Malarkey73

I've read people on this thread arguing about loading more leagues to get a "better" or more "accurate" simulation. This seems odd thinking to me .. as I would have said the more accurate simulation of how the game actually plays for most people would be to use the setup that most people use . e.g. pick a top 5 league team and use the defaults.

This is true. WC squads are actually quite old IRL. But in analysing this problem we shouldn't focus too much just on International Caps in game - though it's admittedly a quick and easy metric to compare. It's just the most extreme metric. And just the tip of the iceberg. If you simply scroll through many big team squads (especially Premier League) after a handful of years you see they are totally bizarre.

Yes . A million times this. And quite apart from balance it makes hugely frustrating gameplay to have your DoF overrule your loans. So you fire him and the HoYD overrules you.

Please add the number of homegrown and homeclub players you have in the selected squad plan. It important to plan for any team with continental competition. And whether the future squads will have enough (i.e. if youth players selected are becoming eligible in future years). This would save a lot of clicking between screens to work it out.

No I know. The point I have been trying to raise is that even if the endpoints were correct the mechanism is still problematic. Another single example here is my save in 2027. Brighton have a 52 man squad. Those who have actually played are with a single exception (Ashley Phillips) over 26 - (oops thats wrong Jeremy Sarmiento is 23 and has played 3 times) The top youth prospect Daniel Pitchford (19) has never been loaned but has been two seasons sitting in first team never played. He has not been available for the youth team during that time - ie hasn't played at all. Interestingly Jung Jung-Hyung was loaned to a Korean team for one year but now in first team he is also rotting (though playing internationals for Korea). Possibly he is the magic player in this squad of the roughly 30 youth to early 20s non playing team that may ever play for this team. Maybe that is realism? maybe if I simulated another 4 years I could say look Jung Jung Hyung developed normally. But its ignoring my lived experience of the game that Brighton wouldn't behave this way... anyway that's my last word on this. I'm ill off work and spending waaay too much time on this...

Okay I can see that the biographies have misled me somewhat as though they are claimed to be first team they have not played but instead been sent to B- teams and so on. Oliver has a single loan before becoming a first teamer at 18(or so), Jawad is a first teamer at 17 (regular at 18 ) after one year in youth, Camilo is a Bellinghamesque prodigy - but Pablo I agree looks realistic and I would say "working as intended" as he appears to have become first team at 20ish after several years development. But overall I agree this is neither as bad as it appeared at first glance nor evidence that all is well.

In your earlier post you showed biographies of a small selection of 4 wonderkids/young internationals. They all seemed to be highly unusual Jude Bellingham types. By this I mean that they were new-genned into clubs in which they appeared to be good enough (or nearly) to enter the first team at ~17 years old. Only the top one had been out on loan elsewhere (at 16 or 17? to Fleetwood for one year) before becoming first team at 18ish. Essentially three of them hadn't really gone through any youth development at all - and one only minimally . Is this typical of the other young internationalists you have mentioned in your simulation? Or just an accident of the ones you chose to show? If typical then I don't think this really solves the issue. You can create a higher rate of magical first team ready 17 year olds but still have the underlying mechanics of loans, reputation, play time broken. Essentially its frustrating as you can just forget the mechanics of trying to develop youth with coaches loans etc micomanaging it yourself. It doesn't matter.. Occasionally a Jude Bellingham will just appear ... or not. It makes you fell like a mug for wasting your time.

No I don't think it should. And after checking a few EPL teams a lot of them have vast squads of virtually never played players... (surprisingly Chelsea, Man City and Man U look more sensible) Southampton have 56! Most unplayed are ca 19-24. A few have managed to be loaned out (I guess the Newcastle players were all too well paid for any other AI team to loan.) It looks at first glance that these early 20s year old players have not played or developed much since youth. This is not really a long term save ... it's 2027 and youth development and balance is already gone AWOL. Does the update fix this AI fail?

