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[FM13] Academy Leagues (beta)


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Very interesting project. I've thought of doing it myself but since you can customize the youth leagues now i never went that far. In theory should be the same since you have custom competitions running with variable reputations so, if you have a league with the same reputation both in a secondary league or in a youth custom league it should be the same thing. But there's no study or anything like that to prove it, so its a good project to test it.

My advice, if you want to test this in a deeper way, create 2 equal leagues using this 2 systems but with equivalent clubs to see if any of them benefits from any of the systems.

Good luck.

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Very interesting project. I've thought of doing it myself but since you can customize the youth leagues now i never went that far. In theory should be the same since you have custom competitions running with variable reputations so, if you have a league with the same reputation both in a secondary league or in a youth custom league it should be the same thing. But there's no study or anything like that to prove it, so its a good project to test it.

My advice, if you want to test this in a deeper way, create 2 equal leagues using this 2 systems but with equivalent clubs to see if any of them benefits from any of the systems.

Good luck.

Thanks. Those are good suggestions.

This is all still just a theory at the moment but the signs looked promising from a couple of 25 season tests that were run on a slightly different version to this. The older version used B-Teams in the academy leagues but there seemed to be a bug with academy player appearances (they'd be doubled for some reason).

So in this version I've set all the B-Teams to Reserve teams... I'm hoping the team status won't make much difference to the outcome since FM is recognising the academy leagues as competitive matches as opposed to ordinary reserve games / friendlies.

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Just a note on the reserver manager bug: it appears that Sandy Martens (ID #1) is being put in charge of all the reserve teams...

Thanks, hopefully Big Yellow will submit a report for it and upload his saved game for SI. I don't think there's anything I can do in the editor to fix it, unfortunately.

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You can avoid the Sandy Martins "bug" by adding another custom file. Just copy Sandy Martins and delete the original record. The game uses Sandy Martins as a placeholder, because he has ID number 0. If there is no player with that ID the game does not fill-up a vacancy.

Some advice posted in my custom league thread

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First of all great idea.

just to two question:

can i ask you why did you change some colours? (just a curiosity)

the last question:

your advice to use them. Just one file or all the file ...

Some of the team text colours were changed to fix some contrast issues in the default SI database.

All the default SI databases going back to at least FM10 have hundreds of entries in them that have poorly chosen colour schemes for a clubs TEXT name and its background colour ...making the teams name hard to see on the match scoreboard, like this...

steua2.jpg

The only way I've found of fixing them is to change the team text to white (or another lighter colour) in the editor, so the team names are much more visible on the match scoreboard screen, like this.....

steua3.jpg

I've edited about 2000 contrast issues like that since FM11 and have merged those fixes into each subsequent database since FM11.

As for which files to use, well it depends on your computer. My PC can only handle about 5 playable nations before it gets too slow, so I only load the main European leagues and set all the others to view only.

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Been using it for a while, notice the link changed a few days ago when I checked back to see if there's a new update.

Really like the leagues, a great benefit is that if I loan out one of my players and they perform poorly instead of being left to rot at their new club they get put into the academy teams and keep playing.

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I never noticed any difference between B-teams and Reserve teams' player development, but with the B-team bug its impossible to say one way or the other until its been resolved. I think the important thing is the competition they play in, not what type of team is competing in it. Its seems competitive competitions built under the secondary league structure in the editor carry more weight in player development than the default SI made reserve leagues.

The advantages of 4.2 is FM separates Academy appearances from 1st team appearances, so once the bug is fixed you'll be able to see exactly how many games a player has played at academy level, and how many at 1st team level. With reserve teams, academy games and first team games are combined together so you can't tell how many matches a player has played in either competition.

4.2 also has a slightly higher academy rep than 3.2 so in theory should be better for development, but again its all early stages yet and we won't know if there's any significant impact on development until people have played 20+ seasons and are noticing a more challenging game.

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I think this is an AMAZING idea. That said, I'm not sure how the AI picks the academy teams though.

I just started a career as Barcelona to test this, and there's only a few players on my academy team, but like 30 on the B team (10-15 of which will likely never see play), and that might be the reason why the results are similar with the stock database: The AI just doesn't use many players on the reserve team.

A player can easily manually demote players from the B team to the reserve team for development, but I don't know how the AI would work that out. It's probably something that SI should implement from their end, and not something we can handle from an editor change, though I hope I'm wrong.

I don't know if it would help, but it seems like most B teams are treated as a separate club, instead of being added as a direct B team on it's database entry. Maybe that's a reason? Idk.

EDIT: I know it'd probably be a lot of work, but how do you think it would work out eliminating B teams as clubs, and adding them as B team on the main club entry?

I'm thinking something like Barcelona > Barcelona B > Barcelona C (Academy), all under the same entry (as it is now you have Barcelona > Academy on one side, and Barcelona B as a separate club with it's own entry).

Does this make any sense? I'd be more than happy to help test this whole thing. It'd add a LOT of value to the game, because right now, after 5-10 seasons then game just goes to hell, and it'd be more "engaging" to develop young players at our clubs.

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Spain is a difficult one to see how things are working because a lot of Spanish clubs already have B teams and I'm not sure how Spanish AI managers are utilizing their teams. In hindsight I suppose putting the existing B teams into the academy leagues would have worked better than adding extra B teams. If I ever make an update I'll probably try that, but until I have some concrete proof that this whole experiment is benefiting long-term games I doubt I'll spend much more time on it for now.

You and others are more than welcome to take this project further and use the files in anyway you like if you have ideas on what may work better :)

At a guess it'll take 15 - 20 seasons of normal game-play before people find out if the game-world is more competitive for them than it was in previous FMs, and if its working it may be worth exploring it in more depth.

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