Quick Q's about hidden players/attributes

hi guys, i completed a season with Man City. finished 3rd. but i only enabled the 4 english leagues + australian league. even many english players attributes in the lower leagues were hidden along with australian players. and overseas teams e.g france belgium only had 1 or 2 players with proper attributes, the rest were masked. i prefer to utilise younger players in the reserves, so i need overseas french/belgian leagues to show all this. do i enable this in the custom database, but is it a matter of adding leagues for play or adding full rosters of nations. cheers

any 1 have any thoughts on this? please!

Hi there.

You're confounding two issues.

First, attribute masking: you can turn attribute masking off in the game Options/Preferences screen; that will ensure that you can see all attributes for all players. If you prefer to leave attribute masking on, then your scouts' familiarity with the nation in question govern how many/few players you have unmasked. For Australia, for example, hiring an Australian-nationality scout will help, and assigning him to continuously scout Australia will help reveal specific players so that fewer of them are masked.

Second, gray players. It sounds like you used a Small database. In a Small DB game, inactive leagues will typically only have a few players who are "real"; every other player will be grayed out, as you describe for France. As you've found, that's usually fine for a single season, but doesn't work so well if you're aiming for a twenty-season career game.

"Fixing" this would require starting a new game. I recommend making the top division of the seven largest nations "Playable": Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. That guarantees more regens in that nation, as well as a more-active AI for teams in that nation. In other words, Barcelona is going to be much more likely to come after top young talent than they would if Spain were inactive. That will keep the Champions League much more competitive than you would find it after ten seasons with the major nations inactive.

In addition, you might make "Playable" the top division from a few favorite nations. From your post, it sounds like you would want Australia and Belgium active, maybe Holland, Portugal, and Scotland as well.

You can also bump up the number of real players simply by using a larger DB: Normal DB or Large DB .. but you don't get the more-active-AI benefit.

The downside, of course, is that the more players in your DB and the more active leagues, the slower your game will be each time you hit Continue - as the game has more AI decisions to make for each of those teams and players.