tl;dr 'Youth Facilities' have no effect on newgen PA in any way. The 'club reputation' of OTHER clubs in your nation has a small effect on newgen PA. 'Corporate facilities' may also have a minor effect on newgen PA, but this could be just statistical noise.
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I did testing before in FM19 and found that youth facilities affect newgen CA but not PA.
I have done a decent amount of testing with FM24 and have found the same, and that median PA continues to be the most reliable measure of newgen quality, with peak PA having much more of a randomness factor.
What I found in my previous testing was roughly the following:
Junior coaching ~40% PA effect Nation youth rating ~25% PA effect Youth recruitment ~25% PA effect Club reputation acts as tie breaker for youth recruitment Either unique nation or division ID ~25% (or perhaps even more) PA effect (a hidden, unchangeable factor - it may be 'Nation attribute template' that is listed as an inaccessible debug option in the editor, which sounds like it would be similar to the 'Nation personality template' before it was removed in recent versions) All other factors no effect
But I wanted to test a few new theories I had this time as well.
First, the data:
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams normal: 141.5 median, 170 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YF1: 138.1 median, 161.4 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YF20: 143.7 median, 171.4 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams JC1: 143 median, 163 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep/Train/YouthImp/Corp 1: 124.3 median, 176.3 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams Train/YouthImp/Corp 1: 137.25 median, 165.5 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YouthImp/Corp 1: 136 median, 171.6 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YouthImp 20/Corp 1: 135.6 median, 164.9 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep1: 130.6 median, 177 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep1/YF1: 142 median, 174 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), premier league normal, all other England teams ClubRep1/YF1/corp1: 138 median, 163.5 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), premier league ClubRep/YF1/Corp1, all other clubs normal: 138.8 median, 177.4 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), north-west local region normal, all other clubs ClubRep1/YF1: 138.4 median, 176 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep/Corp 1: 133.9 median, 167.3 peak
Margin of error I'd guesstimate at ~3-5 median PA. This isn't up to EBFM's standards, but it's 'good enough' in my opinion. I've always been of the view that if you can't replicate it reliably in a few seasons of FM, then its not significant enough of a result to include anyway.
In case you're wondering, keeping the affiliates for Man City reduces median PA by ~15-20, and I deliberately removed them because I know affiliates mess with the newgen intake results as they can replace one or more of them with one from an affiliate club. I wanted to get a pure English club result.
I noticed that Man City often gets some purely Scotland/Ireland only players, and that once their top player (194 PA) was Ireland only. This is notable because Ireland has low enough of a nation youth rating that a 194 PA Ireland player is pretty highly unlikely. It gave credence to the idea that newgens are tied to local region in some way, so I thought I'd re-examine that aspect too (I'd previously tested 'local region' and found it had zero effect on CA/PA).
Hypothesis: Youth facilities have insignificant effect at a single club, but a nations or divisions teams YF contributes cumulatively to a pool of PA that clubs then draw upon. Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities don't effect median PA, but they effect peak PA or the skew. Conclusion: False.
Although YF1 always eventually produced a high peak PA, I did notice that YF1 alone had a long run of ~155-160 peak PA. This wasn't the case in other YF1 tests, and YF20 produced peak PAs all over the place from 159 to 194. Skew is difficult to definitively conclude on, but I didn't get the impression looking through the results that youth facilities effected the skew.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities contribute to a division pool only. Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities contribute to a 'local region' pool only. Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Junior coaching/Training Facilities/Youth Importance of other clubs has an effect somehow. Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Club reputation of other clubs has an effect somehow. Conclusion: Tentatively, yes.
This was a somewhat surprising finding. From memory, I did find before that club rep had a ~10% CA effect, but not on PA. In this case, we can see that ClubRep1 reduced median PA by ~7.7% alone, and ~12.2% when combined with other low club attributes. I took extra samples to be sure and got the same result.
The strange thing is that ClubRep1 result is normal when combined with YF1. I think there's a clue as to what's going on in the fact that the low median PA results only happened when *all* other England teams had low club rep. But that still doesn't make sense of it.
Hypothesis: Corporate facilities of other clubs has an effect somehow. Conclusion: Unclear.
Corp 1 did produce lower median PAs consistently, but the difference of ~3-7 may not be statistically significant. Consider that the typical variance of a club each year is ~5 median PA, even after stripping away the outliers.
Hypothesis: Starting CA affects PA, say that +20 CA due to factor contributes +20 PA as well. Conclusion: False.
Thanks for this! I think I read somewhere else recently (probably Reddit) that Youth Facilities don't impact the PA of newly generated players at all. This is really good to know.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: In case you're wondering, keeping the affiliates for Man City reduces median PA by ~15-20, and I deliberately removed them because I know affiliates mess with the newgen intake results as they can replace one or more of them with one from an affiliate club. I wanted to get a pure English club result. Expand
Great test, man. Thoughts about the affiliate clubs thing:
There are 7 countries with a higher Youth Rating than England(136), highest being Brazil with 163. If my top English club gets an affiliate in Brazil, wouldn't that be a good thing? Seems like swapping an English newgen for a Brazilian should be an upgrade most of the time.
The question is, I guess, how the game makes the Brazilian kid: does he get generated in my youth intake with my own 20/20 JC and YR? or is he made at his own club, with their stats (probably lower than mine), and just moved to my team?
If it's the first option then its a win. If not, then its a gamble. Any ideas?
EvensenFM said: Thanks for this! I think I read somewhere else recently (probably Reddit) that Youth Facilities don't impact the PA of newly generated players at all. This is really good to know. Expand
I actually posted a comment on your youtube recently, that was it.
You do pretty good videos, enjoying watching them alongside doing things, even though I wouldn't have thought football history would be my thing.
kvasir said: Great test, man. Thoughts about the affiliate clubs thing:
There are 7 countries with a higher Youth Rating than England(136), highest being Brazil with 163. If my top English club gets an affiliate in Brazil, wouldn't that be a good thing? Seems like swapping an English newgen for a Brazilian should be an upgrade most of the time.
The question is, I guess, how the game makes the Brazilian kid: does he get generated in my youth intake with my own 20/20 JC and YR? or is he made at his own club, with their stats (probably lower than mine), and just moved to my team?
If it's the first option then its a win. If not, then its a gamble. Any ideas? Expand
Yes, you are entirely correct in your first hypothesis. I just removed the affiliates from Man City because I'm trying to work out the newgen mechanics accurately.
To the question, a few days ago I would have said to you that its just Brazil's youth rating + it must be your own facilities, because in some testing I did before on it I found that it only takes the youth rating, not any of the affiliate club attributes.
