Buying players still too difficult

[LCpl]

1 hour ago, Mons said:

This was in place some versions back, but people criticised SI by saying that everybody has a price and that if x team received a bid of y euro for z player, then they'd surely sell. SI can't win! Fwiw, I think the present method is the more realistic option. Getting quoted an extremely high amount is the game's way of saying he's not for sale at any price...

Yeah, I seem to recall the furore over being told no. You're right, SI can't win. Expecting 150%+ for a player you've transfer listed is what makes me laugh, the same players angry that they can't sell their unwanted players for much-coin, are the same ones snapping up Correa for 60% of his cost because he's listed.

[Tullekunstner]

I think buying players this year is absolutely perfect. The transfer market has often been way too easy to navigate on FM.

 

[Svenc]

On 31.10.2017 at 08:59, themadsheep2001 said:

Yep. And it goes the same way when selling. I've just sold Smalling and Darmian for a combined £52m while bringing Inigo Martinez and Milinkovic-Savic for less. 

Bang on the, well, money.

What's arguably having a bigger impact, in particular long-term, is the wages spend though. They are also consistently higher for consistently lesser players, the further you go back, the moreso. All you would need to do was signing prospect, giving them long-term deals, and negotiate it so that the basic wages are being a few dragged down via clauses and bonus. In particular in your classic "from lower leagues rags to top flight ritches" save, you would then make it to the top flight with a decently competitive squad, having paid a fraction of the league average / top dogs all along. That's all the extra money you need to attract better players on the free agents market, or bolstering the squad with a few clever loan deals -- with  the AI imo being incapable of clever loan strategies anyway.

It's a bit of a different topic and doesn't relate to transfer sums immediately obvious -- but yeah. The day the game will have an AI that can at least approach roughly similar will be the day when the game has coded a competitive AI. At the moment, such isn't even much happening by random mchance, which is ... luck. That isn't down to not trying though, I reckon. AI is difficult, and SI / The Collyers have been strictly purists here. If it can't beat you by "just" means, then it can't beat you. For better, and worse. In a sense, the AI isn't specifically coded to beat a human manager anyway. It's there to have managers in a self-contained, continuous make-believe football world, which operates even if no human guy is even entering it for added competition. Even there though, some bits operate better, some worse (e.g. top teams / managers arguably being too inconsistent and not much standing out from the rest).