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Dude, didn't this just come out like three weeks ago? EDIT: Less than two weeks ago. Testekill fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Nov 11, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 04:26
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Volume One: It's a long, long way to Tipperary Chapter the First: A day that will live in infamy. July 16, 2013  Football Manager Classic is a recently introduced mode that streamlines the game significantly. It's for players who don't want to drop 500+ hours into the full life-eating game. I've never touched it. I've never tried the challenges, either. Those are short scenarios where you're forced to deal with things like your team suffering a stunning number of injuries and you being forced to use your youth squad. Which is fine and all, but nothing like the challenge of going from a regional league to champions of Europe. So we'll be playing Football Manager.  All 51 nations enabled. Right now you can see that we have an approximate player count of 22,000, and an estimated game speed rating of 4 stars. That's not going to last.  This next screen determines which leagues are playable, and which will only be simulated in the background. I've set England to playable, naturally. I've also set Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland to playable as well, since I'll want to pick up players from their leagues in order to improve our own. As you can see, the approximate player count has more than doubled to 56,000. If you set every possible league to playable, you end up with something around 150,000 players, which makes the game process slowly on even top of the line computers. As you can see the estimated game speed rating is now 1.5 stars. I've also clicked off real players. One reason for that is that it will take at least 5 years to make the Premiership, another is because real players won't get into off the field trouble like fake players will. You'll see what I'm talking about when it happens. Plus, this way Lionel Messi won't win the Ballon d'Or 10 years straight like he did in my FM2013 game. The downside is, I won't be able to hire Messi as a coach after he retires like I did in my FM2013 game. On the other hand, every player will get a sweet sweet computer generated portrait.  Now to create the head coach. The most important thing on this page is your “Past Playing Experience”- players, fans, the media, and owners are vastly more likely to respect you if you're a former world class player than if you're some schmoe from the local Sunday league. Since I last played soccer in pickup games way back when I was in college, Sunday league is probably too kind to my past experience but it's the lowest setting there is. I've also changed my place of birth and date of birth, but the picture is real.  There's our team! You can also choose to manage a national team, aiming to win the World Cup, but I find that less interesting than the club game. We have some major advantages over our opposition, in that our stadium is 4-5 times larger, the owner of the team is a Russian mining oligarch, and most importantly that we're a professional team rather than a semi-pro team. Semi-pro teams can only train 3 days a week, which means getting everyone up to speed on tactics takes up most of the training time. If you play Lower League Manager, your first goal is to build up enough of a bankroll to go pro.  This is the news inbox, you'll become very familiar with this window. It's where we're informed of just about everything that happens in the game that matters to our club. Let's take a whirl around the major categories. The Owner:  Yuri Kropotkin is a Russian mining magnate who became a fan of the club after watching his hometown team in Omsk get decimated during the 1971 Fairs Cup. Now loaded with billions upon billions, he's finally accomplished his boyhood dream. Unfortunately "Nova Abromovich" (as he's come to be known as in the Daily Mail) doesn't have the best business sense, spending 185 million pounds on a player from a team no one has ever heard of.  In terms of what they mean for the game, they're the ones who set the budget and who we have to go to hat in hand for improvements to things like training facilities and youth recruitment. Kropotkin will be a sugar daddy, which means we'll get plenty of cash, but he'll also be impatient to see success. The Club:  To say that the club has fallen on hard times is a significant understatement. Despite playing top division soccer in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Tackleford City has finally reached its nadir, falling to the Skrill North division. The glory days of First Division football and winning the League Cup in 1985 are long past. The last decade and a half has seen a slide from the moderate respectability of League One to the barely professional level of non Football League soccer.  Also, yes, it was called the Milk Cup. These days it's sponsored by Capital One, which is a downgrade in pretty much every way.  To make matters worse the team was struck by catastrophe shortly before our story begins, when a large satellite fell from the sky during a pre-season friendly, killing the manager and all but two of the players.  Those grayed out players are what the game gives you when you don't have a full compliment of players. They are horrible, and represent what your team could bring in off the street. They will not be playing any games for us. Orson Duchamps and Cyrus Rosetti are the only players to have survived death from above. Pay no attention to their current five star ratings, your players are rated against the other players on your team, so a player who has a five star rating for your team in the lowest league would be lucky to have a 1 star rating for a Champion's League squad. Since they're being compared to the game's approximation of what a bottom rung side could scrounge up they're going to be considerably overestimated. Also, the current Assistant Manager is a complete poltroon who couldn't recognize talent if it whacked him in the head with a bicycle kick.  