[Better options/behavior when holidaying while unemployed/applying for jobs]

Just some stuff that I noticed/have been thinking about, as I always start a new game unemployed and holiday through until most of the way through the first season.  (This used to be because I didn't want to take over a team in crisis (esp. if starting with low badges/experience) and it would give me a full pre-season.  Now that I'm more interested in data-driven ways of playing, there's the extra help of having a full season of data.)

1.  A return from holiday should be triggered when a team asks you for backroom changes.  At the moment, if you have an interview and keep holidaying (because you think you have no prayer of getting the job), you'll holiday through that inbox item, not make any changes, and only come out of holiday for the contract negotiations.  Yes, staff will still accept mutual termination, etc., but it's just easier to do it via that screen.  This one I'd almost class as a bug.

2. More generally, it would be nice to have more return from holiday options connected with job applications. I like to consider carefully whether I want to even apply for a job, and I always get nervous about the "We see you've applied for a lot of jobs" item in the interview. If you could automatically return from holiday when a new job becomes available, that would be great.  Ideally there'd be a suite of options that you could tweak, like only if reputation of club is above/below X, the league/country/region, etc.

3.  It would maybe partially (but not totally) overlap with the previous point, but it would also be nice to have similar sorts of options also under "Apply for jobs at" if you wanted to move through a little faster.  Some of that is probably covered by "Apply for jobs at higher/lower division clubs", but I'm never quite clear what that means (e.g., top 2 divisions?), and the top division of the Tiawanese Leave is different from the top division of La Liga.  And I assume that "Apply for jobs at higher reputation clubs" means reputation relative to *you*, rather than absolute reputation, but that's potentially not clear.  If you just had a box with different options you could tick (perhaps created dynamically based on the leagues you have loaded) that would be nice.  (I notice that a couple of years ago a request was reviewed about being able to apply for jobs at specific terms. Maybe that's a little much.)

4.  It *looks* like you can't apply for both club and international jobs simultaneously while on holiday.  (At least 'national teams' is separate on the drop down menu.  The 'any' option is only 'any clubs' (and I'm not sure I've ever been approached by a national team while holidaying, but I couldn't swear to it).) It feels like you should be able to do that (and if 'any clubs' means both clubs and national teams, that item should probably just be retitled.) 

 

[The Unofficially Official Training and Mentoring Guide]

5 minutes ago, Seb Wassell said:

Honestly, there's isn't a precise answer to this. Even running the exact same training twice over two identical saves would not yield the exact same results.

Yeah, I'm totally sure that's true.  I was thinking more along the lines of "yeah, making normal assumptions about lack of injuries, reasonable game time, decent facilities, morale, etc. etc. etc. you should be expecting to normally see some improvement after X amount of time (a few weeks/a few months/a season) and if you don't then you might be doing something wrong."

How about this as a simpler, more factual question:  Is there any relationship between individual Additional Focus training and weekly team training in terms of attribute increase?  Or are they just totally separate?  In other words, does Additional Focus training just add whatever (probability of) increase to the attributes being trained and weekly team training does the same (according to the percentages assigned to the different units)?  Or do you 'get a bonus' if you're not just training off on your own but actually in addition working (say practicing free kicks) with other people?  Like working with the team helps you solidify the individual training that you're doing so it beds in better?  I can imagine that either way could be considered 'realistic'.

[The Unofficially Official Training and Mentoring Guide]

Not really quite sure how to ask this question simply, but in broad brush strokes, making whatever assumptions about facilities and coaching rating are appropriate, about how long or in what way should you train before you should expect to see attribute increases, particularly in the context of some of the more niche attributes?  Or, put another way sort of, how does Additional Focus training synergize with weekly team training? 

Here's the situation I'm thinking about:  Let's say I've got a free-kick taker who's OK, but I would like to see improve a little bit.  (Let's call it two points in game terms, just to pick some value.)  So I want him to work on his free-kick taking, but I probably don't want to have that come at the expense of any other significant training during the year. 

So obviously in terms of mechanisms, I've got the individual Additional Focus training I could assign, plus I've got specific free-kick-taking modules that I could insert into the weekly schedule.  How (approximately) should I be thinking about this?  The individual Additional Focus training doesn't take any time out of the broader team schedule, but is this useless or significantly less effective if you don't have sessions in the weekly training schedule to complement it or reinforce it?  Do I need to have several sessions per week to see any benefit, so one isn't enough?  And, in broad terms, how long should I expect to have to keep this specific training up? 

Obviously everything relates to everything else, and everything really depends on your facilities and coaches, but some kind of broad sense of how things work would be really helpful. 

[The Unofficially Official Training and Mentoring Guide]

Is there a way to automate training intensity based on something other than (or in addition to) condition, like the physio recommendation or injury risk?  It doesn't seem like it, but I could easily be missing something.

"Automatic" just looks at player condition as you have it set up under Training -> Rest, but I've got a case now of a player whose  condition is fine (94%), but the physio recommendation is "half intensity" (I assume because he's coming back from injury). 

I've also got my default set up as "Double Intensity" when condition is above 90% (since at some point I think the physio seemed to be suggesting that, or I had complaints that there was too little training, or the training intensity for players seemed to always be on 'light', which seemed inappropriate for mid-season -- I forget which one), but some players are at high risk for injury (I think because of the number of matches I've had recently).

