Filed under: General | Tags: afa, cup triumph, FML, football, live, manager, video
Well, we’ve done it, just 21 days into FML Retail the Warriors have picked up there first official honour, the AFA U21 Cup. I wont bore you with a in depth match report but I will point you towards the video section where you can watch all the goals in the 4-2 triumph.
It was in fact a scrappy performance by my team, with our goals being scored not through skill, but more from grit and hard work with a dash of luck. 3 of the goals game from defenders (only one from my player challenging the goalie at corners) but it was nice to see Adrian score number four in the match.
Here’s to many more official triumphs! Enjoy the video.
Filed under: General | Tags: adrian, backbone, caceres, fabianski, FML, football, Football Manager Live FML 2008 Addicted, galvan, live, manager, sunny
Well, my squad is looking pretty good from a longterm perspective, whilst we may not have as many known potential superstars as some teams and the majority of players I have are very young (even at U21 level) the backbone to the side is in place. These guys will now become the core of my team, some are already at a good level, others still need time to develop, but I expect every one of them to become Legends at the club.
GK – Lukasz Fabianski – Arsenal – 23 Years Old.
The young goalkeeper had been at various clubs on trial before we decided to stump up the cash to buy him, there where other clubs bidding for him and in the end it was my £20,000 deal that won his signature. Whilst out at the other clubs he performed very well, but unfortunately when stuck behind my teams in-experienced defence he didn’t quite reach the level of performance he’d reach at other top clubs. Still, at just 23 with bags of potential I’m sure he’ll be an important member of the club for years to come.
DC – Martín Cáceres – Barcelona – 21 Years Old.
The most expensive free agent signing for the club is young centreback Caceres, who we paid £500,000 for in a wage auction. Another player who has been in and out of clubs on trial, until joining us. Immediately after signing for The Warriors he was shipped out on loan for a week so that his performances wouldn’t be lost on such a youthful side, now that hes back in my team with other members of the elite five around him he should prosper. Would you believe it though that he is the top scorer in the official AFA league!
DMC – Sunny – Valencia – 20 Years Old.
The last player to be brought in as a long term investment for the club was Sunny, already a fully developed defensive midfielder with his own touch of class via his many player preferred moves, he was the player at the top of my hit list. The deal to sign him did take awhile, and also increased in fee. In the end he cost my team a record transfer fee of £700,000, with a 65% future fee. As I didn’t have that amount of money to pay cash up front, me and the other club set up an instalment plan, this was in the form of a £300,000 deposit and then the rest (£400k) one week later.
MC/AMC – Maríin Gálvan – Cruz Azul – 16 Years Old.
Ah, where do we start with this kid? Snapped up stupidly cheaply in a wage auction, the surprise was the amount he’s contracted for, wages of just £4,501! I’d already been tipped off about this youngster after reading a article involving Miles Jacobsen (MD of SI) on the Sky Sports website, Miles believes this kid is set for stardom in the near future. A quick look at him and most people wouldn’t think much of him, but that’s true he’s by no means the finished article, yet. As anyone with FM09 may have noticed he is the youngest member of the -10 Club, putting him up there with Pato, Bojan, Anderson in terms of Potential. At my club we have several squads of different ages, I’ve put Galvan in the lowest one (U17 Squad) as I don’t want to break him in to fast, slow and steady is the way forward for him.
FC – Adrián – Deportivo – 20 Years Old.
The spearhead of my team, who is one of the most valuable players at my team with a market value of £1.3million! Right now he looks ok for a striker, but hes not scoring that frequently, which is understandable with a lad so you, im sure once hes got a few seasons of senior football under his belt he’ll be ready and raring to go. He does hold what I think of as the key to any FML Striker, and that is Acceleration, Pace, Dribbling and the all important, Determination. If you look at any of the top strikers in FML they will all have three of those four characteristics.
Theres also a lot of emerging talent in the rest of my team, Striker Terry Dixon the former Spurs youth is improving nicely, attacking midfielder Christian Mendéz is pushing himself into my first team as a regular now and hes only 18, defender Leandro Molina has so many green arrows I think the drug testers will be wanting a word with him soon, Majd Younis my left back isn’t improving as much as id hoped but he is developing steadily, but probably the biggest surprise is André Augusto da Silva…
Just 15 years old and Silva already looks good and has plenty of green arrows, not bad for a regen, the biggest shocker came this morning when I got a training mail which said…
Your coaching staff have indicated that Brazilian midfield playmaker André Augusto da Silva, spurred on by your cutting edge coaching, has been showing remarkable improvements recently.
Their report went on to indicate they feel he is ready for regular first team football and are delighted that you share this view and are featuring him regularly.
