tezcatlipoca665

January 2024 into a new save and Leandro Trossard is transfer listed 'deemed surplus to requirements' by Arsenal and is about to go on loan to Man Utd. Unreal.

I run a lot of leagues from each continent (probably too many for most people, and a lot more with added league mods now this past while), and I can confirm that this hasn't helped me with AI squad building and AI squad selection issues in the slightest.

I took a job at Portsmouth in my first game of FM23 and they'd already been docked points for failing FFP. I think it was about five seasons in. Rooney was their manager until then and I inherited a complete mess with players constantly complaining about every little thing. The team was bought over by some tycoon sometime before that, and during a press conference, I answered a question about the club's finances without really thinking about it. The board reprimanded me for answering the question and said I should have refused to answer it, and that if I ever did again, I'd be fired. Sketchy as hell.

Personally, I'd like press conferences and journalist questions to be removed altogether. Not revised or rethought - just completely removed. I don't feel like they do anything meaningful and I don't care what other managers have to say about anything. If we had the option to speak to some AI chatbot I'd answer 'How did you feel about ____ getting on the scoresheet for his country?' with 'don't ever call this number again' and hope it'd stick.

Davincid's FM24 mods are the closest you'll get to forcing the AI managers to develop young players, and it's mostly because the mods increase both injuries and player fatigue across the board, which pushes AI managers into playing youth in more first-team games than the vanilla version of the game. Other than that, after having tested the vanilla game multiple times - no, the AI doesn't develop talents. There's a strange and somewhat regular occurrence of national teams prioritizing youth players with high potential by calling them up to their first-team squads, even if they haven't played any league games for their respective clubs, though. It's like they're programmed to call up one or two token players that way.

Okay, I think I understand. The PCA/PPC is something we can't see and it's kind of randomly generated per-staff member, with a greater accuracy being dependent on their attributes and experience, basically. The only complaint I have is that my staff *never* seem to get anything right until it's, like, really obvious even to me - especially HOYD during the youth intakes. That's been my experience with both FM23 and 24, anyway. I wouldn't give Man Utd the benefit of the doubt by missing out on Haaland though, lol. Their recruitment is atrocious and was already in decline about 15 years ago. Not buying Haaland makes total sense.

What do the AI staff and managers base their judgement of a player's potential on, then? Does anybody know? We have to trust the staff to make those judgements without the editor, and we should trust the staff based on their Judging Player Potential score.

The transfer and squad-building decisions are pretty bad in general so I know my answer will be 'this is just how things work', but is there a chance that West Ham need the money or something? I feel like I already know the answer. He clearly hasn't asked to be transferred. Can you create a second manager profile, take over West Ham and have a look around the club? Just don't save the game and you should be fine. I've found a lot of odd quirks doing that.

Premier League, Bundesliga, LaLiga, Serie A, Ligue 1, transfer deadline date = 1st of February. US Major League Roster Compliance Deadline (not transfer deadline, which falls on April 23rd which they'd had to release a patch in May for - which they won't) = 23rd of February. Chinese Super League transfer deadline date = 28th of February. I'm not disputing that they included updated rosters for the MLS in the last update. I'm saying that this is a continuation and finalization of the previous patch. Roy Hodgson left on the 19th of February, after the transfer deadline date on the 1st of February, which - if you think about it - is probably the real reason why he hasn't been removed in-game, because SI most likely finalize *everything* at the transfer date cut-off points of each nation. I'm not defending SI here, but what I'm saying sure makes a lot more sense than 'this is a political move and the Chinese are responsible for it somehow'.

Another thing SI should do is make it clear when their cut-off dates for database changes are so people at least know what to expect with the patches. This was all completely avoidable and could've been solved with extremely basic communication. People holding off playing the game they bought for months, based on the assumption of what the patches would fix, is a really bad reflection of this.

The reason why the current changes have been made and not others is because those are the database changes that didn't make it in the last patch. As far as SI was concerned, the other nations were updated and that was the end of that. Think of this as a part 2 of the last patch and it'll make more sense.

