I think it'd be kinda funny if, due to their almost nonstop posting in this thread, FrogMan and Pumpy Tudors gradually became one person. Maybe even a soccer-based super hero. Look! It's Pumpy Frog Tudors Man!







just kidding guys ;)

*sigh* Still no delivery of it today, so it's still en route to shithole Laramie. I've decided to stop my WWSM2K5 dynasty because I know I'm not going to want to bother with it once I get FM2K6.

It better come tomorrow or I'll burn down the university@$!$!

:(

EDIT - Only change is deleting the :mad: as it reads angrier than I meant it to be. The first half of the post was intended to be a bit of a moan rather than a rant, the second half is a constrcutive solution.

Just found my first medium sized gripe with FM06, and it's another one of those that's been in the series for an eon... :(

I got promoted to the EPL with Leicester, and was looking at the cheap end of the market to strengthen my squad for the next season, not expecting a massive transfer budget.

So the budget gets announced... £1.9m!!! With £20m in the bank... I couldn't buy Peter Crouch's standing leg for that! This came with a message that the intial TV money is taken into account, so I'm guessing I won't even get the August boost in funds as per FM2005 (which I'm glad appears to have been fixed, but this figure is what I would have expected in FM05 at this time, with another £5-6m in August - I'm wondering if it will actually be the same in FM06?)

Wage budget went up from £70k a week to £120k a week, which is OK - I can cope with that: keep it tight 1st year in case of relegation...

On the 1st of July suddenly my wage budget is £300k a week :eek:

I'd signed a young back up GK who should become 1st choice in a year or two, and three 32 year olds (2 quality players IRL, the other I've never heard of tbh but he looks the business), for £1m combined. All are on low wages for the PL, so I'm not even up to £100k a week. And I probably won't go much over the £120k in case it goes tits up and we do go down: I can then keep the bulk of the squad together. If we stay up, I'll start paying decent salaries.

But what irks me is that I'll be spending a minimum of £150k a week less than the board will allow me to (maybe one more player and a loan signing or two), £7.5m less than the budget over the year. IRL if I went into the boardroom and said, 'I'll keep wages £7.5m less than you allow me, but give me a few million more transfer funds for one or two extra players' (which I need), as the money is in the bank, I'm positive they'd agree.

FM does not take this into account. :(


Marc, I suggested this a number of times before: could there not be a combined wages & transfer budget pool? So in the above example, Leicester have £20m in the bank, and are happy to spend £15m on wages, and £1.9m on transfers: i.e. £16.9m total over the year.

At the minute I'm spending £5m in wages, and have spent £1m on transfers, so in theory I've got nearly £11m to play with which I either can't/won't spend at the moment. Surely I should be able to pay £5m for a player in this instance, pay him £20k a week, which would still be £5m less overall than the club are happy for me to spend.

As the wage budget has only just been upped to £300k, I've missed all the Bosman players who deserve high wages (I could only offer £7k a week up to mid June, and £11k a week up to 1st July), and I'm not giving new deals to existing players until I know we're safe...

So the board have set unrealistic budgets: if I spend another £200k a week in this scenario I deserve the sack, and any player I am likely to find for £900k (my remaining transfer budget) will not eat up much of the spare wages allowance. Yet we will make a huge profit this year, at the risk of potentially being relegated - which will again skew the financial model...

By scrapping arbitrary wages and transfer limits, would it not work better if you were told you could spend £15m a year, for example, but if you have committed £12m a year in wages, you only get £3m more to spend?

that is funny :D

Just saw the post refered to by rpi-fan and well :( Looks like I'm off to play some FM2005 then... GO RANGERS!!!

FM

Is this the beef from FM05 that you mentioned you didn't really like talking about? Or is that something else? If it is something else, could you post it here or send it to me in a PM?

Thanks!
~rpi-fan

No, this is more annoying than a proper beef, it does make any sense. I just needed a rant, but a structured rant as I truly cannot see why the idea I put forward is not better and more realistic than what actually happens in the game (as long as you have the money in the bank that is).

