El Payaso

I agree on this. It's a valid style of play and also fairly common nowadays. FM should never be a game where you have to start listing tens of things you cannot do if you don't want to be exploiting the game. It should be a simulation that can respond to the demand and offer balance on most circumstances. Obviously if you intentionally start to do some unrealistic crazy stuff, this is likely to result in unrealistic scenarios but having a game where you have to put a lot of effort to limit your gameplay is the wrong way to go.

It's actually odd that this thing gets so much attention on FM 2024 which in my opinion is many way the most balanced FM game based on match events and stats. For example completed dribbling stats are closer to reality than in many previous versions and also in terms of performances for example attacking wide players look much more like a hit or miss than earlier. This is probably the first version where I have seen pacey wingers being ineffective at times. In games like FM 2015-18 a simple pacey winger or attacking wingback could single handedly break the balance of the whole match engine. For example in FM 2015 Adama Traore was simply unstoppable in the hands of a human player. So, basically how the overpowered pace and gegenpress work on FM 2024? I'm asking this because I've not seen any evidence on my own saves.

In general "catering the game for casuals" is eating away a lot of the game's potential. FM has almost always been a solid game (excluding some versions like FM 2010, 2015-2018). A closer focus on how certain attributes work and limit players would be a fantastic new way but it would make it would ask for a bit of effort from players if they would need to think about what kind of players they need to have in a certain style of play or even good players struggling when they are not suitable for certain roles or style of plays. Like said, this would be a fantastic thing but not something that is going to happen as long as there is only one level of difficulty. Something like backup goalkeepers being able to play as well as your better outfield players and mindless running machines having no technical or intellectual limitations visible are bad but also something that has been present in the game practically always.

DOMESTIC SEASON As we already know, Milan were the eventual champions in the league, mainly thanks to their sturdy defense led by Mike Maignan, who was elected as the best goalkeeper in the league. Atalanta looked good value for the title for long periods but their weak March and April turned out to be too big a dip in the form to secure the title. Inter's season was disappointing as they only won Supercoppa Italiana's final against Napoli. The bad results in league led to Simone Inzaghi being sacked and he was replaced by Unai Emery who led his team to the Europa Conference League title. Atalanta took one trophy though as they beat Napoli in the Coppa Italia final 3-2. TORINO COMPARED TO OTHERS SERIE B It was a season of surprises in Serie B as Spezia, Como, and Brescia made their way to Serie A. Sampdoria's slump continued as the team now found themselves in the third tier of Italian football. Parma and Palermo both made it to the promotion playoff but they were both eliminated. ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD PREMIER LEAGUE BUNDESLIGA LA LIGA LIGUE 1

I find it a bit funny when people raise something like this as a game breaking error. I'm not saying this to claim that some attributes aren't too valuable in the match engine while some like intelligence and technical aren't valued as important. I would see it more a problem that human players can heavily overachieve basically with any approach, especially if they don't add clear house rules for themselves. Taking your local team to the top might be fun "challenge" for a couple of times but when all the challenges turn into success stories, they lose their value. FM for me is a game that should be able to deal and bring us good general balance, no matter what the players' approaches are. Even though I like the game in general, this is where it fails and probably always has done that.

Great season for you! One question of the data: do you make the charts manually or are you pulling data from FM and implementing it somewhere? I've been for a long time intrigued about putting my excels to looker studio and from there to Canva...

Yup. Even if the 2D wouldn't even be included, I'm going to bite the bullet and continue playing. Of course fully hoping and also believing that 2D will be there as it should be. Would be also awesome if the 2D could be modified. In the past we used to have nice small details available for the 2D engine but I think nowadays there are very few if any ME mods available. Obviously the main hope for me is that the 2D would actually look better than it has looked for the last couple FMs. It used to be better in the past with all the widgets.

I agree, as long as some of the effort also goes to 2D. It used to be more beautiful in the past with stadiums etc and with the ability to drop different widgets to the sides.

Probably majority of the FM players also use the vanilla version of the game and don't replace the newgen pictures generated by the game. This doesn't mean that the vanilla version of the game or newgen faces look good or are up to the standards of 2024.

The main difference here is the fact that the 2D match engine hides the animational flaws of the 3D match engine which makes it look better for anyone who likes to see a game of football. That's all that I am saying. E: pfff, why does this community creare two separate replies when I try to combine them inside one message.

I do know how the ME works and that many things are also related on how they are displayed in the animations. That is also what I have been saying all along. Why would I like to watch a 3D ME that is lacking the visual aspect of the collision mode? I'm not even sure how the collision mode has evolved during the years but by all means, it is still far away from a finished product which something like FIFA 2005 had almost 20 years ago. I'm not saying that FIFA has ever had a realistic simulation of a football match but at least the animation is not missing some vital aspects that define football as a sport. For me the 2D dots give you a better immersion as you can at least imagine things happening. This of course is a matter of opinion.

