here, however obvious the problem might seem to our unreliable, pattern-seeking minds.

A couple of additional observations: Play out of defence and distribute to defenders seems odd to combine with 2xCDs. Could one at least be a BPD? Throw it long also seems to contradict that intention. Far too many restrictive PIs. Dribble less and work ball into box are odd to combine with more expressive. I’d suggest removing all your PIs then slowly adding them back as needed. Do you want to play through the midfield or down the flanks? The shape says through the middle, wide FB roles suggest flanks. The ME likes to use the flanks because there’s usually more space there, but if you want to direct play through your DLP and AM you have to force the game narrow. I play a similar 4-3-2-1 and use 2xFB-S and an AM-A.

Feels like he isn’t getting much support behind him (IFB vs FB on the other side) and although IF/Mez looks like they should gel, my experience is that they try to occupy the same spaces. I’d be tempted to try a Carrilero in place of the Mezzala, to offer some wide support. I usually play my AP in CM strata on attack because on support they sit deeper than you might expect (PPMs make a difference here too). IW on attack also cuts in so early they may as well be an IF. An actual Winger might create more width and space for your IF to attack. At the moment you have four players lurking around the edge of the box and no-one properly attacking it.

I've had the best success with "a lot of competition in your position", as long as (1) it's true and (2) the player isn't better than the other options. The others seem reasonably clear to me. Not quite ready = not good enough yet (I'd only say that to a younger player); Not in form = not playing well; Not available = injured a lot.

I think to an extent this depends who we are talking about. People generally lump together quite different players in these sorts of discussions. For example Totti, Baggio, Del Piero were forwards who definitely did not start in midfield and move up. Riquelme started high and moved side to side more than coming deep. Rivaldo played much of his career as what in FM we’d call an IW. Same for Neymar. De Bruyne has pretty much always been a midfielder. I’d say Deco was always a midfielder too. Same for modern attacking playmakers like Pedri and Iniesta. So that’s a pretty wide range of playing styles to categorise as “a classic #10”. Zidane is probably the most complete all-round player IMO. I can definitely see him fitting your description of pushing forward from a deeper starting point. But I still think it is a stretch to describe him as a CM. Where I very much agree with you is on the power of an AP-A or a CM-A as the middle of a CM strata three, with aggressive instructions and PPMs. I have done the same and get a tremendous goal/assist output from them plus (importantly!) some exhilarating driving dribbles and the occasional fantasy goal. Your analysis of how to make this work is excellent. I see you are also using WBs and a Libero. That’s interesting too. I combine my AP-A with a back 4 (2WBs) and a Halfback DM. This is defensively stable and gives good space for the AP to work. I found that using a Libero or IWBs tended to bunch the midfield. The downside of the WB/HB route is that the match engine does like to go wide, presumably because that’s where the space is. So you have to force play through the centre with instructions (and a narrow pitch). Using a AP-A role rather than CM-A helps here because they naturally draw the ball.

I've edited the Colombian league to award the title to the team that's first in the combined table. The opening and closing tournaments still happen, but their results are not included in league or club histories. I have deleted the league histories of the opening and closing tournaments. When I run 2023 the entry is correctly added to the league and winning club's history, However, the winners are not shown in the league history from 2002-2022, which are the years that the opening/closing structure has been in place. This despite there being one contiguous league history with identically formatted entries from 1948 to 2022. The game/editor seems to 'know' that something different started in 2002 but I cannot see where. Any ideas please?

By moving your attacking playmaker to CM strata you are brilliantly making the point that the classic #10 has changed. The players you list would now be midfielders (Zidane, Deco) or deep-lying forwards (Totti, Del Piero). No-one disputes that players such as this can be successful, it’s just that they rarely do it ‘in the hole’ behind strikers. It’s that specific classic role that has largely been squeezed out of the modern game, not the type of player. The exception I think is Riquelme. Too slow, too immobile. Might work in a weaker league, but would be crushed by modern pressing and be a passenger when defending. Try making a success of Joao Felix as an example!