The beef from FM05 is a minor thing in the player instructions during games, which in FM05 did cost me goals through no fault of my own, but in FM06 while still there on the surface, has not actually affected the match once in 59 matches so far. It was the goals going in that was the final straw for me in FM05, on it's own (as it nearly is in 06) it's an inconvenience at worst. If you really want to know I will PM you, but won't post it as it's my guess that a lot of people won't have noticed it, but if I point it out...

Dola,

After rereading my thread further up the page I have edited the angry middle line, as that one line made the post sound a lot worse than I intended. I can't remember a better CM/FM game in terms of out of the box stability and playability than FM06 - not even a threat of a crash on a three year old laptop, and the game flows, immerses you... I was just a little miffed a low transfer budget vs. high wages. (As Leicester have been in administration only a couple of years ago, high wages is a no-no for me, even in a PC simulation)

I just got home from work about a half hour ago. Part of me is disappointed that the download for WWSM 06 isn't out, but the other part is just glad that I won't have anything to distract me from FM 05. Time to see if Flores develops some more :)

I leave on a trip tomarrow. I fully expect that when I get back I will pick up my copy at Gamestop. If they havn't called by Monday night, I'll know something is up.

You can do this in FM when the budgets are announced there is a button on the bottom left to allow you to negotiation them (ie. lower wage budget higher transfer budget etc.) - this is obviously dependant on the situation and mood/personality of the board at the time (ie. if they're about to fire you don't expect much flexibility if any ;) ).

Incidentally though the board will be likely to NEVER allow you that much more than say £5-8m to spend in the situation you're in and would rather have a high wage budget than spend more on transfers - why you ask ... simple economics.

The statistical chances of a newly promoted side surviving in the Premiership isn't particularly high, hence the board will want to ensure that they don't put the club in a precarious position in case they're relegated.

Thus giving you a high wage budget but limited transfer funds will encourage you to purchase cheap players from free transfer or abroad rather than buy in expensive players.

This means should you get relegated the club will have enough funds left to ensure they can run for a while outside of the Premiership either to push for another promotion or to offload players and lower the wage budget ... heck if you bring in freebies they might even make a profit out of it.

On the other hand if you'd had transfers fund then you'd have depleted the clubs cash reserve meaning that if you'd been relagated the club wouldn't be in as stable a financial position.

Hope this helps,

Marc

As I've mentioned in the post above high wages is ok on its own if a club retains a cash buffer, which is what your board are doing.

Its arguably actually safer than running a high transfer budget (as otherwise you end up with a huge squad all on low Premiership/high Championship wages who are harder to offload should you be relegated) ... especially if you're sensible in the lengths of contract you offer.

Wow Marc, I mean, to have the financials of a club taken into account so that the player, unless he understands business and finance, misunderstands/misconstrues the actual reasoning behind a decision, is impressive. Thanks for the explanation.

*hums as he downloads patch*

A 2nd patch is out!?! :)

was the spanish super cup not played in 2004? is that why i have no winner for 2004 listed and it just skips from 2003 to 2005?

Nope, just got the game today in the mail. :)

I have a question. With FM 2005, the recommended setup was something like 15 or 16 leagues in 9 nations... Now with FM 2006, the recommended setup is 8 leagues in 5 nations.... Why so drastic a difference? If anything, I thought the sims were supposed to be faster, allowing for more leagues to be run.

Answering my own question, the game runs a HELL of a lot faster than FM2005 ever did, so I can pretty much ignore the Recommended Leagues setting I've found.

But one thing I noticed is that there's only 33 national sides in the job centre... Is that all there are or are there more?

Game Release =

+

Sega screwed the pooch?

yes...

Oh and I'd just like to say, even though I'm disappointed that there only appear to be 33 national side manager jobs in the game, this game rocks 2005's fro hardcore.

didn't there used to be a work around in the old days where you could manage any nation?

Eh. Wish it was more of a "WILL be Monday", though.

are the rules for the CL changing in the future? Cuz I see something in my second year of play where i have to have so many players (2 i think?) trained at my club, and i think like 4 that are nationals of my country. Is this an actual new set of rules that i never heard about?