And this was the whole point. If the match engine is missing many basic fundamentals of real life football, then how can it be even a somewhat realistic representation of the sport? This isn't even something that could be considered as a matter of opinion but rather a fact. And as someone might still claim that players don't ghost through each other anymore which was a big gripe on FM 2012: Yes, they do.

Not needing the current 3D would probably be the correct way to say it. I would have understood introducing a 3D match engine that contains some basics of real life representation (the collision mode for example) but not the one that we have been "enjoying" ever since the 3D was published. I'd personally never use a match engine where players don't get involved in physical battles and cannot run through each other. Those are things that take it so much away from real representation of football that I wouldn't be able to watch the matches like that. A match engine with poor graphical representation but including some basic fundamentals of real football would have always been a different story.

Yeah, but the thing with 3D is that the representation is still very poor in 2024. For example strength is an attribute that cannot be represented within the match engine as it lacks the collision mode and physical duels that play massive part in real football. It is also easy to detect from the 2D whether a player makes heavy touches etc as you can see the ball escaping. I would also claim that with the 2D it is easier to make your mind simulate think how the situation would have played out in real football. 3D would make sense if it would resemble real football, especially the physical aspects but this has never been the case on FM.

I have never understood why the 3D was needed. Obviously it was a big feature in terms of sales but it is so much easier to follow player movement and other tactical things with 2D that I would never change to 3D no matter how it looks. Also seeing players still ghosting through each other and physical battles missing completely in 2024 is a bit of deal breaker for anyone who wants to manage football matches.

Good to see Agon Sadiku making at least some kind of a revival. As Väänänen is now leaving the club, I'm hoping that you can find at least one Finn to play an important role in the club. I bet at least HJK has plenty of suitable options for that.

@deltasfd11 what is your opinion about yourself (apparently) doing unrealistically well with Manchester United?

Doesn't sound like a challenge to me.

For the AI both Manchester United and Chelsea are usually quite well simulated in season one. Chelsea seems to bounce back quite soon though. But in general the real life simulation is probably best it has ever been in terms if the AI. Obviously I don't know how these worked between 19-23 versions as I didn't play them.

Manchester United or more like Man UFC winning the Champions League is a bigger problem here. Don't see that happening in the near future. In general the current FM is quite good at simulating real world. Of course there are teams like Girona, Leverkusen, Bologna and Inter that aren't usually reaching the real life level of performances but at least two of those were big surprises. It's hard to make it perfect. But when you compare this to something like FM 2017 and 2018 where certain playing styles even under the AI were so powerful that the whole gaming world was a big mess more often than not, we have gone big steps to right direction.

@Cloud9 has often mentioned a successful pre-season as an important factor later on in the season. I would be interested in learning more about pre-season approaches that define a successful pre-season. I haven't personally paid a lot if attention to these. I usually start with a heavy early training schedule and move on towards medium load towards the end. I also usually play 5-6 friendlies against interesting opponents to get the players match fit.

You're doing extremely well both in terms of performances as well as long-term aims. It's going to be interesting to see whether José is capable of ruining PSG. Might well be the case even when PSFG really should be a dominant force domestically. Are you finding the save interesting personally?

Thanks. I will. I live in the Southern part of the country so it is a domestic trip but a trip anyway. I wish that was a clear feature in the game too. Wouldn't mind Buongiorno be willing to stay and my board to keep him. He might actually be one of the hardest ones to keep. And if the board starts to accept bids, there isn't much to do. Hope that we won't come to this. Would be the worst case scenario for me to be forced to completely rebuild the team. And to the previous comment: I actually do like the new outlook of the graphics way more. The only part I need to still fix is the match reporting but I have a few ideas for that too.

Thank you so much for the comment. I can clearly notice that you have laid a lot of attention to that detail of my writing, which is always nice to see. Fully agree on everything, especially with the spine of the team. I'm just a little bit afraid that a team with only stable financial status might be tempted to just get the money when offered. Haven't seen this happening yet from the board on this FM but with Torino I have a bad feeling about this. The aim is to keep hold of as many starters as possible and thereby keep the foundation together. If we can do that, I would say that we have a good team to battle for top-half finish in Serie A and talented pool of youngsters and rotation players to take care of Europe. I'm currently taking a bit of a distance to the save game as I traveled to northern part of Finland to meet my family and only traveled with my work laptop. This story will thereby continue probably in the second half of June. Feel free to keep the thread going though. I read the community regularly with my phone.

In ideal situation no. I would rather keep hold of all my key players from last season. Especially the wing-back area is crucial as I only have three options plus Rodriguez to throw in there. And Bellanova is quite clearly the best of them on paper. Would be almost a disaster to lose him, even if he had a poor ending to the season.