I made a league where you play against some of the top FM20 tactics - extremely tough challenge.

[TroubleMan]

TLDR Version:  I made a 3 tiered league with 7 competitions (1 top, 2 middle, 4 bottom), created a save in this league where I made a human coach for all but 6 teams, locked in a top FM tactic, and then put that coach on vacation indefinitely so that team will always use that tactic.  I made 6 teams of various strengths for a person (you) to take control and try to win the league with.  It is extremely hard to succeed in this league.  Winning with the strongest team is extremely hard, much less the lowest CA team.  If you think you're really good at FM, try this.  I don't even think it's possible to win with the 100 CA team, even with massive save-scumming.  Links for the save and the instructions at the end of the post.

...and now the long version...

Background:  I was curious how top tactics would perform against each other.  We're always testing them against the AI, but rarely against other human tactics.  So I originally made a clone league in North Korea where all of the players, coaches, staff, stadiums, reputation, and income were the same.  It was just 13 teams, with 4 rounds of play.  First I loaded up an unemployed coach - this guy is how I stop or move things forward.  Then for all 13 teams I loaded a human coach, loaded up a tactic, had the assman assign positions, chose captains, maximized team cohesion, maximized tactic familiarity, delegated a few things to the assman, became unfireable (in UK English, I guess they say "unsackable"), and then went on vacation indefinitely checking the box to use current tactics.    This worked great.  It took maybe 20 minutes to set up, and then running a season on holiday took 15-20 minutes.  I did several times, running the test for 20 seasons, and got a lot of great data.  However there are so many good and crazy FM20 tactics out there, almost 200.  I wanted to mash them all together to see how they did.  So I made a huge league.

Here is the league structure and competition names:

You might be seeing that and think, "wow that's a lot of relegation and promotion spots!"  Well, yes, that's the intention.  I want a lot of mixing, a lot of churning, hence the middle tier competition names.  During the previous testing, it was not uncommon for the tactic that won a test to have a few bad or mediocre seasons.  However, that's okay - if you get relegated, have a good next season and you're back up there.  I've run this big league for a lot of seasons, and the cream always seems to rise to the top.  There are some stumbles, but they get back up there. 

Also from a challenge perspective, it makes sense,   Let's say you actually win The Crucible - great job!  Now you face eight new tough challenges, along with the toughest four teams from last season.  And these aren't like your typical freshly promoted teams in the Prem, who are often bringing a knife to a gun fight and struggle to succeed.  These are eight new killer teams, just as good or better than the foes you vanquished last season, bringing completely different strategies to the table. I purposely sprinkled a few of the best tactics in the middle and bottom tiers, so that there's a new dangerous opponent gunning for you every year (watch out for Pilgrimage 4-3-3-0 - I bet you never played against that before!).  You'll usually see them shoot up to the top in a few seasons, like an arrow coming straight for your head....although some might stumble a season or two.  I say if you can win The Crucible six times in a row, you've effectively beaten the challenge, although there will be new challengers for you up to 12 seasons.  All of the clone players are 20, so after12 years, they start to drop off, unless you use an editor. 

The clone players are all 200 PA, but honestly it's not that impressive.  I made the outfielders natural in every single position.  Why?  That way if there is an injury or suspension it won't matter  - every player is fungible.  Plus it thematically fits; they're all clones.  Being a natural in every position eats up a huge chuck of their PA, so all of their stats are all 14 and 15.  It's 14 and 15 across the board, including hidden stats, other than injury proneness of 1 and dirtiness of 10.  The goalies are also PA 200, but only natural at GK, so they're a little more impressive. 

The non-tactic teams are:

1.  The Known Unknowns - same as the clone teams.  Starts in The Crucible. The name is a USA political joke (the assman is Donald Rumsfeld).  I called it that because you know the players, but the tactic is unknown.  Also, if you want to holiday test your own tactic or some tactic I missed, then lock in the tactic here, and it will be on equal footing as the other tactics.

2.  The Sofa Kings - 165 CA team, starts in The Mixing Bowl.  If you win the league with this team, you are Sofa King good at this.

3.  Middle Management - 150 CA team, starts in The Butter Churner.  Just like any middle manager, your goal is to get promoted.

4.  The Fog Duckers - 135 CA team, starts in The Milk Bucket.  Let's see if you can get this team out of the dog house.

5.  The Cabin Boys - 120 CA team, starts in the Cheese Grater.  I don't think it's possible to keep this ship from sinking.

6.  The Glass Joes - 100 CA team, starts in the Waste Basket.  You don't even have a puncher's chance with this team.

FAQ:

1.  North Korea?  Why North Korea?

All of the leagues there were not running in FM (they're there but "extinct").  I could set up my own structure from scratch without having to mess with any of the other popular FM places.  Also, if you really wanted, you could run this league at the same time as any other world structure and it wouldn't interfere.....mostly.....NK will be competitive in the world cup.  Plus if you want to put a little story behind it, this is NK's path to world domination.  They created hundreds of clones of their best athlete, trained them to play football since birth, and their nefarious plan to conquer the world is make a ton of Champion's league money, until the oil magnates pay all the money for their players (all of the money).  Just go with it.

2.  Are the teams really that good?

Yes, they are incredibly good.  They easily dominate the Asian Champions League.  When there is a club world championship, they literally curb stomp it.  You'll see them beat ManU, ManC, Juve, Barca, Liverpool, Chelsea, Bayern, and all of the other great teams by 4-7 goals on the regular.  Oh, and you can't use your "I'm going to exploit the AI behavior" tactic on these teams.  You have to come up with something else.

3.  Any issues?

Yes, sometimes it has a day or two runs pretty slow.  It has to do with their being 157 human coaches in the game, with all of the emails and notifications they get.  I manually cut out as many notifications, social feed, news feeds, and emails as I could find.  It's not crazy slow for me, but it might be for those who have older computers.  If anybody here has any suggestions to help me speed it up, let me know.  This is the second version I made of this - the first version was way too slow, so I cut out a lot of things, and now it's reasonable.   I'm making a scaled-down version with only the top 3 leagues, and that version will run quickly on any computer. 

4.  Wait did you really add 157 human coaches to a save and manually configure each one?

No - I added 158 coaches.  There's an unemployed coach for that you use to vacation to start up the league for a test run.  Also he's necessary so you can enter the save and pick your own team.  Yes, this is a little crazy and is pushing the limits of FM. 

5.  "I don't think this is best way to test tactics."  Neither do I.  There are already several great testing leagues that do an excellent job of that.  However, this might give you an edge in an on-line game if you study the data.  This started off as tactic testing and ended up as an FM challenge.  Where else can you play against all of the great tactic makers in one league? 

6.  Why isn't "insert tactic name" loaded as one of the tactics?   I did the best I could to get all of the best ones.  There is probably one or two I missed.  That's okay, though, you can take over one of the tactic teams and switch the tactics; it would only take a minute or two.

7.  What tactics am I facing?  The name of the club is the tactic.  You'll see a lot with similar names, like Fire & Water or Beowulf.  That's the tactic philosophy, such as wing-play, possession, or gung-ho, and there will be different formations and OI's even though the name similar.

Here are the instructions - please read them.

Clone wars instructions.txt

(Edit on Sept 16th -fixed the height of the gk's in the save file)

Here is the save file:

https://gofile.io/d/d2q9hj

Let me know how you like it.  If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.  If something doesn't work, let me know, too. 

Edited September 16, 2020 by TroubleMan