But recently I was watching EBFM's video on affiliate clubs, and his data shows that while nation youth rating is still the most important factor, affiliate club attributes do in fact influence the quality of the newgen. So now I'm not sure, but I'd say believe what EBFM says on this because it's likely I only took like 5 samples or something in my test, because intake from affiliate clubs isn't really a part of the formula for newgen mechanics that I've been testing for.
You do pretty good videos, enjoying watching them alongside doing things, even though I wouldn't have thought football history would be my thing. Expand
Aha! Yeah, it must have been you. Apologies - I have a hard time keeping track...
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: Junior coaching ~40% PA effect Nation youth rating ~25% PA effect Youth recruitment ~25% PA effect Club reputation acts as tie breaker for youth recruitment Either unique nation or division ID ~25% (or perhaps even more) PA effect (a hidden, unchangeable factor Expand Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: tl;dr 'Youth Facilities' have no effect on newgen PA in any way. The 'club reputation' of OTHER clubs in your nation has a small effect on newgen PA. 'Corporate facilities' may also have a minor effect on newgen PA, but this could be just statistical noise. Expand
Sorry for bringing up old topics. Has anyone tested the impact of the first team's training facility on player development?
Antal said: Sorry for bringing up old topics. Has anyone tested the impact of the first team's training facility on player development? Expand
This is an old video, but from what i understand the mechanics of the game haven't really changed. The conclusion was it does have an impact.
From anecdote though, it mostly has an impact on players with lesser personalities, i've found that if the personality is good the development is good. I could be spouting nonsense, but that's what i've noticed at least.
juliius said: This is an old video, but from what i understand the mechanics of the game haven't really changed. The conclusion was it does have an impact.
From anecdote though, it mostly has an impact on players with lesser personalities, i've found that if the personality is good the development is good. I could be spouting nonsense, but that's what i've noticed at least. Expand
tam1236 said: Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor. Expand The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players.
MeanOnSunday said: The number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues). Expand Would be interesting but do you have any proof? This hypothesis doesn't perfectly fit to the situation because what bothered me, was nearly the same max PA in every probe, nearly the same number of players with high PA>=150, but always PA<160 (though youth rating was set at 200). So if it is generated in such a way as you write, newgens' PA should be also connected with retired players' PA from country X, what I doubt, because lowering youth rating to 1 I got newgens of PA~70 with highest club reputation in a country.
BTW I didnt change any clubs' reputation, but I doubt recruitment works in "your" way (When high-rep, You collect bad players from bad-reputation clubs).
MeanOnSunday said: The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players. Expand I suppose you are referring to me only using Man City, but that is for this FM24 test. In FM19, I tested every playable club, and that is what my factor % approximations are derived from (by examining the differences between the clubs).
It is not true that only club rep followed by youth recruitment matter. If you doubt my own claims, you can see EBFM finding the same results (junior coaching is the most important for newgen PA).
The affiliate player does replace one of the 16 of your intake, and high PA newgens do not squeeze out low PA newgens in the intake. Rather there is a fairly predictable median that is the peak probability of a distribution curve, and the shape of the curve (bunched up or large tails) is affected by a few factors, but essentially the peak PAs you'll see are random (i.e. Man City might get 170 PA peak one year, 190 PA peak the next). The peak PAs are only predictable in one regard, that Man City is going to produce a player somewhere in the range of ~160-200 PA every year, but Brackley Town almost never will. The best indicator of both overall quality and chance of high PA newgens is median PA.
If your theory about how recruitment works was correct, then ClubRep1/YF1 would not produce results equal to default, which it did.
EBFM found that youth facilities of affiliate clubs is inversely correlated with intake PA. He also found that club rep of affiliate affects PA, but not for self-intake. I figure this might be a clue.
We can infer that if other clubs have YF20, their release of high PA newgens to other clubs is dampened. If they have YF1, it would be unrestricted. Since YF does not affect newgen PA, the high PA newgen output of all other English clubs is not affected, it is simply that they are handing over the better players to Man City.
We see consistently that ClubRep1 of all other English clubs results in low median PA, but not if *some* other English clubs are normal (whether same division or not).
Some logical deductions:
1. It is not that there are not enough high PA players being generated, as YF1 alleviates it entirely, even when all other clubs are ClubRep1.
2. Club rep has little effect on self-intake, therefore the boost to PA that high club rep of *other* clubs provide isn't coming from their intake quality being raised, but that the standard high PA players are more likely to be poached if the team is high rep. My guess is that this is meant to represent high rep teams being more likely to be scouted, while the reality is that good youths can come from anywhere but many simply go unnoticed.
3. So the low PA of ClubRep1 actually represents a scouting failure, rather than an actual drop in available youth quality.
4. YF1 must negate the scouting failure. Perhaps it is because these players seek out the better club to join, instead of waiting to be scouted.
Another way of thinking about it is that youth facilities represent your defense against poaching, while club rep is what makes you 'visible' to poachers.
In theory, this should mean a YF1 high rep club should have slightly lower median PA intakes.
I suppose that 'youth recruitment' is what the aforementioned scouting would be. An interesting question is if there is a real hidden pool of pre-newgens, where does the new 16th player come from when one get poached, and who is the replaced player and where does he get dropped to.
We know that youth recruitment is also a pecking order rather than absolute, i.e. YR 19 is no good if every other team is YR20. But it doesn't sound right that if one team is YR 2 and everyone is YR 1, then there would be no difference between YR 2 and YR 20 for that club. Having YR 20 overcome high YF and low clubrep barriers makes more sense.
This is all difficult to test, but I have noticed the following suggestive oddity: The Jamaican Premier League starts with 8 teams with 20 youth recruitment. Turkey on the other hand has 16 1st div clubs with 6 or less YR. Without diving into this too deeply, obviously something is going on here beyond just YR 2 beats YR 1, and it seems to me that YR is being adjusted to produce desired results when club rep and expected player quality is set in stone first. Pete Sottrel (SI staff) claimed 'The Youth Recruitment rating tells us how wide the club’s catchment area is' but this has to be a bullshit story because clubs in the microstate of San Marino have mostly YR of 2, while Luxembourg have several YR 14-20, Seattle has 12, and Sugar Boys and two others in the British Virgin Islands have 18.
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything.
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything. Expand Hear me out, I believe you are largely mistaken on this.
From memory, game importance does have a modest effect on the distribution (low game importance = PA more bunched up around median), but it doesn't change the median or rule out very high PA players occurring entirely. Don't take my word for it, you can see EBFM's test results. Two problems with EBFM's data here is that he didn't look at the distribution as a whole, and he uses average instead of median. I think I've neglected to say before that this is (likely) why EBFM came to a different conclusion about youth facilities, where he found a very slight but consistent increase to PA. This is because he used the average, which isn't reliable with FM's system, and I guess it's possible something is going on here but I'd think if there is it'd probably be that the CA boost from YF is roughly added to the PA (i.e. 36 CA > 40 CA = 120 PA > 124 PA).