…they want me to give him REGULAR first team football!? At 15 years old!? Wow! Maybe Galvan is gonna have someone to pair up with in the heart of my midfield, or will it turn into a Lampard-Gerrard partnership? When all these youngsters start needing senior locks it locks like im gonna have some hard choices of who to keep and who to sell on.
Filed under: General | Tags: bank, FML, football, instalments, live, manager
That damn bank manager in FML, he’s no different from the ones in real life, He’s the bane of all us virtual managers. You get a big name in your sights only to find that despite having a healthy projected cash he’s decided that your club record breaking bid will send you into debt, so no, you can’t have him.
What can you do? Well you could always wait a few days, maybe weeks until the projected cash is actually in your pocket, but more often than not you’ll find someone has beaten you to him. So the search begins again, or does have too?
Not a lot of people realise, much like in real life football you can pay in instalments, and this is something the bank manager doesn’t mind, as long as none of the payments send you over your overdraft of course. Unfortunately you can’t pay for a free agent this way, and it can only be done on a player at a club who isn’t in a transfer auction.
For example, your projected say you’ll have £1 million in 4 weeks, there’s no reason you make a million pound offer for a player and pay the balance daily over 28 days, or pay half now and half in a week, there’s many ways of actually doing it. This is also some managers preferred way of selling players as it means you can squeeze more money out of someone, as long as you have the patience to wait for your cash.
Hopefully at some point in the future this will be expanded upon, and we’ll see bonuses for player performances, payments for promotion, making it into a UFFA competition, scoring 30 goals in official competitions, the scope for improvement is vast.
Now, not a lot of people know this next bit of information, not only can you spend the projected money via instalments, you can go outside of it. There is the option to pay over for example 8 weeks which as the bank manager is small minded and he will only look at your projected 28 days. An example would be having a projected of £1million you could in fact bid £2 million and pay 8 weekly payments of £250,000.
Of course instalment plans have high risks attached to them, if you’ve only got a small squad and you suffer a injury crisis it’s unlikely you’ll have the cash to bring in a replacement, or maybe your daily income drops and you can afford the payments you’ll soon start plummeting into debts as the money will come out of your balance, the other team will get paid on time. Don’t hit the restart button either, as those payments will still come out of your clubs coffers.
I’m a keen reader on the official forums, every week I search for posts by Ov and his FML lapdogs and read every bit of information they release, you really can learn a hell of a lot from ready those guys posts.
Ov tends to read something someone else posts like an idea and the crazy guy comes back five minutes later and says “yeah I just threw that together into the code” probably whilst smoking a cigar “expect to see it in the next release”. For example, coming in a new version of the game we’ll be seeing an extra screen in match that shows us the point where each shot was hit from, to any fan of FM it’s those little things that make the game so awesome, and it’s this kind of dedication and openness to new ideas that means FML won’t fail.
Then there are Graeme Kelly’s posts, not sure what he does at SI, I think has the office Jester, and gets a lot of the blame for things when they go wrong .
As far as I can make out Ovs main job is the financial system in the game, whilst Rob Cooper tends to do everything else, the fun sounding stuff anyway! His posts are probably the most informative ones you can read in the forums, whilst not as hands on in the forums as Ov, it just makes his ones much better when they do come, though sometimes he does go into too much detail for some people. One post I do remember was one saying that you couldn’t export pkms (data about a certain match) from FML and so you wouldn’t be able to do something as simple as watching a FML match offline in FM09…
This morning I stumbled upon a pkm from FML, then worked out that the option was still in FML to export one, though it wasn’t that obvious to most people, if you go to an old match up in the top right is an export PKM button. Which then got me thinking, what’s the worst that could happen if I tried to run that in the match viewer on FM09? Not a lot actually did go wrong, it loaded up and then there it was, my mighty young Mitsubishi Warriors in 3D, battling away! Whilst in the game they were called Ajax, well actually both teams where, and one side was kitted out in red and one was all blue, but the names of the players where intact and running about, passing shooting, scoring!
Awesome, whoever is in charge of getting that into the world of FML the first crate of redbull is on me! There are a few problems with importing the PKM in though, as the two match engines are so wildly different the results can differ, players can get reds that actually didn’t get reds in FML, which is very strange but understandable though.
So there you go, if the idea of stadiums in FML doesn’t get your wallet out then just think how awesome it will be when they get 3D into FML!
Filed under: General | Tags: cantona, FML, football, gameworld, live, manager, raw, regen
Originally my team was just a bunch of young undeveloped players who I planned on selling off to the highest bidder when they reached a point when I couldn’t lock there contracts down, the final aim of the team was to reach a balance of £100million in game.