Strange, Monday is the 7th, which is the date that Gamestop has for the release date for WWSM06. Huge coincidence though! ;)

Well both were supposed to be the 2nd, so take that date how you will.

I uppsed the 'judging' levels for what is considered Uber/Good/Average PC's in the game so you PC was probably judged as 'uber' last year but only 'Good' this year ... hence it recommends less leagues.

These recommendations are purely based on a combination of my and PaulC's patience thresholds and our knowledge of what a PC can handle league wise so don't stress about upping ithe level if you've played the game before and know your patience level.

I agree, if you don't mind waiting a minute or two between games, feel free to go far beyond what they put as recommmendations.. I did, and it's still fast enough..

It can be a bit annoying if you have multiple coaches, or a World Cup is happening (I'm controlling MLS's New England), but most times there's only one or two pauses for human interaction in between games.

Yeah. They're instituting a "hometown" rule thingie soon.

Its a real-life rule coming in over the next few years, its quite interesting watching how it affects teams in the game as irl its largely an unknown quantity at present ...

yeah. it hasn't been a problem for me yet, but it's definately something I'm going to have to keep an eye on moving forward to make sure I still have some homegrown players on the team.

One question I have that I never quite got cleared. The goalkeeper's rating of "tendency to punch" . . . does high mean not as likely to punch at the ball or does high mean more likely to?

Oh. By the way. I don't know if this was in '05 or not as I did not have the full game . . .

But I was watching my game in the watching everything mode. One of the players on the opposing team fell on the ground injured [I'm sure he tripped on his own boot because my players are extremely clean . . . *whistle*] in the middle of our attacking move when one of our pass was misplaced and went straight to their goalkeeper. I'm completely confused as he catches it and IMMEDIATELY kicks the ball straight to the sideline without any pressure. Then I read the commentary: "And now can receive medical attention." The medics promptly trot in. As they kicked the ball out of bound intentionally to stop play, the ball is turned over to us. At which point, Gael Glichy immediately threw the ball out of bound [if that makes sense] to give the opposing team a goal kick.

I know this sounds like a ridiculously miniscule thing to be going ga-ga about [when I have so much more significant things to do so about] but I think it's insanely awesome that the SI team managed to get this into the engine. It adds . . . I don't know. It adds some "life" or something. I'm sure someone else can find better and more eloquent way of what it adds but all I can say about it would be: "cooooooool."

Kudos, SI team.

In between monstrous homework assignments today, I posted a few times on the SI boards.

Then, when reading replies to my comments, I was reminded why I haven't read, let alone posted, there in a few years.

:eek:

~rpi-fan

HIgh means he punches more - personally I dislike keepers who punch, but on the continent its much more common than in England ....

If you have a keeper who's good at it then in theory at least it can be a powerful and fairly accurate clearance ... if you have one who's poor at it then he'll limp-wristedly palm it to an incoming striker ...

'tis good and bad imho - means we still have a way to go in ensuring the feedback and explanations to people are good enough in the game ... we'll keep trying to improve this side of things in the future.

I can see the argument, not sure I agree with it (I suppose that's why you've said 'arguably' ;) ) I would qualify the below by saying I am not an expert in the field of economics (depsite having a joint honours History/Economics degree tbh I was good at the first and only got by at best at the economics part) or the running of a football club (although my dad was General Sec at Villa & Leicester for the first 22 years or so of my life (I'm now 32)). So I am in the position of having a little knowledge in each area (which as we all know is a dangerous thing :D)

Our own RL plight, that of Derby, Sheff Wed a few years ago, Ipswich, all go against the low fees/high wages scenarios. To take everything to a logical and literal conclusion: if you get relegated, it suggests the players aren't good enough, and therefore I believe you are less likely to be able to get rid of high wage earners off the wage bill - the chances are PL clubs may not want them, and those clubs who who might do so are likely to be on the same level as yourselves and therefore will likely not be able to pay them as much as they are already on (we could only get rid of Scowcroft this year when his contract ran out: his wages were the exact reason he was at Leicester so long: he wouldn't have got that anywhere else, and you can't blame him for not taking a cut. Wise punching Davidson was perfect as nobody else would have paid him the £32.5k a week we were, and we had a case for sacking him, or else we would have had him for three more years. Other examples: Ravanelli, Bakke, Carbone, the Dutch defender at Chelsea - although not relegated same idea, etc)

