Using the FM engine to answer some of the "big" questions

This is a question for the developers of football manager

Has it occured to you to use the simulation engine to answer some of the big questions which come up from time to time regarding the England football team-

1 ) Would the england team be more successful if we had 4 less teams in the premier league?

2 ) Would a winter break make a difference to England's international tournament performances?

3 ) Should the league cup be dropped?

Just that kind of stuff -

I imagine you could run seasons in "managerless" mode (computer runs the whole league), and then use monte-carlo analysis to identify probably outcomes and results. You could also generate publicity for the game, since the media are the ones always asking these sorts of questions!

I like england team so much

If the FA wanted this type of information, they could approach SI on a commercial basis, I suppose. I am sure that the SI staff have more to do with trying to improve the game to consider this type of time consuming analysis

If the FA wanted this kind of information they could just get Roy to play around on his laptop when not actually managing England =}.

While it sounds like a cool thing to do, if you've worked with computational simulations (can't vouch for every case of course) you know that they can be really error prone even for a moderately complex case compared to real life. I would say that FM has nowhere reached the level of maturity yet for the AI to gather any meaningful data. On a positive note they use Simcity for city planning don't they so what do I know?

Are you sure you don't have vested interests to put the blame on SI if things go bad for England .

If the FA wanted this type of information, they could approach SI on a commercial basis, I suppose. I am sure that the SI staff have more to do with trying to improve the game to consider this type of time consuming analysis

I would think that a "press release" built around this sort of simulation would probably be good PR for the game, making the time spent on it worthwhile

While it sounds like a cool thing to do, if you've worked with computational simulations (can't vouch for every case of course) you know that they can be really error prone even for a moderately complex case compared to real life.

I work in software engineering for simulators. People use them all the time for making meaningful judgements about everything from the stock market to the weather.

Given that FM has been in development for absolutely ages, it is probably one of the best "football simulations" out there - and run in a monte carlo analysis, it could probably throw up something interesting.

The great thing about computer simulations is that they take up a computers time, not a persons! It might take a few weeks to run it, but it would be interesting to see the results...

I don't know if they'd get any meaningful results on the kind of questions there - there might well be a statistically measurable change of some sort due to the way FM handles reputations, finances, and the like, but it would only tell you about FM's model - I can't see it telling you anything meaningful about real football. Might be interesting as a gimmick but nothing more. Some things translate well from FM to real football, but this doesn't look like one of them.

For all of those questions the answer would be yes. The main reason why England don't play very well at major tournaments is quite often due to fatigue. FM isn't needed, just common sense.