Those scores are... not good. The other staff are no better. The club trainer is the worst. A physiotherapy score of 2 means he's got the medical skills of a novice Dwarf Fortress doctor. They're all getting fired and replaced by people who at least are in the vicinity of competent.  By comparison, Cyrus Rosetti's far better than our team deserves, but also worth about 2% of his 185 million quid transfer fee. Attributes range from 1 to 20 in Football manager, anything above a 12 is reasonably competent, anything above a 16 is world class. We're not going to have players with many scores above a 16 for a while. Rosetti costs serious money, earning 40% of our overall wage budget, but he's got better attributes than any other striker in the Skrill North. He's fast, possesses good acceleration, is very good off the ball, and has good finishing and composure. He'll be the best player by a significant amount in the league, and wouldn't be out of place in the Championship division. The Boardroom:  This is the boardroom screen, where you can see how your board thinks of you, ask for things, and change your budget. The budget will be the first thing we change. Since there's no point in spending millions of pounds on players who'd rather retire than sign with us, we're going to pare the transfer budget as far back as the board will let us, which will allow us to overpay players with League Two talent to come play with our team.  It's good to have an oligarchs backing. In most games, it's a careful dance between setting your wage budget and keeping enough money on hand to buy some players and improve your squad. We don't have that concern, yet. So that's roughly where we start. Next update we'll be hiring players and staff, setting up our tactics and training regimen, and maybe even playing a soccer match or two. Exciting stuff in the world of spreadsheets, I can already tell that you just can't wait! habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 04:29
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Testekill posted:Dude, didn't this just come out like three weeks ago? It did. Given that FM has no plot, and is simply a slightly different iteration each year with updated rosters, I'm hoping that that's OK. Especially as I haven't been able to find a complete LP of the series (the one I could find is fairly recent but also hasn't been updated in a month and a half, and made it through 2 games). If it's not OK, then I'll abandon it.
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Nov 11, 2013 04:35
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Please don't. Also offer tips and tutorials like you are now on how to play! Thanks.
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Nov 11, 2013 10:06
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habeasdorkus posted:If it's not OK, then I'll abandon it. You should probably ask a mod for confirmation before proceeding either way.
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Nov 11, 2013 10:35
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Literally the only difference between FM's is sometimes adding 1 new feature and always making a new database of players.
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Nov 11, 2013 10:42
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I don't think this is against the spirit of the 3 month rule. This clearly isn't some "Hey look at me playing the latest AAA title although I know poo poo all about it" attention grab, it just makes sense to use the latest version of the game. I mean, sure, there might be more interest in the thread because of the recent version, but it's not going to affect the quality of the thread in this case.
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Nov 11, 2013 12:01
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Thanks for the feedback. I emailed the mods last night. I'll wait til I hear from them before continuing.
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Nov 11, 2013 13:49
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Got word from Zorak that this is a no-go. I might keep writing this up on my own and save it for after Christmas, that'd actually give me a decent sized backlog of posts to put up once every couple days and I'd still probably be somewhere around only the 3rd or 4th season. Or I might wait until then anyways for the game to get patched if there's any bonkers errors in the match engine that cause weird results while playing. It's too bad, though. I'd have really liked to get some feedback on my writing style and what people are interested in seeing. I could go back to FM13, but I'd just end up playing my current save. Reading about a team with some of the best players in the world dominating the poor little clubs isn't as much fun as watching a terrible team stumble around on their way up. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Nov 11, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 15:27
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For what it's worth, I thought your writing is both sharp and funny. The game mechanic discussion is interesting. I mean that's pretty much how these games play, you need to figure out how the whole thing ticks. I don't know anything about the webcomic, but you said it wouldn't be a focus anyway, so that's fine.
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Nov 11, 2013 16:53
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With a little refinement this could actually be pretty great in a couple of months.
