LightningFlik said: Idea for an experiment (which I'd run if I had a more performant PC, but I'm at the mercy of you kind strangers): what if you assembled a squad of players, who were capable of winning the league, but then randomly shuffled each player's set of attributes amongst each other?
For example, your LB has your MC's attributes, your ST has your RB's attributes, your DM has your ST's attributes and so on (leaving goalkeepers alone). Naturally each player's role analysis would be in the toilet but if experiments have revealed that tactics are less impactful than attributes alone, it might also follow that the sum talent of your team is more important than who plays where (assuming you're 1. using a tactic that makes sense and 2. players aren't playing out of position, just wildly out of role). Expand I've tried this, and found that it doesn't work because as soon as the DM's performance as 'ST' becomes better than DM, he becomes DM+ST.
What can work is you can game it slightly, since FM's role calculations aren't perfect (i.e. overweights technicals/mentals).
Digging deeper, there are certain attributes that do appear to be pooled as a team, or are primarily about order of priority. Obvious example would be finishing, where I found you can win the Premier League with 1 CA players and a ST with 1 finishing, it's just that the bulk of the goalscoring gets shifted to the other position that has the highest finishing. Not sure if it's also being pooled in this case, but having some finishing on at least one player seems beneficial (HarvestGreen's testing show it's a minor-moderate contributing factor).
Can't remember what attributes seemed pooled and which aren't, but overall I'd say the pooled attributes don't contribute much anyway. High pace/acc on all players (except GK) is kind of essential to win.
You might also think that since we're favoring a high pace/acc/drib team, a team of selfish players in an abstract sense, then we should adjust our tactic towards one that gels with that. Either knap's tactic is already tailored towards this perfectly, or this theory just doesn't work in practice, because I've tried a whole bunch of adjustments with this idea and nothing did any better.
I suppose the other thing to mention is that some positions are more cost-efficient than others, and quite significantly so. AMR/AML is the most costly, DM the least. So if had a low PA team, you might favor some sort of tactic with 3 DMs and no AMR/AML. But personally, I just stick with the top knap tactic, which does use AMR/AML (in FM24).
Mark said: What is the DM as AMl exploit? Expand I'm referring to the method that has been done successfully with a 1 CA team before, where strikerless tactic with 6 DM/MC are used because the CA cost for that position is the lowest.
Couldn't really come up with a good single phrase to describe it
After aligning attributes more closely with HarvestGreen's win % findings and making a bunch of other minor adjustments to various things, season win rate with the 1 CA players is now at 70% (5/7 wins). Previously it was 10%<.
Honestly, I just wanted to share the results. But here are some further thoughts I have derived so far from the testing process:
It shows that HarvestGreen's data is accurate, but also that it works in 20/6/1 attribute scenarios rather than just scenarios where all other attributes are held at 10. In other words, high variability/oscillation of attributes doesn't seem to alter the impact of an individual attribute.
I changed so many things at once that I can't confirm as much as I'd like to right now, but what I can say is that all players had '1' in the following attributes: Decisions, Technique, First Touch, Flair, Leadership, Teamwork. All outfield players also had '1' Bravery, Off The Ball, Corners, Crossing, Free Kicks, Long Shots, Long Throws, Penalty Taking, Tackling. All players also had '1' consistency, but this was just for demonstrative purposes as 1 CA cannot go below 1 CA.
Mucking around with the Knap EF 424 IF HP V2 P101 AC tactic didn't seem to do anything beneficial, at best I got the same results. I guess it's also the right place here to point out that I have used only the default Knap tactic and Blue set pieces routines, default Man City club & staff (only players changed), one-shot whole season loads (no savescumming individual matches), and no DM-as-AML positional exploits (though I have in the end, made certain players dual position such as DR/L and AMR/L which has 0 CA cost).
TheBucket said: I'll try to respond in sequence, and sorry for the wall of nothing, I was overthinking what kind of message would resonate and just ended up copping out, I apologize for that.
Of course, it's your experience and your interpretation of why your works and contributions seemed to get drowned out. I don't think its strictly because of a benign username or the manner you present that information that gives you any authority or respect on these subjects. I think anyone that scrolls these forums for 5 minutes will realize you do add immense value to this community and maybe the shift you experienced was a culture shift in how forums operate here, but also people recognizing your hard work and what you told people was leading to better outcomes in how they tested and played. This cuts against my point that the username matters, but I just want to be honest.
1) I do think the quality of content here is very solid, its understandable for even the guy who plays this game a few hours a week, and that's where I agree with your point of if this was more of a formal site it wouldn't thrive. It has its place, and its a great place for more uses than just asking questions that 90% of people here know the answer to.
2) I don't think I'll be the last one who asks about your username and I still stand by the idea you should abandon it, simply because it doesn't represent truth in the way we can both access it.
I appreciate the examples you give and its not my intention to remove politics from places I deem they don't belong, there's a harsh debate that people can have about if claims or statements of fact that are unpopular should be platformed, regardless of harm. My conflict is that this community is a haven for exactly what you said, unfortunate truths of how the game we want to love so much is filled with flaws and cannot be enjoyed the way you used to once that is figured out. Here's the conflict, we ran tests to find out what was true about this game. We understand this game is flawed as shit, pace abusing and strikerless tactics are how you win, and it sucks and most of us have stomached that. We found out something that sucked at expense of truth, so isn't truth the most important thing? That's why when I see your username in a place that values truth above comfort, they are values going in literally opposite directions. The history of this claim that George Floyd overdosed was so hate mongering racists would have a stronger reason to go against the BLM movement. Have your opinions on how that movement panned out and the actual motives behind you (I will probably agree with you), but you cannot tell me with all available evidence, your username leads us closer to the truth, than to a comfort statement. I understand the concept of your username, there are truth statements people need to investigate, no matter how badly it makes me or anyone observing it feel. At the end though, the truth should overcome that comfort. That's why if someone asks me "hey bro how do I get better at FM", I don't tell them to to run a formation that fits your players, or to train weak foots and create balanced players in training. I would expect the same with how you represent yourself, if your username represents a fundamental mistruth, that is for comfort. Expand A man drinks 3 beers and then drives home. He ends up misjudging a turn in the darkness and dies by crashing into a tree. What killed him? The alcohol? 'Blunt trauma'? Noncompliance with the road rules? The tree? What if the government planted that tree there, in a way that constituted gross negligance? If it is the alcohol, does his death make the 3 beers constitute an 'overdose' for him?
Personally I think what 'killed' Mr. Floyd is in the realm of uncertainty. But it was striking to me how in this case where one could nonetheless normally say something like 'I reckon he was drunk', you were condemned as a heretic in past ages would be for questioning the narrative that a knee is what killed him.
Perhaps what inspired me to use the phrase specifically is the analogous nature to how I was treated on the SI forums. You claim something about an uncertain matter, in this case the game's mechanics, and you get harassed by zealots who want to exercise power over you. You see how 'Hitler 2.0' or 'F_U_Miles' just wouldn't capture quite the same intimations.
So that is the meaning behind it, but the practical use of it is obviously that it also prevents direct attribution of my findings by SI sycophants who want to have their cake and eat it too. To me it is amusing to see the debate play out when it does of if my data can even be mentioned given my username, and it also drives something of a wedge then therefore between following SI's orders and making sense of the game. Of course what can be done about this is to simply take the data and strip my name from it. I've made no effort to 'gate' anything, and although I personally do think I have made some substantial findings of my own, EBFM and HarvestGreen have largely captured the limelight and lion's share of the $0 prize pool with their more thorough and extensive findings in their respective areas of investigation. Overall I figure that aside from mere temporary satisfaction of vanity, an upside of posting info is that the mere dissemination of it will hasten SI's demise even if it is not attributed to me.
Now vanity and retribution and amusement may not sound akin to the goal of truth to you, no doubt, but I think you are being a bit too grave about this matter. This does, after all, concern a video game. On a deeper level, I simply just enjoy uncovering the game mechanics, because the game itself became quite boring and tedious for me a few years ago. Sharing discoveries requires different motivations from that. You are driven by your own distinct values and motivations to certain goals, seemingly community through a shared virtue of truth (or is it the other way around?), and I don't object to that per se, except to say that that's not what I'm here for.. or perhaps more accurately, I do not have it as my narrow focus that overrides everything else. That is not to say I am right and you are wrong, an analogy I can come up with of this is that you strongly feel eating should be aligned with bodily health and you do not think I should have my display picture as a delicious cake while giving out effective diet tips. You can imagine this cause celibre playing out on a weight loss forum.
