How much obsessing is necessary to achieve success?

I've played CM/FM for around 7/8 years now, and I've always been average at the game. I've only ever won about 5 titles (league or cup) all the time I've played. I've been away from the forums for a few months and I thought this would be a good topic to come back with.

I've always played in quite a casual way, using my common sense mostly, and never really obsessing over the little details that much. I have a very good football knowledge but in FM things don't always turn out how you would imagine.

I'm very good at achieving respectable positions with lower mid-table teams, but with really good teams I never acheive their title-winning potential.

I would like people to suggest tips for me on how much attention to detail I should pay and whether or not it will pay off.

For example at the moment I don't really do training that much as the players never seem to improve no matter what I do, and I develop pretty basic tactics but I do change the basic things like Captain, corner/free kick takers, target men, etc.

i used to play like yourself wit the earlier versions where you could get away with it but since coming back to FM07 just a few days ago i have so far got my game time up to about 7 or 8 hours and have only just played my 3rd game i think. i also now watch the game, albeit at a fairly fast pace where in the past i just used to watch the key moments.

I have made a tactic i am fairly happy with so far so i am not making major changes each game but there are a few here and there. Also i am spending quite a lot of time selecting my staff and scouts out as well as making some logical decisions for the training. So as i am in pre season i made a fitness training that was heavy in fitness and strength, medium in tactics and light in everything else but GK. Then i'll make up some others for more specific positions to help the players improve during the year.

I have to say that while in earlier versions of CM and FM you could kind of play it easy without taking too much time, the newer versions certainly benifit from the added attention to detail.

I don't think the key is 'obsessing', but rather being able to 'read' the game. Common sense will do wonders in real life, but games are built on rules, and understanding these rules is the trick. Experimenting to the end of finding a systematic way of playing has always worked for me, in every singleplayer game actually. ^^

About 3-4 hours daily.

It would just be nice to leave traing to the Assistant and actually have it reap rewards instead of making nearly all your players worse no matter which coaches you have!!!

It would just be nice to leave traing to the Assistant and actually have it reap rewards instead of making nearly all your players worse no matter which coaches you have!!!

That is one of the things that can take a lot of time, is setting up the training, but I think obsessing is maybe a little strong in your choice of words, although to be fair a lot of people on here are obsessive about the game, myself included, IMO I don't think obesssion is needed for success rather attention to detail, once these details, such as getting 7* coaches etc, can be identified, they can be sorted relatively quickly and things will begin to fall into place,

Plus as Nerion said, understanding how the game works in fundemental to success, once the dynamics of the game are comprehended, it becomes relatively easy to work out how to "beat the system", but that said, you can, like I'm sure many people on here do, delve a bit too deep in the workings and get lost in obsession

I used 'obsessing' so everyone knew what I meant. It was meant as paying attention to the different workings of the game.

The game is somewhat not very friendly to casual gamers and it can not be played like most of the other games ( play good = win ) , if you do not have time or interest to go deep into it you better move to something else.

In my humble opinion it would be cool if FM had difficulty settings.

There are times ( a few weeks after each other mostly) when I'm really too busy to be playing FM more than 1 or 2 hours a day. In my experience it's useless to play FM just for 1 hour because you can't really do much in that time as it is at the moment. Therefore it would be very cool if you could also have an easy difficult setting for when you don't have the time to go to deeply into the tweaking of tactics and training and such. So I could have 2 save games: 1 with an easy difficulty setting for when I'm busy, and 1 with a hard difficulty setting for when I really have the time to play FM intensely.

That's what other football manager games are for! I've no idea how you could add difficulty levels to FM other than through using the Assistant Manager more to give you feedback, but since Assistant Managers are so appalling currently in FM that probably wouldn't make things any easier! My assistant manager could probably start World War III if I leave him to his own devices for a few weeks!

difficulty levels are bad. Think of it as fm hard cm and fifa medium and premier manager is easy. I laughed my head off when m brother (21) said premier manager was the best. Premier manage's match engine is gay. You can't choose to watch highlights you have to ramp it up to full speed and watch the blobs go crazy.

I don't see the point in difficulty levels, with each new game I start as one of the top teams and I consider that as easy mode, from there I work the game out etc and gradually build up to playing the game on hard with a low level European team.