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Nov 11, 2013 18:29
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StoryTime posted:For what it's worth, I thought your writing is both sharp and funny. The game mechanic discussion is interesting. I mean that's pretty much how these games play, you need to figure out how the whole thing ticks. I don't know anything about the webcomic, but you said it wouldn't be a focus anyway, so that's fine. Yeah this. It's a pity you weren't allowed to do this, FM14 is the same as FM13 just with a different database. It's even less than a usual DLC but costs full price! I look forward to reading it next year.
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Nov 11, 2013 20:07
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That Italian Guy posted:You should probably ask a mod for confirmation before proceeding either way. Testekill posted:Dude, didn't this just come out like three weeks ago? Christ, what are you two? Hall monitors? Are your names Melvin in real life? You guys are mega weeners.
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Nov 11, 2013 20:29
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habeasdorkus posted:Got word from Zorak that this is a no-go. You know what? I got a couple of PMs that said it's mostly roster changes here. Since this isn't like a AAA game that you're doing just to get e-cred or whatever, I could go either way on this. I talked to Zorak who'd already vetoed it but he said, "eh, if you wanna override, go nuts." So I'm going to flip a coin now. Heads, don't worry about the three month rule and go for it. Tails, wait til three months. Sound good?
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Nov 12, 2013 00:32
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It's heads. Go nuts.
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Nov 12, 2013 00:33
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I was kind of hoping that would happen. There are some changes from the 2013 model, but it's a heck of a lot less than comes in most expansion packs. Thanks!
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Nov 12, 2013 00:39
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Could you thumbnail he screenshots? I'm liking this otherwise.
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Nov 12, 2013 00:46
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I also flipped a coin over should I confess this over PM or just post it in the thread. Oops, looks like it's heads! I love you, Slowbeef 
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Nov 12, 2013 00:48
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Slowbeef posted:It's heads. Go nuts. Thanks! You rock!
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Nov 12, 2013 00:56
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Glad to see it continuing. You've got a pretty enjoyable writing style and have put in a lot of effort with your op and first update.
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Nov 12, 2013 01:06
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Farecoal posted:Could you thumbnail he screenshots? I'm liking this otherwise. Definitely. And over time I'll actually learn how to crop images well. Heck, at some point there might even be short video clips of the matches instead of poorly timed screenshots.
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Nov 12, 2013 01:22
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habeasdorkus posted:Definitely. And over time I'll actually learn how to crop images well. Heck, at some point there might even be short video clips of the matches instead of poorly timed screenshots. You might want to consider Irfanview. That allows batch resizing of images which is what a lot of people use for LPs.
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Nov 12, 2013 01:30
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Chapter the Second, Wherein I realize that we have to play a game far sooner than I expected. July 16, 2013  The first course of business is to cancel the friendly matches that had been arranged by the previous manager. I'd have been doing this anyways, it's almost always better to set up your own friendlies and as a lower league club without any cash acting as a top flight team's punching bag is a good way to rapidly improve your finances, but there's absolutely no point in playing friendlies when only 2 of the current players will be on the team in a few weeks.  Unfortunately, my first day on the job coincides with a match against Fleetwood, a League Two team. You'd have thought that someone would have canceled that game given the shape of the team, but it's the managers job to schedule friendlies and no one got around to doing it before I was hired. Worse, it looks like the team was forced to play an away game at Wrexham the previous week, which they promptly lost 5-0. It's too late to cancel the friendly, we're going to have to play a match with our current players. If we only lose by 5 it'll be a minor miracle. On the other hand, if one of the replacements plays well I might sign him to a contract, we need at least 16 players before the season begins in about a month's time.  Before we get to the game, it's time to clean house. When you first take over as manager of a team you have the option of asking the current staff to accept a mutual termination. It'll cost you less than firing them outright, but you still have to pay them a portion of their remaining contract as severance. If you're a poor club, you might have to wait a while before you can upgrade your staff. We are not a poor club, so everyone is getting the sack. Letting lots of people go in a short period of time is generally bad for team morale, as people begin to wonder who's next to be called into your office to discuss their lack of a future with the team. Since I'm firing all but 2 people at the club, and one of them already has a morale of “Abysmal,” I don't really care.  