Is there an alternative to micro-managing this?  And what's the best thing to do if you don't want to micro-manage?  Just stick everyone on "Normal Intensity" and not worry about the complaints?  And is that effect on morale the better trade-off vs. potential injuries? 

[The Unofficially Official Training and Mentoring Guide]

2 hours ago, Seb Wassell said:

I take exception to that. 

We worked hard and closely with the community to produce this, before the game has released. We also put out a brief guide to accompany the Beta.

With the vast majority of copies of FM now purchased and played digitally, and people taking to the internet for their information rather than a manual, I believe this is a great way for us to both connect with and help inform the amazing community FM has around it.

With the introduction of the in-game inductions this year we have taken a step towards better informing new/returning Users from within the gameworld itself, if you have suggestions on how we can continue to improve this please do let us know in the appropriate place and we'll look into it.

Striking a balance between providing you guys with all the information you need but specifically not telling you how to "win" is something I am passionate about.

Yeah, of course.  I completely agree, and I certainly didn't mean to give the impression by talking about the community "doing this" that I meant in any way to downplay your input, Seb, or the SI input more generally in the context of this particular guide, which, to emphasize, I think is fantastic and exactly the right balance in terms of useful information all in one place without just being a victory guide.

Some of it is definitely just a philosophical difference of opinion.  Bitter old people like me think that "people taking to the internet for their information" is not always a good thing.  Maybe that's because we have less time because we're going to die soon.  I'm really glad that, as you say, we're here on the day before release with this information, rather than it being the result of six months, eight months, a year of people backing-and-forthing on this forum and others, having arguments, falling out, needing to weed out wrong guesses/misinformation about basic stuff about how things interact, etc.  (I'm thinking in particular of the whole Team Shape discussion, which naturally I finally felt like I was beginning to understand )  And, you're absolutely right Seb that things are better than they have been (the in-game introductions, etc.).  That's a very fair point. 

Anyway, back to the thread....

[The Unofficially Official Training and Mentoring Guide]

So, just to clarify something that I think came up in one of the other training threads, there aren't any Goalkeeper training attributes that you can set as a specific focus.  So in order to see any substantial attribute increases for your goalkeepers, you should be setting up goalkeeper training during the week?  The various modules (attack, defense, etc.) will obviously have some goalkeeper training, but is that enough?  I don't think any of the default schedules that I've seen so far use specific goalkeeper training modules. 

[The Unofficially Official Training and Mentoring Guide]

This is absolutely fantastic guys!  Many thanks for all your hard work in putting this together!

However, it has kind of triggered a rant which I need to get off my chest, so apologies in advance. 

[rant]

Fundamentally, it shouldn't have been the community having to do this.

Maybe I'm just a bitter old man who remembers a time when everything didn't suck, but in my day, any computer game worth playing came with a manual the size of War and Peace.  It told you everything that you needed to know about how the game worked, how the various parts interrelated, etc. etc.  It didn't tell you how to win the game, but it did ultimately explain everything, and give you the tools to work out how you wanted to approach things.  And if you ever had a question like "How does this aspect of this part of the game influence or relate to this other part?", it was there somewhere.

Now sure in an age of physical distribution, where you've got to actually ship physical discs and physical books and stuff, that sort of thing gets very expensive very quickly.  But there's no longer an excuse for that now.  And I think SI has been grossly derelict for years in terms of providing a proper manual for the game.  (I'm not the only person to make that point of course.)

And clearly it seems like there's a blind spot or something.  I think it was the first Twitch stream, when Miles was there with Curtis and Tom, and Miles was telling this story of somebody playing the Alpha build and saying to him "Gosh, my players are getting tired and injured in training all the time.  What am I doing wrong?".  Miles replies "Well, do you have all three training sessions every day filled up?" and the guy says "yeah".  Then Miles says something like "Well, if you were a professional footballer, you wouldn't want to have all that time filled up?  Wouldn't that be excessive?" and the person replies "Yeah, I guess so."

That really got me mad.  The correct answer to that last question is "I don't have a clue, Miles.  I'm not a professional footballer.  I'm playing a game that involves interacting with professional footballers, and it's your job to explain to me how to do that, given the way you've chosen to simulate it."  And if people are making 'basic' mistakes like that, then something's not right.

Now don't get me wrong, I think the new training module looks fantastic, and it's great that it's more realistic and detailed, and I'm looking forward to playing around with it.  And I'm glad that Seb has taken so much time to explain how things work so that you guys can put it together and we're not spending months guessing and arguing and falling out over various things.  But for a game this detailed, there really should be one, official document, written by people who know how the game works, that explains how the simulated world works in enough detail to get to grips with it without guessing.  In my day, it was called a manual.

[Edit:  For clarity, I'm not asking for a Dungeons & Dragons style tables of numbers, so that you can game things.  Just the kind of detailed information that's the guys have put together above.]

[/rant]

[The FM Show Season 2, Episode 2 - Feature Reveal]

Well, I guess the presentation maybe seems mildly less tone-deaf than previous years. Though I did almost throw up when one of the first things they discussed was how excited they were about the consistency of the FM branding throughout the game. I guarantee that absolutely no one who doesn't have a financial stake in SI gives a toss about the consistency of the FM branding.  And I still couldn't make it through 5 minutes of the video before I had to give up. At least it got me here, which is presumably what people wanted.

New features seem nice though. Looking forward to getting to grips with the new tactics creator.