I would say that game importance is equivalent to a ~10% PA factor, it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure.
That said I haven't tested it in a long time, and it's possible your testing was qualitatively different to what I did. You said you maxed out all other factors. I guess it's possible low game importance has a more pronounced effect in such conditions. But what I do know is that with the default game settings we play with, game importance is almost a negligible factor.
Part of it could also be that because nations do in fact appear to have different (and significant) values set under the hood, it's easy to confuse that with game importance, cities, etc.
I've been doing more testing that I've been sitting on for a while now as I reflect on how to best communicate it. Basically I noticed how newgens have unique 'place of birth' that usually isn't even the club's city, so I thought this might be a clue that would allow me to deduce the hidden nation mechanics.
EBFM got as far as thinking it's probably a national pool & draft process going on. What I've found is that seemingly can't be true. From testing before, I already knew that city, local region, etc. all had zero influence on PA. But now I also know that the whole city system is essentially purely cosmetic. There is a sophisticated mechanic that assigns the place of birth, but it does not affect the newgen PA.
Why this matters:
- There isn't some more sophisticated behind the scenes stuff going on like HoYDs/U18s staff poaching from other cities in the local region or such. This doesn't mean that 'Youth Recruitment' doesn't do anything, it just means that it acts independently with its own mechanism; it doesn't interact with some underlying hidden process regarding cities and pre-newgens floating around the place and whatnot.
- There aren't 'player pools' in cities, therefore there is no player scarcity in regards to 'youth recruitment' in congested areas.
- The PA comes from the club location (nation), not the birth city location.
- 'Local region' doesn't seem to have any effect on...anything. I think it probably simply serves a 'boundary' purpose for editing, i.e. a team coordinates is in south England but is part of a northern local region so it gets counted in the north division.
Teasing out those implications takes some thought itself, but there is more (though less significant) that is difficult to explain without bamboozling someone who hasn't been looking at it for several hours as I have. For instance:
- Newgens come from the city location, not the club location, but they adopt the nationality of the club. This is confusing, and purely cosmetic, but I can illustrate its probable intended purpose with an example: Suppose an American Samoa club is added to USA competition. The club is 'based in' USA for economic travel reasons say, but the youths coming through are born in 'Pago Pago' because it's an American Samoa club.
- You cannot tell whether players are generated first at cities or at clubs, because they are the same thing - the club generates them as having come from cities.
- There is a map coordinate geometry to city/'place of birth' selection, likely a rectangle with decreasing selection probability towards the edges. But there are nuances and even exceptions.
Of course I would have to furnish all the different examples I found to prove my findings, in addition to explaining these abstractions.
Unfortunately it didn't get me any closer to uncovering the hidden nation factor, but what it has shown me is that the newgen recruitment process is probably a lot more simple than previously thought, in regards to PA, and it reinforces that unique nation ID is a key component while staff, cities, whatnot isn't.
Here's my rough mockup of what the 'place of birth' selection actually looks like.
This whole thing appears to be purely cosmetic, so don't try and work out how to get better newgens with it. There is no actual competing for newgens, or even newgen generation in these cities, going on.
There are three clubs: Ljubljana, Kamnik, and Maribor.
The rectangle is area the club can draw newgens from.
It is not that newgens are generated at each city and a few of them get picked up, it is that the club generates precisely 16 newgens. There 'place of birth' is probabilistic based on distance from club and 'inhabitants range' of the city. The circles are just to convey the idea of decreasing probability the further you go out from the club location.
Notice how Ljubljana and Maribor each draw ~4 players from their own city, but Kamnik only draws 2 and takes many more from nearby the nearby capital of Ljubljana. This is because Kamnik has low inhabitants range, and Ljubljana is high probability because of proximity + high inhabitants.
I do not think city 'attraction' affects it, I have tested it but the results are not 100% clear but clear enough to rule it out I think. From memory, 'inhabitants range' is also relative to 'inhabitants range' of other cities. That is to say, if Ljubjlana only had 10,000 people, it would still be top dog if all other cities are 1000< pop, but also it would be less commonly the place of birth than if it had 20mil people and others 1000< pop. There are some further nuances that reveal themselves when you try to break it with extremes like this, but since the mechanic is cosmetic, I won't go further into that.
Lastly there is the matter of exceptions. As you can see, sometimes there can be instances outside the rectangle. I don't know what exactly is going on here, I suspect it has something to do with youth recruitment perhaps. Maybe it's even just a randomness factor they've put in to try and better reflect reality.
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything. Expand
I’m doing an USA only MLS save the bolded is simply not true. Once you max out Junior Coaching/Youth Recuitment you get tons of regens with 130-140 PA which is a great MLS player. Over 3 seasons with maxed out everything I have like 15 players with 130 plus and a ton of mid+ 120s. Might be the easiest intake only save to win every competition besides Mexico. (I’ve got a lot of issues with how stupid they handle MLS academies when they basically work identical to Europe with no youth contracts.) I’ve got two starters already in the mid 130s from the academy pre maxing everything out.
The draft also pumps out 120-140 pa players but they are mostly too old since there is no youth league and the phantom games don’t do shit for development so their CAs are f**king terrible at 20/21
I have an academy CD getting called into the senior NT with the real players still active but the active CDs are all in the 130s except Carter Vickers.
While most of the good regens are from Europe/Mexico , I’ve seen some crazy players come out of MLS academies in other saves. Like high 150s starting for Arsenal good but it’s like once every 3-5 years and tedious to scout. (But always free.)
Though yeah if you change game importance to the highest setting the US starts pumping out WC talent left and right because the clubs have nothing to spend on besides infrastructure and the countries economic/population stats are so high. (I would argue the U.S. regen quality is realistic if only slightly punishing given the trajectory MLS academies are going. Basically all the starters that grew up in the U.S. were in MLS academies at one point.)
From memory, game importance does have a modest effect on the distribution (low game importance = PA more bunched up around median), but it doesn't change the median or rule out very high PA players occurring entirely. Don't take my word for it, you can see EBFM's test results. Two problems with EBFM's data here is that he didn't look at the distribution as a whole, and he uses average instead of median. I think I've neglected to say before that this is (likely) why EBFM came to a different conclusion about youth facilities, where he found a very slight but consistent increase to PA. This is because he used the average, which isn't reliable with FM's system, and I guess it's possible something is going on here but I'd think if there is it'd probably be that the CA boost from YF is roughly added to the PA (i.e. 36 CA > 40 CA = 120 PA > 124 PA).
I would say that game importance is equivalent to a ~10% PA factor, it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure.
That said I haven't tested it in a long time, and it's possible your testing was qualitatively different to what I did. You said you maxed out all other factors. I guess it's possible low game importance has a more pronounced effect in such conditions. But what I do know is that with the default game settings we play with, game importance is almost a negligible factor.