Cptbull said: By coincidence I have been doing that throughout my years of FM. Often cancelling already preset friendlies by assistant manager when starting a new save, just to squeeze that extra moral boost.
I have however never looked at the pitch quality when selecting an opponent. Do you think there is a real correlation there? Expand I was going to say that I've never tested it, but that pitch quality is supposed to have some minor effect on injury risk.
But I asked chatgpt for an SI staff source, and it said that pitch quality doesn't effect injuries. So perhaps I'm mistaken on this one. Closest I could get is that pitch condition affects the match engine.
The issue is not just that the username is provocative. It is that it makes the community look less serious, less evidence-driven, and more tolerant of political bait. Keeping the name creates friction for everyone else, while changing it costs almost nothing and preserves the person’s actual FM contributions. Expand What do I want to say here..
Let's start with what is most pertinent to FM and players of the game.
A few years ago, I donned my sunday best and presented facts about the game on the SI forums in a neutral manner under a bland username. I was pointing out how 'game importance' and 'youth facilities' don't actually effect newgen PA. This was when no one else had discovered this, or at least weren't pointing it out.
The response I got was the same response still being meted out today, which is to be drowned out by mods making 70% of the replies saying you can't say 2+2=4 unless you have a PhD in mathematics, that you need to send your workings to them privately for verification before you can reply to them or others, and that the thread is now closed for the divisiveness and ill-will your claims have engendered and for the sheer arrogance of ignoring the moderators by failing to reply to them.
I preferred your first post rather than the AI slop you replaced it with, but nonetheless I will contend with the heart of what you say. You claim essentially that the content pertaining to FM here would be diluted, perhaps even eviscerated, by the encroachment of politics and no doubt other forms of generalized discussion.
1) I think the quality of the content on this forum is doing just fine, don't you? Certainly a hell of a lot better than what we see on the much larger SI forums that follow the framework for discussion you advocate for. You will always end up with endless posts of 'so what's the best one to use?' and people who want to quibble about usernames and whatnot. I think if you delete all this and turn it into a kind of academic journal, it would flounder, and so I'm glad this place is the way it is right now.
2) FM is inherently political, and therefore some discussion of politics is warranted even if you believe that discussion should be strictly relevant to the game itself. Remember when Brexit got added as a compulsory and frustrating element of the game before Brexit even happened in real life, because Miles wanted to inflict some kind of collective punishment for his fellow countrymen voting for it? What about when he added coming out as homosexual as in-game event? What about when he removed the capital of Israel from the game because he is a radical leftist? What about when FM had 'nation attribute templates' where black people were typecast as stupid and violent, and the response was to deny its existence while quietly doing away with regional variety altogether. And now we have of course the whole women's football thing. Once you go down the path of censoring references to politics, even if there's a fair case to be made for it, you'll find yourself inescapably shutting down discussion on whole swathes of the game, and inevitably it descends from preventing the 'off-topic' and 'hatred' to removing the 'unconstructive' or 'provocative', as one sees now to a comic extent in the 'official FM26 feedback' thread.
Interesting regarding friendlies in pre-season. On older versions I cluttered the schedule with as many pre-season friendlies as possible to get tactical familiarity as high as possible before the season started... Which this site and EBFM-videos has shown me to be useless... Expand I'm glad someone noticed, as I know my posts in this thread were particularly painful to try and skim read. I think I need to redo a summary of all this at some point.
I can add a piece of extra info that I know now. It seems to me that the 'running start' morale impact of pre-season friendly wins have a substantial impact on the chance of winning the competitive season. In other words, it seems best to schedule friendlies against the weakest teams possible, and have enough of them to get your morale up to perfect ideally (balanced against fitness considerations). I suppose it's best to only do home games (win chance boost+pitch control), or otherwise at least pick teams that have stadiums with perfect pitches to minimize injuries. I think two other implications here is not to worry about overconfidence from winning the pre-season friendlies, and fill up any mid-season gaps with a friendly against a weak team.
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.
Antal said: What do they consider important matches, bro? My understanding is any knockout game in a cup. Championship games are generally not important. Expand It's more than you think. Premier league games count as important matches, but to a lesser extent than cup finals. EBFM's video if you want the stats.
tam1236 said: From many cheats I tried I must say it's not true. Unless you meant "probability of an outcome". Expand I was going to say yes and no, but after digging into it again, I have to retract the pre-determination claim. There's people who claim this going two decades back, but I couldn't find anything from say Paul Collyer himself (if anything, he says the opposite).
Possebrew said: I did notice that it's better to sub players out based on their current match-rating than based on condition.
6.2 players seldom recover to get an 8.0 Replacing these bums with a fresh player that starts at 6.7 sometimes ends in a "super-sub" situation.
It's almost as if the the game rolls some dice for each player during the match on whether they will have a good match or a bad match, and then it spends the rest of the game working towards the outcome of the dice. Expand
Yes, this is actually 'consistency' and/or 'important matches' in action I think. Determination and concentration too for specific times or circumstances in the match.
TactocTestor said: Does this also imply that the touchline shout and stuff are not statically significant for the whole season too Expand
I compared AI assistants, but I don't know if human management does better than AI assistant. We have Miles' cryptic assertion that 'touchline shouts weren't influential to morale'. My impression is that touchline shouts were designed primarily to correct particular deficiencies in the mindset of players. We know that the 'pressure' personality attribute has a outsized impact upon performance, so if you say 'no pressure!' to an ST with pressure 6 who just missed a penalty it probably does something.. but let's make a guesstimate:
I count 20 games in a premier league save I have where the game was won or lost by a single goal, or drawn We have been told by SI staff that shouts last ~10 minutes The winning team must typically score at least 2-3 goals over the 90 minutes, so let's say 35 minutes per goal So your shout, if 100% effective but not always employed at the right time, secures wins in 28.5% of 20 matches That's 15% of all the matches HarvestGreen finds recently that pressure 6 > 18 = +8.9% win rate 0.15 x 0.089 = +1.335% to season wins from shouting 'no pressure!' once every match to your striker who is vulnerable to pressure Maybe you say it multiple times during matches, or pick just the right times, but this would be balanced by the fact that sometimes it simply doesn't work or the player gets fed up of the overuse of it
Possebrew said: Say, I wanted to cheese this to the max. Which attributes should my assistant manager bring to the table?
- Tactical Knowledge - Tactics (?) - Motivation - Shouts (?) - Judging Current Ability - Substitutions (?) - Determination - Just because it makes everything better? Expand From what I've read, the game's outcome is essentially pre-determined the moment you enter the match with your selected players, but that the outcome will be recalculated when you make substitutions. This still won't sway the outcome much, because each substitution is at best a ~10% difference of 9% of what's on the field. If you're going in with the right tactic already set, the rest doesn't seem to matter.
I think what is most beneficial is non-rotation tendency. You'll have noticed that AI managers rarely, if ever, rotate their players. They keep running them even if they're exhausted, and it is perhaps for the two following reasons. First, low match fitness is significantly more detrimental than low condition, and almost impossible to keep atop of if a player is not playing almost every game of the season. Second, the high morale produced by a run of good form seems to moderately increase the chance of winning the next game, but this also snowballs over the season. Morale appears to return to a neutral baseline fairly quickly, so rotation interrupts and prevents good form from occurring.
Additionally, it's been deduced that giving young players a handful of matches each season or subbing them on in the dying minutes does little to nothing for their development. They need at least ~15 full matches per season at a minimum for development, otherwise they're better off playing friendlies in the reserves.
I realized that at this point, no assistant manager attribute is essential, and so I put this theory to the test. FM24, Manchester City, with a top preset tactic and set routines. Assistant manager was assigned all relevant roles, including setting training.
To reduce the effect of the player variability through the season, and also see if a different effect was seen in an inferior/underdog team, I tested using my 1 CA players Man City team. I created a perfect 200 PA assistant manager with 20 in almost all attributes, and a 1 PA one with the opposite (I even gave them 1/10 English proficiency). Same tactics were used. Simmed only to midseason, since I was running into problems with sacking after that point.
