Possible Update/Alteration to Club Philosophies

[sjg11]

Hi, 

I've been a huge fan of FM for years but there's one thing that consistently bugs me a little bit about the game. After a certain amount of time the AI teams and clubs start to blend together a little bit. Moreover, particularly in the Premier League, I find that often the mid-table sides are a little bit too stable. It occasionally feels like, in the game, an established Premier League side is a bit more established than they would be in real life. I find this a particular issue with the PL where the gap between a mid-table side and a struggling side, in the long-term, is bigger than it is in real life. Finally, the procedure for sacking AI managers often feels a little bit formulaic when, in reality, managers do get sacked for... more random reasons occasionally. 

So, this is my suggestion to help combat some of these issues. I don't want to over-exaggerate this stuff either, I'm aware that club philosophies are already a thing and obviously it is possible for a mid-table side to slip into a relegation battle. It's more a matter of degree rather than any attempt to suggest that the AI clubs on FM follow a completely set template and are innately stable. 

My first suggestion would be to have chairmen and DoFs take a more active role in determining how an AI club runs and operates. What I mean by this is increase the importance of club philosophies for AI clubs. For example, some clubs could sign players from certain countries (eg Wolves could sign a lot of Portuguese players), or could bring in managers who play a specific style of play or could focus on signing younger players or more experienced players or could focus on signing players who have strong physical stats or technical stats or mental stats or whatever. Basically, make club philosophies more varied, more common and make them have a bigger influence on how AI clubs operate in the game. This would help to allow the game to feel more varied and flexible if you're doing a long-term save when, at the moment, after a certain point the AI gets kinda samey and the opponents start to blend into each other a bit. These philosophies could change as a result of a new chairman or DOF coming in or could even change because the club is performing badly and the chairman wants to "freshen" things up a bit. 

Tied to the above, there could be a new feature on the club information page called "Identity and Stability". This would outline what a club's identity or strategy is. It would also have two bars on the page. The first bar would show how strongly a club is wedded to their identity. Initially when a new chairman or manager or when a club embarks on a new strategy, they would be strongly wedded to their identity. But after a bad season or two an impatient chairman may become less wedded to a specific identity or strategy. 

The second bar would indicate a club's stability. This would deal with another small issue with the gameplay I've noticed. Often clubs are able to sack managers fairly regularly in game without feeling any obvious negative consequences for that or the consequences aren't as negative as they would be in real life. Obviously though in real life if a club starts getting through managers regularly it has an impact on the club and the club becomes a visionless mess with no strategy and no identity. 

I would also tend to suggest that these changes should NOT apply to the player's club. Simply because a lot of these changes involve the chairman or the DOF playing a more active role in the game and that would get really frustrating really quickly for a player. In particular if you were to introduce more "random" sackings into the game for the AI that go beyond simply looking at whether results meet a minimum level that would be a terrible idea if it happened to the player as it would just be REALLY frustrating. 

Effectively some specific suggestions are above but what I'm really trying to get at is that, in terms of tactics, the AI is fairly well-developed when it comes to FM but the AI often seems to lack a coherent long-term strategy. Part of this is due to the structure of the game. As the game is about managing a football club, the manager has all the power. And although this obviously makes sense for the player's club, for the AI clubs it's problematic. As plenty of AI clubs get through managers at a fairly reasonable rate and the managers effectively control the club's strategy, the clubs never develop a coherent strategy. In order to combat this it might make sense to move the AI's strategic decisions to a chairman or a DOF and away from the manager as chairmen tend to last longer than managers do. It might also more accurately reflect how many actual football clubs operate. And obviously you could have variety to this, some clubs will have a strong identity and strategy while other clubs will float around looking for short-term fixes, as in real life. This could make for a more dynamic and challenging AI that thinks ahead and could also lead to more instability. Newly promoted teams tend to do worse on FM than they do in real life and this is because newly promoted teams often have a strong identity and strategy (hence why they got promoted in the first place) which some clubs in the division above lack which makes up for their comparative lack of resources. 

Anyway I'm rambling and I think my point has probably been made at this point so... 

[Jimmy Wong]

Reviewed so locked.