shirajzl

Use "continue time-out" option. It's changed the way I play FM for the better ever since I've started using it a few years ago.

It's certainly not realistic to pack the team with super fast players who are otherwise awful and overachieve astonishingly, but it's simply how it works in the game and has been working for years. Whether you want to use that fact or not, it's everyone's choice.

90% of you people here will buy FM 24 regardless of what you said in this thread. You're completely right with your criticisms and wishes, but come November, the new version will be bought. And that's why your discontent will be ignored by SI.

That would be fine in case of one season shocks like Leicester, but in FM we're talking about long term domination. You can take a small club, win 10 CLs in a row (literally), be the top club in the world in reputation (according to in-game chart), the richest club etc. and players will STILL want to move to Many City/PSG/Real M./Bayern and the likes, because you are not deemed as big as them.

That kind of budget is more than enough if you use the instalments exploit like most people do. Yes, in real life most transfers are paid in instalments, but in FM, you can recklessly overdo it and the club will always let you and it will never end up in financial trouble.

This argument of "if your input is unrealistic, don't expect realistic results" has been repeated ad nauseam on these forums and it's completely false and, honestly, nonsensical. It's a video game. A video game needs to balanced in a way that it can handle all possible user inputs, i.e. ways of playing. That's the whole freaking point of balanced game mechanics. Otherwise, every game developer would say "here's a game we made, but please play it this specific way we envisaged, otherwise it will fall apart".

Tbh I'm surprised to read that, I thought it was common knowledge that Pace/Acceleration/Agility/Balance combo has been overpowered in FM since forever. Anyone who has played any of FMs for an extensive period could've seen that easily. It's very interesting, for the lack of a better word, to see people disagree.

Pace, Acceleration, Balance and Agility have been the king in FM for years. And I mean as far back as CM/FM split. Sure, you can be successful with slow players if you know what you're doing, but a sure fire way for massively overachieving is getting fast players, regardless of league, club, tactics, morale management etc.

International management has always been really difficult and random. Maybe it's a lack of care SI have put into it over all these years, we all know a myriad of little bugs and inconsistencies specific to international management. Then again, it's seemingly quite random even in real life, so... One thing is for sure, this challenge wouldn't be even near to what it is now if it was only clubs.

If ONLY that part is resolved in the future, the player base would be over the moon. On the other hand, given the number of issues that have piled up over the years, I guess it's not an "only" thing, i.e. something easily solvable, but SI have only themselves to blame for that. I'm not the one to scream "SI don't care", but what else should we deduce from the whole situation that's been going on for years?

Number 3 from OP is what's been bothering me the most for years in FM. You can take a small club, make them literally the most successful, reputable and richest club in the world, but some of your players will still want to move to present day high reputation clubs. It almost feels hard coded and makes anything you do in a save meaningless in that respect.

My favourite part is Youtubers trying to justify their clear exploitation of this in their saves as "realism" because instalments as such exist in real life.

Training is one of the things in FM that work just fine if you don't touch it, i.e. if you delegate. Sure, the AI won't optimize it, but I've never seen it do disastrously. The same applies to press conferences and team talks, btw. People sometimes say that assman ruins your team morale that way, but I've never seen it in all the years of playing FM, ever since those mechanics were introduced. If you got transfers and tactics spot on, no amount of bad team talks can ruin your success long term. Moreover, it's been documented (e.g. on various YT channels etc.) that you can just employ a director of football and leave EVERYTHING (signing all the staff etc.) to him and you'll do just fine, even in non-league. If you want to delve into it for immersion, that's fine, but if you don't want to, you can leave it to the AI and you won't suffer the consequences.

If you acquire fast and agile players for every position (except for GK), you will overachieve dramatically, regardless of players' personalities, hidden attributes, mental or technical capabilities. I've played this game since Championship Manager 96/97 and it's been like that for every ME version. That's not to say slow players are useless, just that overachievement comes quicker with pacey players, no pun intended.

Given the state of FM 23, I'm thinking of doing this challenge on FM 22, tbh.

Pace, Acceleration, Agility and Balance for every position except for GK. If you match them with good Determination and Work Rate, you have an unstoppable force, regardless of their mentals and technicals.

It does, actually, but not in the old sense of the word. We don't have Diablo level tactics like in the old days of CM and FM where quality of your players was inconsequential. Nowadays, there are meta tactics which are optimized to work with a certain ME version and if you pair them with decent team building you're unstoppable. Even without transfers, those modern exploity tactics easily take a bottom predicted team to a top 4 finish in the first season. Sure, you can't win the title without better players, but you can surely overachieve like mad.

The last few years the default skin is actually pleasing to the eye (although it's subjective, of course). Much different to the old skins of, let's say FM 12 with all the grey drabness.

FM has always had that feeling of "the game has decided that you're on a bad streak of form now, be patient" when your world class players still play the opposition off the park easily, but miss every chance, while at the same time you concede seemingly after every other corner, freekick and a random long ball. After a few games, it resets and you continue winning as before. Myth or not, that exact same feeling has been uncanny over the years.

How do you approach players with bad personalities? Obviously you want to mentor them, but it can't be done before you move them to the first team, i.e. when they're 18 or so. By "can't be done" I mean if you keep a 16yo in the first team for mentoring purposes, he doesn't train with the youth team, which is the most important at that age. If you keep said 16yo in the youth team, you can't mentor him and he won't develop as well until he reaches 18.

It's the vanity of FM community. Right now we have one version of FM and it's the same for everyone, so when someone achieves something, it has some weight (supposedly) because the playing field is the same. Imagine if we had difficulty levels etc., if someone says "I won the CL with Bradford PA", he'd get bombarded with questions like "yeah, but was it on hard difficulty, did you give the AI custom tactics? No? Pffft."

Again, having football knowledge is fine, but if you know the ME, you'll easily spot the changes from one version to the other, adapt and continue to dominate.

The point is that if you do know the ME, it will be sufficient to win consistently, even without any exploits. Actual football knowledge is irrelevant once you truly understand the ME.

It's a long standing problem of the franchise, you need to understand the ME and its workings, not football tactics as such (although it does help, of course). FOR YEARS I've been reading on these forums the same things like "I told my midfielder to shoot less, but he keeps doing it even though he has passing options". That's because people follow RL logic and miss the inner workings of the ME. It's a huge problem that I can't see being solved. The underlying fact of this game is that if you've got your tactics spot on, almost none of the other stuff matters (attributes, morale, player interactions). It ties into what I said above, if you know the ME inside and out (which the best FM tacticians do, and I don't mean those who make expoit tactics), you're practically invincible in the long term.

This is just a continuation of FM 22 where the development of newgens were MUCH slower than ever before. Pre FM 22 it was normal to sign a 18y prospect who would reach his potential by the 20th birthday so it was extremely easy to have an army of world beaters 20-21 year old. SI overcorrected this issue.