Not been on here for a long time
Is anyone playing FM14? Just wondering what you lot think about it?
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.