Hopefully SI will think about outlining what they definitely are and definitely are no longer working on in the forum from now on, at the very least. They haven't touched the ME since the first patch four weeks after the official release and should have made it both clear and known that the match engine was finalized. A pinned post would've helped solve a lot of this.

I think this is a good idea. Like, for everybody talking about positional play, managers aren't going to be like 'I want you to play as a Ball Winning Midfielder on support duty with the following individual instructions' when it'd just be easier to give the players what shape you expect them to take first of all and then tell individual players what you want them to do from there (if anything in particular). It's kinda annoying having to visualize in your head what positions the players will take up based on the Player Role and added instructions you've given them when you'd just show it on a whiteboard irl to see it and show everybody else.

A lot of the managers in this game don't reflect how they are in real life, so why not make it easier and allow us (via the editor) to give managers their tactics the same way we set our own up in the game? People like RDF Tactics are great at recreating managers' styles as best as possible in the match engine, so with this kind of thing in mind, why not just let us use the editor and give the respective managers their tactics? Girona and Leverkusen are really underwhelming in this edition, with Girona in particular regularly struggling against relegation in the first season, but letting us modify and give the managers maybe up to three tactics (formations, player roles, optional player instructions maybe that the AI manager can decide to discard based on who plays the position). Obviously, the basic tactics should still be available regardless in case they need to make major changes during a match or something. Maybe more can be added to this idea, but I feel like this is probably a good start to increasing the realism.

Fair. To be honest, I forgot this was even released since it was only about 3 weeks after the official release. Everything since this has been cosmetic. I just don't understand the 'it shouldn't have been a surprise' comment considering FM23 definitely did continue to update and tweak the ME. Did SI seriously make it clear in an announcement that they were finished updating and tweaking the ME?

It's also just flat-out not true. FM23 had multiple match engine fixes in its February update. Changes to how players react, defend, attack - it's all there.

What changes were made to the match engine? The only one I can see that comes close is goalkeeper injury frequency, and that's not really anything other than reducing the chance of them occurring. I'm not counting AI manager team selection, player morale with team talks and substitution logic either - those aren't match engine changes.

For FM25. They should've been clear that they're not touching FM24's ME in the first place. I get why, and the reason is kinda obvious imo - they've ported animations and code over to FM25 at a certain cutoff date and continued working with Unity from there, making it pointless to tweak FM24's engine because they'd have to simultaneously figure out how to make those changes work with FM25 at whatever stage it was/is at so they'd be present in the new release. How many months had they been working on FM25's engine before FM24's was finalized? It's almost certainly at least over a year's worth of difference between both game engines. But again, they should've clarified this, even if it risked making people unhappy back in November or whenever. I don't buy the 'we're happy with the match engine' reason so much as 'we're not getting tangled up making changes in the old engine and then figuring out how to implement those changes in the new engine this far into development'. The only changes made with the match engine through the patches with this edition were cosmetic - Champions League ball updated, weather effects showing, player appearance glitches, and others.

What frustrates me the most about this (and it happens *a lot* in both FM23 and 24 for me) is that the players signed are given practically no chance before being discarded by the AI managers. Don't bother mentioning Kalvin Phillips as a real-life example btw before somebody points that out - it's clear Guardiola didn't want him and his lack of appearances has always been commented on as unusual, which is something that the media mechanic in these games isn't capable of highlighting (which makes sense, since this is not considered unusual or undesirable behaviour within the game overall). The optional/mandatory future fees for loans make no sense either when the teams don't even play these players during their loan periods before they sign them for the next season and, again after that, don't play them. Another thing is that these transfers don't take into consideration any future fees owed to other clubs. Tammy Abraham joined Aston Villa in my game for £2.4m in the first season while he was injured, and they're not using him now he's fit. Not only does the transfer not make sense from Villa's point of view since they didn't need him and he wasn't even 'in-form' (he hadn't played a game), but Roma sold him at a massive discount while they're still scheduled to pay my team (Chelsea) £6.8m for each of the next three years for a player they don't have, and hilariously, now need again because Lukaku just returned to us from his loan period there.

