Grez

Nothing that I'm aware of, although I've never looked up ways to cheat so if there was anything I probably wouldn't know. The host can definitely cheat through the use of an editor, but the other players don't have that option. What I would say is there's a lot unethical things that you can do that isn't necessarily "cheating" but is still a massive advantage that some people might take advantage of. For example looking up wonderkid lists or online player stats to help with transfers, pushing transfer debt to ridiculous limits, downloading optimised premade tactics, deliberately unsettling opponents players before important matches etc. But in terms of actual cheating I can't think of anything.

Don't think so. Haven't played a multiplayer since last year's game, but even on that version when we had a player disconnect and have to rejoin they'd have to spectate, and the score continued from what it was when they left. I would assume the current version does the same.

I suspect there's little desire from SI to increase difficulty. The game is almost certainly balanced around new players who don't know how to play yet, and I really don't blame SI for that. The worst possible outcome for SI is a new player picking up the game for free during their end of year promotion, losing every game, getting fired, and then never coming back - so these players need to be protected and made to feel like they're doing well so that they keep coming back. I think the issue is not that the game is too easy, it's that there's only one difficulty level. The current difficulty is absolutely fine for new players, or for players who just want to play out a fantasy, but it's not fine for experienced players who want a challenge. I don't think you can ever cater to everybody with only one difficulty level. One thing I disagree with is that AI is the problem. The AI has flaws, but that's not what sets the difficulty. In reality this is a numbers game - It's wages, transfer fees and budgets. It's club reputations, team cohesion and tactical familiarity. It's player attributes, morale and condition - it's all numbers - so as such the difficulty can be changed by adjusting the numbers. Want a slightly harder game? Make player-managed clubs slightly worse at all of these aspects - Imagine if your player interactions resulted in slightly worse morale, your training was slightly less effective, your team cohesion dropped more from new signings, your players demand more wages, your players play as if they have lower attributes, your fatigue rises faster and condition drops quicker etc - There's dozens of scenarios that are decided by comparing and incrementing numbers, so if you apply a difficulty modifier to these calculations you modify the difficulty. No complicated AI changes, no changes to the way the game flows, no need to alienate new players - just an optional modifier on a few numbers that would allow infinite difficulty levels to keep everybody entertained.

It's always happened to an extent, I've had AI managers complain and had players recalled on previous versions of FM due to players being in the incorrect position or role, or just due to their playing time. Whether it happens more or less this year I don't know though. To be honest I don't mind it though, because I would do exactly the same. It's one of the reasons I dislike loaning players to the AI - they often train players badly, play them out of position etc - I'd recall them too. I wish we could set stronger rules for loans, for example sending a player out with a "Suggested individual training plan", or at least see what individual training a player is being given.

Yeah I've had a look at adding debt before and it could definitely give you a tricky start. I figured once you get past the initial debt you're just going back into the normal flow of things though, and I was looking for something that adds a more permanent challenge to the save (which is why I looked at chairmen attributes/resources). I guess if you made the loan payments persist long term that would make it a more permanent problem though. That gives me an interesting idea - adding debt repayments that increase every year, so even though you're growing and improving the club every year, the debt repayments are increasing too. It would be a race between how quickly you can improve the club and raise money vs how quickly you fall into administration due to the ever-increasing debt. I like the sound of this for a save idea, it'll just be hard to know what level to set the debt payments at so that they're not irrelevant, but also not impossible to deal with.

Ah yeah I meant 20 interference, my mistake! Custom board objectives could be interesting, I'll have to take a look at that too. Thanks for the suggestion!

How do I create the worst possible chairman? Once the official pre-game editor is released for FM24 I'm looking at creating a challenge save where I give my club the worst possible chairman, and give the other teams in the league a perfect chairman, hopefully creating a save where the league is hard to climb due to the mismatch in club finances. A chairman has 4 attributes Resources Patience Interference Business Resources, Patience and Interference seem fairly straightforward - putting them all at 1 should give me a poor chairman who likes to interfere and fires me at the first sign of failure, but I'm not entirely sure what "Business" does. Does 1 Business mean we'll be poorer as a club due to less sponsorship/merchandising sales? Does 20 Business mean he runs the club like a business rather than a football club - so it doesn't let me invest in players or put the club into any debt? I suspect setting it to 1 is probably the correct move, I Just want to be sure I'm not misunderstanding what the attribute does. Also - is there anything else I should consider when editing the club/board members? Cheers

You're allowed 25 players, BUT.. 4 have to be trained at Rangers 4 more have to be trained in Scotland (any club, including Rangers) 2 have to be goalkeepers So because you only have 5 players who were trained in Scotland, the remaining 3 slots in your squad can ONLY be filled by players who were trained in Scotland. Because you only have 2 players trained at Rangers, 2 of those 3 players must be players trained at Rangers. Because Tom Lawrence was trained in England from 15-21 he's not eligible, so the squad is considered full. If you don't have enough players to fill the home-grown slots you just have to leave them empty, which is why it complains when you try to add Tom Lawrence. You have to place extra value on home-grown players. It's worth specifically scouting for home-grown players and keeping hold of them, even if they're only average squad players. Fortunately for you most good Scottish players come from either Celtic or Rangers so there will be a lot of decent options out there. I recently did a save at St Mirren and had a tough time finding anybody at all!