Part of it could also be that because nations do in fact appear to have different (and significant) values set under the hood, it's easy to confuse that with game importance, cities, etc.
I've been doing more testing that I've been sitting on for a while now as I reflect on how to best communicate it. Basically I noticed how newgens have unique 'place of birth' that usually isn't even the club's city, so I thought this might be a clue that would allow me to deduce the hidden nation mechanics.
EBFM got as far as thinking it's probably a national pool & draft process going on. What I've found is that seemingly can't be true. From testing before, I already knew that city, local region, etc. all had zero influence on PA. But now I also know that the whole city system is essentially purely cosmetic. There is a sophisticated mechanic that assigns the place of birth, but it does not affect the newgen PA.
Why this matters:
- There isn't some more sophisticated behind the scenes stuff going on like HoYDs/U18s staff poaching from other cities in the local region or such. This doesn't mean that 'Youth Recruitment' doesn't do anything, it just means that it acts independently with its own mechanism; it doesn't interact with some underlying hidden process regarding cities and pre-newgens floating around the place and whatnot.
- There aren't 'player pools' in cities, therefore there is no player scarcity in regards to 'youth recruitment' in congested areas.
- The PA comes from the club location (nation), not the birth city location.
- 'Local region' doesn't seem to have any effect on...anything. I think it probably simply serves a 'boundary' purpose for editing, i.e. a team coordinates is in south England but is part of a northern local region so it gets counted in the north division.
Teasing out those implications takes some thought itself, but there is more (though less significant) that is difficult to explain without bamboozling someone who hasn't been looking at it for several hours as I have. For instance:
- Newgens come from the city location, not the club location, but they adopt the nationality of the club. This is confusing, and purely cosmetic, but I can illustrate its probable intended purpose with an example: Suppose an American Samoa club is added to USA competition. The club is 'based in' USA for economic travel reasons say, but the youths coming through are born in 'Pago Pago' because it's an American Samoa club.
- You cannot tell whether players are generated first at cities or at clubs, because they are the same thing - the club generates them as having come from cities.
- There is a map coordinate geometry to city/'place of birth' selection, likely a rectangle with decreasing selection probability towards the edges. But there are nuances and even exceptions.
Of course I would have to furnish all the different examples I found to prove my findings, in addition to explaining these abstractions.
Unfortunately it didn't get me any closer to uncovering the hidden nation factor, but what it has shown me is that the newgen recruitment process is probably a lot more simple than previously thought, in regards to PA, and it reinforces that unique nation ID is a key component while staff, cities, whatnot isn't. Expand
I wish I was mistaken all of the Build a Nation players know about Game Importance superseding NewGen settings. Go watch a ton of of SecondYellowCard Build a Nation setup videos and read his discords where his followers test all of the NewGen stuff for the lowest nations.
I can tell you my last 3 build a nation saves were hungary before I knew about game importance, Andorra and Faroe Islands. Hungary even after 60 years where I gave every club billions and billions to max out their facilities could never produce a NewGen that was as good as IRL national club member. The way you give clubs billions is by buying their horrendous youth players for 10 million each as the board never turns down 10 million offers. So you are buying 30+ players per club eventually. Giving clubs 300 million each season.
bigloser said: I’m doing an USA only MLS save the bolded is simply not true. Once you max out Junior Coaching/Youth Recuitment you get tons of regens with 130-140 PA which is a great MLS player. Over 3 seasons with maxed out everything I have like 15 players with 130 plus and a ton of mid+ 120s. Might be the easiest intake only save to win every competition besides Mexico. (I’ve got a lot of issues with how stupid they handle MLS academies when they basically work identical to Europe with no youth contracts.) I’ve got two starters already in the mid 130s from the academy pre maxing everything out.
The draft also pumps out 120-140 pa players but they are mostly too old since there is no youth league and the phantom games don’t do shit for development so their CAs are f**king terrible at 20/21
I have an academy CD getting called into the senior NT with the real players still active but the active CDs are all in the 130s except Carter Vickers.
While most of the good regens are from Europe/Mexico , I’ve seen some crazy players come out of MLS academies in other saves. Like high 150s starting for Arsenal good but it’s like once every 3-5 years and tedious to scout. (But always free.)
Though yeah if you change game importance to the highest setting the US starts pumping out WC talent left and right because the clubs have nothing to spend on besides infrastructure and the countries economic/population stats are so high. (I would argue the U.S. regen quality is realistic if only slightly punishing given the trajectory MLS academies are going. Basically all the starters that grew up in the U.S. were in MLS academies at one point.) Expand
I may have exaggerated the MLS talent but only a little. And it is different if you are actually playing in MLS as it makes it Active thus the entire nation gets full newgens as opposed to a league that is just loaded but not active.
This is why people make Brazil active since you have a much higher % to spawn mass quality of NewGens every season as opposed to a just top tier loaded but not active. I load all leagues but only have 5-10 active and never USA as active. In testing since not many actually play with USA.
Quantity of newgens is different for active vs not active but loaded vs not active and not loaded.
Unless using custom leagues Africa has no leagues except South Africa. So early you can find great African irl players. So you will notice a lot of NewGens spawn in Europe who play for Africa National Clubs as Africa since no leagues only spawn NewGens when a player retires because FM wants to always keep the total player number the same in the database.
While the active league all clubs spawn full set of Newgens every season.
This is also the reason after 50-60 years England takes over as the NewGen king if you have a full England pyramid loaded. You are talking 6/7 tiers of clubs who can spawn newgens and with RNG Jesus even if the combined lower tier pop out 1 National CLub bench player a season it eventually adds up after decades.
Go create a backup save and sim 20 years in the future and see where the USA national team players spawned at. It will all be overseas. USA wont be able to create in nation NewGens for a top 20 Fifa club. That is completely unrealistic. Sure some USA players are born overseas and have dual citizenship. But in FM they will 100% be spawned overseas. The reason USA stays a top 15 Fifa Club is because they spawn in Europe. USA might spawn 2-3 players born in USA who spawned at USA clubs that get to the national team.
People have won the World Cup with Wales when doing older Pre Ryan Reynold Wrexham Road to Glory saves. As the NewGens actually follow the England settings. Since as far as FM settings go Wrexham is in England.
This also use to be the case in old FM back in the day with San Marino as they had a club somewhere down in Italy's lowest tiers with a custom database. And once you got that club to top Tier Italy and became the #1 club in the world they could spawn world class newgens enabling people to win the World Cup with San Marino National Team as all the NewGens would come from the human controlled club in Italy.
There use to a link to the guy who did the San Marino world cup on reddit or Si forum. It might be 10 years old at this point. Think he had to play over 100 years or something.
tl;dr 'Youth Facilities' have no effect on newgen PA in any way. The 'club reputation' of OTHER clubs in your nation has a small effect on newgen PA. 'Corporate facilities' may also have a minor effect on newgen PA, but this could be just statistical noise.
