Changing the difficulty of the game

This thread is not for those who say "oh no the game is soooo hard, it's unplayable blah blah blah"... c'mon!!

I represent the (probably large number) of people who find the game easy and this tread is about how to make the game harder.

I've tried all sorts of ways to play the game, turning a lower league club into a european super-club, tried the popular manager route, the evil hairdrier route and i have to say that the game is basically easy.

This is, until you start a network game with a fellow "FM-is-easy" devotee. Besides the bugs (don't get me started on the network game bugs) it's somehow harder, much harder.

Now, I have personally managed millwall right into the champions league and out the other end with a shiny trophy but as soon as theres another human manager somewhere in the universe things get a little different, try 4 years in League one, then a real slog of a season in the championship, all the while my friend, Mr. three-goals-conceded-all-season-with-United is slogging it out fighting with the bottom 7 in league one as Leeds.

So whats different? I bet the guys at SI would say nothing but i decided to make this little experiment to find out for myself. The theory is that once you add another human into the world, the game engine loses its bias and makes things a little more challenging.

And for those who think this post has gone on long enough, the experiment has proven (to me, at least) that adding an extra manager to the world makes things harder, and more interesting. So you can do that (if you don't have any friends willing to ruin their lives and their keyboards playing through the seasons with you, just add a manager to the game starting unemployed and holidaying indefinitely).

Basically, what I did is loaded a simple game as Man City. All the variables were the same to start with. Past experience, everything blah blah. I made no signings, no training and didn't change anything. Just to be clear, nothing was altered by me other than the name of the man city manager, get it? Good lets move on...

Then, I played the first 5 games of a season. 30 times i started this new setup (oh i loaded up in december to cut out the pre-season). Each time i noted down match events and the impressions of players on the press conferences that my assistant took.

Now then, for 10 of these starts it was just me in the universe. And the season seemed to start well, the average score per game was 2.3-1.6 to me, i won on average 3 out of 5 (each time the games were, everton (H), aston villa (H), sunderland (a), fulham (h) and Manchester united (a))

For 10 of the other games i had a manager called "first name last name" on an indefinite holiday while i repeated the same again. Now then you have to bear in mind all of the wonderful variables in FM, like injuries and player reactions but baring this uncontrollable variation in mind the average score was 1.8-0.6 against me!!, i won an average 2 out of 5 and whats more, interestingly my players seemed much more serious in their reactions to press conferences. I can't prove this since i didn't record the actual severity of the player reactions in my first 10 starts.

The final 10 starts were using a network connection for the second manager, and he was still on permanent holiday. The same thing happened, average result was a defeat of around 0-1, i won 2 out of 5 in most cases and i had one and half times more injuries (granted most were simple 2-3days incidents).

So, this satisfies me that to increase the difficulty of the game itself, add another manager!

Any else convinced? More importantly have i just spent my sunday evening testing something that is already common knowledge!!!!

-D

Based on previous versions of FM I'm not convinced - I always have a solo game going and a multiplayer game with 2 friends, and I am usually pretty successful in both and haven't noticed the AI improving.

Will test this on FM11 as I am currently halfway through the first season and top with Liverpool, while we have also just started a multiplayer game and I am managing Liverpool in that as well. I had a poor start to the season but using different tactics to my solo game. So, I will switch to the same tactic and see what happens.

The difficulty level is determined by where you start your game and your starting reputation.

IMO FM is not the sort of game that requires difficulty levels. How could it possibly work? If you select easy does that mean you have unlimited transfer budget? The AI lose more matches? They are silly ideas that ruin the point of the game imo.

Improved AI is all that is required to keep long term saves challenging and realistic. AI squad building must improve.

I really don't understand any of this :/

I have noticed though that a 2 player game will tend to react more realistcally in the transfer market if you dont do transfers in the first window in FM10. Dont know about difficulty but the game is always livelier with 2

I must just say that i don't think the AI gets any cleverer or harder. I think that what happens is that the game is somehow biased towards the human player... if i had to guess why it would be because the Ai is not "taught" to use the features like a human is, i'm fairly sure that if you were able to read the messages of an AI then it would be full of upset player messages and the like.

Perhaps it is also something to do with the stats that AI managers have vs the ones for humans. I used to be frustrated at the thought that i can't use myself as a coach at a lower league side where other managers had coaching stats (and so i assumed they would take some training sessions) but now i think that the manager stats for humans go some way to determining success. I think that what basically happens during a multiplayer game is that the game can no longer favour just one team (that of the human) when looking at transfers/results so the game naturally evens things out.

One of the biggest changes in multiplayer vs. single player is that when a custom tactic is used it more often than not bombs. unless the team is built around playing that tactic, and i should say that most of the experience i have of this is from FM08 and FM10.

So, all i'm saying is that the game becomes more balanced and less biased, and of course having another Human to play against just adds massive extra depths... i can't wait until I have the ability to use my workplace servers to host huge 20 player network games (this should happen in january since i personally run the servers there ;P)