"Stockport Town FC Challenge" PRE-DISCUSSION THREAD.

Hello, friends!

Some of you may know me from The Ultimate Football Manager Challenge thread or from my attempts at the Dafuge challenge and the San Marino challenge.

I am in the process of creating an FM16 challenge now that a Level 11 database has been released by fellow SI Forums user Dan BHTFC, and I've decided to base this challenge around the club Stockport Town FC!

I am doing some edits (approved by the creator) to the club to provide a very good playing experience and challenge for the users here, and I've got a few questions or am in search of some advice to really make our challenge a great one!

The main area I am looking for advice currently is in the area of facilities. This club has access to some extremely nice ones, as they are a home club at a "Sports Village" and their ground and facilities underwent a £9M renovation just in 2005. They are partners with the GB Football Academy and boast that they have the same number and type of pitches as FC Barcelona. Here are some links:

http://gbfootballacademy.co.uk/facilities/ <- facilities available

http://gbfootballacademy.co.uk/our-coaches/ <- coaches of their partner academy

https://www.lifeleisure.net/enterprise/StockportSportsVillage <- more facilities information

I'm just curious as to what other potential challengers would think would be a good level of rating for these facilities.

The challenge will be plenty hard enough as the ground, while having a 3G pitch as the stadium ground, won't have a ton in upkeep or replacement expenses, it has a less than 200 seated capacity, which is fine because they won't draw that many at first.

I am going to be treating the club as a fan-owned entity in the save, so you won't have to worry about takeovers, and I am going to give a one-time stipend of £100,000 (This is the same that FC United of Manchester had in the bank when they entered the league at this point) so that your club at least has some money to give you the freedom to pursue different ways of taking it forward.

The squads are NOT correct, but at this level of start, does it matter? Obviously, everything that is normally playable and there in the SI database is there, but if not having the real players at a Step 6 club bothers you, this isn't going to be the challenge for you.

I'm solely gauging interest in this challenge and leaving it to potential challenges for advice at this point, so I will be making a final challenge thread once we begin, so please feel free to comment about how you think the challenge should be designed -- I'm looking for community input. We've been speaking about it on Twitter a great deal already, but I'm constructing the challenge for THIS FORUM so I want YOUR INPUT!

Give us a shout!

How would you rate those linked facilities?

Do you want the £100K or not?

Is there any problem with the club staying fan-owned? I thought it would be a nice thing for the challenge.

Any other input, please feel free! Thank you for reading and hopefully participating!

SO, am I to understand that no one else other than me has any interest at all in a Level 10 (Step 6) challenge?

Kind of soul crushing, but over 80 of you have viewed this now and no one can even drop some input??

I'd probably say you need some more variant factors to this - so more questions. If it was to be a challenge, maybe training and youth facilities are at the lowest and the stadium is tiny, Sunday league experience manager and no budget whatsoever?

Just another view here. What would be interesting in a level 10 thread is rather than a challenge, you have sides in the same league at the lowest level and have them at the same reputation but variable factors.

For example, one side has a high youth rating, one side has a ton of money, one side has a superstar, one side has amazing training facilities etc and see how they get on. It'd be a good test of the AI that far down as I've seen a lot of people say that it is pretty easy until you hit what would be the playable leagues.

Just an opinion anyway - it's good to see a focus on the county leagues and below.

I would think the challenge would be taking a newly-constructed club (Stockport Town F.C. was formed in 2014 and this is their inaugural season in the NWC Division One) all the way to the Prem and CL glory!

And that was the reasoning behind using a single club and having all challengers use that club -- everyone starts from a common point, and we see who gets on best.

I've heard the same talk on Twitter though, that there may not be enough differentiation in the players below the initially playable leagues that there wouldn't be a strong difficulty until you reached Level 6. That's one of the reasons I did the discussion thread, I had figured a lot more people would be interested in it, because going from Level 10 to the Prem is obviously a ridiculous accomplishment.

But, it doesn't appear there is very much interest so I'll probably just wind up scrapping the idea and just keep going on the same old challenges we all play year after year.

I think a lot of people might be put off just because you'd have to download something to play it. That, and the fact that it's very similar to most 'Road to Glory' challenges, just starting further down. SuperDan!'s idea does sound interesting though.

But, it doesn't appear there is very much interest so I'll probably just wind up scrapping the idea and just keep going on the same old challenges we all play year after year.

The problem there is is that all challenges are similar in stature anyway so it's hard to develop anything substantially different. There's also a lot of longstanding challenges which have garnered high levels of reputations version after version - this keeps people coming back and that's why they're popular. It's great to see new ideas being created though.

With something like this using these levels, you'd want to get people challenging to get Man Utd unplayable or something like that (without using tactics like not playing a goalkeeper).

SoSolidSnake is right though, it's harder to engage people in something that requires extra effort such as downloading a unique database - simplicity is key!

SoSolidSnake is right though, it's harder to engage people in something that requires extra effort such as downloading a unique database - simplicity is key!

Well, you would only have to download the save file. I haven't finalized it yet (I've actually made contact with the club for more information and have already gotten a response) but the creator indicates that all the would be required would be to download a created save (similar to the saves people create with certain clubs in Dafuge, etc) and he doesn't think the download of his database is required as the usable portion is already in the save file.

I totally get your point about the challenges being very similar, that's why I actually thought there would be a lot more interest. Yes, its essentially a Dafuge style save, but I figured people would be "turned on" by the difficulty of having to advance from Step 6 on what is already a hard challenge starting as a Dafuge save!

I have just been kicking this idea around for a while because I thought it would give something back to the community that brings me a ton of pleasure in the game, and also provide some nice content for my blog.

Once I get the info I requested from Stockport Town FC, I will probably write up the challenge and make the starting save available just because it won't take me a ton of time to do, but I'm starting different saves to play in the meantime.

I *DO* appreciate your input greatly, though -- thank you very much!

While you guys are here, how would you rate those facilities linked in the original post? That would be a great help to me if you could take the time to view them and give a snippet of your thoughts! Thanks again!