Now that that's over, it's time to bring in new staff. The most important of those positions is your Assistant Manager, or rear end Man. Besides having an unfortunate abbreviated title, he's the guy who keeps us informed of what's going on in your clubhouse and gives you his recommendation on your players current abilities and potential for improvement. Also, when (not if) we get ourselves banned from the sideline by the Football Association for telling the referee that we're going to burn down his house after he misses a clear penalty our rear end Man will take over match tactics and team pep-talks. The Assistant Manager and other staffers such as the Chief Scout, Head of Youth Development, and Director of Football, can be delegated quite a bit of responsibility in the game. They can handle your in-game tactics and team pep talks, attend the press conferences, even negotiate and ink contracts with players and handle transfers. I generally like to micromanage, which is why I only play one Football Manager save a year, and why I only care about my rear end Man's ability to judge talent. And I made it all the way to the end of this section without making a joke about being an rear end man. I'm getting old.  This is the staff search page. Get to know it, you'll be spending a lot of time here and on the very similar player search page. You can modify what you're searching for almost any way you wish, right down to looking for an unemployed 50 year old Irishman who has great management skills with older players but just doesn't understand kids these days. You can also change which attributes and information is shown in the results. The above are the attributes and information I generally use when looking for scouts and assistant managers. As I said. I primarily want my rear end Man to be a good judge of current and potential ability. Well, and I want him for one other thing that I'll mention later. I also like all of my coaches to have good determination, discipline, and motivation scores, as those attributes impact their training rating. As you can see here, there's 15 people the club is aware of who meet our specifications of being fine connoisseurs of talent. None of them will even consider working for us- they all either have jobs at other, much better clubs or can get hired by other, much better clubs. Which is the second thing I need my rear end Man for, without one you can't filter out everyone who's unwilling to join your organization from your searches. Always remember to complete contract negotiations with your new rear end Man before you kick the old one out the door, or you won't be able to figure out which assistant managers would be interested in the job.  Ah, much better. None of these guys are anything special, but they're all significantly better than the incumbent. Marc McLaughlin has decent scouting stats, and isn't shabby when it comes to determination, discipline, and motivation. He's even pretty good working with young players, something that will be important given how I fetishize youth in unseemly ways. I mean, why sign a 26 year old who's really good but probably won't get better when I can sign a not quite as good 19 year old who could be great in 5 years? I tend to lust for young players like Hollywood lusts for budding actresses. Heck, when I'm playing this game I'm often on my couch! Ahem. Anyways, who cares if McLaughlin's knowledge of tactics begins and ends with which goal you're supposed to try and kick the ball into? Let's see if he'll sign on with us.  I seem to have offended him by low-balling on the first offer. Negotiations consist of offers going back and forth between a player/staffer or their agent and you. Depending on the traits of the person you're dealing with and your personal relationship with them they have more or less willingness to keep trading offers. At one point in my last save I had to sell the midfielder who I'd raised with the team since he was in high school, despite my being listed as his favorite person, because his agent had a patience of 1 and my relationship with the agent was “Hatred.” The agent would demand contracts worth more than my board would let me offer, then refuse to negotiate. So the moral of the story is, don't get too attached to the bits of binary that make up players in this game. Also, gently caress agents.  If the person you're trying to hire's background turns yellow it means you've got one last chance to get them to accept an offer. I sign McLaughlin after haggling him down to £240/week. In a few days we'll get a message in our inbox signaling that he's accepted our offer, and he'll join the team. Next up we quickly find a team doctor that won't kill our players by accident while trying to treat a stubbed toe, and our sawbones's physiotherapy attribute goes from 2 to 16. Then we add half dozen or so scouts whose job will be finding us players from the UK and Ireland. I also hire some coaches to train the players, but I'll hold off on showing them until I explain how training works.  On their way out the door, one of the sacked staffers leaks our contract offer I made to a cromulent young goalkeeper, setting off five other teams also making contract offers. I want that 28k in severance package back, jerk.  Now that we've staffed up, it's time for our first match. At Fleetwood, July 16, 2013 Friendly  We're going to start off in the 4-4-2 formation. 1 goalkeeper, 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, 2 strikers. We'll get fancier as we go along, but the old 4-4-2 is a classic and basic formation for a reason as it's both simple and balanced. We're still going to get murdered.  What makes it even worse is that our temporary players apparently tied one on last night, and are in horrible condition. Generally you don't want to start players who are at less than 95% because of the decline in performance due to fatigue and increased chance of injury. Starting players who are already down to 64% means the ones playing a full match will be in the 30s by the time the game is over.  That went about as expected. On the bright side, we literally have nowhere else to go but up from here. Fleetwood 5-0 Tackleford habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Nov 12, 2013 02:02
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Hmm, thumbnailing the images makes them really hard to read. I'm going to leave them as a normal image tag for now, then go and figure out how to resize them so they're not gigantic, and then come back with more reasonably sized pictures.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:08
