steve.battisti

Some brothers get the short end of the stick...

Hi all, Having an interesting issue in my new save. Playing in Tier 10 in England using DanFM's database. I took over Stafford Town. I immediately placed an ad for a scout, a physio, and a coach. But after two weeks, no one was interested in any of my openings. I prefer to sign staff that way instead of min-maxing the search function, but I tried a staff search just to see what was going on. The lowliest staff member in the system wants £425 p/w! This is a for a coach with 1s in all of the key attributes. My max is £80 p/w. Rinse and repeat for the other staff positions. So, it certainly seems likely the reason I'm not getting any applicants is the wage thing. I tried asking to increase the wages, and they did - to £100 p/w. Anyone have any idea what's going on, or how I can fix it?

Thanks very much for your help! Just curious, when it comes to "simming," is there a consensus on what has the biggest impact on simulation time - CPU vs memory vs disk speed, etc.? Main reason I ask is because I like to do games where I sim significantly into the future. That's really difficult with my current setup unless I only load like 3-5 leagues. (Last night I did a save with 14 leagues, left it to sim overnight, and only made it a year into the future.)

Awesome, thank you! Just curious, I noted that this has 16 GB of RAM. Is that still, like, a decent amount of RAM? I had thought that 10 years down the road machines would commonly have more memory than that?

Hi all, I'm starting to think about considering to be in the market for a laptop that would also be used for FM going forward. Where I'm struggling is understanding what I might need. I'm running on a 10-yo PC I built at a time in my life when I was interested in hardware and such. Those days have long passed and I have no idea what the computing scene is like anymore. My current machine has: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) 16 whole GB of RAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card Samsung SSD 860 PRO 256GB drive A 1 GB WDC WD10EZEX-08M2NA0 drive So I'm sure just about anything now is faster than what I have. But I have no concept of what would be a "solid computer" these days. FM is the primary game I'd be playing on it, and beyond that it would get very little intensive use. I might play something like Civ on it, but no shooters or anything like that. I'm in the US. I don't really have a fixed budget, but, like, $1,500 / £1,200 isn't out of the realm of possibility. If I can get a great computer for less than that, fantastic. Ideas? I'm open to specific recommendations, but really, I'm just trying to understand, what is a reasonable price point these days for a decent laptop??

Thanks guys, I appreciate the tips!

Hi all. I'm in my first ever transfer window with an actual transfer budget. Usually I just play in lower leagues for a while, get bored, and start over, so I never actually get up to the point where I need to buy players. And I'm struggling. When you've been doing nothing but free transfers and one-year contracts, it's so hard to pull the trigger on purchases! When I look at the players my scouts have found, I find that the vast majority of the players seem to fall into these categories: Worse than players in my squad, so not interested. Comparable to existing players in my squad in star level / attributes . . . so why do I need to sign these guys exactly? Better than my existing players, but either completely not interested, or out of my price range. Players with lower current ability than my current senior squad, but good potential, most of whom are out of my price range. For reference, I'm definitely a small fish in a big pond. I am in Danish 3F league, and have about 350k in transfer budget and 680k in salary commitments. The next lowest salary in the league is 3.7m, so over five times my salary, and they go up from there to 33m! Can anyone give me some strategies on how you would approach signing players in this scenario? Thanks!

Hi all. If you can believe it, I'm thousands of hours into FM and I've never bought a player before. I tend to hang around the lower leagues a lot, so really free transfers is all I've ever done. I'm finally managing a team in top league in Denmark, and I have a whopping (for me) 370k transfer budget. And I realized I have no idea how to buy players. So, for example, I came across this kid, who already at 16 would be the best midfielder in my squad. Denmark has rules about players being trained at club before the age of 21, so extra bonus for me. His transfer value says 0-10k, but it has the line through it that I think means my info is out of date. I went to offer him a transfer, and here's what the other team suggested: At this point, I don't even know how to understand if this is a good deal. Are there typical things I should do here to counter effectively? Like, should I remove the % of next sale? Is there any chance I will be able to talk them down? Should I shift the money around so that more is on installments or whatever? Does anyone know of a video or post that gives an overview of how to effectively negotiate transfers? I'm not really looking for "glitches" to trick the game, just looking to understand negotiating transfers better. Thanks all!