----------------------------
I did testing before in FM19 and found that youth facilities affect newgen CA but not PA.
I have done a decent amount of testing with FM24 and have found the same, and that median PA continues to be the most reliable measure of newgen quality, with peak PA having much more of a randomness factor.
What I found in my previous testing was roughly the following:
Junior coaching ~40% PA effect
Nation youth rating ~25% PA effect
Youth recruitment ~25% PA effect
Club reputation acts as tie breaker for youth recruitment
Either unique nation or division ID ~25% (or perhaps even more) PA effect (a hidden, unchangeable factor - it may be 'Nation attribute template' that is listed as an inaccessible debug option in the editor, which sounds like it would be similar to the 'Nation personality template' before it was removed in recent versions)
All other factors no effect
But I wanted to test a few new theories I had this time as well.
First, the data:
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams normal: 141.5 median, 170 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YF1: 138.1 median, 161.4 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YF20: 143.7 median, 171.4 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams JC1: 143 median, 163 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep/Train/YouthImp/Corp 1: 124.3 median, 176.3 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams Train/YouthImp/Corp 1: 137.25 median, 165.5 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YouthImp/Corp 1: 136 median, 171.6 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YouthImp 20/Corp 1: 135.6 median, 164.9 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep1: 130.6 median, 177 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep1/YF1: 142 median, 174 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), premier league normal, all other England teams ClubRep1/YF1/corp1: 138 median, 163.5 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), premier league ClubRep/YF1/Corp1, all other clubs normal: 138.8 median, 177.4 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), north-west local region normal, all other clubs ClubRep1/YF1: 138.4 median, 176 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep/Corp 1: 133.9 median, 167.3 peak
Margin of error I'd guesstimate at ~3-5 median PA. This isn't up to EBFM's standards, but it's 'good enough' in my opinion. I've always been of the view that if you can't replicate it reliably in a few seasons of FM, then its not significant enough of a result to include anyway.
In case you're wondering, keeping the affiliates for Man City reduces median PA by ~15-20, and I deliberately removed them because I know affiliates mess with the newgen intake results as they can replace one or more of them with one from an affiliate club. I wanted to get a pure English club result.
I noticed that Man City often gets some purely Scotland/Ireland only players, and that once their top player (194 PA) was Ireland only. This is notable because Ireland has low enough of a nation youth rating that a 194 PA Ireland player is pretty highly unlikely. It gave credence to the idea that newgens are tied to local region in some way, so I thought I'd re-examine that aspect too (I'd previously tested 'local region' and found it had zero effect on CA/PA).
Hypothesis: Youth facilities have insignificant effect at a single club, but a nations or divisions teams YF contributes cumulatively to a pool of PA that clubs then draw upon.
Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities don't effect median PA, but they effect peak PA or the skew.
Conclusion: False.
Although YF1 always eventually produced a high peak PA, I did notice that YF1 alone had a long run of ~155-160 peak PA. This wasn't the case in other YF1 tests, and YF20 produced peak PAs all over the place from 159 to 194. Skew is difficult to definitively conclude on, but I didn't get the impression looking through the results that youth facilities effected the skew.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities contribute to a division pool only.
Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities contribute to a 'local region' pool only.
Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Junior coaching/Training Facilities/Youth Importance of other clubs has an effect somehow.
Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Club reputation of other clubs has an effect somehow.
Conclusion: Tentatively, yes.
This was a somewhat surprising finding. From memory, I did find before that club rep had a ~10% CA effect, but not on PA. In this case, we can see that ClubRep1 reduced median PA by ~7.7% alone, and ~12.2% when combined with other low club attributes. I took extra samples to be sure and got the same result.
The strange thing is that ClubRep1 result is normal when combined with YF1. I think there's a clue as to what's going on in the fact that the low median PA results only happened when *all* other England teams had low club rep. But that still doesn't make sense of it.
Hypothesis: Corporate facilities of other clubs has an effect somehow.
Conclusion: Unclear.
Corp 1 did produce lower median PAs consistently, but the difference of ~3-7 may not be statistically significant. Consider that the typical variance of a club each year is ~5 median PA, even after stripping away the outliers.
Hypothesis: Starting CA affects PA, say that +20 CA due to factor contributes +20 PA as well.
Conclusion: False.
Thanks for this! I think I read somewhere else recently (probably Reddit) that Youth Facilities don't impact the PA of newly generated players at all. This is really good to know.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: In case you're wondering, keeping the affiliates for Man City reduces median PA by ~15-20, and I deliberately removed them because I know affiliates mess with the newgen intake results as they can replace one or more of them with one from an affiliate club. I wanted to get a pure English club result.
Great test, man. Thoughts about the affiliate clubs thing:
There are 7 countries with a higher Youth Rating than England(136), highest being Brazil with 163. If my top English club gets an affiliate in Brazil, wouldn't that be a good thing? Seems like swapping an English newgen for a Brazilian should be an upgrade most of the time.
The question is, I guess, how the game makes the Brazilian kid: does he get generated in my youth intake with my own 20/20 JC and YR? or is he made at his own club, with their stats (probably lower than mine), and just moved to my team?
If it's the first option then its a win. If not, then its a gamble. Any ideas?
EvensenFM said: Thanks for this! I think I read somewhere else recently (probably Reddit) that Youth Facilities don't impact the PA of newly generated players at all. This is really good to know.
I actually posted a comment on your youtube recently, that was it.
You do pretty good videos, enjoying watching them alongside doing things, even though I wouldn't have thought football history would be my thing.
kvasir said: Great test, man. Thoughts about the affiliate clubs thing:
There are 7 countries with a higher Youth Rating than England(136), highest being Brazil with 163. If my top English club gets an affiliate in Brazil, wouldn't that be a good thing? Seems like swapping an English newgen for a Brazilian should be an upgrade most of the time.
The question is, I guess, how the game makes the Brazilian kid: does he get generated in my youth intake with my own 20/20 JC and YR? or is he made at his own club, with their stats (probably lower than mine), and just moved to my team?
If it's the first option then its a win. If not, then its a gamble. Any ideas?
Yes, you are entirely correct in your first hypothesis. I just removed the affiliates from Man City because I'm trying to work out the newgen mechanics accurately.
To the question, a few days ago I would have said to you that its just Brazil's youth rating + it must be your own facilities, because in some testing I did before on it I found that it only takes the youth rating, not any of the affiliate club attributes.
But recently I was watching EBFM's video on affiliate clubs, and his data shows that while nation youth rating is still the most important factor, affiliate club attributes do in fact influence the quality of the newgen. So now I'm not sure, but I'd say believe what EBFM says on this because it's likely I only took like 5 samples or something in my test, because intake from affiliate clubs isn't really a part of the formula for newgen mechanics that I've been testing for.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: I actually posted a comment on your youtube recently, that was it.