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habeasdorkus posted:Hmm, thumbnailing the images makes them really hard to read. I'm going to leave them as a normal image tag for now, then go and figure out how to resize them so they're not gigantic, and then come back with more reasonably sized pictures. As I said, Irfanview than do a resize batch with dimensions being 800 x 600. That will fit in but still be legible.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:11
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I like how, despite being a new goon, you still managed to run four four loving two. FM seems like it'd be up my alley but I can never bring myself to actually give it a shot since I know nothing of soccer besides the fact that I irritated a lot of people by referring to it as soccer & the formations go in numerical order defenders-midfielders-strikers unless you have some convoluted 4-2-1-2-1 thing. Really hoping this LP takes off as the last few have barely made it past the first couple games.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:54
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I didn't know a whole lot about the technical side of soccer before starting to play a couple years ago. I hardly knew anything about league structures outside of the basics of promotion and relegation. It's really made it easier for me to be a fan of the professional sport beyond merely enjoying the international competitions. The images are still slightly hard to read, I'll probably have to reduce my screen resolution somewhat so that they're easier to read in the future. Which is annoying, because there's still a lot of stuff that isn't shown on each screen at 1600x900. If anyone has questions or whatnot, feel free to ask them, i'm going to aim for a couple updates a week. Once I'm past the initial surge of "here's all the important screens in the game and how you use them" things should be able to move at a pretty good clip. And since Football Manager is designed for people to upload match videos directly to YouTube I'll be able to give clips from interesting and important matches once in a whil
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Nov 12, 2013 03:09
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habeasdorkus posted:Also, gently caress agents. Christ I loving hate those bastards. I'm pretty much at the point where I avoid players whose agents look to be troublesome. My last save on FM12 was with Chester, and a good quarter of my first team has the same agent. It's the most annoying thing in the world having to renew contracts with impatient greedy agents. I think in 14 you get the dialogue option to ask a player to ditch their agent? Be picking that up for sure when the January patch hits if so. Anyway, good stuff so far. The images as they are at this moment are perfect for me, and I'm enjoying your write-ups of the mechanics.
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Nov 12, 2013 06:10
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rizzen posted:I think in 14 you get the dialogue option to ask a player to ditch their agent? Be picking that up for sure when the January patch hits if so. It tends to only work if the player has you in favoured personnel, mostly it just pisses the player and the agent off so if you want to buy other players that have him as their agent I'd advise not trying it.
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Nov 12, 2013 09:42
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habeasdorkus posted:The images are still slightly hard to read, I'll probably have to reduce my screen resolution somewhat so that they're easier to read in the future. Which is annoying, because there's still a lot of stuff that isn't shown on each screen at 1600x900. I thought one of the features of FM 2014 was the ability to change font size? I could be wrong, I haven't been following that closely.
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Nov 12, 2013 12:48
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Just in case you are not aware, if you keep the images at the original size and thumbnail them, clicking the blue box (not the image itself) on the thumbnail that shows the dimensions will expand the image to its original size, so there is no loss of information. Personally, I don't have a problem with the images breaking tables as long as you linebreak your text to prevent it running offscreen to the right. That might be a minority opinion though.
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Nov 12, 2013 14:06
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Cart Cam posted:It tends to only work if the player has you in favoured personnel, mostly it just pisses the player and the agent off so if you want to buy other players that have him as their agent I'd advise not trying it. Yeah, I'm looking forward to trying this down the road once my players are good enough to actually have agents. I don't mind agents who are patient, even if they're tough negotiators. It's just massively frustrating to make an initial offer when you don't know what the agent is looking for and have them immediately get huffy and difficult to negotiate with. FM14 has a new negotiations page, I can't tell how much of an improvement it is yet. Reveilled posted:Just in case you are not aware, if you keep the images at the original size and thumbnail them, clicking the blue box (not the image itself) on the thumbnail that shows the dimensions will expand the image to its original size, so there is no loss of information. StoryTime posted:I thought one of the features of FM 2014 was the ability to change font size? I could be wrong, I haven't been following that closely. I'll keep fiddling with it. I'll also start cropping photos for stuff where i've already shown the screen previously, which should reduce the need for resizing. Thanks for the feedback! I should have another update coming up this evening after work. I'd like to get 1-2 more up before Friday, then I'm going to be away for several days.