It is kinda funny that the whole positional play marketing for FM24 was promoted with Man City used as the best example, yet AI Guardiola usually can't seem to figure out how to utilize it well in the game. Man City almost always underperform in these games, though I do think Rodrigogc is correct and that it's an attribute-weighting problem more than AI Guardiola being poor. My current save saw them win the Premier League in the first season, finally, so Davincid's mods have probably helped there. They were always really poor in FM23 under Guardiola too. Honestly, the best and most consistently performing teams in the PL in my experience from the first season on are always Liverpool and Man Utd. Without Haaland, City would be completely lost in the vanilla versions of these games (well, until a Gengenpressing-focused manager is hired anyway).

I checked this on my save just now and it's everywhere lmao. I never noticed before. Happens all over Serie A with Inter, Milan, Roma and Juventus too. I think this stuff does matter because you're essentially guaranteed to have a really tough period of fixtures every season, which affects confidence and potentially fitness depending on how you make your team play against more difficult sides (fielding your best 11 four-to-five games in a row can end up having a knock-on effect). I'm still seeing patterns of playing the same team twice in a row due to domestic cup competitions. Milan played Atalanta in the Coppa Italia final just after a Serie A match with them. We (Chelsea) played Arsenal in the FA Cup final just after having a league match with them. Roma played Torino twice in a row. Salernitana played Bologna twice in a row. It just looks very odd and I can't unsee this stuff now. EDIT: After checking somebody else's long-term save, it's definitely just a coincidence and seems to be happening to me a lot in my saves for some reason lol.

I thought it was just a weird coincidence, but this happens to me a lot too. In my current save, I'm about to play Arsenal in the FA Cup Final after playing them on the final league game of the season. Happened to me a lot in my Milan save in FM23 with cup games and league games being scheduled so I'd play the same team twice in a row too. There's no way it happens because of some design oversight - idk how that'd even be possible.

Well, looking at the save, Juventus went from 4th place the first season with 61 goals for and 38 against, whereas in contrast to this season, they've dropped to 28 goals for and 42 against. I took over the team to see what I could find: - Their xG is minus 15 - the worst in the league, with only Udinese coming close with minus 11. The xGA is 0, so they were on target with that. - The defensive capabilities are basically the same, but that's a shocking drop in goal difference with what's basically the same team as the previous season. Vlahovic scored 22 goals in 32 league games during the first season, whereas he scored 5 in 21 this season... and was joint-top scorer with Chiesa, who also scored 5 league goals. Vlahovic has been injured since February but was poor when he was playing. - Glancing over the available games with full detail, Juventus made substitutions purely for (I assume) tactical reasons and not because players were tired. They lost 2-0 in a game against Torino and only used 3 substitutes - and not one of them was for a tired player, nor were they for the worst-performing players. - Following on from above, it looks like these players were run into the ground. The added CL fixture congestion - something they didn't have to worry about the first season - is probably what killed them. - Allegri was sacked and replaced with Zidane in December. It didn't make a difference and Zidane was sacked too due to relegation, so it's unlikely (in my view) that this is a normal manager issue. - Squad dynamics look fine. Rugani wants to leave for a new challenge, but he's listed for transfer since November 2024 (and this is normal behaviour for Rugani in my experience, even with FM23). It's reported that there are 11 unhappy players but no real reported reason, and no signs of a squad mutiny or anything like that - I think a big reason is just not respecting my appointment as manager as I already have 13 players that oppose me in the Squad Hierarchy. Team Cohesion is good. Club Atmosphere is poor, but most likely due to the recent relegation. Overall morale is bad but, again, the actual happiness of the squad is good overall according to the Happiness page where most people are either Content or Slightly Happy. So it looks like poor logic in sub choices and poor squad rotation - each in relation to player condition and a lack of foresight with fixture congestion - is what undid Juve.

lol it even has the result as a notable highlight on the same page.

Probably a cynical answer, but I'd really like if SI started a lot of this over again, not including the database. Many gameplay mechanics currently come across as set-and-forget from long ago; introduced to sell past editions as headline features, and haven't been paid attention to since. The player interactions, 'player power', squad hierarchy and media are some of the most annoying aspects of the game.