UNL - S02 review and stats

Things are slowly becoming more interesting with this save and in my DB. I just finished my 13/14 season, which is season 2, and despite our slight struggles in the second half of the season, we still ended up with a much sought after promotion to the main league. This time around the promotions went to us (Heidelberg), Taipei 101 (which did have a fairly promising season in 12/13), Celtic Tigers (extremely powerful team this season) and St. Davids City.

In terms of league positions this is what ended up happening:

 Here are our fixtures for the season. We had a really strong start, winning our first 6 games, at which point the team did hit a bit of a slump which I feel we didn't really recover from until mid frebruary. During this point we lost quite a few important games including our loss to Inter Zagreb and Celtic Tigers, which are likely the reason we didn't end the season a bit higher up. I shouldn't complain too much since we did manage a promotion, and during the playoffs we needed to perform and it happened for us.

Our last game was against Kalevipoeg, one of the stronger teams this season, winning group B despite being one of the weakest group winners. Here are the stats for our last game and the fixtures for the playoff games in League 2.

Lastly, here are some stats from our players and the League 1 standings.

Some of my favorite players this season were:

Axel Cedric Konan, my favorite striker up until this point. He ended up with the best average this season and a great 13 goals in 26 appearances. Our top scorer was actually Defederico, our new Argentinian striker however.

In the midfield Dennis Gerster made sure to deliver again this season. He had a 90% pass completion rate, which surprisingly wasn't our best, but this guy is just such a well rounded midfielder. This wasn't unnoticed by other teams either. There were many large offers in the mid season trade window for him, including a few offers of 2.7M dollars for him. These were hard to turn down, but he is simply too valuable for our team right now. Selling him at that point could have easily cost us the promotion.

Resit Kucukkaya was the one surprise for me this season. He ended up with 10 assists, 5 goals and an average rating of 7.31 in 28 games. I was hesitant to keep him our capitain, but I did not regret the decision in the end. He delivered a mature performance for us.


In terms of transfers here is a summary:

A few remarks on those. Defederico was our striker purchase this year, for 20k I bought my top scorer for last season. Not a bad deal. Leo Lacroix was another purchase which I see as an investment. He is only 22 years old, and cost me almost 600k, but I do believe I can develop him into a 1M+ full back.

UNL - S01 review and stats

For all those stat nerds out there here are some of the stats and results from this season.

First the playoff results that I forgot to show last time. As you can see Londinium FC, Empire United, ASS Riga and Minato were the four teams that moved to the main league this time around. Minato and Riga were no surprises for me, however Londinium and Empire U were. Londinium had a mediocre season but during the playoffs they stepped up their game and were able to defeat all opponents, including my team. I do still have the excuse of being short half my team, but still, they did well.

 Here are the results from the main league. 84 Munchen from Munic won the league, followed by Clube Paulista from Brazil. Relegations went to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Amsterdam and Stockholm.
 

The UN Cup almost had a UNL2 team win. As you see in the figure below, during the late stages most of the teams were from the 2nd division, however none of them were able to defeat Kobenhavn from Denmark, which took the trophy in the end.

	Goals
Dudu (Riga)	21
Luka Senicanin (Taipei 101)	18
Silvan Eggmann (Antwerpen)	18
Chinedu Vine (Celtic Tigers)	16
Florian Eberle (Kyiv)	16

Stats wise, here are the best 11 of this season, which include one of our players, Osigwe. This is our Swiss goalie, which definitely worked hard to deserve the honor and the prize involved.

Here are some more stats

	Goals
Dudu (Riga)	21
Luka Senicanin (Taipei 101)	18
Silvan Eggmann (Antwerpen)	18
Chinedu Vine (Celtic Tigers)	16
Florian Eberle (Kyiv)	16

	Avg Rating
Roberto Rodriguez (Minato)	7.65
Dudu (Riga)	7.65
Chinedu Vine (Celtic Tigers)	7.62
Frits Kempers (Maastricht)	7.55
Choi Kwang-Soo (Gangnam)	7.63

Player of the Year
Chinedu Vine (Celtic Tigers), Roberto Rodrigez (Minato), Evgeny Frolov (Riga)
Playmaker of the Year
Roberto Rodrigez (Minato), Kuo Yueh-han (Taipei), Dudu (Riga)
Popular Badge
Chinedu Vine (Celtic Tigers), Dudu (Riga), Roberto Rodrigez (Minato)
Best GK
Sebastian Osigwe (Heidelberg), Rene Borkovic (Kalevipoeg), Joel Mall (Riga)
Best Def
Giordano (Ontario Accord), Daniel Tchen (Florida Gators), Hassan Lingani (Beograd)
Best Mid
Yukio Iikima (Minato), Ryota Takayasu (Kyoto), Gregor Dodlek (Ljubljana)
Best Striker
Ayron del Valle (Bogota), Janko Pacar (Bygdoy), Luka Senicanin (Taipei)

UNL - first season is over

I just finished my first season playing the latest beta version of the database. I played Heidelberg, which was a good pick it turns out. We had a very solid campaign during the league games, and managed to finish 2nd in group D. Here are the standings prior to the playoffs.