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Nov 12, 2013 15:56
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Definitely watching this. I had fond memories of the AFC Parmos let's plays of years past, and being someone who is utter trash at FM games, I love watching other people take nobody teams and turning them into something great. Especially fictional ones. Up the Lads! (doesn't have great ring to it. Yet.)
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Nov 12, 2013 16:08
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Chapter the Third: Shut up and take my money! July 16, 2013-July 26, 2013 The day after our thrashing at the hands of Fleetwood I get introduced to the assembled members of the press. Press conferences usually bookend matches and sometimes occur when you bring a new player. The media tends to ask questions about the results of the recent game, the performance of players, strategy, your relationship with opposing players and coaches, and potential future transfers and signings. In this case, they're wondering what I'll do to the staff that was present when I arrived.  “You brute! When are you planning on firing everyone?” “I already did it 35 minutes ago.”  It's generally not a good idea to get on the wrong side of the owners straight off the bat, but there will be times when complaining to the press might help you get something you want, such as new training facilities or a larger transfer budget. Generally you need to be firmly entrenched in your job, which will make it hard for them to just fire you for impertinence.  Can it really be called a press conference if only one reporter shows up? I guess it's understandable, but you'd think we'd at least have some local bloggers who wanted free coffee and danishes. But at least this means we won't be bothered while we try and build our team.  And this is why having your potential transfers leak is a bad thing. I've put contract offers to a dozen or so players, based upon what I knew from my original scout. The problem is that we're a bottom rung team, and players tend to go to the highest level where they can get a job even if that means being a backup instead of a full time player. Moreover, most of them are wanted by other teams who are also offering them contracts.  Board meetings. Football Manager does a great job with verisimilitude here, board meetings in the game are as boring and frustrating as in real life. You can request a meeting with the board more or less whenever you wish, but they won't accept any requests which had been recently denied.  I first try to persuade the board to change their philosophy towards a youth oriented one rather than one of signing high reputation players. This both fits the way I play, and means we wouldn't have a grumpy board when no stars are willing to come play for us. They refuse. I also try to get them to find us a parent club, a team from several leagues above us from whom we can take players on loan.  It takes some convincing, but they agree to it. They also agree to improve our training facilities, which will cost us £1.3m but will be worth it once we start getting players who have a lot of potential upside. We only get to make three requests at a time, and given that the board can reject our wishes they're essentially a poo poo genie.  I've let the game run a bit, and while we still haven't signed any players we've at least got some scouts now. You can assign scouts to watch one league and look for new talent in one region, and under what criteria they should file a report on a player they scout. Since we're currently limited to the UK and Ireland region, there's not much variety there, but I send them off to look for young players with a chance of being excellent or better. This will hopefully find us players who can improve enough to be useful through multiple leagues. More likely it'll result in me finding a lot of players who have no interest playing for us.  You can also select individual players to be scouted via either the search screen or their team's screen. These will get done by whichever scout has some free time. Currently we've got 229 players in the scouting pool, and it'll take several weeks for our five scouts to work up reports on them all. A scout will get more or less work done depending on their determination, motivation, and discipline stats. Most of these players are all on the transfer list at their current teams, which means their team has put them up for sale.  We've also hired a full compliment of coaches. Coaches are rated on a scale from 1 to 5 stars, and unlike players their rating is not compared to other coaches on your staff. Coaches work best when they are only teaching one skill, have them do more than one and their ratings drop quickly. Generally anything above 3 stars is very good for the lower leagues, and you should be aiming for 4 stars minimum when you get to the top league. The goalkeeper coaches have only a 2 star rating at the moment, but that's because they don't have any to train yet.  Figuring out what makes a good coach is a bit of a pain in the rear end, however. Ratings are based upon the interplay of two primary statistics, such as Attacking and Mental for Attacking rating or Attacking and Technique for Shooting rating, as well as their Discipline, Motivation, and Determination scores. I strongly recommend just getting one of the many rating calculators available so you don't have to try and do the math in your head. It's not a lot of fun when you think you've improved your coaching staff, fired the old guy to make room, and then find out that your new, more expensive coach has the same rating as the old guy. The above attributes belong to our new 4.5 star fitness coach, who I've locked up with a very long, very cheap contract as he's good enough to be working in the Premier League.  