Thoughts and Prayers

[martin willoughby]

I'm praying that this game has many iterations over the coming years, each one an improvement on the previous in many ways. Not an FM type 'update', but every few years a new game that builds on the previous one, with minor changes and updates as they do now.

The current release is not perfect, but what game is? it is though an impressive start.

My thoughts on the game can be divided into, with apologies to Sergio Leone, The Good, The irritating, and The Ugly. Feel free to add or comment on the below.

[martin willoughby]

The Good
- Speed: A season can be played to a satisfactory end in a few hours or a day even with a fair amount of micromanagement.
- Staff: Having to have a certain number of staff at a certain level to get the best our of your club and players. This is one of the best systems I've ever seen in a football management game.
- Stadium Building: Wonderful, if only from the aesthetic side of things
- Training Facilities: Love this part. Seeing the results of your building efforts and knowing that it has a direct effect on your players is a superb idea.
- Manager Skills: Excellent addition, including the 'further education'.
- Shares In The Club: Great way to raise extra money. [Could do with the board just supplying money sometimes]
- Player Skills: Allowing some leeway on what a player learns is a great idea.
- The Paid Streaker: Please animate him.
- Foreign Youth Academies: Fantastic idea.
- Playing Levels: Being able to take some of the complexity and hardness out of the game makes it more fun for casual players like myself.
- Player Evaluations: Brilliant idea.

[martin willoughby]

The Irritating
- Transfers: AI teams get far better deals than human players.
- Manager Contract: Not being able to resign. Very few options when taking a job.
- Player Negotiations: The negotiation points and negotiation rounds.
- Buying a house: Only options are a flat or a mansion on the club training grounds.
- Shares In The Club: The only irritating aspect is not being able to leave it entirely in the hands of the finance department.
- Manager's Health: No matter how I do the first week back at work, I'm always nearly comatose by the end of it. Even if I only take part in a few things. And what's with the 'Do Sport?' Unnecessary distraction.
- Player's's Fitness: Too tired, too quickly. Then they take two months to recover from injury unless I put the whole team on a fitness regime.
- Player skills: Not being able top remove existing ones so they can retrain in another one
- Player Levels: The sudden increase when they rise an extra star, instead of them rising an extra star when they hit a certain level.
- Two/Three/Four Hour Time Slots: Why 2 hours to tell someone they're going into the reserves or to the first team?
- Staff: Very few suggestions coming from them
- Player Evaluations: There aren't any. I'd like to know what the coaches think of the players at all levels in the club.
- Youth Players Disappearing: Once they leave a club they are not held within the game. For those that leave the bigger clubs it would be useful to have them available for lower league clubs.
- End Of Season: No matter that I keep training going throughout June, come July 1st, everything drops 10-20%.Also, why can't I start on 1st July instead of having to wait a few days till the end of the week?
- More Funding From Board: The increases are based as a precentage of what's currently available, rather than a lump sum from the bank account.
- Youth Squad Visibility: Not being able to see anbother team's youth squad. It's not as if they're in a prison.
- Youth Academy: A youth academy in my own town will not let me lift the players into my own youth teams.
- Green Credentials: The way it's applied is irritating. I can see the in-game benefit of the PR, both positive and negative, yet there is little leeway to reduce dependence on air travel or to cut back the investment in air travel. As for the 100,000, no small club can get it and it's too small an amount to make a difference to a big club that can afford £50m for a fusion reactor. How about having a local firm/government install solar generators or wind turbines on the training ground to help remedy this?
- Club Colours: Only being able to change the kit, not the colours. I want all my teams to play in Purple.
- Training Statuses: Not all of them are visible, like penalties and tackling, yet we have separate training options for them.
- Trophies: Lower league trophies are ignored in the museum, though for many small teams they are objects of pride.
- Rookie Of The Month: Why just the top leagues?
- Action Points: Only really useful at the start of the season to get more money from the board.
- Line Up: AI drops random players into a spot. If there is no player in a spot on the bench, no option to put a player. can only ask Assistant to create bench, then adjust it.
- Roads/Paths/Parking: As they are more for aesthetics than anything else, why do we have to pay for them?
- Substitutions: Players argue far too much with the reasons for being subbed. I want them fresh for the next game and they argue about it.

[martin willoughby]

The Ugly
- Player Wages: What on God's green Earth is going on here. 17 year olds with 5 bronze stars want 200,000 per year when going to the reserve team, more if they have any silver stars. Staff aren't much better. One solution could be to have a sporting director handle incoming and outgoing transfers once the manager has decided to buy/sell/loan them. As the AI seems to get better deals than the player this could be the way forward, expecially for those of us who aren't that interested in this side of the game.
- Training: Too many options. It needs to be thinned down. It could be a simple as Defence, Control, Attack, Set Pieces. For some that would take the fun out of the game. For others it would help make good use of the coaches and their specialities. Maybe have staff who specialise in those areas.
- Ultras: They have no effect, seemingly, except to paitn messages on walls.
- The screen layout: Too much on the pages.
- Investments: They count as a negative on the balance sheet. Why?

[martin willoughby]

Possible Additions
- Corporate Takeovers. Not common, but it does happen.
- Allow staff to go on courses to improve
- Allow senior players to take the UEFA badges so they can join the club staff after retirement or become a manager themselves. Maybe let them train the youth every so often if they're not playing themselves.