The difference between a perfect assistant manager and an abysmal one is statistically insignificant as to be indistinguishable from random chance variation of results. It may not be just a coincidence that the superior assistant manager does slightly better in both tests, but even if so, the difference between two realistic assistant manager options (stats of 12 vs 16 instead of 1 vs 20) would be minuscule.
Seems to me that one should choose an assistant manager who is a good coach or cheap.
TactocTestor said: Hi i'm using your r5xm3t file for FM26. While are you assigning such high coefficients to long shot for striker? i thought it is a non significant attribute? Expand The ratings for 'target striker' are if you want a good set piece taker (penalties, free kicks) specifically
Use 'fast striker' for pure performance
Panneton0 said: Another thing about the r5xm3t rating file. Anyone here using a strikeless tactic seen any difference in using the Attacking midfields ratings vs the fast strikers ratings for their top line?
I'm using the AMC/Wingers ratings even if there are no strikers up front. It's working well, but wondering if anyone tries to use other ratings?
I tried to put my best "target striker" as my AMC in my strikerless tactic and THAT went poorly. Expand Something I've noticed, albeit in FM24 testing, is that if I make the striker a complete technical dud (i.e. 1 finishing) other players will pick up the goalscoring slack without any overall performance decrease. And in fact it turned out that this was the most efficient - my best results with a team of 1 CA players came from having strikers who were 1 finishing, 1 long shots, 1 technique, 5 composure. So I think it's probably not necessary to have a striker-like player in a strikerless tactic if the tactic works.
BaZuKa said: The 331 training method, in my experience, causes a lot of player injuries.
In the first season, without the 331 training method, I had few injuries. In the second season, once I started using the 331 method, I had almost triple the injuries. And the third season isn’t starting any better.
Expand
From memory, when I was doing 4-year tests using the EBFM test league file, there would usually be no injuries in the first year, and gradually more until maximum in the 4th year.
In hindsight, this is peculiar.
Looking at your injury list, I'd say it's worse than average. I see a lot are from matches rather than training, which suggests to me it could be that your players have too low match fitness
bigloser said: I don’t see how attributes can change first when RCA often lags behind CA when players are getting better. RCA is the actual value of your attributes not CA. A young player growing can get a RCA higher than CA and recalibrate down. People use these values interchangeably, but they aren’t the same. CA is more like your temporary PA that your RCA chases. It’s also the way the game behaves when people use the editor to make players better than their CA. The theory that training allocates the attributes that develop when RCA increases to meet CA in the only one that makes sense.
Two things can be true . Minutes give CA and young players get free CA so the cpu doesn’t completely ruin generations of regens. The U.S. has zero youth games in FM24 so you can look at their CA to PA and compare them to England. Ie 130 pa 18 y/o in the U.S. will have significantly lower CAs than their English equivalents.
Not in your post, but the premium (expensive) ACC/PAC values are more valuable than their CA cost. If you don’t have the room the game will tell you and change the individual training to something less. ACC/PAC is just that busted. This has been proven a million different ways.
There is no cap based on league rep , I’ve seen videos of people locking 200 pa players in like Australia and them hitting it. Expand The first paragraph is stretching my mental capacity, but I think I have a response. I know that attributes don't have linear CA weighting, so there has to be RCA before it becomes CA. EBFM tried to deduce the exact formula on CA calculations and gave up on it. I tried myself and also failed to work it out.
But what this would mean is that it can't simply be +1 pace > +10 CA, nor +10 CA > +1 pace.
It must be, as you say, something like attribute increase > RCA increase > CA changes to match RCA. If RCA exceeds the PA cap, then attributes are dropped equally across the board to fit the PA cap. We see this if you make a 200 PA all '20' attribute player, where attributes end up at ~17 in-game, and also when players hit their PA through training where +1 pace happens but then many other attributes have a slight down arrow (0.2 decline) so that CA fits within PA.
If instead it was +1 CA first (i.e. through playing match), then +1 pace couldn't occur if CA was at PA, since CA wouldn't be able to increase in the first place. I suppose you could have +1 RCA happen, but since +1 RCA can't be +0 attributes, +1 pace must necessarily happen first.
As I mentioned, but didn't explain, young players also improve with zero matches. And if you look at the data, it turns out that a function of 'professionalism' is that it permits significant growth for players in lieu of playing matches. From a narrative perspective this kind of makes sense too - a 'professional' individual improves regardless of what he's given to work with; if he's not playing, he's likely doing extra drills in his free time instead.
I think you can't use US vs England youth as an example for several reasons. More generally I want to make the point that you shouldn't assume no domestic matches = poor growth. Obviously club facilities make a difference to CA and CA-PA gap to begin with, but supposing you identify two clubs that are the same, there is actually a hidden factor that makes at least newgen PA significantly different between nations (even when all visible factors are identical). Furthermore, matches only become a significant factor in development once they reach 18-21, and as mentioned professionalism can actually make up for having few matches. Coincidentally and anecdotally, I've noticed a lot of high professionalism newgens come from the US in the game. I previously believed personality allocation was now entirely random after nation attribute templates got scrapped a few years ago, but it turns out this is not the case.
HarvestGreen22 is inclined to 331 or 334. I already did some calcs on 331 and didn't find it good enough to match the best, but 334 is a contender for the best due to its very high efficiency (performance per CA cost). I would still personally just go with the best performance (243) though.
In my view these are all strong results for GK, so these schedules don't come at the expense of GK.
I see low CA gain as somewhat important for GK unlike other positions, as I noticed GK has the highest CA cost of any position for an 'ideal' template, plus I think high PA GKs are in general difficult to get. But I didn't include this in my calculation.
9.09% weighting to the 3 main goalkeeping attributes 1.818% weighting to the 4 lesser GK attributes 20% weighting to jumping reach
My reasoning for these weightings is that a GK represents 9.09% of a team on the field and the 3 main attributes function basically as pace/acc do for outfield players. I gave the minor attributes a flat 20% weighting of the main ones (1.818% each), as we're talking fairly minuscule overall figures here anyway.
Jumping reach is more of a lowball guesstimate. In certain cases, jumping reach can be about as impactful as pace/acc, but I think more typically its value is that of a strong secondary attribute.
Although I have shown 'decisions' values here, it does not form part of my calculations. I figured it's going to be more accurate to simply divide the key attributes by the total CA cost, which will take decisions into account. So if you add in 'decisions' to below, it will double-count it and be invalid.
I've also added 92:[Attacking]x5[Defending]x5[Match Practice]x2[GoalKeeping][Quickness focus] to give an idea about a considerable but inferior schedule would compare. Although 92 doesn't do much worse than 243, it would result in a lot more tiredness and injuries.
keithb said: What a load of shit😂. Do you think we're five years old?! Exposing the truths about football manager has nothing to do with your username.
Clearly you're desperate to be someone in the community, but all you're mainly doing is regurgitating other people's work. Well done. Bravo. You're a nobody. But at least you've got that username, really sticking it to SI!! Expand I enjoy the kudos I receive for my findings, and being referenced in various places outside of this forum, but I know that's the extent of it.
I don't have a youtube, paywall, watermarks, etc. and if I wanted to 'be someone in the community' I wouldn't have chosen to go by a name that people can't mention on other websites without it being censored.
Fame is rarely acquired even when deserved, a burden if you do get it, and fleeting as well. Chasing after the approval and affections of people such as yourself is a mug's game, and it's something I deliberately set out to avoid.
What drives me primarily is that working out the game mechanics is now the game for me, as the game itself has stagnated at best, perhaps dead now with FM26. So I enjoy the work in and of itself, that's the first thing. But of course I could just keep it to myself instead of posting here. I post here for, again, enjoyment. Once I grow tired of it, I'll stop posting and disappear.
I do think SI have it coming to them, and deservedly so, but I don't see the path to that as complaining about them or appealing to normies to 'wake up', particularly as communication is a fickle thing. Showing that the game is actually a dud cloaked in lies I think by contrast has a fair chance of disseminating itself, not necessarily immediately, but over time. And I'm happy with playing just some small, forgotten, part in that.