This is actually how I typically do it, but this time I tried using the "start with all fictional players" option instead. But I have since simmed to 2050 and started over, and all is well, thank you!

I'm sure you get a lot of complaints around conversations and some of the frustrating aspects of them. I agree with some of that, but overall I DO like the concept of having these sorts of events where you have to interact with the team or players. That said, one event that is noticeably absent is something when a new season kicks off. For example, I'm coaching in 1st division Sweden right now. My players go away for two months, and after a promotion last season we come to the beginning of preseason, and . . . nothing. No mail saying "GUFC kicks off their first season ever in the Swedish First Division North." Nothing telling me where I'm expected to finish unless I go hunting for it. No opportunity to address the team after the offseason. There should be something like that! That's when we should be finalizing the code of conduct, etc. Maybe that's a good place to tell them if this is the squad we're rolling with, or if we continue to plan to make transfers. Maybe this is where you tell them your expectations for the season? It just seems like a big nothing burger when in real life, while it's not the start of the season, for the CLUB and players it is.

Oh. That's annoying. (Seems like a pretty simply problem to fix from a development perspective. If the player chooses "fake players," then start the unique IDs at a range outside of where "real players" fall. Boom, no random names with same UID as a real player.)

Hi all, So, in my save, I manually set up faces for just the players on my team, not just newgens. I play in a fictional world, so no one has "real faces." I do my own configuration in the config.xml. I'm familiar with the recent patch that changed the pattern to require a "r-" in front of the ID for newgens. I don't use NewGan or any program to do this. That worked great in my prior save, in which I was in 2050 so everyone was a newgen. However, I just started a new save in 2024, and I'm stumped. I have 20 pepole on my squad. Only one is a regen. I set up all of the player photos with r-, and only my one newgen works. I removed the "r-" for the other 19, but they still don't work. In other words, it seems to be working just fine for any newgens, but I can't get the faces to change for any NON-newgens. So, for example this is the record for my sole newgen, and his player photo works fine: <record from="SWE432" to="graphics/pictures/person/r-2002047977/portrait"/> This is the record for another fictional player automatically created at the start of the game, and his player photo does NOT work, whether I leave it like this or add a "r-" in front of the ID: <record from="ENG44" to="graphics/pictures/person/2000297457/portrait"/> Anyone have any ideas? I've of course tried clearing my cache and reloading the skin, and I've confirmed that the relevant image files are in the correct folder.

Thank you! Not sure why I couldn't find that. I feel like I've been on that screen a hundred times.

Awesome, thank you very much!

Hi all, Already starting to plot out my next save. I'm currently doing a Tier 10 England save, and all I have as playable are England, Ireland, N. Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. But my PC isn't particularly strong. Right now with that setup and 59,000 players, my estimated game speed is 4 stars. In my next save, I'd love to do something like a journeyman, starting far down somewhere else in the world, starting with no badges, Sunday footballer, and just maxing out adaptability. Ideally, I'd like to just say, "I'll go anywhere in the world," but I feel like if I enable every lower league in the world, I'll end up with way more players than my PC can handle. I've never done this before, so can anyone recommend the best approach to setting this up that maximizes my ability to have a random start at a low-level team, but also minimizes the impact on my computer? Thanks!

Is there a way to change set piece takers, apart from penalties? For example, I have a guy with 19 long throw, but every time I get an attacking third throw in, my guy with 11 long throw takes it.

Players often get annoyed when you play them out of position. But it's a super common throughout football for the manager to play players in different positions than what they are familiar with, especially with younger players. There really should be some conversation options related to position changes, that you can initiate. They could be things like: This team needs someone like you in the middle of the pitch. I know you're more used to playing fullback, but I really think you could make a difference for us there. I'd like to try you at inverted fullback. That requires you to play from the opposite side of the pitch from your stronger foot. Are you willing to give it a try? I think you could be a fantastic central midfielder. Not only could you make a difference for the team, but having that kind of versatility can only improve your marketability in the future. We're in a tough spot right now due to the transfer embargo. We need you to step up and play defensive midfielder for a few games until we can make some transfers. (This could be a promise.) And if the player reacts well, then they wouldn't whinge incessantly about being played out of position.