Sounds like Oostende is correct then. I just thought it was worth mentioning when I saw multiple clubs falling into administration. Do we know if the Aspire Academy are looking to sell Eupen too? It feels a little weird that they allow the club to go into administration so easily in-game given it has been a part of the Qatari football project - we all know Qatar can easily afford to cover the debts if they want to. I'm sure the debt is correct if their financial documents say so, it just feels more likely that they'd bail out the club rather than letting it fall into administration - unless you know something about them looking to end that partnership.

Hi OlivierL, The issue I've seen is slightly different but does affect at least a couple of clubs in Belgium that I'm aware of. I can explain what happens: Oostende and Eupen both start with large bank loans (£5-10m+, which is a lot for Belgium) and large chairman loans. The bank loans are set up to be paid over 1 year only, which they can't afford. The repayments of these bank loans cause these clubs to go into £5-10m+ of debt during their first season, which makes it almost inevitable they enter administration. The administration emails/news items then state that the clubs are in £40-50m+ of debt because the chairman loans are included in the total figure. I suspect that the loan terms are set up incorrectly and should be paid over a longer, more manageable term, but I'm not an expert on these clubs irl finances. Cheers, Grez

Anyone else seeing multiple clubs go into administration? Not sure if it's a bug because I don't know enough about Belgian football, maybe these clubs are actually in financial trouble, but it seems very suspicous because I've almost never seen clubs go into administration on FM before. Oostende went into admin after 1 season with £38m of debt. Google does suggest they're in some trouble - but administration so quickly, and such a large amount of debt? Eupen seems very suspicious - they actually made a profit this season in game and their costs were only a couple of million in total, but they're in administration with over £55m of debt after only 1 season. Google suggests they're owned by Qataris after having some debt issues around a decade ago - so it doesn't really add up for them to be in such big trouble. Any Belgian football experts know anything about these clubs finances?

Yeah that would be a bit of a challenge, but it's not impossible. You could continue basing the newgens on real squads, but change the values a lot more when they're converted to newgens. Randomise the age, randomise the hidden stats, increase/decrease CA/PA randomly by up to 10% or so, maybe pick a random player template - so instead of having an Andy Robertson clone, maybe you start with Robertson but he becomes 23yo, his CA drops by 10% but his PA increases by 7%, his hidden attributes become completely random, and he could stay at left-back but becomes a No-nonsense Full Back instead of whatever he is now. So you end up with a team of players that has a similar balance of positions to the real life squads, and a similar overall CA/PA level, but the players feel a lot less predictable. Some players become better, some become worse, some get older or younger, some change roles slightly - But overall it should balance out pretty well and feel much more like a random database than it does now Instead of basing each player on a real player, look at the average CA/PA etc of the real squad, and then generate completely new players based on that. You would probably give the team a randomly generated manager first, and then give it 2 players per position for that managers preferred formation, plus a few youth prospects. So if for example Liverpool's real squad had an average CA of 150, and an average PA of 160, you'd set that as the baseline and generate 22 players that fit the managers formation, each one randomly falling into a range of something like 135-165 CA and 145-175PA - so you'd keep squads at a similar level, and you'd always have a squad that the manager can use because it's built around them There's obviously other considerations, like you'd need to generate a bunch of free-agents to pick up, and you want to randomise the contract lengths so players are coming up each year, but that seems like it would be easier to do. You do need to be careful of squad registration rules and nationalities when generating players, so changing nationalities comes with some challenges. I'd probably be fine with option 1 - it's not the end of the world if we keep using the real players as a template, but way more needs to be randomised so the players aren't so obviously recognisable. Obviously the more you change the more you affect database creation times, but honestly the kind of people who would want to play this game-mode aren't going to care if the initial loading time takes a while. I've literally left my game holidaying overnight to create newgen databases to play with, so a longer initial loading time really doesn't worry me - you just stick a warning on it and let people make their own decision.

Even better - you don't have to wait until the season ends, just offer them a trial while they're still at their club. Clubs will accept your trial requests if they don't intend to keep the player. For example if you're managing in Scotland or in a lower league English team on a smaller budget, instead of wasting money on a UK-wide scouting package and waiting to get scouting reports back you can just offer trials to any premier league youth kid on a short contract. I literally click on Man City, go to "Squad" and "All players", sort by contract expiry date and offer a trial to everyone with less than 6 months left. Immediately cancel the obviously bad players and repeat for every team in the prem until you're full on trials, then repeat a few weeks later to work your way through the league. There will be a few you can't get on trial, but you can scout those later if you need to. I think the real tip for free transfers though is to save some money for October/November - I know it's tempting but don't spend all your money in August unless you really need to. Every season there will be a handful of really good players released that were previously at a bigger club and are still expecting really high wages. They'll sit unemployed for a few months until finally, around October/November, their demands will drop by enough that you can sign them. You can sign some absolute gems this way, and they still have 2/3 of the season left to be involved in.