The top 3 are so close that choosing between them would be more about what you're going for. 243 is high CA gain and balanced. 113 is most efficient and produces fastest players. 150 is in my opinion actually the weakest of the three but then again it is also slightly lighter in workload intensity.
97 isn't actually 4th, I just wanted to see how it did, but it would roughly reflect how about the next best dozen or so would do.
First off, thanks a lot for taking the time to do this analysis and write it up — it’s really helpful for the rest of us trying to make sense of the spreadsheets.
Would you mind explaining how you arrived at the individual numbers in your totals (e.g., the 3.17675, 3.1, 0.27 etc.)? I can see the weightings you list (Acceleration 0.97, Pace 1.0, etc.), but I’m not fully following how you convert the spreadsheet values into those weighted components and then into the final score.
If you have a document / sheet you made to do the calculations (even just a template with the formulas), would you be willing to share it? That would make it much easier for others to reproduce and sanity-check the results.
Also, if you have the time, could you run the same calculation with AMC and DM included as well? Many of us play a 4-2-3-1, so having the numbers for AMC + (both) DM roles included would make it much easier to apply your work directly.
Thanks again for the effort — genuinely useful stuff. Expand Thankyou for your compliment
So as HarvestGreen22 has said, we can know now with fair accuracy how much the attributes change, but weighting the attributes remains a bit of a conundrum.
HarvestGreen22's approach to this seems to be to weight according to attribute 6 > 18 win difference % and also add a flat 25% bonus to certain attributes such as dribbling. Dribbling in particular because it is difficult to train up.
I saw that tam1236 took an approach of using HarvestGreen22's attribute 1 > 20 goal difference(?) data, and scored taking into account every attribute.
For my own approach, I use roughly the values in my FM Genie Scout ratings file for just a few key attributes, as well as an arbitrary -0.3x weighting for 'decisions'. Additionally I use only the positions for a particular top knap tactic (i.e. no AMC), and for certain attributes (concentration, dribbling) only get them in positions where they actually count (based on my own extensive testing).
My FM Genie Scout ratings file values are the amalgamation of my own testing, HarvestGreen22's data, Orion's data, relative actual availability of attributes, and a few other things such as taking into account the implications of match sharpness. So I think my approach is superior.
Example of key problem I have identified with those 2 sources I mention:
HarvestGreen22 - Values are for entire team, not per position. Orion - Values are per position, and also actually more accurately predict results but not perfectly and it appears this is because Orion is assessing using 'match rating' which has been shown to favor technicals/mentals over physicals even when physicals actually win the games.
I've given the weights I used, so if you want to change them up you can just take the numbers I wrote down and redo them like this:
acc 0.97 new weight = 1.00 my weighted acc value = 3.17675
(3.17675/97)x100 = 3.275
Or, you could conduct my actual method, which is to go through HarvestGreen22's spreadsheet tables of results where there's a breakdown of each position, then highlight only the relevant positions for each relevant attribute, take the average and then apply your own weight to it.
I believe that explains my method, but I would like to elucidate on this whole matter a little bit more.
Although I personally believe my method is going to be the most predicatively accurate so far, it's still largely guesswork and I wouldn't begrudge others for favoring different weightings. I'm not sure myself about including 'decisions'. On the one hand, it has ~0 impact, so it should be weighted ~0, but on the other hand it hogs a lot of CA for itself, so you could theoretically say 1 dec (10 CA weight) = 1 pace (10 CA weight) = 1.00 weighting.. in the end I settled on -0.3x weighting, but I had considered 0.5x or 0.1x, so it's really quite arbitrary and this degree of inaccuracy is going to mess up the results quite badly:
So suddenly all those low intensity schedules don't look so great anymore, and the old tried and true meta is king again.
But if you did go with 113, you wouldn't be any worse off. And I included a lesser training schedule to show that although the hierarchy is disrupted, the wheat is still separated from the chaff.
With 97 you can see a reflection of my own track record. Before HarvestGreen22's latest data, I was doing my own experiments with less precision and believed that my 97 beat the 243 meta. In the end this turned out to be a bit erroneous, but I think it's scored high enough to show I haven't just been pulling stuff out of my ass. I know a lot of people just tend to make stuff up (just out of naivety and enthusiasm for narrative), when people assume they've actually done the hard research. I do ride with some assumptions myself sometimes, but mostly I use brute-force methods similar to HarvestGreen22 to find out and verify.
Another reason I included 188 there is because that's what HarvestGreen22 recommends for 'moderate growth, high quality' (albeit a slight variation, 317, where all members are in attack group). I agree with his recommendation of 85[match review] (or 100 - 2xmatch review) for 'least growth but highest quality', but I'm left scratching my head at this one. If you look at 317 the pace/acc gain is +5.84, which is decent but meh basically. Perhaps he is taking into account jumping reach which is +1.48, which is ~0.5 higher than typical. I personally left jumping reach out entirely, because I see it as an attribute a player either already has or he doesn't have - your DC with 12 jump reach isn't going to get to where he needs to be whether he's getting +1 or +1.5 each season. But this could explain the difference between my recommendation and HarvestGreen22's recommendation. No doubt he is also favoring lower CA, while I am in favor of more CA so long as it's good attributes.
If we remove decisions, which is the least reliable part of my formula, it's 7.664 for 113 and 7.689 for 243. But the physical gains are also more balanced in 113 and there would be lower injury risk, so I think it's fair to say 113 is slightly better no matter how you slice it.
Might give it a realistic test later to see how 113 goes
When I was making 1 CA players to win the premier league, a bunch of my tests gave the players each half a dozen traits or so that were complimentary to my tactic. It seemed to make zero difference to no traits.
I think that if anything, traits may actually be a negative, where the player won't follow your tactic as well because it contradicts his trait.
A thought I just had is that maybe they make traits have zero performance impact in and of themselves because otherwise you could end up with unfortunate results such as Haaland supposed to be slightly better than Mbappe as Striker, but then a researcher adds 'Shoots with Power' trait to Mbappe and unwittingly messes the hierarchy up.
For example, your LB has your MC's attributes, your ST has your RB's attributes, your DM has your ST's attributes and so on (leaving goalkeepers alone). Naturally each player's role analysis would be in the toilet but if experiments have revealed that tactics are less impactful than attributes alone, it might also follow that the sum talent of your team is more important than who plays where (assuming you're 1. using a tactic that makes sense and 2. players aren't playing out of position, just wildly out of role).
I've tried this, and found that it doesn't work because as soon as the DM's performance as 'ST' becomes better than DM, he becomes DM+ST.
What can work is you can game it slightly, since FM's role calculations aren't perfect (i.e. overweights technicals/mentals).
Digging deeper, there are certain attributes that do appear to be pooled as a team, or are primarily about order of priority. Obvious example would be finishing, where I found you can win the Premier League with 1 CA players and a ST with 1 finishing, it's just that the bulk of the goalscoring gets shifted to the other position that has the highest finishing. Not sure if it's also being pooled in this case, but having some finishing on at least one player seems beneficial (HarvestGreen's testing show it's a minor-moderate contributing factor).
Can't remember what attributes seemed pooled and which aren't, but overall I'd say the pooled attributes don't contribute much anyway. High pace/acc on all players (except GK) is kind of essential to win.
You might also think that since we're favoring a high pace/acc/drib team, a team of selfish players in an abstract sense, then we should adjust our tactic towards one that gels with that. Either knap's tactic is already tailored towards this perfectly, or this theory just doesn't work in practice, because I've tried a whole bunch of adjustments with this idea and nothing did any better.
I suppose the other thing to mention is that some positions are more cost-efficient than others, and quite significantly so. AMR/AML is the most costly, DM the least. So if had a low PA team, you might favor some sort of tactic with 3 DMs and no AMR/AML. But personally, I just stick with the top knap tactic, which does use AMR/AML (in FM24).
I'm referring to the method that has been done successfully with a 1 CA team before, where strikerless tactic with 6 DM/MC are used because the CA cost for that position is the lowest.
Couldn't really come up with a good single phrase to describe it
Results:
2nd 93pts
1st 99pts
1st 84pts
3rd 73pts
1st 96pts
1st 84pts
1st 91pts
Honestly, I just wanted to share the results. But here are some further thoughts I have derived so far from the testing process:
It shows that HarvestGreen's data is accurate, but also that it works in 20/6/1 attribute scenarios rather than just scenarios where all other attributes are held at 10. In other words, high variability/oscillation of attributes doesn't seem to alter the impact of an individual attribute.