It's hard to really comment on anyone's performance of course, since at this point it is a bit of a game of chance. I was hoping to see some more interesting results during the playoff games. Some of the strongest teams I saw during the season definitely seemed to indicate that in the end. Minato was the best team of the season, and the other team I had my eyes on for a while was ASS Riga. After some analysis, it seems like their star player(Captain perk for Riga) made a huge impact on the team. His name was Evgeny Frolov, a 27 year old Russian that plays MC. He finished the season with 25 games, 6 goals, 6 assists, 4 PoMs and an average rating of 7.36. A really strong player, currently worth 6M, which is huge at this point.

Our team definitely did what they could this season. As you can see on our fixtures, we had a very good campaign. The playoffs were not bad either, regardless of a few losses. We first eliminated Bogota, which was one of the bottom qualifiers from group A. We lost our away game 1x0, but managed to bring our A game for the home show. A wooping 5x2, that included one goal from Sascha Amon, Mario Kienzl, Axel Cedric Konan and two by Haris Seferovic. Bogota had a goal by S. Rapp and M. Germanier. We really played well, with 20 shots, 10 on goal and a strong 67% possession. Our loaner Seferovic took the player of the match.

Next we faced KVC Antwerp, which were from our group, and we had won both games against before the match. In game one we tied 1x1, bringing us to the away game which forced us to play hard. We ended up winning that game 2x1, with a strong performance by Gester, Seferovic and Milan Gajic. Gester got MoTM with a 8.6 performance, while Seferovic and Gajic had the goals. Silvan Eggmann was the scorer for Antwerp.

Our final was against Londinium FC, a team that showed some heart during the playoffs. First they defeated the Aztecas by 2x1 in aggregate. Followed by a 5x4 against the other redditor's team Taipei 101.

As you can see we had a horrible first game, losing 4x1. Unfortunately, we had a lot of players missing during both games. Extremely poor timing I would say, which made us end up changing up our strategy to the 41221 defensive tactic for game one, and a more balanced 41221 for game two. This here made it very difficult for us, we were missing Konan, Seferovic and Obradovic, which were our best 3 strikers. We were missing Mitreski, one of our top CDs, and Mario Kienzl, a definite force on our midfield. Finally, Osigwe was out, our starting goalie, leaving us with a mediocre goalie for our 2 most important games of the season. Very unfortunate.

UNL - Heidelberg save - Testing the DB

Heidelberg was my pick for my first game using my new (still beta) custom database for Football Manager 2013. I`m using exactly what I posted on my last post, and Heidelberg is one of my German clubs, with the increased budget perk as well as the training facility perk. This means that instead of starting with 20M, Heidelberg starts off with 30M in their balance. The training facility perk I believe moves a team from having a training facility rated 12 to a facility rated 20 instead.

I chose Heidelberg mostly because it is a lower league team, which is where I wanted to start and it has some of the perks that I thought would be ideal for a slow growth campaign. I also thought that a German team was also more likely to produce some interesting regens, which goes along with the slow growth idea.

Heidelberg fell into group D in the lower division, which is the same as I posted in my previous post. The team started off with a fairly decent squad (in relation to other teams which are all, generally speaking, crappy). I decided to start off with a 4-4-2 setup but also keep them training on another formation I like, a 4-1-2-2-1 which uses a DMC, two MCs, two attacking wingers and a single striker. I`m just going to toy with this formation for a while, alongside my 4-4-2 which should work relatively well as a reliable strategy.


I also had a couple of players I needed to pick up to make up for the lack of some players in a few positions (such as DMC), as well as to just have a handful of mildly competent players.

Here is a look at my squad at this point. I`m actually almost done this season, I`ll post more about the progress on my next post which will be after the end of the 2012-2013 season. The season went well for us, but considering the situation I`m not going to be bragging about it anytime soon.

UN League - Custom DB information

So as I mentioned on my previous post, I decided to craft a custom database for my next FM13 game. I posted on Reddit about making this database and I asked people's input, which was mainly on some team entries and how they wanted their teams.

