NineCloudNine

The most obvious answer is that you are somehow mistaken about him signing a new deal with you. This would be stated in the relevant emails about him accepting either your contract or the other club’s.

One thing that used to catch me out - though I have no idea if it’s a factor here - is that appearence fees and goal/ clean sheet/ assist and trophy bonuses are not counted in your listed salary commitments but do come out of the wage budget. This can lead to a significant overspend. I no longer offer appearence fees in contracts and I have never had a negotiation fail as a result.

Take a read of the Marca article I linked to above. It looks like the payout is based on the last five league positions, which would explain your payout going up. From the outside it looks like a system guaranteed to reward the big clubs who regularly challenge for the top spots.

Yes, although one will always be top of their list. Many roles have similar attribute requirements so are much easier for a player to have equal familiarity. I have had success with players moving seamlessly between roles in a tactic, especially in midfield, but as you imply it is sensible to largely train and play them in the same role.

The classic Barcelona 4-3-3 with Busquets (one of my all-time favourite players) at HB had a similar back 4 to @Safe Hands - one attacking FB and one IFB. I have used that in FM too but I find it constrains the structure - you are very tied in to specific roles in specific positions, which means specific players. All very Guardiola-controlly but personally I like a little bit more variety, flexibility, even chaos! and having too many positional rotations limits that. Edited to add: I also always play with a SK-Attack and train them to try killer balls and long passes. That can be a lot of fun.

I have found that the HB works brilliantly with very aggressive FB/WBs. However, having players in the AML and AMR slots inhibits those fullbacks - they fight for similar positions and get on top of each other, or the WB doesn’t push up as much, cluttering the midfield. I solved this by using a 4-1-3-2 with two CWBs, the DM as a HB and the middle of three CMs being an aggressive AP (who is basically a #10 starting deep). The left and right CMs can be B2B, Carrileros or Mezzalas depending on the patterns you want and the opposition. I like B2Bs for the extreme verticality - counter attacks are awesome! Almost any combination of support/scorer strikers work. The HB role here is extremely demanding, basically a CD with playmaking skills. Trained with long passes and switches to wide areas they can become an awesome quarterback. So not a 4-3-3 strictly, though it attacks with players in similar positions to a 4-3-3 which has wide players tucking in. I’ve just had more success creating that attacking shape with the structure described above than with one that starts as a 4-3-3.

But…what if my Dad actually is stronger than his Dad!

You can make your own hardcore mod, the editor is free and there’s an active modding community here. You could even take Daveincid’s mod and tune it to be even harder. And there are skins available that hide a lot of the detail which makes the game easy.

Duplicate

This is correct, though it’s a pretty complicated formula. This article is a couple of years old but explains the principle: https://amp.marca.com/en/football/spanish-football/2022/08/12/62f6a40a268e3e696a8b45cc.html How (or how well) that is reflected in FM, I don’t know.

There is always a third-place field in the database section for competition histories and awards, plus third and fourth place finishes can be added to player achivement lists, but it is up to the relevant researcher to add the information and many do not.

Until a mod comes along and tells us to stop this enjoyable exchange, neither of us are right or wrong . Your views on where the game’s difficulty balance should be are perfectly coherent and you’ve articulated them clearly. My pushback is that you have put that difficulty centre of gravity at pretty much the exact way you like to play. Your suggested changes would force other people to play the game differently to how they currently play, for example by removing key highlights (which I am willing to bet is by far the most commonly used option) or by making it harder to ignore areas like the data centre. If you don’t like key highlights, don’t use them. I don’t understand why you think that choice should be forced on the large numbers of players who do use that option. This is the point I keep returning to: FM gives you the tools and options to make the game as easy or as hard as you like, including a free editor with which you can make wholesale changes to the game world. So there is no justification for asking SI to make the game harder for other people. We all play in our own sandbox.

Your idea of the perfect pace isn’t the same as mine! I like to see progress and my vision for my club and players coming to fruition. I like long-term saves. ‘Success’ is relative. I don’t always play clubs that are going to win stuff, but I still want to do well by the standards of that club. Isn’t that the entire point if being a football club manager? Your posts here are thoughtful but you are too hung up on your way of playing being the ‘right’ or ‘normal’ way. In psychology that’s called ‘naive realism’ and it’s a fascinating topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_realism_(psychology)

There’s lots you can do. Off the top of my head: Use an attributeless skin. Impose a strict transfer policy on yourself. Never use player search, only scout reports. Pick a broke/weak team. Don’t do things (like do transfer deals between windows) that the AI doesn’t do. Recruit by character. Use the injury mod so you have to manage your team’s effort and pressing rather than just press ‘go’. Get deep into OIs. Get deep into training to make your players perfect for your style.

