FM light anyone?

First of all, I love FM09. It's the only proper manager SIMULATION, and I'm sure it will be even better after the second patch.

It is hard, but hey, management is. As for a real life manager (like Arsene Wenger at the moment) all the time spent doesn't guarantee you success. When I heard Liverpool drew both West Ham and Fulham consecutively 0-0, IRL!, I thought "that's FM!". Man UTD lost to West Ham 1-0 home and away, lost to Man City home and away. Barcelona lost 1-0 away to Almeria, Real lost 2-0 to the same team. Bayern lost 2-5 at home to Werder! Valencias last season was a nightmare even though they've got the likes of David Villa & Silva! There are many more axamples. On all the occasions I've heard of these kind of fates I've more and more accepted that consistency should be hard fought for, and not a certainty for bigger teams. Who would watch Champions League if Barca always won using 4-2-3-1 wondertactic.tac.

On FM09, I've played 4 seasons with ManUtd so far, and my only real piece of silverware is the Euro Cup in 2011, although I was in the CL final a year earlier. In the league I've finished: 2nd (84p), 4th (79p), 3rd (87p), 3rd (77p). Many of the "wondermakers" on these forums will say I'm crap, but at least I've not reloaded one single game. Best performance: probably 4-0 against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in the CL semis. Lost the final to Arsenal (of course). The biggest problem for me is I'm drawing too many away games in PL against average teams, and sometimes concede way to many. The question I've been asking myself the most times is "should I design a 4-5-1 with more restricted mentality, deep defensive line and maybe counter attack for those games and the hard CL matches, or will this disrupt the players and make them perform less?" When Man utd lost 3-0 away to Milan Sir Alex was playing too "naive". The season after he managed to get ManU play more italian and get 0-0 away to Barca. I think he played 4-5-1 on both occations, so probably he changed some mentality sliders, and set the defensive line to deep I've heard that the season after the CL win in 1999, all the big teams they faced had worked out the way United played, and Sir Alex has admitted that he should have changed. Isn't that just FM? the AI learns..

I won't lie, sometimes I feel that I want to be more successful and want my reasonably good team to perform.. reasonably good! I think SI could make some money from making a "FM light version". This could be done in two ways:

1. Make all tactical settings in FM09 POSSIBLY managed by the assistant, that includes: Formation, Sliders, Defensive line, oppostion instructions, everything. You should be able to let the assistant control whatever tactic setting you want, and what you want to control yourself, you should be able to control.

2. CM 03/04 was great, and easy! Add an up-to-date database, make it FASTER, and there you've got many hours of great fun for those Ronald Koemans who just don't get it right.

For every major step in the Match engine they kind off limit our choices. Here's a few screenies I just made in CM 01/02 of Wibble wobble.

I really feel that for the next year they shouldn't add any more crappy features we have to do over and over again until we are about to fall asleep.

Many people have been quite annoyed with FM09's tactical setup aswell. Instead of all these sliders look back at CM 01/02 or 03/04 and let us design the tactics like we used to.

Let us set where we want the players to be placed in any given situation. (they may not make it there if you mess it up, but with this kind of tactical choses most people would be able to tune their tactics like they want.

I leave you with screenshots, for those who forgot and for those who never saw it, but most of all to the devs who forgot or lost their focus.

Yellow square represent where the ball is and you could set up where you wanted each player depending on the situation.

Overview:

http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/8466/overviewbk1.jpg

Wibble (with ball) :

http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/9265/wibble1ab4.jpg

Wobble (without ball) :

http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/9797/wobble1zf0.jpg

Crazy wobble just to show the freedom:

http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/470/wibblewobblebf1.jpg

Team instructions:

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/4416/teaminstog6.jpg

I still think that With/Without the ball was so much easier then endlessly playing with sliders and small details in team and player instructions. If you read the Tactics Forum, people posting in there that the best way to get winning tactics is to watch a few games in FULL to get a measure of what needs tweaking.

Now apart from the people who have no job or can play FM while working (by the way how do I get one of those jobs?), who really wants to or has the time to watch a game of FM for 90 mins so they can actually get some enjoyment out of it later on?

I do think SI need to look into a way of making the game more accessable to people, and by accessable I dont mean dumb it down, just make it more fun to play. Yes we dont have to set the price of food and arrange advertising boards etc like "other" games, but I want to be able to sit down and play FM and enjoy it without feeling i have to put in 20 hrs of work before I can actually start playing.

OH and before anyone thinks "oh he just critical because he is s*** at the game!" I'm currently in my 1st season with Middlesbrough, (it has taken me until now to get to Feb '09) and I'm sat 14th in the league, so no I'm not winning every trophy going, but equally am not un-happy....in fact I'm actually enjoying this more than previous versions. I just feel certain things could be made "easier" for the casual player.

Please discuss this in the Training and Tactics forum. I geuss you can get more information on this issue there then you can get in the General discussion part.