I changed so many things at once that I can't confirm as much as I'd like to right now, but what I can say is that all players had '1' in the following attributes: Decisions, Technique, First Touch, Flair, Leadership, Teamwork. All outfield players also had '1' Bravery, Off The Ball, Corners, Crossing, Free Kicks, Long Shots, Long Throws, Penalty Taking, Tackling. All players also had '1' consistency, but this was just for demonstrative purposes as 1 CA cannot go below 1 CA.
Mucking around with the Knap EF 424 IF HP V2 P101 AC tactic didn't seem to do anything beneficial, at best I got the same results. I guess it's also the right place here to point out that I have used only the default Knap tactic and Blue set pieces routines, default Man City club & staff (only players changed), one-shot whole season loads (no savescumming individual matches), and no DM-as-AML positional exploits (though I have in the end, made certain players dual position such as DR/L and AMR/L which has 0 CA cost).
Of course, it's your experience and your interpretation of why your works and contributions seemed to get drowned out. I don't think its strictly because of a benign username or the manner you present that information that gives you any authority or respect on these subjects. I think anyone that scrolls these forums for 5 minutes will realize you do add immense value to this community and maybe the shift you experienced was a culture shift in how forums operate here, but also people recognizing your hard work and what you told people was leading to better outcomes in how they tested and played. This cuts against my point that the username matters, but I just want to be honest.
1) I do think the quality of content here is very solid, its understandable for even the guy who plays this game a few hours a week, and that's where I agree with your point of if this was more of a formal site it wouldn't thrive. It has its place, and its a great place for more uses than just asking questions that 90% of people here know the answer to.
2) I don't think I'll be the last one who asks about your username and I still stand by the idea you should abandon it, simply because it doesn't represent truth in the way we can both access it.
I appreciate the examples you give and its not my intention to remove politics from places I deem they don't belong, there's a harsh debate that people can have about if claims or statements of fact that are unpopular should be platformed, regardless of harm. My conflict is that this community is a haven for exactly what you said, unfortunate truths of how the game we want to love so much is filled with flaws and cannot be enjoyed the way you used to once that is figured out. Here's the conflict, we ran tests to find out what was true about this game. We understand this game is flawed as shit, pace abusing and strikerless tactics are how you win, and it sucks and most of us have stomached that. We found out something that sucked at expense of truth, so isn't truth the most important thing? That's why when I see your username in a place that values truth above comfort, they are values going in literally opposite directions. The history of this claim that George Floyd overdosed was so hate mongering racists would have a stronger reason to go against the BLM movement. Have your opinions on how that movement panned out and the actual motives behind you (I will probably agree with you), but you cannot tell me with all available evidence, your username leads us closer to the truth, than to a comfort statement. I understand the concept of your username, there are truth statements people need to investigate, no matter how badly it makes me or anyone observing it feel. At the end though, the truth should overcome that comfort. That's why if someone asks me "hey bro how do I get better at FM", I don't tell them to to run a formation that fits your players, or to train weak foots and create balanced players in training. I would expect the same with how you represent yourself, if your username represents a fundamental mistruth, that is for comfort.
A man drinks 3 beers and then drives home. He ends up misjudging a turn in the darkness and dies by crashing into a tree. What killed him? The alcohol? 'Blunt trauma'? Noncompliance with the road rules? The tree? What if the government planted that tree there, in a way that constituted gross negligance? If it is the alcohol, does his death make the 3 beers constitute an 'overdose' for him?
Personally I think what 'killed' Mr. Floyd is in the realm of uncertainty. But it was striking to me how in this case where one could nonetheless normally say something like 'I reckon he was drunk', you were condemned as a heretic in past ages would be for questioning the narrative that a knee is what killed him.
Perhaps what inspired me to use the phrase specifically is the analogous nature to how I was treated on the SI forums. You claim something about an uncertain matter, in this case the game's mechanics, and you get harassed by zealots who want to exercise power over you. You see how 'Hitler 2.0' or 'F_U_Miles' just wouldn't capture quite the same intimations.
So that is the meaning behind it, but the practical use of it is obviously that it also prevents direct attribution of my findings by SI sycophants who want to have their cake and eat it too. To me it is amusing to see the debate play out when it does of if my data can even be mentioned given my username, and it also drives something of a wedge then therefore between following SI's orders and making sense of the game. Of course what can be done about this is to simply take the data and strip my name from it. I've made no effort to 'gate' anything, and although I personally do think I have made some substantial findings of my own, EBFM and HarvestGreen have largely captured the limelight and lion's share of the $0 prize pool with their more thorough and extensive findings in their respective areas of investigation. Overall I figure that aside from mere temporary satisfaction of vanity, an upside of posting info is that the mere dissemination of it will hasten SI's demise even if it is not attributed to me.
Now vanity and retribution and amusement may not sound akin to the goal of truth to you, no doubt, but I think you are being a bit too grave about this matter. This does, after all, concern a video game. On a deeper level, I simply just enjoy uncovering the game mechanics, because the game itself became quite boring and tedious for me a few years ago. Sharing discoveries requires different motivations from that. You are driven by your own distinct values and motivations to certain goals, seemingly community through a shared virtue of truth (or is it the other way around?), and I don't object to that per se, except to say that that's not what I'm here for.. or perhaps more accurately, I do not have it as my narrow focus that overrides everything else. That is not to say I am right and you are wrong, an analogy I can come up with of this is that you strongly feel eating should be aligned with bodily health and you do not think I should have my display picture as a delicious cake while giving out effective diet tips. You can imagine this cause celibre playing out on a weight loss forum.
I have however never looked at the pitch quality when selecting an opponent. Do you think there is a real correlation there?
I was going to say that I've never tested it, but that pitch quality is supposed to have some minor effect on injury risk.
But I asked chatgpt for an SI staff source, and it said that pitch quality doesn't effect injuries. So perhaps I'm mistaken on this one. Closest I could get is that pitch condition affects the match engine.
TheBucket said: TLDR for my comment above
The issue is not just that the username is provocative. It is that it makes the community look less serious, less evidence-driven, and more tolerant of political bait. Keeping the name creates friction for everyone else, while changing it costs almost nothing and preserves the person’s actual FM contributions.
What do I want to say here..
Let's start with what is most pertinent to FM and players of the game.
A few years ago, I donned my sunday best and presented facts about the game on the SI forums in a neutral manner under a bland username. I was pointing out how 'game importance' and 'youth facilities' don't actually effect newgen PA. This was when no one else had discovered this, or at least weren't pointing it out.
The response I got was the same response still being meted out today, which is to be drowned out by mods making 70% of the replies saying you can't say 2+2=4 unless you have a PhD in mathematics, that you need to send your workings to them privately for verification before you can reply to them or others, and that the thread is now closed for the divisiveness and ill-will your claims have engendered and for the sheer arrogance of ignoring the moderators by failing to reply to them.
I preferred your first post rather than the AI slop you replaced it with, but nonetheless I will contend with the heart of what you say. You claim essentially that the content pertaining to FM here would be diluted, perhaps even eviscerated, by the encroachment of politics and no doubt other forms of generalized discussion.
1) I think the quality of the content on this forum is doing just fine, don't you? Certainly a hell of a lot better than what we see on the much larger SI forums that follow the framework for discussion you advocate for. You will always end up with endless posts of 'so what's the best one to use?' and people who want to quibble about usernames and whatnot. I think if you delete all this and turn it into a kind of academic journal, it would flounder, and so I'm glad this place is the way it is right now.
2) FM is inherently political, and therefore some discussion of politics is warranted even if you believe that discussion should be strictly relevant to the game itself. Remember when Brexit got added as a compulsory and frustrating element of the game before Brexit even happened in real life, because Miles wanted to inflict some kind of collective punishment for his fellow countrymen voting for it? What about when he added coming out as homosexual as in-game event? What about when he removed the capital of Israel from the game because he is a radical leftist? What about when FM had 'nation attribute templates' where black people were typecast as stupid and violent, and the response was to deny its existence while quietly doing away with regional variety altogether. And now we have of course the whole women's football thing. Once you go down the path of censoring references to politics, even if there's a fair case to be made for it, you'll find yourself inescapably shutting down discussion on whole swathes of the game, and inevitably it descends from preventing the 'off-topic' and 'hatred' to removing the 'unconstructive' or 'provocative', as one sees now to a comic extent in the 'official FM26 feedback' thread.
