Brentford Alan

just to add another pkm for this as I seem to have had the same issue just now. I'd put in my order for 3 subs just before Pontus Jansson was (rightly ) given his marching orders for a second yellow in the 78th minute. When the tactics menu popped back up some subs were shown on the pitch but it let me make 2 or 3 more but no 'team talk'. I played on a bit then went back into tactics where I could finally make 1 sub but was then told I had no more left beyond that despite no players having come off at all. Tried again a few game minutes later with the same result. Brentford v Sheff Utd.pkm

Interesting, during the beta I ran some unemployed soak tests and Brentford were always mid-table or flirting with relegation and sacking Thomas Frank around christmas. The only significant difference between Brentford's last beta database and release database was an increase in TF's board confidence to decrease the occurances of him being sacked and a swapping of his favoured formations to match the changes made irl after our indifferent start to the campaign. Will have to run some more soaks pre-winter update

Josh McEachran, about to be released by Brentford. Predicted to be a future England star when coming through the ranks at Chelsea but well on a downward spiral now and it's hard to see where his career goes after 4 seasons of producing nothing with us.

He thinks I'm a dickhead.

I'd mentally list him as a nephew if it was my save, assuming 'uncle' isn't available.

In steam go to the library, right click on FM18 and select properties, go to the local files tab and then select verify local files. Once its run it should start the patch.

from a researchers POV I would say it's extremely unlikely. Whilst the vast majority of attributes remain the same each year, elements such as the weighting effect of attributes to CA can change, each edition of the game sees new info added like player debuts etc. Ultimately a researcher would have to update the 'new' FM19 data set, as well as the 'old' FM18 data set, and however many other 'old' versions were being kept updated for example. That's not to say it's impossible for us to do, but I would have thought the extra time spent on top of the current workload we're fitting in around real life jobs etc would just simply be too much for many researchers (let alone SI staff). Purely my own opinion of course, and I say it from the viewpoint of someone who would actually like to see yearly data update options with a new full FM version (and FIFA/PES for that matter) every 3 years if it were financially viable for SI, which I don't believe it would be.

Really good idea that. It could also be interesting to allow the game to generate a history for you to randomise things a bit. I think it would lead to more press questions on how you feel about your 'old' team's performance, or going up against them with your new team which would freshen that area of the game up a little as well.

Yes, it's simple enough. No PA limit anymore, very straight forward. So now the limit of a players CA (assuming Raptor and yourself are not suggesting every player has the opportunity to hit a 200 CA, no matter how remote?) is determined by several growth factors which may or may not be flexible in terms of their own growth. If those growth factors, no matter how many you use, are set by researchers as a hard limit (ie Natural Talent 15, Ambition 10 etc) that cannot be improved as a player ages you have still effectively set a PA that cannot be beaten, whether it's a simple viewable figure like now or one calculated by the game without being shown. If those growth factors can be improved (ie Natural Talent can go from 12 to 20, Ambition can go 8 to 20) as a player ages where (other than injuries) does the limitation come from that stops an unrealistic number of players becoming world class once managers have worked out the 'correct' formula of training, game time and tutoring?

Sorry, I don't think you've really explained in your proposal how the game would stop an unrealistic amount of players becoming world class, unless a high percentage of youngsters receive career limiting injuries at some point. And there simply has to be something limiting player growth across the board to stop the game being ridiculously easy, whether it's one attribute such as PA or several 'growth' attributes combining to create a CA limit. If the parameters such as professionalism, determination, ambition etc that could be used to limit CA growth have no limit themselves as per your Vardy example, surely it's only a matter of farming high natural talent players and working out the best mix of training/game time/tutoring to exploit the open ended nature of the system and thus flooding the game (or at least the team controlled by the player if the AI managers are somehow prevented from doing the same) with too many world class players? I think trying to allow for one 16 year old 'Vardy' to happen from the lower reaches of the football pyramid per season (for example) by removing PA you are risking making it far too easy for the vast number of young players above where he was at the time in terms of ability and mentality to also make it to the level he's now at, so long as they avoid injury. If those attributes are limited from the start, your Vardy example doesn't happen in game as no researcher worth their salt is giving him the natural talent, or determination, or ambition at the start of his career, based on how he acted in real life at that time, that could possibly foresee his eventual real life rise, as pointed out above.

The FIFA/PES comparison doesn't work for me either. Both of those games, and admittedly I have more experience with FIFA, have stagnated since roughly the 2009 versions with PES improving a bit since then. FIFA is the exact same game with more emphasis on FUT and the financial benefits EA sees from it. Career mode gets an artificial make over every couple of years which is usually just a case of bringing back a feature removed previously. They still haven't fixed the stadium naming bug or hopeless scheduling (I had 4 games in a week the other day ffs!). No effort has been made to improve computer AI - it still uses the same crap handicaps from 09 to make the game seem more 'difficult' at World Class and Legendary such as players refusing to jump for headers and speed boosts for AI defenders, and that's with a new engine since 17 I believe? There's more but this isn't the thread for it Needless to say I won't be buying it again for a long, long time if ever. Compare FM09 to FM18 in context to FIFA/PES 09 and FIFA/PES 18. Healthy competition can stagnate games possibly more than having no competition at all!

My, final on this subject, reply in bold.

We get what you are trying to say. What you still fail to appreciate is putting in figures for attributes that affect a players growth will still create a hard limit whether it's set as PA or whether it's calculated by the game. It's simply how the game runs, for example 2 players rated; Player A Growth/Talent 14 Professionalism 15 Adaptability 15 Player B Growth/Talent 10 Professionalism 10 Adaptability 11 Player B would still never achieve a peak CA the same as Player A could achieve because his/her attributes will limit how much they can possibly grow. That's not to say Player B would be without use of course, just he could never hit the same level as Player A assuming both were utilised correctly and given the same opportunities to progress. So you are, whether you like it or not, creating a hard limit that each player cannot progress above when entering the attributes, perhaps with a slightly larger range of possibilities compared to now. Unless of course you are suggesting leaving all the various attributes determining player growth to be randomised by the game each time a save is started? But even then a CA limit would still be created for each player when the game assigns them attribute ratings!

My reply is in bold.

But by setting a natural talent/growth attribute on a 1-20 scale you'd still be limiting the maximum PA (to use the 'current' term) in blocks of 10 (ie 20 natural talent = max 200, 19 = 190, 15 = 150 and so on) - with other factors only serving to decrease the maximum CA a player could reach. And there has to be an upper limit to CA, the game will calculate an upper ceiling based on the numbers put in to the attributes mentioned above, whether you can physically see or set that number (as you can now with PA) or not, it's one of the fundamental elements of the staff database. Unless you are saying someone with a 10 growth rating could still exceed a CA of, say, 140, just by staying injury free and playing regularly at the top level? In which case if I start a game as Man Utd, buy 11 or so League 1/2 random youngsters aged 16 with high professionalism (who in the current FM would have been assigned a low PA if the researchers do not consider them likely to play at high levels) and low injury proneness, train them with top class coaches and facilities and be guaranteed to have at least 8 of them become world class players if I start feeding them into the first team regularly aged 18 or 19, which just isn't realistic in the slightest.