Beyond setting up your coaches you also determine the practice schedule. I tend towards fitness training during the pre-season and a switch to a balanced schedule during the season, but in this case, I'll be switching over to teamwork since our players are as familiar with each other as the Mighty Ducks were after the recruitment montage. You also have to determine how much time you spend training for each match and familiarizing the team with the tactics you're using. During the pre-season I tend to focus on tactical training heavily as players, like students, tend to forget everything they learned the prior year over summer break. Once they're well trained in a formation, then I scale back significantly on the amount of match training they do. You can also schedule days off before and after games, which is a good idea if you don't want your players to all die of exhaustion by mid-season.  Our first signing is Sam Edwards, a 30 year old fullback who cost us more than he really should have. It's only a 2 year deal, however, and given our budget we could afford to pay much more than we are. We need players, and I can't afford to be picky.  He's not a very good player, but he can play all of the defensive positions competently and can fake it just about everywhere else on the field. He's also going to be our designated throw in man, with a Long Throws stat of 19 he could create some real chances for a goal when we get throw ins on the opponents side of the field. At 30 years old he should still be a couple years away from when his physical attributes go into free-fall, if they do he's going to become awful real quick.  After one week we've only signed one new player. Most of our targets went elsewhere, including the ones who were actually decent. It gives me some schadenfreude to see the guy I had tried to sign as a backup goalkeeper hurt himself immediately after signing elsewhere. Our team is more or less set up except that we don't have players, and I'm starting to get concerned as our next friendly is in a week. It's time to stop trying to find bargains and start throwing money at the problem. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2013 22:20
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Great stuff so far! For the record though, you may want to use the timg tag, as you're still breaking tables. For stuff like press conferences, instead of pasting an entire screenshot, maybe just give us a line-by-line recap typed out? We don't really need to see the whole UI for stuff like that. For simple image editing, try giving Paint.NET a try, as it's free and basic, allowing you to do some stuff like cropping/resizing. I'm loving how informative you're making things though, since it helps make this game a bit less opaque for someone who really wants to like it but can't quite figure it out themselves (like me). Drone fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 22:51
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I'm really loving this. Football Manager always seemed like the sort of game that'd make my brain explode in frustration trying to keep track of stuff, especially since everything I know about soccer I learned from the older Football Manager lp's.
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Nov 14, 2013 23:12
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It makes me a little sad to see the club with so much money but I'm definitely enjoying this so far.
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Nov 14, 2013 23:25
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Drone posted:Great stuff so far! For the record though, you may want to use the timg tag, as you're still breaking tables. For stuff like press conferences, instead of pasting an entire screenshot, maybe just give us a line-by-line recap typed out? We don't really need to see the whole UI for stuff like that. For simple image editing, try giving Paint.NET a try, as it's free and basic, allowing you to do some stuff like cropping/resizing. Yeah, I might just go full tIMG, i've tried cropping but it still ends up with wide screenshots. mfcrocker posted:It makes me a little sad to see the club with so much money but I'm definitely enjoying this so far. I know, I'm tempted to edit the owner so that he sells the team. I literally could not spend 8 million on transfers. I'm probably not going to spend much more than half of the wage budget this season, and that's with 2 of my players earning 1/3rd of the budget. eta: Also, after 2 press conferences the guy from The Non-League Paper already loves me. I'm not sure how that works, but he's already at the point where his relationship towards me is one of "Great Respect." I guess I must have taken him out drinking on the owners dime. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 23:37
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Nice to see this, and I'm enjoying your style and gameplay commentary. All the past FM Let's Plays went for narrative, but I find this gameplay approach much more interesting. It's nice to be able to understand the workings of such a complex game.
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Nov 15, 2013 00:11
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