What a difference a playable league makes

I usually play in the Spanish or the English leagues, but with FM11 I decided to start a career on the Chilean league. I started a game with all American (north and south) leagues as "view only" and the European leagues as playable. The game was enjoyable but after a while I noticed my scouts never sent any reports in, and any player I could find would basically laugh when asked to join my team. I played about 3 seasons like that.

Then, I decided to start a new game, managing the same club in Chile, but this time with all American leagues selected as playable. And wow! The game-world just came alive. I'm getting agent offers, scout reports all over the place, have signed tons of promising South American players. It's such a huge difference. I had never realized how much was lost with the view-only leagues, since when managing in Europe most players are available anyways.

So to anyone starting a career as a manager in a distant place of the Earth, sacrifice a bit of game-speed, but discover a truly amazing gaming experience.

By the way, loving FM11 so far. Been playing it so much more than the previous years, which I also liked. Congrats to SI for an awesome game.

You're right, if you are going for a career game selecting as many leagues as possible is a must, just be aware that game speed degrades as time goes on

You're right, if you are going for a career game selecting as many leagues as possible is a must, just be aware that game speed degrades as time goes on

That's true. My game has slowed down as I've progressed a bit, but at least for me it's totally worth it. If in FM11 SI added dynamic league reputations, maybe for FM12 they could add the option to activate additional leagues you want after you've started a game. That would be quite amazing.

Theres a big problem with activating leagues during the game, if you have a solution to this do tell SI.

Say you're managing in the Norwegian league and you don't have others loaded, you look at the Slovenian league for example theres going to be maybe 2 or 3 teams with most of their players being real and the others with the odd few players.

In order to make this league playable everyone would have to be a real player.

How do you suddenly generate a bunch of real players of the right sort of quality in a way that won't skew the gameworld?

Suddenly theres going to be a whole lot of transfers for the new players, some of which will obviously be pretty good. The newly active clubs will also be busy buying in players to make their teams, you can't just give them all youth players that would leave a strange youth league for many years.

Theres a big problem with activating leagues during the game, if you have a solution to this do tell SI.

Say you're managing in the Norwegian league and you don't have others loaded, you look at the Slovenian league for example theres going to be maybe 2 or 3 teams with most of their players being real and the others with the odd few players.

In order to make this league playable everyone would have to be a real player.

How do you suddenly generate a bunch of real players of the right sort of quality in a way that won't skew the gameworld?

Suddenly theres going to be a whole lot of transfers for the new players, some of which will obviously be pretty good. The newly active clubs will also be busy buying in players to make their teams, you can't just give them all youth players that would leave a strange youth league for many years.

I understand, but I don't see why to make the league playable every player would have to be real. A solution would be something like: when you "activate" a league mid-game, FM waits until the end of the season and then populates that league with made up players to make up for all the missing players. This could be done by adding made up players of all ages in order to constitute a database similar to the real one in terms of talent, but with fake players.

Thus, the league would be playable, even if the players are not real.

By real there I really meant, not grey. The problem is your method still skews the gameworld a lot.

You know this new league is added, you know its going to contain some good players so you can get a headstart scouting it. AI teams will of course join in raiding it for the perfect players for their team. Say there weren't many good left wingers around, suddenly you've created a whole bunch and everyone has a great left winger. One team may have spent a fortune because it was such a rare commodity but all of a sudden its not.

Maybe a solution to this would be to create players for the club you are managing only. The first few seasons the other clubs in the newly created league would have mostly greyed out players, but with the addition of newgens every year they would gradually be filled up. Not a perfect solution of course, but at least in that way you could decide whether playing like that would be something you would like to do. Another solution would be to allow players to add leagues during the game, but these leagues only becoming playable after a number of seasons when a sufficient amount of newgens had been added to them.

That's true. My game has slowed down as I've progressed a bit, but at least for me it's totally worth it. If in FM11 SI added dynamic league reputations, maybe for FM12 they could add the option to activate additional leagues you want after you've started a game. That would be quite amazing.

This would definitely be an amazing option, activating / deactivating leagues

By real there I really meant, not grey. The problem is your method still skews the gameworld a lot.

You know this new league is added, you know its going to contain some good players so you can get a headstart scouting it. AI teams will of course join in raiding it for the perfect players for their team. Say there weren't many good left wingers around, suddenly you've created a whole bunch and everyone has a great left winger. One team may have spent a fortune because it was such a rare commodity but all of a sudden its not.

I don't see the problem with that really. as long as the AI (who to be honest has a head start on you at the very beginning of the game in terms of knowing talneted players from all I've seen - talk about "setting up manager shortlists") is smart enough to recongnize that this league has more players, you won'T have too much options to sign the best out of them withough being challenged. I terms of balancing I would not be too cocerned as this is not really different to me compared to activating the league from the get go.

I don't see the problem with that really. as long as the AI (who to be honest has a head start on you at the very beginning of the game in terms of knowing talneted players from all I've seen - talk about "setting up manager shortlists") is smart enough to recongnize that this league has more players, you won'T have too much options to sign the best out of them withough being challenged. I terms of balancing I would not be too cocerned as this is not really different to me compared to activating the league from the get go.

Exactly. I don't see the difference in activating a league from the start or activating it later on. Both choices make more players available. When you start a game with 10 leagues, and then start another one with 11 leagues, you don't see all AI teams unrealistically raiding that extra league. It's not like AI teams think "oh, there's another league available now, I'll go buy all the players I can get". I really don't see the problem with this, as long as you don't mind playing with the fake added players.

If adding an extra league later on "adds a lot of left wingers" and that is a problem, why doesn't adding that extra league from the start create the same problem? I just don't see where the problem would be, except maybe for the programmers in having to create a whole new part of the game to make this work.