The year is 2027 and Newcastle United have a 51 man first team squad. For their upcoming Champions League match 23 of those players are unregistered. Most of those have played none or a few matches this year and are very unhappy. About half of these players are earning ~100K (e.g. Kepa Arrizabalga, Malcom, Lucas Paqueta). A handful of the registered players have virtually no games either and are paid ~100K (e.g. Harry Maguire) I think that's broke. I know Newcastle are supposed to be rich. But I still think the AI is just broke.

Method matters. There is obviously a problem in that they are trying achieve balance by tweaking certain variables - then simulating to see if that fixes it. But the ongoing problems suggest that they cannot achieve a longterm balance with the current model (possibly other features of the game become unrealistic). Its possible there isn't a solution possible just by tweaking variables. They have to put a bit of effort into changing the model.

Yeah my youth teams are going deep into the UEFA youth League competing against Real Madrid, Barcelona and Man City etc, plus most are youth internationals up to u21 but this gametime seems to do them little good. They all get to ~18-19 progress starts dipping and they cannot get loans or they themselves will reject a move to an affiliate. Possibly this is specific to the Scottish league - but I have basically never in the past 4 FM versions managed to develop a newgen player from my youth team into my main team. And I have tried very very hard to do this. Now maybe SI will say - "well that's life, that's realistic". But the current Celtic squad and all CL squads have to have 4 HG players + 4HN. And they do. So it should be possible achievable in the future too? [without buying 18 year old Brazilian wonderkids already good enough for first team - which actually is highly highly unrealistic]. sigh...

Indeed I think thats exactly what is happening. I would also add as further evidence of poor logic/AI that stops development another detail from my current game. Here is a newgen that in the games own words "needs further gametime to develop". His value is ~£6-9m and has roughly 4star potential for my team. He isn't quite good enough for first team and I don't have space right now. I initially offer out for a decent 50% wage - but have to reduce again and again till I finally get an offer at ~10-30% .... which the management rejects as not being enough! I'm guessing this is what the AI in my game did to Moukoko? It won't play him and it won't loan him because ... reasons....I see this a lot in my own game this year and in previous versions. It's fine that some players just don't make the step up. That's realistic. But the fact that a player shouldn't develop because the AI optimises a few hundred pounds a week instead of developing a supposed multi-million pound asset is ...frustrating. Anyway ... my point is rather than worry about tweaking a few variables like reputation to try and restore balance much of the underlying logic requires a bit more thought.

Here is my current game. The year is 2027. Moukoko is 22 and after having played a bit in Dortmund II but virtually never in Dortmund first team has moved to Nantes in Ligue2 for £3.6m and earns £16k per week. By January he is worth £32-38m. This seems poor management by Dortmund. Maybe that's realistic for some clubs? .. but it seems general not particular? My intuition is that the balance issues of development are not about small tweaks to variables in the in-game editor. They are more fundamentally about how the AI works. It is all optimising all the time. It cant do something suboptimal for a while for better performance later. Maybe.. its just my hunch...

The biggest advantage that human players have over the AI are (in my opinion) down to the poor way that the AI picks teams. It has no short term think-ahead prioritisation that will rest your important players for big matches and play backups (often younger players) in easier games. This seems to be the no1 reason you can get an average team to win the Champions League after enough seasons. It also has no long term think ahead to develop talented young players by playing them more than their current ability suggests. This gives the human player the ability to pick up talent cheaply or free from big clubs with unhappy unused wonderkids. Perhaps there is an element of real life truth to this with some big clubs. But I think the poor squad planning is more a bug than a feature??? These AI deficiencies make the game more fun (easier) for the human player to beat the big clubs. But the poor rotation and poor development AI are probably also the reason why the game gets out of sync and becomes unrealistic over time.

I don't know if their match fitness and stats are simmed? What does that mean? Is there an invisible match on a given day (with fatigue and injury risk?). Or is it just added passively across the week? On arranging B-fixtures - yes I explained that poorly. I have been tediously manually arranging a fixture each week. What I should have said is that there is no option to have the manager arrange fixtures (because there is an invisible fixture???). Now I'm worried that I have been over-playing them? It's really just not clear what is happening...