Agent fees and installments for the transfer discrepancy and I reckon the difference between the 187m and 214m is Staff.

Although you may not mean to, I’d bet you are in fact playing a more aggressive, attacking game than most IRL teams. It’s very hard not to in FM. The moment you put the mentality to ‘positive’, have more than one attack duty, or leave an extra player upfield while defending a set piece, you are already playing an attacking game by real football standards.

Just on this, I think part of the problem SI have is that they can’t properly represent the poor personalities or boardroom incompetence that underlie a lot of these IRL problems. For example, disastrous recruitment by DoF, lazy players sitting on big contracts, absolute assholes like Antony… To an extent team dynamics and morale are intended to depict this side of management, but this can lead to fast downward spirals which might be realistic but are a horrible gameplay experience for most. I do tend to support the idea of a hardcore mode in the game, where absolutely everything is tuned-up: more injuries, more random dynamics, better AI opponents. I’m unconvinced that many of the systems in the game could cope with multiple modes, but that is a different discussion!

But why do you want to force people to use it? It’s there for those who want it but not required for those who don’t. Why is that a problem? Why does it matter to you how other people play when you have all the tools you need to go as deep as you want? I’ve been playing FM since it was CM but I can tell you I would 100% quit if mastery of the data hub became required to play the game. I am also happy to delegate training. But I am delighted that those features are there for players who enjoy them.

I don’t think I have ever played a game with more tools to geek out on than FM. I honestly don’t know what else you need. The depth of data, tactical tweaking, scouting, match preparation and training is so great as to risk being overwhelming to a new player. This is the point I keep coming back to - detail-oriented, meticulous players already have everything they need and a single community mod adds most of the rest. Now, whether all those features work properly or not is another question!

Not everyone wants to play the game the way you think it should be played. Someone spending an hour or two on the game in the evening after a long day at work might quite like clipping through a few games rather than one or two. They certainly don’t want to spend that time reading Rashidi guides on how to set up a tactic or watching Youtube tutorials on the meaning of ‘mentality’. This happens on the forums of every game I have ever played. Dedicated, hardcore players simply fail to understand the motivations of players who are less invested. But without those casual players, there wouldn’t even be a game for the hardcore to geek out over. This is why I keep coming back to the same point. Since FM is overwhelmingly a single player game, it makes absolutely no difference if certain styles are overpowered because you can just not use them. You can make the game as easy or as hard as you want it to be, you don’t need SI to do it for you.

Those players already have high CA / reputation at the start of the game. I have yet to see a single example of an AI club actively developing a high PA player from a low CA to first team regular through smart loans, appearences in Cups and gradual increase in minutes. That pathway behaviour by AI clubs just does not exist. Nor is there any chance in FM of a player erupting into the first team like Pau Cubarsi has, because the AI Xavi would never, ever pick him over the other Barcelona CBs given his starting CA, no matter what his PA was. It has definitely improved slightly from FM22/23, but that’s a low bar because young player development was essentially non-existent in those games. So while the improvement and attention given to this area is welcome, I personally think there’s a very long way to go.

“In range” refers to the location range of your scouting package - your division, your country, continental, world etc. It does not mean ‘in your financial range’.

I do agree that a simple "there's no way the club can afford that" or "the board won't allow me to offer you that" seems like an obvious and susprising omission. It's the same when you ask an agent about a player's transfer interest and the suggested wage is far too high. There's no option to say "no, sorry, not going to offer that, we're done bye". Instead you have to stall, even if there's now no intention of pursuing a deal, which means getting regular reminders to "follow up on interest" when that interest no longer exists because the player wants a billion pounds a week.

FM is based on fixed rules though. Under the graphics it’s just a massive collection of numerical calculations. In theory an AI could crunch all possible choices and calculate the optimum input at each decision point. Solving the complexity of the interaction of all the variables is just a function of computing power. Difficulty levels could thus involve simply removing constraints on what number-crunching the AI is allowed to do. However, it is much more likely that difficulty levels would mean artificial +/- modifiers on calculations performed on the human player’s team/choices. Crude, but easier to tune.

You are going to have to be more precise with what is confusing to you.