You do pretty good videos, enjoying watching them alongside doing things, even though I wouldn't have thought football history would be my thing.
Aha! Yeah, it must have been you. Apologies - I have a hard time keeping track...
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: Junior coaching ~40% PA effect
Nation youth rating ~25% PA effect
Youth recruitment ~25% PA effect
Club reputation acts as tie breaker for youth recruitment
Either unique nation or division ID ~25% (or perhaps even more) PA effect (a hidden, unchangeable factor
Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: tl;dr 'Youth Facilities' have no effect on newgen PA in any way. The 'club reputation' of OTHER clubs in your nation has a small effect on newgen PA. 'Corporate facilities' may also have a minor effect on newgen PA, but this could be just statistical noise.
Sorry for bringing up old topics. Has anyone tested the impact of the first team's training facility on player development?
Antal said: Sorry for bringing up old topics. Has anyone tested the impact of the first team's training facility on player development?
This is an old video, but from what i understand the mechanics of the game haven't really changed. The conclusion was it does have an impact.
From anecdote though, it mostly has an impact on players with lesser personalities, i've found that if the personality is good the development is good. I could be spouting nonsense, but that's what i've noticed at least.
juliius said:
This is an old video, but from what i understand the mechanics of the game haven't really changed. The conclusion was it does have an impact.
From anecdote though, it mostly has an impact on players with lesser personalities, i've found that if the personality is good the development is good. I could be spouting nonsense, but that's what i've noticed at least.
Thanks my friend, this is a great video.
tam1236 said: Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor.
The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players.
MeanOnSunday said: The number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Would be interesting but do you have any proof?
This hypothesis doesn't perfectly fit to the situation because what bothered me, was nearly the same max PA in every probe, nearly the same number of players with high PA>=150, but always PA<160 (though youth rating was set at 200). So if it is generated in such a way as you write, newgens' PA should be also connected with retired players' PA from country X, what I doubt, because lowering youth rating to 1 I got newgens of PA~70 with highest club reputation in a country.
BTW I didnt change any clubs' reputation, but I doubt recruitment works in "your" way (When high-rep, You collect bad players from bad-reputation clubs).
MeanOnSunday said: The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players.
I suppose you are referring to me only using Man City, but that is for this FM24 test. In FM19, I tested every playable club, and that is what my factor % approximations are derived from (by examining the differences between the clubs).
It is not true that only club rep followed by youth recruitment matter. If you doubt my own claims, you can see EBFM finding the same results (junior coaching is the most important for newgen PA).
The affiliate player does replace one of the 16 of your intake, and high PA newgens do not squeeze out low PA newgens in the intake. Rather there is a fairly predictable median that is the peak probability of a distribution curve, and the shape of the curve (bunched up or large tails) is affected by a few factors, but essentially the peak PAs you'll see are random (i.e. Man City might get 170 PA peak one year, 190 PA peak the next). The peak PAs are only predictable in one regard, that Man City is going to produce a player somewhere in the range of ~160-200 PA every year, but Brackley Town almost never will. The best indicator of both overall quality and chance of high PA newgens is median PA.
If your theory about how recruitment works was correct, then ClubRep1/YF1 would not produce results equal to default, which it did.
EBFM found that youth facilities of affiliate clubs is inversely correlated with intake PA. He also found that club rep of affiliate affects PA, but not for self-intake. I figure this might be a clue.
We can infer that if other clubs have YF20, their release of high PA newgens to other clubs is dampened. If they have YF1, it would be unrestricted. Since YF does not affect newgen PA, the high PA newgen output of all other English clubs is not affected, it is simply that they are handing over the better players to Man City.
We see consistently that ClubRep1 of all other English clubs results in low median PA, but not if *some* other English clubs are normal (whether same division or not).
Some logical deductions:
1. It is not that there are not enough high PA players being generated, as YF1 alleviates it entirely, even when all other clubs are ClubRep1.
2. Club rep has little effect on self-intake, therefore the boost to PA that high club rep of *other* clubs provide isn't coming from their intake quality being raised, but that the standard high PA players are more likely to be poached if the team is high rep. My guess is that this is meant to represent high rep teams being more likely to be scouted, while the reality is that good youths can come from anywhere but many simply go unnoticed.
3. So the low PA of ClubRep1 actually represents a scouting failure, rather than an actual drop in available youth quality.
4. YF1 must negate the scouting failure. Perhaps it is because these players seek out the better club to join, instead of waiting to be scouted.
Another way of thinking about it is that youth facilities represent your defense against poaching, while club rep is what makes you 'visible' to poachers.
In theory, this should mean a YF1 high rep club should have slightly lower median PA intakes.
I suppose that 'youth recruitment' is what the aforementioned scouting would be. An interesting question is if there is a real hidden pool of pre-newgens, where does the new 16th player come from when one get poached, and who is the replaced player and where does he get dropped to.
We know that youth recruitment is also a pecking order rather than absolute, i.e. YR 19 is no good if every other team is YR20. But it doesn't sound right that if one team is YR 2 and everyone is YR 1, then there would be no difference between YR 2 and YR 20 for that club. Having YR 20 overcome high YF and low clubrep barriers makes more sense.
This is all difficult to test, but I have noticed the following suggestive oddity: The Jamaican Premier League starts with 8 teams with 20 youth recruitment. Turkey on the other hand has 16 1st div clubs with 6 or less YR. Without diving into this too deeply, obviously something is going on here beyond just YR 2 beats YR 1, and it seems to me that YR is being adjusted to produce desired results when club rep and expected player quality is set in stone first. Pete Sottrel (SI staff) claimed 'The Youth Recruitment rating tells us how wide the club’s catchment area is' but this has to be a bullshit story because clubs in the microstate of San Marino have mostly YR of 2, while Luxembourg have several YR 14-20, Seattle has 12, and Sugar Boys and two others in the British Virgin Islands have 18.
So for the country level newgens......
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything.
jimmysthebestcop said: So for the country level newgens......
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything.
Hear me out, I believe you are largely mistaken on this.
From memory, game importance does have a modest effect on the distribution (low game importance = PA more bunched up around median), but it doesn't change the median or rule out very high PA players occurring entirely. Don't take my word for it, you can see EBFM's test results. Two problems with EBFM's data here is that he didn't look at the distribution as a whole, and he uses average instead of median. I think I've neglected to say before that this is (likely) why EBFM came to a different conclusion about youth facilities, where he found a very slight but consistent increase to PA. This is because he used the average, which isn't reliable with FM's system, and I guess it's possible something is going on here but I'd think if there is it'd probably be that the CA boost from YF is roughly added to the PA (i.e. 36 CA > 40 CA = 120 PA > 124 PA).