I've been playing a lower-league save, and I've noticed one thing that can be really frustrating as you try to move a team up the ranks. Let's say it's nearing the end of the season. Maybe it's early April or something, and then on April 8th we win a match that confirms we win the league. Yay! The game is smart enough to know this, and smart enough to show the ceremony and so forth. But when it comes to the rest of the game world recognizing this, it doesn't seem to happen until the league year officially switches over, which is typically sometime in late June. This means that from April 8th through, say, June 20th or whatever, the list of players interested in a transfer is very limited, because it's like they haven't recognized that you have already won promotion and will be a level up next season. When the league year officially turns over, THEN all of a sudden more players are interested. But of course, when you're trying to prepare a squad that can compete effectively in a higher level, it's absolutely awful to lose two-plus months of potentially signing better players. This also impacts things like renewing loans, and sometimes even contract renewals with players who want to play at a higher level. So, the ask is simple: Have the game world to recognize promotions (and maybe the correlating reputation increases) as soon as promotion is achieved, not at the official season cutover. Thanks!

Thanks all for your great feedback! (For the record, we had a nice wobble, but hung on and won the league in the second to last game.)

Awesome, thanks for the tip.

Hi all, Would like some advice on figuring out "what went wrong." I've noticed that my general approach seems to be very simplistic. I set up my tactic. I play out the games (only using key highlights). Rinse and repeat. I'm not really doing much managing other than hoping we will play better after a loss. I'd like to better understand what went wrong in a particular game, so I can try to figure out, for example, what I might want to change the next time I play that same team other than randomly messing with tactics and hoping it works better. But I realized, I don't really understand how in FM24 to figure that out (what went wrong). For example, we recently played a game against a team far below us in the standings. We're in 1st. We lost 2-0 and only generated .8 xG. I have two trained attacking tactics and switched at half-time; neither made a difference. All of the "intangibles" seemed to have been good - we were in form, have good team cohesion, tactical familiarity, happiness, and manager support. How do I figure out why we lost and what we could do differently? I know there are all of those performance graphs and so on (although I'm in Vanarama North and don't have a performance analyst), but I just don't really know how to analyze what happened. Anyone have any good suggestions?

I know this one is super minor, but I think there should be more conversation opportunities around red cards. For example, I'm in a promotion battle, and have a tough match against the team right below us. My CB gets a red card two minutes into the game for a flagrant foul. We end up losing, and I'm sitting here fuming. So I go under the options for Criticize > Last Game, and there is nothing there to reference his red card. Yes, he gets fined according to the code of conduct. But it seems odd that such a substantial event goes unnoticed. There should really be options like: "You really put us in a difficult spot with that red card. Keep that up and your playing time is going to drop." "This was a critical game for us in our promotion push, and you cost us with your first half sending off. You have to be more disciplined." "I'm furious about your red card in the last game. Your team is counting on you, and you put us to 10 men with your careless play."

Just to add ammunition here... I tend to play in lower leagues, so maybe the limited scouting range affects this. But my experience is this that if I create ANY position-specific recruitment focus, I'll get zero hits, even if it's as broad as: "Find any fullback (anywhere, any age) with a strong left foot and at least 3 stars" I have never managed to create a recruitment focus for a specific position that returned anything. Without fail they say "We're having trouble finding anyone." For example I created this focus to find an AML: https://imgur.com/a/VhFFdlj It failed to find any players. Yet, my ongoing Vanarama National League North/South and "All of England" recruitment focuses found all of these guys: https://imgur.com/mWEdtHn Let me know if I can provide more information.

Nope, not yet.

I heard a rumor that when a player is wanted by another team, there is somewhere that you can see why they haven't made an offer, like "Not enough available budget" or something like that. I've found a screen where I can see why they want the player, like "Would improve the starting 11." But I can't find anything like what I mentioned above. Does this really exist? If so, how do I get to it? Thanks!