A few games into Cantona (predominantly loses) I started to think this isn’t fun, how can I get a bit more enjoyment out of the game? Then It struck me, the five senior locks. What if I kept a core set of five players, these could then be the back bone of my team for years to come, whilst the filler around it would be made up of regens and promising youngsters, who with the right development could become the next members of the elite 5.
So, hows is my plan going? Well, ive got 23 year Arsenal player Fabanski in goal, 21 year old Martin Cacares who plays for Real Madrid and also 21 year old Spanish starlet Adrien upfront. Currently we’ve got 16 year old Mexican wonderkid Martin Galvan waiting in the wings to take up his place in the Elite 5, but at only 16 hes still got a long time of being on a youth contract. If I can just get my hands on a good young Defensive midfielder the backbone of the squad will be pretty impressive, and the Elite 5 will be in place.
Whilst I doubt the squad will ever go winning a senior UFFA trophy, we should be able to compete against most teams by the turn of the year, until then its going to be a harsh learning curve for the kids.
Filed under: General | Tags: filter, FML, football, hunt, live, manager, mensa, mental, regen
Today im gonna talk about how to hunt down that regen without banking on the lottery that is Potential Skill. First you’ve gotta get the right net set up to save you time, you don’t want to be checking every single regen as sometimes (especially when you have lots of scouting skills) that could take ours. Heres mine that I use…
As you can see if set it to find players with some determination and natural fitness as those two are key for any player and they barely progress, ive also told it to filter for atleast 10 in all the key positional skills (passing, tackling and finishing).
Next you need to take into account the rule of 5, what this means is any attribute except for flair/determination/natural fitness can raise by 5 points, sometimes they can rise even more but those cases are very rare.
Looks good don’t he? Or does he? Hes very heavy in set piece attributes which gives the impression that’s hes got lots of high attributes, set piece attributes are meaningless on regens, anyone can get them. He also has awful mental attrbutes…
Not exactly gonna be applying for mensa when hes developed is he lol. Personally if I want a regen im looking for a nice spread of 9-10 across the board with a 13 in key areas, and maybe PPM thrown in for good effect. On a side note with PPMs have a look at a players attributes that complement the PPM, does he have the PPM likes to TRY and beat offside trap? Well hes gonna need speed and decisions otherwise hes gonna fail miserably every time for example.
Filed under: General | Tags: Beta, bugs, FML, football, live, manager, retail
So retail is well underway for FM fans everywhere, I was “lucky” enough to be chosen to moderate in the first to go live nearly two weeks ago. As a moderator in FML, tho this post could well spell the end to that! Hopefuly not as the game has such good prospects and its great being involved. Onwards and downwards with my post…
Well quite frankly, the game is heavily bugged still, and as a mods we’re finding it quite hard to explain away all these bugs, in the Beta tests we would repeatedly say everything will be sorted in time for release and that finding these bugs now would help make the retail release all shiny awesome, how wrong could we be!
Right now my young Warriors are suffering a crisis, a plague is running through town taking down players left right and centre. My squad has had 7 injuries two days running, there are many other teams with the same problem, strangely we’re all youth teams, whats causing it is some bright spark at SI decided that U21 games shouldn’t count towards the activity rating which governs how many injuries a team gets depending on how often you play, so what’s happening is all the Youth teams are getting hit hard by injuries as we play as few senior games as possible as we don’t want to harm our youngsters progression. Unfortunately there’s no official word from SI on this matter maybe we’ll get a response like the FM2009 injury crisis, which was we don’t think there’s a problem and we’ll look into it, at least SI are showing continuity between releases.
A few weeks ago we where told that we wouldn’t be able to take skills between Gameworlds and would have to restart them unless we moved to a Pro Gameworld. Sounds fair enough as skills can be perceived a big advantage when others have none, but whats happened, someone at SI was rumoured to have forgot to put the measures in place and people have been jumping to new Gameworlds with their skills intact.
Elsewhere we’ve got a bug that takes more money than it should and with cash being so tight in the first season its really hurting people financial standings. What’s happened is the game is having problems where it should be applying transfer negotiation skills, and is causing people to pay over what the price is for free agents, or its not taking off discounts where it should. Oops.
Another weird one we experienced in Gameworld Cantona was when the Season started some players ages changed when they shouldn’t have done, well that’s what we where told in beta, players wouldn’t age until the start of the 2nd season, a bit of back peddling from SI and they’ve decided that’s what should have happened! Hmmmm are they sure? Expect a change of mind soon as some players have actually managed to get younger, is that another part of the plan then?
Well there you go, some glaring bugs hampering what at the core is a great game, personally if you haven’t yet joined the FML experience I wouldn’t bother, its defiantly not worth it, and someone said recently “its just like paying for Beta” ouch. I think people are better off waiting until January/February and getting the game then as there will be new features that and hopefully a bug free experience!
