FM10 Editor / Season Length question

A question I have : I assume that one of the basic aspects of the new League editor will be determining how many fixtures there are in a season.

Obviously this is determined by (number of teams-1) x (number of rounds), for number of league fixtures anyway.

So I assume there will be a simple way to modify the number of rounds?

The reason I ask, is that I am quite a meticulous manager, and don't have a groundbreakingly-fast supercomputer, and also like to play with a decent number of leagues and large database.

Because of this, it generally takes me a long time - at least 1 or 2 real-life months - to complete an in-game season, which can easily rack up over 60 games a season.

An idea I had was to, say, modify all English leagues so that there is only one round - each team only plays each other once. This would theoretically halve the time it takes to complete a season.

Firstly: I can only guess this is as simple as changing one field in the editor for each league?

Secondly: Is this likely to have game-breaking implications? (i.e. ruining player fitness levels, or throwing the league out of whack with other continental leagues).

Of course, the other method to reduce number of fixtures - and therefore the amount of time it takes to complete a season - would be to reduce the number of teams in the league, which I figure is also relatively straightforward to do in the editor.

Just wanted some feedback on this idea. I'm sure that the new editor is going to give an endless array of exciting and innovative opportunities to users that will provide new ways of playing the game. I can't wait!

I have a similar feeling to you about the amount of games per season. Unfortunately, with the new editor, we won't be able to just edit existing leagues, we have to recreate them from scratch. It does look fairly straight-forward though, so don't be too daunted by that.

My solution is to recreate the entire English league system, making them into divisions of 16 teams. That is 30 games per season which I think is a better number, considering how congested the fixture list can get these days.

These are my assumptions, but I think as long as the season start and end dates are similar to how they were, the fixtures will be spread out as evenly as possible, therefore it shouldn't have any detrimental effect on continental competitions. You're right to be thinking that if you go even lower than 16 teams per division, you could run the risk of fixtures being too far apart and not ideal conditions for your players fitness-wise, but I think you'd have to be quite drastic to get to that level and I don't think many would anyway, as it would damage the competitiveness of the league if you were down to 14 league games per season.

I'm sure with a bit of experimentation you'll find an amount that suits you perfectly.

I'm trialling a 20-division league (no reserves or youth comps) with rubbish teams, destined to crash out in the first round of cups. As a result there are very few mid-week games; each game is 7 days apart.

I'm finding it works well with my tiny squad - after filling a bench I have 6 kids left over. With a bigger squad there would be fitness issues and disgruntled players. So that's my tip: few games = small squad.