enigmatic

Well... it makes a change from people complaining about Youth Rating, I guess.... I assume the actual reason is because setting Turkey as 'developing' would deter the sort of players that actually move to the Super Lig from moving there in game, and setting the richer Czechia/Slovenia as "developed" would make their top tier hoover up players from neighbouring nations. (Less obvious how Poland breaks that pattern, but it's quite international for what is rated as a really poor league offering low wages in game) The ratings aren't supposed to be seen and are used in conjunction with a lot of other figures to do with finances, city attractiveness, reputation, national transfer preferences etc (and whilst that message isn't great, a second tier Turk quite possibly would turn down a move because nothing he's heard about Czechia makes him want to live there. Footballers are more interested in 'infrastructure' like foreign language schools, shiny new villas and stadia than good roads and industry and more Czechs move to Turkey to play football than vice versa)

Nah mate, you only won those because it was scripted...

Sub 6.7 ratings for strikers when they don't score or assist is completely normal and a tendency to play killer balls (I.e lose the ball more) is only going to increase that

Ironically, it's because the press isn't as aggressive and effective as it can be. The equivalent graphs that show the trigger press "much more often" has barely any impact on "distance covered"...

I think the answer to the the chicken or egg situation is probably in your second paragraph. I'd prefer it if international management had more features and less incoherent national vision, I'd settle for youth international management having fewer bugs, but at the end of the day lots of the stuff people play FM for is necessarily absent, and when I do try international management it's because I don't care about that stuff or would rather avoid micromanagement altogether. You actually can watch games every week if you want, but I bet not many people do...

International management is low priority because not many people do it as much more than an afterthought I actually like the "national vision" idea and the current training setup would translate quite well to international management even if it was a simple cohesion Vs fitness tradeoff, but at the end of the day it's low priority because not many people play it as their main game and those who do are mostly doing it to avoid stuff like dynamics etc...

The point wasn't that perfection or photorealism is easy, the point was that it's not difficult to find a broad agreement that basic stuff like higher poly models and more naturalistic colours, effects like fog make a better looking game in the current one. Whereas nobody actually agrees what "better tactical control" or a "more realistic transfer market" actually means, and this stuff has had a lot more attention from version to version and patch to patch than stuff like the stadium art direction, no, it's not like they haven't been trying. I do agree that higher poly models mean more scope for transitions between animations and collisions looking awkward, but the bar isn't high because it's got to beat FM24 not FIFA (and I'm sure they'll control available camera angles and zooms carefully.) (FWIW there are - according to SI - four decision making calculations per player per second, plus obviously real-time ball physics and movement executed according to those decisions. tbh the number of decisions per second not being particularly large probably makes it harder to align animations with real time ball physics and collisions)

This argument works better in reverse. Getting a 3D engine which is cosmetically better than the current one is trivially easy with the right resources, and getting better motion captured animations is realistically achievable with today's technology. On the other hand ensuring "the games foundations were achieved flawlessly or near enough" is an impossible goal even with infinite development resource and processing power, because nobody agrees what perfect (or even "a bit better" is). If we look at the most regular requests for improvements on the forums, people want: The transfer market to involve AI clubs building their squads smartly without loads of superfluous players and pointless signings, but also for them to compete aggressively for players and unwanted players to find buyers as soon as offered out at a bargain price. Also for it not to be too easy to mop up all the wonderkids from poorer leagues but their clubs shouldn't make unrealistically high fee demands and those players shouldn't want to stay at smaller clubs on lower wages or demand regular starts before they're good enough to deserve them. Tactics should be easier to learn but also much more flexible but also more difficult not to exploit that flexibility to destroy the AI, and clubs should exactly hit their real world levels playing football that's recognisably their style but also adapt to your tactical changes to be harder to beat and copy the most successful tactics and use their players' individual characteristics more effectively, and the effectiveness of stuff like gegenpressing should be much more dependent on attributes but also the game shouldn't overrate physical attributes or work rate. Overall it should play more like real world football and be harder but also play more like the particularly easy and unrealistic FM17... So the choice of what to expend extra resources on improving is between "make a 3D engine using the same tech everyone else does" or "make it squarer but also more circular". Then you've got to take into account "Better 3D" sells extra copies to pay back it's extra development costs in numbers which "Even GrouchyForumUser agrees this incarnation of the transfer market plays better" wouldn't do...

I guess the question you'd have to ask yourself is, would you have reloaded if you won the first time and then didn't win after the crash? The AI wont be upset either way

Inverted Defence Triangle will probably be a player role in FM25 tbf looking forward to playing a Zombie in between my Ramdeuters as well

yeah, @Jimbokav1971 has the answer. Although it's not ideal, because as I understand it, they're not interested list excludes them from searches rather than just stopping scouts wasting time fully scouting a player you already know enough about and arent prioritising

I'm not sure "set up a game balanced for long term gameplay" falls into the 'joy of discovery' thing A more generally I think SI's approach to keeping what a lot of stuff actually means obscure has the opposite effect: people want to know what a feature does and end up finding out from a third party site that tells them not to worry about it because they can download this tactic that breaks the match engine instead...

Fair enough I'd be the first person to agree SI should put some of this stuff in a manual. I just see a lot of people very convinced that SI is fixing results (usually against them!) by forcing one side to score to match their win probability rather than actually simulating the whole match, and some of them really don't like being told otherwise

No. The tactical changes logic is calculating that the team with a man down will go a bit more defensive and (if not losing by a small margin) waste lots of time, and the team with an extra man will go more attacking. Then the ME plays it out in exactly the same way as before. Which has been explained dozens of times as individually making decisions for each player based on attributes and tactics several times a second whilst updating their positions on the pitch or touches of the ball accordingly. A consequence of this is that an attacking team against a defensive team which is lacking an out ball to the forward will create a lot more final third pressure situations, many of which will be set pieces.