Interesting regarding friendlies in pre-season. On older versions I cluttered the schedule with as many pre-season friendlies as possible to get tactical familiarity as high as possible before the season started... Which this site and EBFM-videos has shown me to be useless...
I'm glad someone noticed, as I know my posts in this thread were particularly painful to try and skim read. I think I need to redo a summary of all this at some point.
I can add a piece of extra info that I know now. It seems to me that the 'running start' morale impact of pre-season friendly wins have a substantial impact on the chance of winning the competitive season. In other words, it seems best to schedule friendlies against the weakest teams possible, and have enough of them to get your morale up to perfect ideally (balanced against fitness considerations). I suppose it's best to only do home games (win chance boost+pitch control), or otherwise at least pick teams that have stadiums with perfect pitches to minimize injuries. I think two other implications here is not to worry about overconfidence from winning the pre-season friendlies, and fill up any mid-season gaps with a friendly against a weak team.
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.
My understanding is any knockout game in a cup.
Championship games are generally not important.
It's more than you think. Premier league games count as important matches, but to a lesser extent than cup finals. EBFM's video if you want the stats.
I was going to say yes and no, but after digging into it again, I have to retract the pre-determination claim. There's people who claim this going two decades back, but I couldn't find anything from say Paul Collyer himself (if anything, he says the opposite).
Possebrew said: I did notice that it's better to sub players out based on their current match-rating than based on condition.
6.2 players seldom recover to get an 8.0
Replacing these bums with a fresh player that starts at 6.7 sometimes ends in a "super-sub" situation.
It's almost as if the the game rolls some dice for each player during the match on whether they will have a good match or a bad match, and then it spends the rest of the game working towards the outcome of the dice.
Yes, this is actually 'consistency' and/or 'important matches' in action I think. Determination and concentration too for specific times or circumstances in the match.
TactocTestor said: Does this also imply that the touchline shout and stuff are not statically significant for the whole season too
I compared AI assistants, but I don't know if human management does better than AI assistant. We have Miles' cryptic assertion that 'touchline shouts weren't influential to morale'. My impression is that touchline shouts were designed primarily to correct particular deficiencies in the mindset of players. We know that the 'pressure' personality attribute has a outsized impact upon performance, so if you say 'no pressure!' to an ST with pressure 6 who just missed a penalty it probably does something.. but let's make a guesstimate:
I count 20 games in a premier league save I have where the game was won or lost by a single goal, or drawn
We have been told by SI staff that shouts last ~10 minutes
The winning team must typically score at least 2-3 goals over the 90 minutes, so let's say 35 minutes per goal
So your shout, if 100% effective but not always employed at the right time, secures wins in 28.5% of 20 matches
That's 15% of all the matches
HarvestGreen finds recently that pressure 6 > 18 = +8.9% win rate
0.15 x 0.089 = +1.335% to season wins from shouting 'no pressure!' once every match to your striker who is vulnerable to pressure
Maybe you say it multiple times during matches, or pick just the right times, but this would be balanced by the fact that sometimes it simply doesn't work or the player gets fed up of the overuse of it
Yes
Which attributes should my assistant manager bring to the table?
- Tactical Knowledge - Tactics (?)
- Motivation - Shouts (?)
- Judging Current Ability - Substitutions (?)
- Determination - Just because it makes everything better?
From what I've read, the game's outcome is essentially pre-determined the moment you enter the match with your selected players, but that the outcome will be recalculated when you make substitutions. This still won't sway the outcome much, because each substitution is at best a ~10% difference of 9% of what's on the field. If you're going in with the right tactic already set, the rest doesn't seem to matter.
I think what is most beneficial is non-rotation tendency. You'll have noticed that AI managers rarely, if ever, rotate their players. They keep running them even if they're exhausted, and it is perhaps for the two following reasons. First, low match fitness is significantly more detrimental than low condition, and almost impossible to keep atop of if a player is not playing almost every game of the season. Second, the high morale produced by a run of good form seems to moderately increase the chance of winning the next game, but this also snowballs over the season. Morale appears to return to a neutral baseline fairly quickly, so rotation interrupts and prevents good form from occurring.
Additionally, it's been deduced that giving young players a handful of matches each season or subbing them on in the dying minutes does little to nothing for their development. They need at least ~15 full matches per season at a minimum for development, otherwise they're better off playing friendlies in the reserves.
I realized that at this point, no assistant manager attribute is essential, and so I put this theory to the test. FM24, Manchester City, with a top preset tactic and set routines. Assistant manager was assigned all relevant roles, including setting training.
Default:
+122 105pts
+89 95pts
+82 92pts
+87 90pts
95.5 pts average
1 PA:
+106 100pts
+81 97pts
+95 96pts
+79 92pts
+83 88pts
94.6 pts average
To reduce the effect of the player variability through the season, and also see if a different effect was seen in an inferior/underdog team, I tested using my 1 CA players Man City team. I created a perfect 200 PA assistant manager with 20 in almost all attributes, and a 1 PA one with the opposite (I even gave them 1/10 English proficiency). Same tactics were used. Simmed only to midseason, since I was running into problems with sacking after that point.
200 PA:
+42 66pts 2nd
+13 48pts 5th
+1 48pts 8th
+10 40pts 8th
50.5 pts average
1 PA:
+27 57pts 2nd
+15 46pts 5th
+19 45pts 7th
+13 43pts 6th
47.75 pts average
The difference between a perfect assistant manager and an abysmal one is statistically insignificant as to be indistinguishable from random chance variation of results. It may not be just a coincidence that the superior assistant manager does slightly better in both tests, but even if so, the difference between two realistic assistant manager options (stats of 12 vs 16 instead of 1 vs 20) would be minuscule.
Seems to me that one should choose an assistant manager who is a good coach or cheap.
The ratings for 'target striker' are if you want a good set piece taker (penalties, free kicks) specifically
Use 'fast striker' for pure performance
Panneton0 said: Another thing about the r5xm3t rating file.
Anyone here using a strikeless tactic seen any difference in using the Attacking midfields ratings vs the fast strikers ratings for their top line?
I'm using the AMC/Wingers ratings even if there are no strikers up front. It's working well, but wondering if anyone tries to use other ratings?
I tried to put my best "target striker" as my AMC in my strikerless tactic and THAT went poorly.
Something I've noticed, albeit in FM24 testing, is that if I make the striker a complete technical dud (i.e. 1 finishing) other players will pick up the goalscoring slack without any overall performance decrease. And in fact it turned out that this was the most efficient - my best results with a team of 1 CA players came from having strikers who were 1 finishing, 1 long shots, 1 technique, 5 composure. So I think it's probably not necessary to have a striker-like player in a strikerless tactic if the tactic works.
In the first season, without the 331 training method, I had few injuries. In the second season, once I started using the 331 method, I had almost triple the injuries. And the third season isn’t starting any better.
From memory, when I was doing 4-year tests using the EBFM test league file, there would usually be no injuries in the first year, and gradually more until maximum in the 4th year.
In hindsight, this is peculiar.
Looking at your injury list, I'd say it's worse than average. I see a lot are from matches rather than training, which suggests to me it could be that your players have too low match fitness
Two things can be true . Minutes give CA and young players get free CA so the cpu doesn’t completely ruin generations of regens. The U.S. has zero youth games in FM24 so you can look at their CA to PA and compare them to England. Ie 130 pa 18 y/o in the U.S. will have significantly lower CAs than their English equivalents.
Not in your post, but the premium (expensive) ACC/PAC values are more valuable than their CA cost. If you don’t have the room the game will tell you and change the individual training to something less. ACC/PAC is just that busted. This has been proven a million different ways.
There is no cap based on league rep , I’ve seen videos of people locking 200 pa players in like Australia and them hitting it.
The first paragraph is stretching my mental capacity, but I think I have a response. I know that attributes don't have linear CA weighting, so there has to be RCA before it becomes CA. EBFM tried to deduce the exact formula on CA calculations and gave up on it. I tried myself and also failed to work it out.