I would say that game importance is equivalent to a ~10% PA factor, it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure.
That said I haven't tested it in a long time, and it's possible your testing was qualitatively different to what I did. You said you maxed out all other factors. I guess it's possible low game importance has a more pronounced effect in such conditions. But what I do know is that with the default game settings we play with, game importance is almost a negligible factor.
Part of it could also be that because nations do in fact appear to have different (and significant) values set under the hood, it's easy to confuse that with game importance, cities, etc.
I've been doing more testing that I've been sitting on for a while now as I reflect on how to best communicate it. Basically I noticed how newgens have unique 'place of birth' that usually isn't even the club's city, so I thought this might be a clue that would allow me to deduce the hidden nation mechanics.
EBFM got as far as thinking it's probably a national pool & draft process going on. What I've found is that seemingly can't be true. From testing before, I already knew that city, local region, etc. all had zero influence on PA. But now I also know that the whole city system is essentially purely cosmetic. There is a sophisticated mechanic that assigns the place of birth, but it does not affect the newgen PA.
Why this matters:
- There isn't some more sophisticated behind the scenes stuff going on like HoYDs/U18s staff poaching from other cities in the local region or such. This doesn't mean that 'Youth Recruitment' doesn't do anything, it just means that it acts independently with its own mechanism; it doesn't interact with some underlying hidden process regarding cities and pre-newgens floating around the place and whatnot.
- There aren't 'player pools' in cities, therefore there is no player scarcity in regards to 'youth recruitment' in congested areas.
- The PA comes from the club location (nation), not the birth city location.
- 'Local region' doesn't seem to have any effect on...anything. I think it probably simply serves a 'boundary' purpose for editing, i.e. a team coordinates is in south England but is part of a northern local region so it gets counted in the north division.
Teasing out those implications takes some thought itself, but there is more (though less significant) that is difficult to explain without bamboozling someone who hasn't been looking at it for several hours as I have. For instance:
- Newgens come from the city location, not the club location, but they adopt the nationality of the club. This is confusing, and purely cosmetic, but I can illustrate its probable intended purpose with an example: Suppose an American Samoa club is added to USA competition. The club is 'based in' USA for economic travel reasons say, but the youths coming through are born in 'Pago Pago' because it's an American Samoa club.
- You cannot tell whether players are generated first at cities or at clubs, because they are the same thing - the club generates them as having come from cities.
- There is a map coordinate geometry to city/'place of birth' selection, likely a rectangle with decreasing selection probability towards the edges. But there are nuances and even exceptions.
Of course I would have to furnish all the different examples I found to prove my findings, in addition to explaining these abstractions.
Unfortunately it didn't get me any closer to uncovering the hidden nation factor, but what it has shown me is that the newgen recruitment process is probably a lot more simple than previously thought, in regards to PA, and it reinforces that unique nation ID is a key component while staff, cities, whatnot isn't.
Here's my rough mockup of what the 'place of birth' selection actually looks like.
This whole thing appears to be purely cosmetic, so don't try and work out how to get better newgens with it. There is no actual competing for newgens, or even newgen generation in these cities, going on.
There are three clubs: Ljubljana, Kamnik, and Maribor.
The rectangle is area the club can draw newgens from.
It is not that newgens are generated at each city and a few of them get picked up, it is that the club generates precisely 16 newgens. There 'place of birth' is probabilistic based on distance from club and 'inhabitants range' of the city. The circles are just to convey the idea of decreasing probability the further you go out from the club location.
Notice how Ljubljana and Maribor each draw ~4 players from their own city, but Kamnik only draws 2 and takes many more from nearby the nearby capital of Ljubljana. This is because Kamnik has low inhabitants range, and Ljubljana is high probability because of proximity + high inhabitants.
I do not think city 'attraction' affects it, I have tested it but the results are not 100% clear but clear enough to rule it out I think. From memory, 'inhabitants range' is also relative to 'inhabitants range' of other cities. That is to say, if Ljubjlana only had 10,000 people, it would still be top dog if all other cities are 1000< pop, but also it would be less commonly the place of birth than if it had 20mil people and others 1000< pop. There are some further nuances that reveal themselves when you try to break it with extremes like this, but since the mechanic is cosmetic, I won't go further into that.
Lastly there is the matter of exceptions. As you can see, sometimes there can be instances outside the rectangle. I don't know what exactly is going on here, I suspect it has something to do with youth recruitment perhaps. Maybe it's even just a randomness factor they've put in to try and better reflect reality.
jimmysthebestcop said: So for the country level newgens......
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything.
I’m doing an USA only MLS save the bolded is simply not true. Once you max out Junior Coaching/Youth Recuitment you get tons of regens with 130-140 PA which is a great MLS player. Over 3 seasons with maxed out everything I have like 15 players with 130 plus and a ton of mid+ 120s. Might be the easiest intake only save to win every competition besides Mexico. (I’ve got a lot of issues with how stupid they handle MLS academies when they basically work identical to Europe with no youth contracts.) I’ve got two starters already in the mid 130s from the academy pre maxing everything out.
The draft also pumps out 120-140 pa players but they are mostly too old since there is no youth league and the phantom games don’t do shit for development so their CAs are f**king terrible at 20/21
I have an academy CD getting called into the senior NT with the real players still active but the active CDs are all in the 130s except Carter Vickers.
While most of the good regens are from Europe/Mexico , I’ve seen some crazy players come out of MLS academies in other saves. Like high 150s starting for Arsenal good but it’s like once every 3-5 years and tedious to scout. (But always free.)
Though yeah if you change game importance to the highest setting the US starts pumping out WC talent left and right because the clubs have nothing to spend on besides infrastructure and the countries economic/population stats are so high. (I would argue the U.S. regen quality is realistic if only slightly punishing given the trajectory MLS academies are going. Basically all the starters that grew up in the U.S. were in MLS academies at one point.)
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: Hear me out, I believe you are largely mistaken on this.
From memory, game importance does have a modest effect on the distribution (low game importance = PA more bunched up around median), but it doesn't change the median or rule out very high PA players occurring entirely. Don't take my word for it, you can see EBFM's test results. Two problems with EBFM's data here is that he didn't look at the distribution as a whole, and he uses average instead of median. I think I've neglected to say before that this is (likely) why EBFM came to a different conclusion about youth facilities, where he found a very slight but consistent increase to PA. This is because he used the average, which isn't reliable with FM's system, and I guess it's possible something is going on here but I'd think if there is it'd probably be that the CA boost from YF is roughly added to the PA (i.e. 36 CA > 40 CA = 120 PA > 124 PA).
I would say that game importance is equivalent to a ~10% PA factor, it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure.
