So Long, Farewell
So do you remember in my second post when I talked about how I set up the database? Well, I screwed something up somehow, majorly.
I play this game at a quicker pace than I post which means that I was in the 2015/2016 season when some form of savefile corruption manifested. I got to the end of the season and I never got an end of season email or season expectation emails or best players email or beginning of the season emails. I loaded up an older save file and simmed through May and June, which produced the expected results. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t play one Continue click at a time and get the normal experience. This happened when Brixton was going into the Conference South and I guess the disconnect happened there. I surmise the game engine is expecting certain things from the database but when the database is bad from the get-go or gets corrupted somehow along the way, weird things happen.
I proceeded anyways and most things seemed to work except Brixton wasn’t invited to any cups, tactical familiarity was improving glacially, and I started having really drastically bad training results. I proceeded all the way to 1 April 2017 when I just couldn’t take having bad training results anymore. The problem has driven me to abandon the game.
And We Were So Loaded
It’s quite a shame. On Youth Intake Day for 2015 I got the most amazing Romanian right wingback, Gheorghe Steop.
He was an incredible crosser, great in the overlap, and that low Flair is a lie. An absolute game-changer.
On Youth Intake Day for 2016 I got this field general. Another game-changer. He and Steop combined many times to get attacks going. And when he scored I got to write about the other team, “You just got Roasted!” Le sigh.
And worst of all, on Youth Intake Day 2017 I believe I got one of the best goalkeepers in the world. He doesn’t look like much generally but him having 14s and 15s for Handling, Reflexes, Bravery, Concentration, and Positioning at age 16 is just otherworldly.
Moving On Up
Despite all the great players Brixton has, I just found FM2014 had run its course in my life. My final complaint was the difficulty of getting players trained for new positions while playing in the U18 team. No matter what I’d try to do, the U18 manager would play youths in positions I didn’t want him to. I was trying to get one right centreback trained up for right fullback and no matter how many centrebacks I would have in the team, and only having the one player in the team for DR (Accomplished at the time), that youth would end up playing central midfielder or leftback. And to get that one player qualified for DR to be on the roster, I would have to move players up to the U21 on game day and back to U18 after the match. Very frustrating.
Around the beginning of December 2023 in real life I started dreaming of a Football Manager reboot. Something that addressed the following concerns.
So I started firing up the other versions of Football Manager I have. I had certain requirements:
· The old style training module where you set up things for the week, not the 3 sessions per day thing.
· The old style tutoring module where you have one-on-ones, not the grouping methods.
· The old style of Youth Intake Day, not the preview four or so months before the actual day.
· Squad dynamics: I know it adds some work for the manager but I think it adds realism.
· New positions: I’m intrigued by the idea of having three DCs, two WBs, three MCs and 2 STs so long as the left and right MCs are Mezzalas. Also, I’d like to employ Pressing Forwards.
One other thing I considered was graphics, at first. Every FM after 2014 has the absolute worse graphics for player faces so my hand was forced there. I don’t understand why SI ditched the FaceGen module for those atrocious 3D faces. Another poor Myles decision. Even in FM2024 they look amateurish. Sort it out, SI!
So given all the above, I ultimately settled on FM 2018. It took me almost all of December to reach this conclusion and start setting up a new database. By January I had set everything up and started simming seasons. I did a lot of extensive testing of the database to make sure I don’t have the same problems when Brixton advances to Conference South. I also had to make sure I didn’t get hosed over Brexit.
I’ll be starting this all over again soon. I hope people will tune in when I get this Dynasty Report set up on FOFC and my personal website. See you on the other side!