It would appear to be a question of strategy: the policy you've outlined works if the plan is to offer one year deals to Bosman players to try and stay in the EPL, gain prestige so that the following year you are more likely to get a higher class player for the 2nd PL campaign - but in my eyes this means you are pretty much starting from behind the 8-ball two seasons in a row, having to build a virtually new team every year. The one year contracts are the only way in which you can risk high wages without mortgaging the future of the club

Higher transfer fees/lower wages are still safer in my mind: once you have paid the fee, that's it - no/vastly reduced further future risk if the wages are low. Then you will likely not be financially threatened if relegated as your ongoing costs (i.e. wages) are much much lower, and you might not need to offload players, or certainly to the same degree.

In my mind (and I could well be in a minority) for this reason I prefer to keep wages low first year if possible, but get players who I believe will be able to contribute for 2-3 years minimum at the PL level. If I do get relegated, there is a good chance I will be able to afford to keep the squad together in the Championship (if the players are prepared to stay), if I stay up I can then look at giving these players contracts comparable to other EPL teams with a knowledge they are good enough. This way you have continuity and a gradual consistent building process.

Unfortately I didn't see the negotiation button when budgets were announced (I did in the contract negotiation screen though, so I've banged my head repeatedly and won't forget to look for it next year now!). FWIW I was reckoning I might get £5-6m transfer budget, which is similar to your 'best case' figures: and I'd scouted transfer listed players and those up to £1m maximum value in advance of this expected figure.

As I say I can see the ideas behind what you say, but this being the case, all of the decent Bosmans who would come to Leicester had gone by the time I was allowed to pay a lot of wages, so I'd be stuck with paying inflated salaries for ordinary players (as player demands go drastically up once there is a lot of room in the wage budgets)...

Thanks for the reply: as the post above says, it is fantastic that you take the time out to answer queries/concerns such as this. And I am very pleased to know there is a 'playing budget' idea within the transfer/salary funds - just wish I'd noticed it :D

I've seen this happen in FM 05, FWIW.

Alright, I have class from 8am-12pm tomorrow, and then a dentist apt. 12:30pm-1pm, I'm hoping it might be released by the time I get home!

WHOA! Liverpool just came in with an offer to poach me after sacking Rafa Benitez. SWEEEEET. Unfortunately I'm attached to my guys so I think I shall have to reject it.

Jari, fwiw, I did receive a "due to improvement in finances, your transfer budget has been increased," playing as Leeds the season after promotion to the EPL. It happened in late July, early August if I remember correctly. They gave me about $5 million more. So it is possible.

So I simmed to the draft for the MLS. No one of any great regard was there. Some kids with some long term potential, but a good 3-4 years it looked like.

They improve rather quickly.. I had a Next Brad Friedel in my first revs game (that was lost to the crash)

I'd have to check to see by how much, but it also happened in my current Q.P.R. career. And it was a pretty big increase, although it was in my 3rd season in the EPL I think that Jari's shorts (:)) is complaining about not getting an increase in the first season or so...

FM

delayed dola...

There it is: http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~fof/foru...d.php?p=938386

They increased it a whopping $17.5M from $10M to $27.5M after I'd been stacking cash for a couple seasons...

FM

I don't know why it bothers me, since I won't even have time to play it tonight (GO PATS!!!), but not getting any news when it's already past lunch time and closing in on the end of another workday in England feels like deja vu... all over again... :(

sigh...

FM

Frogman, didn't I see that Sega was on the West Coast? So it wouldn't even be 8am there yet. Could that be a reason why? Or am I off on that?

yeah, I remember seeing that too, would make sense. It then means that we have just about one shot per day of them making it work. They worked on it on Friday, sent it back to Sega and if there's a problem today, it's pushed to tomorrow... This worldwide thing is nice, but dang, time differences are not helping matters...

Oh well...

FM