Is there any way to load more staff into the game without making leagues playable?

[mikelfc8]

My dilemma is that I (obviously) want an active and competitive transfer market and realistic world football environment. The best way to achieve that seems to be by loading as many playable leagues as my PC can manage (not very many btw).

However, I only intend to manage Liverpool. So I do not need other leagues to be playable.

So, ideally, I would choose English top 4 leagues as playable and then every other country's top league as view-only (detail none). Then add to that the players from the top teams of each continent. But that doesn't add enough staff for me.

However, I noticed on FM 16 (gave 17 a miss) that unless other leagues are playable I get a much shallower pool of staff to choose from.

I am currently thinking of using the large/huge database and adding a few more playable top leagues from the really significant footballing nations and leaving the more peripheral ones as view-only.

 

Is there any way to load more staff into the game without making leagues playable?

[BMNJohn]

1 hour ago, mikelfc8 said:

My dilemma is that I (obviously) want an active and competitive transfer market and realistic world football environment. The best way to achieve that seems to be by loading as many playable leagues as my PC can manage (not very many btw).

However, I only intend to manage Liverpool. So I do not need other leagues to be playable.

So, ideally, I would choose English top 4 leagues as playable and then every other country's top league as view-only (detail none). Then add to that the players from the top teams of each continent. But that doesn't add enough staff for me.

However, I noticed on FM 16 (gave 17 a miss) that unless other leagues are playable I get a much shallower pool of staff to choose from.

I am currently thinking of using the large/huge database and adding a few more playable top leagues from the really significant footballing nations and leaving the more peripheral ones as view-only.

 

Is there any way to load more staff into the game without making leagues playable?

Please describe "not enough staff". Logically if you add the players of top clubs, it would mostly add the staff from those top clubs and not much else. I suggest to try widening your reach. Also, I find that adding more players has a bigger effect on game speed than adding more leagues to simulate; I suggest adding a couple of leagues you'd want to scout or recruit in as well. It also makes offloading players a bit easier since there are more active clubs! Their detail level should be rather low anyway, and can be configured separately in the "Detail Level" menu.

[mikelfc8]

11 minutes ago, BMNJohn said:

Please describe "not enough staff". Logically if you add the players of top clubs, it would mostly add the staff from those top clubs and not much else. I suggest to try widening your reach. Also, I find that adding more players has a bigger effect on game speed than adding more leagues to simulate; I suggest adding a couple of leagues you'd want to scout or recruit in as well. It also makes offloading players a bit easier since there are more active clubs! Their detail level should be rather low anyway, and can be configured separately in the "Detail Level" menu.

That's a fair point. Not enough staff to me means not enough to fill some pretty strict requirements.

I only sign personalities that are high in professionalism, ambition and determination. I like the idea of a club culture that feeds into the players.

I also use staff to increase the club's world knowledge. So I like to have a really diverse pool to choose from including every continent. Especially the nations like Egypt that have decent youth ratings.

These requirements make the game fun for me but also make it tough to find enough staff to meet them and have the skill set required for a top club. A lot of the standard database staff that meet all of these requirements aren't interested because they work for my rivals.

Your suggestions about leagues and detail levels are really good. Many thanks. I'm going through a few combinations now to see if I can find a balance that works. But the only thing that worked on 16 was to have loads of playable leagues.

I was just hoping someone could suggest a magical editing way to force the game to load a whole host of staff without having to have their leagues playable.

[BMNJohn]

6 minutes ago, mikelfc8 said:

I was just hoping someone could suggest a magical editing way to force the game to load a whole host of staff without having to have their leagues playable.

It would be very gamey and rather unrealistic, but you could try editing a bunch of unattached staff to be based in England. Not sure it'd work, but you can try. That does take away some of the "challenge" of getting them to relocate and sign for your club though.

EDIT: Turns out the option is greyed out. Tough luck then. Maybe add a career plan to be a coach in England, but at this stage you might as well simply add them to your club straight away and not beat around the bush.

[mikelfc8]

17 minutes ago, BMNJohn said:

It would be very gamey and rather unrealistic, but you could try editing a bunch of unattached staff to be based in England. Not sure it'd work, but you can try. That does take away some of the "challenge" of getting them to relocate and sign for your club though.

EDIT: Turns out the option is greyed out. Tough luck then. Maybe add a career plan to be a coach in England, but at this stage you might as well simply add them to your club straight away and not beat around the bush.

Thanks so much for checking but you're right about how gamey that feels.

Most of the fun comes from finding the right candidate and persuading them to join.

I basically want a staff version of the custom database options you get when setting up the leagues at the start of a new game. But want doesn't necessarily get. 😁👍

[robevz]

you could try this way in the video, in terms of just playing as liverpool with no other leagues plus 90,000-

300,000 players..that might add more staff but it does say right at the start before you set up a save do you wanna add key staff to non playable teams or something like that.      

 

[mikelfc8]

7 hours ago, robevz said:

you could try this way in the video, in terms of just playing as liverpool with no other leagues plus 90,000-

300,000 players..that might add more staff but it does say right at the start before you set up a save do you wanna add key staff to non playable teams or something like that.      

 

Good suggestion, thanks. I've given something similar to that, with a few playable leagues, and it's looking like a decent balance so far.

[robevz]

1 minute ago, mikelfc8 said:

Good suggestion, thanks. I've given something similar to that, with a few playable leagues, and it's looking like a decent balance so far.

what i found is i trialled a save where i only had germany playable and evry single league must be 40 odd as viewable ...but the game still loads the viewable leagues results which i didnt want..so then i found that video and its better in a way as it lets you triple the amount of players andthe running game to game still flys past quick.... so if you dont plan on going to another club i suggest the best way to do it is just load the league your in & no playables & use the vid above to get the amount of players you need

i always have a habit of loading 7 playable leagues every year but that vid saved my life haha

[BMNJohn]

10 hours ago, mikelfc8 said:

Thanks so much for checking but you're right about how gamey that feels.

Most of the fun comes from finding the right candidate and persuading them to join.

I basically want a staff version of the custom database options you get when setting up the leagues at the start of a new game. But want doesn't necessarily get. 😁👍

To be honest, I only care about the personality of the staff that's in contact with the players. For scouts, while I prefer them to have good determination, I don't care for their personality. Hell, I don't even care that they're good for those assigned to obscure regions: them having good overall knowledge is more important. If those bad but knowledgeable scouts bring something up, I just ask my good scouts to double-check. I care more for those assigned to important and/or loaded regions, but those regions tend to have no shortage of staff to choose from, so I can afford to be picky.

[Bigpole]

Unfortunately, there's no option to select only staff to be added, so either you'll take players and staff or nothing. But the good thing is that game is trying to 'maintain' the overall number of players and staff so there won't be shortage of staff (in terms of numbers of course, attributes are random generally).

[mikelfc8]

21 hours ago, Bigpole said:

Unfortunately, there's no option to select only staff to be added, so either you'll take players and staff or nothing. But the good thing is that game is trying to 'maintain' the overall number of players and staff so there won't be shortage of staff (in terms of numbers of course, attributes are random generally).

You're right. I'm beginning to realise that my experiences with finding staff on FM16 do not translate to the new game. On my current save there are LOADS to choose from and I only have a handful of playable leagues (as @BMNJohn suggested) with all the rest set on view only. I have used the add player instructions from the vid @robevz kindly posted and the game world seems really well populated.

Colour me happy

Thanks folks