I've played a bunch of multiplayer saves and we've never put any restrictions on tactics, I think if you banned 2-AF formations it would be sad when you find two good strikers and you're not allowed to use them together. It's also a little problematic when you're behind and need a goal - can you not bring on another striker to find a goal? I don't think I would put restrictions on tactics personally, I think there's better ways to limit yourselves. As for set pieces - I think that's a little more reasonable. Nobody enjoys doing set pieces anyway, they take ages to set up and edit, so just agreeing to play with default set pieces speeds up the game and might reduce the human-controlled-team dominance a little bit. The main thing we put a restriction on is transfer instalments. It's entirely possible to pay £0 up-front for a lot of transfers and kick the instalments several years down the line, so we ban that. On our multiplayer saves at least 50% of the transfer fee has to be paid up front, and instalments have to be paid in a reasonable amount of time (2 years max on our current save) - with no abusing anything like sell-on clauses to reduce transfer fees). It doesn't make a huge difference but it just means that squad rebuild might take an extra season or two to achieve when you can't stretch your budget out 3-4x further than intended. We also have certain fair-play rules in place, for example not deliberately unsettling each others players, and not interfering with anybody's transfers by declaring interest/bidding unless you really mean it. Other ideas we've had are things like custom squad registration rules - for example you could randomly assign each player a country, or set of countries, and your squad has to contain a few players from those countries. Maybe you're playing in Scotland, so your Europa league squad already has to contain home-grown Scottish players (which is already a problem when there's a few of you competing for the few good Scottish players that exist) but then you also have a custom rule in place that mean you have to have at least 1 player from each continent too - it can make squad building a little more challenging, rather than just sending a bunch of scouts down to find the best South American wonderkids every time. I'd be interested to know if you come up with any other interesting restrictions.

Hah that's amazing, I love it. I guess this specific kind of red card should be rare, you don't see many GKs getting sent off for hand-ball. The obvious changes I'd like to see would be red cards for Bringing down an attacker outside of the box Second yellow card offences We'd probably need to add more yellow cards for things like time-wasting and dissent too, if they're not already a thing, because I'm not sure if I can remember my GK even picking up yellow cards, nevermind reds.

Hi, Following on from the recently announced extra "game-modes" - there is one extra game-mode that I think would be an excellent addition - newgen only mode. In order to do it at the moment you have to create a game and send your manager on holiday for 10-15 years to let the newgens take over, which takes a long time. It's something I already play, and so do a few of my friends. I think once you've already played a save on the regular database it actually makes the game better for new saves, as you get a more diverse pool of players with more varied personalities, and it ensures that you have to properly scout and sign new players rather than relying on signing the same old players every time. It's also great for multiplayer to ensure people can't cheat by using wonderkid shortlists or googling player attributes/potential. I'm aware that you can select an option to "Use fake players and staff" when setting up your database - but this doesn't actually work. This option turns existing players into newgens rather than generating a new pool of players. For example if I start a new save at Arsenal with this option enabled I have the following player: Mohammed Farid - a 29yo Egyptian ball winning midfielder who can play both CM and DM and has 139 CA and 155 PA This is suspiciously similar to: Mohammed Elneny - a 29yo Egyptian ball winning midfielder who can play both CM and DM and has 139 CA and 155 PA It does make SOME changes to some players, for example some young players don't have exactly the same CA, and for some reason Thomas Partey disappeared and got replaced with a 22yo from Burkina Faso, but generally for 95% of players it's pretty obvious who they are. You may as well just be playing a regular database rather than pretending Liverpool left-back Cameron McDonald is a new player and totally not Andy Robertson. Cheers, Grez

It's actually crazy that they don't already. I suspect this will have been suggested before, but I did search and I couldn't see anything specifically about it. I have thousands of hours across several iterations of FM, and I've never seen my goalkeeper get a red card or an injury during a game. Anyone who watches football knows this is unrealistic - several GKs will get a red card across a season, and several more will take an injury. Most people I know don't bring a goalkeeper on the bench on FM, because you don't need to unless the competition rules force you to. Pros: Adds realism Makes backup goalkeepers more relevant / worth thinking about during transfer windows Increases chance of us using and developing our youth/backup keepers, which is rewarding for the manager when you see the development Makes bench choices more interesting as you have fewer spots on the bench for outfield players Cons: Non-GK players playing in goal might need looking at to ensure they don't cause anything weird in the match engine - eg. does having an extremely poor GK cause opponent strikers to turn into prime Maradona? I suspect injuries would be an easy first step as the logic / need for new animations would be lower than it would be for GK specific fouls. Cheers, Grez

Ah amazing, that's perfect. Does it do that already or is that new? It's a while since I've used long throws but I remember having issues with it in the past, but maybe it was my own fault for setting "backup" throw-in players.

One thought - is there an option to only do long throws if I have somebody capable of doing it? Long throw specialists are fairly rare, so what often happens to me is I'll set up my long throws and then when my long throw specialist isn't playing it defaults back to some guy with 7 Long Throws and we make a mess of throw-ins until I remember to go into the options and turn off long throws. It would be nice to be able to assign a list of long throw specialists, and only do long throws if one of them is on the pitch.