[The Realism Thread]

This is really great advice. Thanks to both George_84 and Brother Ben.

I'm about to be fired from my first job -- Spennymoor Town, in the Vanarama North division -- so I feel that I am well on my way!

[The Realism Thread]

18 minutes ago, Hovis Dexter said:

I would agree with @Platinum when he said "Now player search only includes players in your scouting package/have been individually scouted which is realistic imo."

If you limit your search players to Scouting>>Players>>Scouted, Scouting>>Players>>Analysed, and Scouting>>Players>>Recent and do not use Scouting>>Players>>Search you will only find players who have been found by either your scouts or analysts.

Right. That makes complete sense. Thanks.

[The Realism Thread]

41 minutes ago, Platinum said:

Everyone has their way of playing so theirs no right or wrong way. I'll give you my opinions though.

 

1. I dont use this real but it makes sense to me. I would think the rule is not necessary when the club becomes professional AND the player has a full time contract. You can be a professional club before going into League 2.

2. That scouting rule is now outdated and no longer makes the game more realistic, but instead it just makes the game harder. The rule is a hangover from back when FM allowed players to search for any player in the game and find loads of info on them. Now player search only includes players in your scouting package/have been individually scouted which is realistic imo.

I don't think the crucial issue is whether players are full-time, but whether scouts are. But yes, I agree. If the staff are full-time employees, you should be able to send them to wherever you can afford and your scouting range allows.

However, I still need guidance about packages and the player search function. Junkhead's original post in this thread made no mention of scouting packages, only about aiming to sign players that his scouts had already turned up. If that statement is taken in the strictest sense, then scouting packages would be off the table, right? And again, I'm not asking to be told what to do, but only whether scouting packages seem realistic.

[The Realism Thread]

After playing CM and FM for many years, I I am now a convert to lower-league play with non-numerical attributes, and am having a complete blast with it. And this is such an interesting thread -- thanks for all the great advice, such as this recent stuff about the "1-hour drive" rule.

So here are two questions about scouting. First, assuming that I do manage eventually to claw my way into becoming a fully professional team in, say, League 2 in England, surely by then the 1-hour rule ceases to be relevant, right? What then should be considered a realistic limit on scouting range? Does the game itself handle that decently by that point? In my opinion, it does: I have played many times before where one cannot go beyond the UK and Ireland as a standard range until making it to the Championship, or perhaps to League 1. To me, that feels right.

A second question concerns scouting packages. If a realistic approach to the game forbids using player search to just power through all possible players, what about using scouting packages? Don't those just increase what's available in player searches, and if that's correct, then they too would seem gamey and unrealistic, right? I ask here not because I feel that I need to be told what to do to play the game "correctly," but really just to make sure that I understand what scouting packages deliver.

Thanks

[[FM21][SKIN] NoStars+Attributes21 *V2.2* (Updated 17th July 21)]

3 minutes ago, Tyburn said:

I belive I just left it as default.

If you want to have a play around with changing it open settings/NoStars+Attributes21 settings and scroll down to <!-- Profile attribute colours -->. Change the rgb numbers in this line - <colour name="unknown attribute background" value="rgb(32,33,35)"/>

I haven't tested it but this should change the background colour of unscouted attributes.

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll give it a go.

[[FM21][SKIN] NoStars+Attributes21 *V2.2* (Updated 17th July 21)]

I just downloaded this skin - thanks ever so much for all your work on it. After 15 or more years of fairly conventional play, I'm looking forward to this new and perplexing way into the game.

At the very top of the thread, you said that you use white, yellow, green and blue for the attribute levels and use black for unscouted attributes. How do you choose a color for unscouted attributes? The skin preferences don't present that as an option. Or is that just a default requiring no choice?

[How to Create an Effective Short-Term Scouting Focus]

Thanks for the answer. In most cases I do something similar to what you describe, but for once I wanted to try doing it in a less labor-intensive way. That still doesn't answer why the short-term focus, even one that allows two months at high intensity, doesn't turn up any results. So maybe yhe answer is that that method simply never should be used.

[How to Create an Effective Short-Term Scouting Focus]

I have an observation and a question. For change of pace in my current game, I have decided to let my chief scout take over assignments -- disappointingly, they're all "general," which is not exactly what I intended from him! Or maybe that's how it's supposed to go. We have a worldwide scouting package and a diversity of scouts and coaches that give me pretty good, but not perfect, knowledge of almost all the countries that could be useful. Perhaps that's why general assignments are chosen by the Chief Scout, because there are already so many players to sort through. I've got  fairly large number of playable leagues, for example, which makes the database comparatively large. I wish I knew the logic dictating all this a little better.

Meanwhile, once in a while I do need to set a short-term focus to find a player for a particular position and role. Yet these never seem to go very well, even if I give set the availability to "all, the priority to "high" and give them two months to finish. I might as well just give them the time off entirely, because they rarely seem to come up with any recommendations. Why is that? Any ideas? I'm not exactly demanding that they always come up with 5-star superstuds. So what gives?

 

Thanks

[Do backroom staff have any limits to their work capacity?]

Thanks for the help. I wasn't asking about coaches, for whom the workload does seem to affect their ability to carry out their jobs.

I agree that if there are no limits to the number of tasks you can assign your GM, there ought to be. A good GM makes the Technical Director and Loan Manager completely superfluous.

[Do backroom staff have any limits to their work capacity?]

Here's a situation that one encounters once in a while:

At the moment my club -- Tranmere Rovers, just promoted to the Premier League -- has an outstanding General Manager who, among other things, has very high ratings for judging staff ability and negotiating. In this circumstance it only makes sense to use him to hire staff for my U-18 and U-23 teams and save money on a Technical Director, right? My GM also has excellent player-spotting skills, so I send him out on scouting runs to make the final call on potential players to be signed as well.

So the obvious question here is, does the guy ever get tired? He certainly shows no signs of slowing down at a little club like Tranmere, but what if I were in charge of Real Madrid or another giant organization? Would the stress show up there?