But what this would mean is that it can't simply be +1 pace > +10 CA, nor +10 CA > +1 pace.
It must be, as you say, something like attribute increase > RCA increase > CA changes to match RCA. If RCA exceeds the PA cap, then attributes are dropped equally across the board to fit the PA cap. We see this if you make a 200 PA all '20' attribute player, where attributes end up at ~17 in-game, and also when players hit their PA through training where +1 pace happens but then many other attributes have a slight down arrow (0.2 decline) so that CA fits within PA.
If instead it was +1 CA first (i.e. through playing match), then +1 pace couldn't occur if CA was at PA, since CA wouldn't be able to increase in the first place. I suppose you could have +1 RCA happen, but since +1 RCA can't be +0 attributes, +1 pace must necessarily happen first.
As I mentioned, but didn't explain, young players also improve with zero matches. And if you look at the data, it turns out that a function of 'professionalism' is that it permits significant growth for players in lieu of playing matches. From a narrative perspective this kind of makes sense too - a 'professional' individual improves regardless of what he's given to work with; if he's not playing, he's likely doing extra drills in his free time instead.
I think you can't use US vs England youth as an example for several reasons. More generally I want to make the point that you shouldn't assume no domestic matches = poor growth. Obviously club facilities make a difference to CA and CA-PA gap to begin with, but supposing you identify two clubs that are the same, there is actually a hidden factor that makes at least newgen PA significantly different between nations (even when all visible factors are identical). Furthermore, matches only become a significant factor in development once they reach 18-21, and as mentioned professionalism can actually make up for having few matches. Coincidentally and anecdotally, I've noticed a lot of high professionalism newgens come from the US in the game. I previously believed personality allocation was now entirely random after nation attribute templates got scrapped a few years ago, but it turns out this is not the case.
For GK (sorted best to worst):
334 - 40.3 CA | 4.5 agil, 1.4 aer, 0.6 ref (6.5 major) | 1 pac, 2.4 vis, 2.7 con, 2.9 ant (9 minor)
243 - 41.83 CA | 4.333 agil, 1 aer, 0.666 ref (6.0 major) | 1.33 pac, 3.16 vis, 2.83 con, 3.33 ant (10.65 minor)
150 - 44.5 CA | 3.5 agil, 1.5 aer, 1 ref (6.0 major) | 0 pac, 2.0 vis, 4.0 con, 3.5 ant (9.5 minor)
113 - 31.8 CA | 3.4 agil, 1.4 aer, 0.8 ref (5.6 major) | 1 pac, 2.8 vis, 3.4 con, 1.8 ant (9 minor)
97 - 37.2 CA | 2.8 agil, 1 aer, 1.2 ref (5.0 major) | 0.6 pac, 2.4 vis, 2.6 con, 3.4 ant (9 minor)
In my view these are all strong results for GK, so these schedules don't come at the expense of GK.
I see low CA gain as somewhat important for GK unlike other positions, as I noticed GK has the highest CA cost of any position for an 'ideal' template, plus I think high PA GKs are in general difficult to get. But I didn't include this in my calculation.
Jumping Reach:
334 - 1.4 jump
243 - 1.1666 jump
150 - 1.0625 jump
113 - 1.025 jump
97 - 0.925 jump
Decisions (low = good):
334 - 1.05 dec
113 - 2.15 dec
97 - 2.375 dec
243 - 2.625 dec
150 - 3 dec
Pace/Acc:
243: 6.08333
150: 6.0625
113: 6.375
97: 6.025
334: 6.0125
Dribbling:
243: 1.6666 drib
150: 1.58333 drib
97: 1.3333 drib
334: 1.0875 drib
113: 0.9666 drib
9.09% weighting to the 3 main goalkeeping attributes
1.818% weighting to the 4 lesser GK attributes
20% weighting to jumping reach
My reasoning for these weightings is that a GK represents 9.09% of a team on the field and the 3 main attributes function basically as pace/acc do for outfield players. I gave the minor attributes a flat 20% weighting of the main ones (1.818% each), as we're talking fairly minuscule overall figures here anyway.
Jumping reach is more of a lowball guesstimate. In certain cases, jumping reach can be about as impactful as pace/acc, but I think more typically its value is that of a strong secondary attribute.
Although I have shown 'decisions' values here, it does not form part of my calculations. I figured it's going to be more accurate to simply divide the key attributes by the total CA cost, which will take decisions into account. So if you add in 'decisions' to below, it will double-count it and be invalid.
243: [Quickness][Match Practice[Attackingx2][Quickness focus] - 7.689 + 0.5454 + 0.193617 + 0.23332 = 8.661337 / 38.9583 = 0.222323
150: [Attacking x 6][Quickness focus] - 7.6855 + 0.5454 + 0.17271 + 0.2125 = 8.61611 / 36.875 = 0.233657
113: [Quickness][Match Practice][Chance Conversion][Quickness focus] - 7.664 + 0.50904 + 0.16362 + 0.205 = 8.54166 / 35.575 = 0.240103
97: [Chance creation][Attacking][Aerial Defense][Handling][Defending from front][Quickness][Quick focus] - 7.4395 + 0.4545 + 0.16362 + 0.185 = 8.24262 / 37.3 = 0.2209818
334 [Physical]x2[Aerial Defence][Attacking]: 7.3637 + 0.59085 + 0.16362 + 0.28 = 8.39817 / 31.21 = 0.2690859
To help clarify the true value of 'efficiency', I've added [Match Reviewx2][Quickness] to these, since it's the most efficient for just pure pace/acc.
100: [Match Reviewx2][Quickness] - 7.329584 + 0.34542 + 0.039996 + 0.2 = 7.915 / 18.05 = 0.4385
I've also added 92:[Attacking]x5[Defending]x5[Match Practice]x2[GoalKeeping][Quickness focus] to give an idea about a considerable but inferior schedule would compare. Although 92 doesn't do much worse than 243, it would result in a lot more tiredness and injuries.
This can be simplified to:
Efficiency
100 - 100%
334 - 61.4%
113 - 54.8%
150 - 53.3%
243 - 50.7%
97 - 50.4%
92 - 49.7%
Performance
243 - 100%
150 - 99.5%
113 - 98.6%
92 - 98.3%
334 - 97.0%
97 - 95.2%
100 - 91.4%
Combined
100 - 95.7%
334 - 79.2%
113 - 76.7%
150 - 76.4%
243 - 75.3%
92 - 74.0%
97 - 72.8%
Clearly you're desperate to be someone in the community, but all you're mainly doing is regurgitating other people's work. Well done. Bravo. You're a nobody. But at least you've got that username, really sticking it to SI!!
I enjoy the kudos I receive for my findings, and being referenced in various places outside of this forum, but I know that's the extent of it.
I don't have a youtube, paywall, watermarks, etc. and if I wanted to 'be someone in the community' I wouldn't have chosen to go by a name that people can't mention on other websites without it being censored.
Fame is rarely acquired even when deserved, a burden if you do get it, and fleeting as well. Chasing after the approval and affections of people such as yourself is a mug's game, and it's something I deliberately set out to avoid.
What drives me primarily is that working out the game mechanics is now the game for me, as the game itself has stagnated at best, perhaps dead now with FM26. So I enjoy the work in and of itself, that's the first thing. But of course I could just keep it to myself instead of posting here. I post here for, again, enjoyment. Once I grow tired of it, I'll stop posting and disappear.
I do think SI have it coming to them, and deservedly so, but I don't see the path to that as complaining about them or appealing to normies to 'wake up', particularly as communication is a fickle thing. Showing that the game is actually a dud cloaked in lies I think by contrast has a fair chance of disseminating itself, not necessarily immediately, but over time. And I'm happy with playing just some small, forgotten, part in that.
I'll post the calculations later, but here's a simplified summary:
Efficiency
113 - 100%
150 - 97.3%
243 - 92.6%
97 - 92.0%
Performance
243 - 100%
150 - 99.5%
113 - 98.6%
97 - 95.2%
Combined
113: [Quickness][Match Practice][Chance Conversion][Quickness focus] - 99.3%
150: [Attacking x 6][Quickness focus] - 98.4%
243: [Quickness][Match Practice][Attackingx2][Quickness focus] - 96.3%
97: [Chance creation][Attacking][Aerial Defense][Handling][Defending from front][Quickness][Quick focus] - 93.6%
The top 3 are so close that choosing between them would be more about what you're going for. 243 is high CA gain and balanced. 113 is most efficient and produces fastest players. 150 is in my opinion actually the weakest of the three but then again it is also slightly lighter in workload intensity.