That said I haven't tested it in a long time, and it's possible your testing was qualitatively different to what I did. You said you maxed out all other factors. I guess it's possible low game importance has a more pronounced effect in such conditions. But what I do know is that with the default game settings we play with, game importance is almost a negligible factor.
Part of it could also be that because nations do in fact appear to have different (and significant) values set under the hood, it's easy to confuse that with game importance, cities, etc.
I've been doing more testing that I've been sitting on for a while now as I reflect on how to best communicate it. Basically I noticed how newgens have unique 'place of birth' that usually isn't even the club's city, so I thought this might be a clue that would allow me to deduce the hidden nation mechanics.
EBFM got as far as thinking it's probably a national pool & draft process going on. What I've found is that seemingly can't be true. From testing before, I already knew that city, local region, etc. all had zero influence on PA. But now I also know that the whole city system is essentially purely cosmetic. There is a sophisticated mechanic that assigns the place of birth, but it does not affect the newgen PA.
Why this matters:
- There isn't some more sophisticated behind the scenes stuff going on like HoYDs/U18s staff poaching from other cities in the local region or such. This doesn't mean that 'Youth Recruitment' doesn't do anything, it just means that it acts independently with its own mechanism; it doesn't interact with some underlying hidden process regarding cities and pre-newgens floating around the place and whatnot.
- There aren't 'player pools' in cities, therefore there is no player scarcity in regards to 'youth recruitment' in congested areas.
- The PA comes from the club location (nation), not the birth city location.
- 'Local region' doesn't seem to have any effect on...anything. I think it probably simply serves a 'boundary' purpose for editing, i.e. a team coordinates is in south England but is part of a northern local region so it gets counted in the north division.
Teasing out those implications takes some thought itself, but there is more (though less significant) that is difficult to explain without bamboozling someone who hasn't been looking at it for several hours as I have. For instance:
- Newgens come from the city location, not the club location, but they adopt the nationality of the club. This is confusing, and purely cosmetic, but I can illustrate its probable intended purpose with an example: Suppose an American Samoa club is added to USA competition. The club is 'based in' USA for economic travel reasons say, but the youths coming through are born in 'Pago Pago' because it's an American Samoa club.
- You cannot tell whether players are generated first at cities or at clubs, because they are the same thing - the club generates them as having come from cities.
- There is a map coordinate geometry to city/'place of birth' selection, likely a rectangle with decreasing selection probability towards the edges. But there are nuances and even exceptions.
Of course I would have to furnish all the different examples I found to prove my findings, in addition to explaining these abstractions.
Unfortunately it didn't get me any closer to uncovering the hidden nation factor, but what it has shown me is that the newgen recruitment process is probably a lot more simple than previously thought, in regards to PA, and it reinforces that unique nation ID is a key component while staff, cities, whatnot isn't.
I wish I was mistaken all of the Build a Nation players know about Game Importance superseding NewGen settings. Go watch a ton of of SecondYellowCard Build a Nation setup videos and read his discords where his followers test all of the NewGen stuff for the lowest nations.
I can tell you my last 3 build a nation saves were hungary before I knew about game importance, Andorra and Faroe Islands. Hungary even after 60 years where I gave every club billions and billions to max out their facilities could never produce a NewGen that was as good as IRL national club member. The way you give clubs billions is by buying their horrendous youth players for 10 million each as the board never turns down 10 million offers. So you are buying 30+ players per club eventually. Giving clubs 300 million each season.
bigloser said: I’m doing an USA only MLS save the bolded is simply not true. Once you max out Junior Coaching/Youth Recuitment you get tons of regens with 130-140 PA which is a great MLS player. Over 3 seasons with maxed out everything I have like 15 players with 130 plus and a ton of mid+ 120s. Might be the easiest intake only save to win every competition besides Mexico. (I’ve got a lot of issues with how stupid they handle MLS academies when they basically work identical to Europe with no youth contracts.) I’ve got two starters already in the mid 130s from the academy pre maxing everything out.
The draft also pumps out 120-140 pa players but they are mostly too old since there is no youth league and the phantom games don’t do shit for development so their CAs are f**king terrible at 20/21
I have an academy CD getting called into the senior NT with the real players still active but the active CDs are all in the 130s except Carter Vickers.
While most of the good regens are from Europe/Mexico , I’ve seen some crazy players come out of MLS academies in other saves. Like high 150s starting for Arsenal good but it’s like once every 3-5 years and tedious to scout. (But always free.)
Though yeah if you change game importance to the highest setting the US starts pumping out WC talent left and right because the clubs have nothing to spend on besides infrastructure and the countries economic/population stats are so high. (I would argue the U.S. regen quality is realistic if only slightly punishing given the trajectory MLS academies are going. Basically all the starters that grew up in the U.S. were in MLS academies at one point.)
I may have exaggerated the MLS talent but only a little. And it is different if you are actually playing in MLS as it makes it Active thus the entire nation gets full newgens as opposed to a league that is just loaded but not active.
This is why people make Brazil active since you have a much higher % to spawn mass quality of NewGens every season as opposed to a just top tier loaded but not active. I load all leagues but only have 5-10 active and never USA as active. In testing since not many actually play with USA.
Quantity of newgens is different for active vs not active but loaded vs not active and not loaded.
Unless using custom leagues Africa has no leagues except South Africa. So early you can find great African irl players. So you will notice a lot of NewGens spawn in Europe who play for Africa National Clubs as Africa since no leagues only spawn NewGens when a player retires because FM wants to always keep the total player number the same in the database.
While the active league all clubs spawn full set of Newgens every season.
This is also the reason after 50-60 years England takes over as the NewGen king if you have a full England pyramid loaded. You are talking 6/7 tiers of clubs who can spawn newgens and with RNG Jesus even if the combined lower tier pop out 1 National CLub bench player a season it eventually adds up after decades.
Go create a backup save and sim 20 years in the future and see where the USA national team players spawned at. It will all be overseas. USA wont be able to create in nation NewGens for a top 20 Fifa club. That is completely unrealistic. Sure some USA players are born overseas and have dual citizenship. But in FM they will 100% be spawned overseas. The reason USA stays a top 15 Fifa Club is because they spawn in Europe. USA might spawn 2-3 players born in USA who spawned at USA clubs that get to the national team.
People have won the World Cup with Wales when doing older Pre Ryan Reynold Wrexham Road to Glory saves. As the NewGens actually follow the England settings. Since as far as FM settings go Wrexham is in England.
This also use to be the case in old FM back in the day with San Marino as they had a club somewhere down in Italy's lowest tiers with a custom database. And once you got that club to top Tier Italy and became the #1 club in the world they could spawn world class newgens enabling people to win the World Cup with San Marino National Team as all the NewGens would come from the human controlled club in Italy.
There use to a link to the guy who did the San Marino world cup on reddit or Si forum. It might be 10 years old at this point. Think he had to play over 100 years or something.