Got a new reason to get the new one now as FM12 has just pissed me off. Took Costa Rica to the World Cup and the game decided to remove one of my players from the database mid-tournament. As if it wasn't going to be enough of a challenge already, I had to do it without my only holding midfielder.
I got a bit stitched up in my Andorra save when my whole team got released the day before the promotion play off final.
It really is just relying on luck when the youth candidates are announced, though. Hell of a challenge being limited to Basque players, but you don't get much of a say on how good your team's gonna be. It's start unemployed for me every time.
I took the plunge and bought it a week or two ago. Got Saints to the Champions League in my first season but got more into my other save, in which I now find myself at Arsenal. Me and a mate are having a competition to see who can get the Real Madrid job first.
Just about to start an online league with 2 mates. I have chosen Wolfsburg or Lazio depending on which league we do. They are Leverkusen/Napoli and Schalke 04/AC Milan. I had 3rd choice and no say in which league we did, however I get first choice next time and choose the league, so there are positives.
It's okay. They added/changed a bunch of stuff to it, but unfortunately it just makes the game more tedious. The only way I can get my team's tactical familiarity levels up is to have the shortest break possible, and then schedule two friendlies a week until the season starts. You also have to put the slider all the way over on match prep. And you have to coach them yourself, or your assman will use a different formation. So right away you're looking at 15-20 games you have to go through that you don't care about. Having skipped 2013, I did not understand the training screen which is really not all that self-explanatory so I wasted maybe 5-6 hours going through the same pre-season trying to figure out how to do this before giving up and googling it. But even after the match training strategy was explained to me, it still seems to not work all the time. I don't know if scouting has a bug or not, but you can't set scouts to search a region on "roaming." They just go to the same country and scout the same players over and over again. Doesn't matter what attributes your scouts have. So before I figured this out, I went through an entire season with four scouts scouting "UK and Ireland" and I didn't have any reports on over half the players in the Premier League. All they did was shuffle between England and Scotland once a month and tell me that Vidic and Oxlade-Chamberlain were good. I had no reports on players like Wayne Rooney or Peter Cech. I had to tell my scouts to scout England. Then when they finished, Wales. Then Scotland. Then Northern Ireland. Then England again, etc. And you have to do this for every region. So, Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, etc., etc. It gets old really fast. It seems like every year, they add some complexity to the game which isn't really that needed. And, to try and offset this, they give you a Director of Football or a Chief Scout or Assistant Manager so ostensibly if you don't get it or don't want to do it, they'll do it. But they're terrible. I can understand them not being GREAT at the job, to encourage you to do it yourself but if you set those guys to do anything for you they will screw it up way, way bad. Worse than if you didn't tell them to do it and then simply ignored it. So really all it does is give you a dozen extra ways to mess up your game without you knowing why. There's a limit to how much realism I want in a simulation. I assume Mauricio Pochettino takes ****s. I don't really want to have to click "Take a ****" every day or else Pochettino poops his pants and his reputation takes a dive. Oh wait, you can hire an assistant to remind you to **** and wipe your ass... but he only does it half the time. There's way too much stuff like that. Things that don't require any cleverness on the part of the user or add an interesting dimension to the game, it's just another thing you have to remember to do that is annoying. And also that you have to figure out because the game just gives you mystery messages or enigmatic instructions/sliders, etc. So much of it is just "hide the ball" rather than presenting the user with understandable, but complex and meaningful decisions/strategies. I quit my Southampton game after about a half a season, too much work. Started over unemployed in Spain. Then it got better. Lower league sides where you don't have to 1,000 things that have to be done perfectly are still fun and when you play that way it's still the same ol' Football Manager.
Southampton have just become a little bit too good to be any fun this year. Currently managing Barnet sitting mid table league 2 in my 2nd season.
Dont get alot of time anymore for FM But my saints career is pretty good, in my 3th season. Ruffier Clyne lovren dawson shaw Wanyama Spiderman Chambo Lallana Prowse Morate With a strong bench.
Oh man I shouldn't have read this thread. My laptop hasn't been able to run Football Manager for a couple of years. When I move off to university I am totally getting a laptop and FM2014.
I took over Bristol City after starting unemployed, got to the play-off final in the first season but lost to Preston. My second season with them now and football league wage restrictions have forced me to sell a few of my better players, including Baldock and Fontaine. But I'm still doing reasonably well, currently in 5th and looking good for the Play-offs again in February.
Vegard Forren is actually quite a bargain! If you are attempting an LLM-type game I guess he probably won't sign for a League 1 or 2 side. You might be able to sign him as a Championship side, but it would be cheating a bit as your board probably won't let you scout him. But if I recall, he was available for under 1 million and cheap wages. He was good enough to be at least a rotation option for just about any Premier League side and better than Lovren. There also seems to be a plethora of good GK's out there cheap or on frees, which is usually a hard spot to fill. In general, it seems to me like there are a lot of good players both in UK and Europe available on free either right away or after the first season at the L1/C/Premier level. I don't think it's due to changes in the game, just the luck of the draw that there happens to be some good contracts running out in real life. I typically rarely sign players on free or on loan but I find myself relying heavily on it this year in all my various saves. It really rescued my career in a couple of instances as due to problems scouting I didn't get info. on the number of players I usually do. As far as Saints go, I just got tired of managing big teams. But if you're going to go with a Premier League team, they are pretty fun. The young talent on the team is unbelievable and easily enough to win the Premier League in a couple of years. You can also likely count on a fantastic youth intake as all their junior coaching, youth facilities, etc. are top notch. But the team isn't that great to start off with and you play in a 4-5-1 while having no wingers, no defensive mids and way too many strikers. Cortese/the board are also kind of picky about specific team philosophies they want you to meet some of which cannot easily be done with the current squad. So there's a lot that has to be done right away, but on the plus side you have a pretty decent budget. If you like doing a lot of wheeling and dealing right off the bat and watching youth players develop it's a good team to play with.
At what point does your board start letting you scout outside of the UK? Bloody Barnet board won't let me have any fun.
Came across this today. [video=youtube;UfMYRjUQRt0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfMYRjUQRt0http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfMYRjUQRt0[/video]