97 isn't actually 4th, I just wanted to see how it did, but it would roughly reflect how about the next best dozen or so would do.
First off, thanks a lot for taking the time to do this analysis and write it up — it’s really helpful for the rest of us trying to make sense of the spreadsheets.
Would you mind explaining how you arrived at the individual numbers in your totals (e.g., the 3.17675, 3.1, 0.27 etc.)? I can see the weightings you list (Acceleration 0.97, Pace 1.0, etc.), but I’m not fully following how you convert the spreadsheet values into those weighted components and then into the final score.
If you have a document / sheet you made to do the calculations (even just a template with the formulas), would you be willing to share it? That would make it much easier for others to reproduce and sanity-check the results.
Also, if you have the time, could you run the same calculation with AMC and DM included as well? Many of us play a 4-2-3-1, so having the numbers for AMC + (both) DM roles included would make it much easier to apply your work directly.
Thanks again for the effort — genuinely useful stuff.
Thankyou for your compliment
So as HarvestGreen22 has said, we can know now with fair accuracy how much the attributes change, but weighting the attributes remains a bit of a conundrum.
HarvestGreen22's approach to this seems to be to weight according to attribute 6 > 18 win difference % and also add a flat 25% bonus to certain attributes such as dribbling. Dribbling in particular because it is difficult to train up.
I saw that tam1236 took an approach of using HarvestGreen22's attribute 1 > 20 goal difference(?) data, and scored taking into account every attribute.
For my own approach, I use roughly the values in my FM Genie Scout ratings file for just a few key attributes, as well as an arbitrary -0.3x weighting for 'decisions'. Additionally I use only the positions for a particular top knap tactic (i.e. no AMC), and for certain attributes (concentration, dribbling) only get them in positions where they actually count (based on my own extensive testing).
My FM Genie Scout ratings file values are the amalgamation of my own testing, HarvestGreen22's data, Orion's data, relative actual availability of attributes, and a few other things such as taking into account the implications of match sharpness. So I think my approach is superior.
Example of key problem I have identified with those 2 sources I mention:
HarvestGreen22 - Values are for entire team, not per position.
Orion - Values are per position, and also actually more accurately predict results but not perfectly and it appears this is because Orion is assessing using 'match rating' which has been shown to favor technicals/mentals over physicals even when physicals actually win the games.
I've given the weights I used, so if you want to change them up you can just take the numbers I wrote down and redo them like this:
acc 0.97
new weight = 1.00
my weighted acc value = 3.17675
(3.17675/97)x100 = 3.275
Or, you could conduct my actual method, which is to go through HarvestGreen22's spreadsheet tables of results where there's a breakdown of each position, then highlight only the relevant positions for each relevant attribute, take the average and then apply your own weight to it.
I believe that explains my method, but I would like to elucidate on this whole matter a little bit more.
Although I personally believe my method is going to be the most predicatively accurate so far, it's still largely guesswork and I wouldn't begrudge others for favoring different weightings. I'm not sure myself about including 'decisions'. On the one hand, it has ~0 impact, so it should be weighted ~0, but on the other hand it hogs a lot of CA for itself, so you could theoretically say 1 dec (10 CA weight) = 1 pace (10 CA weight) = 1.00 weighting.. in the end I settled on -0.3x weighting, but I had considered 0.5x or 0.1x, so it's really quite arbitrary and this degree of inaccuracy is going to mess up the results quite badly:
With decisions -0.3x:
113: [Quickness][Match Practice][Chance Conversion][Quickness focus] - 7.019
243: [Quickness][Match Practice[Attackingx2][Quick focus] - 6.9016
284: [Aerial Defence][Quickness focus][All players in attack group] - 6.874
282: [Defending Wide][Quickness focus][All players in attack group] - 6.867
306: [Chance Creation][Quickness focus][All players in defend group] - 6.839
276: [Attacking Wings][Quickness focus][All players in attack group] - 6.79
150: [Attacking x 6][Quickness focus] - 6.7855
97: [Chance creation][Attacking][Aerial Defense][Handling][Defending from front][Quickness][Quick focus] - 6.727
188: [Physical x 2][Chance Conversion][Attacking] - 6.206
Without decisions:
243: [Quickness][Match Practice[Attackingx2][Quickness focus] - 7.689
150: [Attacking x 6][Quickness focus] - 7.6855
113: [Quickness][Match Practice][Chance Conversion][Quickness focus] - 7.664
97: [Chance creation][Attacking][Aerial Defense][Handling][Defending from front][Quickness][Quick focus] - 7.4395
284: [Aerial Defence][Quickness focus][All players in attack group] - 7.264
276: [Attacking Wings][Quickness focus][All players in attack group] - 7.240
306: [Chance Creation][Quickness focus][All players in defend group] - 7.199
282: [Defending Wide][Quickness focus][All players in attack group] - 6.987
188: [Physical x 2][Chance Conversion][Attacking] - 6.74625
So suddenly all those low intensity schedules don't look so great anymore, and the old tried and true meta is king again.
But if you did go with 113, you wouldn't be any worse off. And I included a lesser training schedule to show that although the hierarchy is disrupted, the wheat is still separated from the chaff.
With 97 you can see a reflection of my own track record. Before HarvestGreen22's latest data, I was doing my own experiments with less precision and believed that my 97 beat the 243 meta. In the end this turned out to be a bit erroneous, but I think it's scored high enough to show I haven't just been pulling stuff out of my ass. I know a lot of people just tend to make stuff up (just out of naivety and enthusiasm for narrative), when people assume they've actually done the hard research. I do ride with some assumptions myself sometimes, but mostly I use brute-force methods similar to HarvestGreen22 to find out and verify.
Another reason I included 188 there is because that's what HarvestGreen22 recommends for 'moderate growth, high quality' (albeit a slight variation, 317, where all members are in attack group). I agree with his recommendation of 85[match review] (or 100 - 2xmatch review) for 'least growth but highest quality', but I'm left scratching my head at this one. If you look at 317 the pace/acc gain is +5.84, which is decent but meh basically. Perhaps he is taking into account jumping reach which is +1.48, which is ~0.5 higher than typical. I personally left jumping reach out entirely, because I see it as an attribute a player either already has or he doesn't have - your DC with 12 jump reach isn't going to get to where he needs to be whether he's getting +1 or +1.5 each season. But this could explain the difference between my recommendation and HarvestGreen22's recommendation. No doubt he is also favoring lower CA, while I am in favor of more CA so long as it's good attributes.
https://mega.nz/file/dENF1KSK#gY0GO3Od_fALZ51UW_2dxLnAMnmlt0hkt01FVh9ZP50
or
https://pixeldrain.com/u/ihxzDL9p
There is a sub-page 243 .
243 [Quickness][Match Practice[Attackingx2][Quickness focus]: 2.86958 + 3.125 + 0.4666 + 0.66 + 0.330416 + 0.2375 - 0.7875 = 6.9016 | 115-115-115
That places it 2nd according to my formula
113 [Quickness][Match Practice][Chance Conversion][Quickness focus]: 3.17675 + 3.1 + 0.27 + 0.627 + 0.28275 + 0.2075 - 0.645 = 7.019 | 90-90-100
If we remove decisions, which is the least reliable part of my formula, it's 7.664 for 113 and 7.689 for 243. But the physical gains are also more balanced in 113 and there would be lower injury risk, so I think it's fair to say 113 is slightly better no matter how you slice it.
Might give it a realistic test later to see how 113 goes
I think that if anything, traits may actually be a negative, where the player won't follow your tactic as well because it contradicts his trait.
A thought I just had is that maybe they make traits have zero performance impact in and of themselves because otherwise you could end up with unfortunate results such as Haaland supposed to be slightly better than Mbappe as Striker, but then a researcher adds 'Shoots with Power' trait to Mbappe and unwittingly messes the hierarchy up.