Anyway, I should begin by explaining what the concept of this DB is first. The idea is to have a world league with teams from all over the world. This may sound like something that you've seen before, however I wanted to implement a few new things to this DB. In this DB, teams are going to start from scratch, and I wanted them to start off fairly similar in a lot of ways, in order to keep the starting years relatively even and see how teams progress. Players for the most part will be generated. There may be a few caviats with this concept, one is that when you start a game from the first year (2012), the teams will be fairly weak, and management will be fairly poor for almost everyone. Which means that it may actually be quite easy to climb up the ladder when most teams are just struggling to fill up their squad with half decent players. The other option is to let the game simulate for a few years and pick up a team later on. That may be a lot more interesting to most people, but that way you are subjected to luck, as the team you want may not be available for a long time.

The other new thing I want to try, is to have teams follow a sort of template (especially teams not in the first division), where all teams start off in a similar financial situation, similar reputation and infrastructure. From this template however, each team will get "perks" if you will, where a team has 2 perks which are areas in which that particular team has an advantage over other teams that follow the same template. For instance, a team may have an improved training facility and a bigger stadium, while another team may have a wonderkid and more starting cash. I will post later how these will be assigned, most teams from redditors had their perks picked out.

This database replaces the Swiss league and accomodates the top 20 teams, I started off by having these teams be somewhat based on other real life teams in terms of their stats. Then in the lower division, I am trying to keep the numbers in a way that during a season there are a reasonable number of games, and yet still room for cups that will be added as well. The current beta version of my DB has 56 teams in the lower division, which is divided into 4 groups of 14 teams. I've made quite a few modifications from the version posted on reddit, and I'm hoping to still make a few more.

current beta (k) version of the DB

included in my proposed changes from the current version are:
- More teams in the lower division. Currently I have 56 which makes it so that there are 26 league games prior to the playoffs (up to 6 extra games). I feel that it would be easy to add at least 1 more team per group without filling up the schedule too too much. Potentially even adding 2 teams per group. If you have suggestions for more teams let me know.
- There are season awards currently, but it would probably be useful to also have a few monthly awards, such as MVP and things like that.
- Perhaps increase TV money in lower league, I personally like how much money the teams have during season 1, but in order to really step up the quality of the teams it would be nice to give them extra funds.
- Change some of the stadium names and things to make them more personalized.

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Soon I will post my first save with this DB, which I feel has already potential to be my first FM13 serious save. I will still modify the DB a bit more, even if I don't play it for a while.

FM13 review and my custom database

So, as I mentioned on my previous post, I have moved to FM13. After playing it a little bit, I have to say, there are definite improvements to the game, which are only held back by a number of problems, glitches and quirks.

I really enjoyed playing FM Classic. It is a simplified version of the game, which removes a lot of the main time consuming parts of it, which in some cases I'm happy about and in others, not so much. I like not having to many press conferences, meetings, complaints and all that jazz. You really only get a little question every so often and there isn't even a pre-game, post-game talk option, which to be honest, I won't miss. The one part I do wish was a bit more deep is the staff control. Now, much of the staff management you do, relies on just a few key people. You no longer have several scouts, several coaches and several physio people. Instead you have your assistant, you have a chief scout and a chief physio, and so forth. So it limits what you can do which can be a tad annoying, it does however eliminate a lot of the time I use to spend on those tasks. The main focus of the classic game ends up being on tactics, matches, player trades, some contract stuff, and a dumbed down version of the old training. Training I understand has changed for the whole game however, so this may also apply to the regular saves.

The new interface is quite nice on the FM Classic. It's simple, practical and intuitive. It's not perfect, but does the job better than previous versions in my opinion. The classic mode lacks a lot of the statistics you use to have on regular FM. Your basic team stats are still there, don't worry, however match stats from two seasons ago and things like that are erased once they are no longer important. This is good in that it makes the game saves a bit leaner, but for people like me who love stats, it can be a tad annoying. To the point that I have to make checkpoint saves every so often in order to revisit stats from previous seasons when I feel like it.

Now, in terms of complaints, the common one is the match engine which was very glithcy during the early days. There were players that were simply retarded, that would just stop and watch the game at times. This has improved as far as I'm concerned, and I don't think it is as much of a big deal now. The other problem, which for me is very very annoying, is that the db editor is only supposed to work for the regular game, and not for FM classic. This is very very annoying, as I don't see why I can only play custom games when playing a full game. I understand they want to make FM classic a more online friendly thing, but to me this feels a bit like FML, where the developers are a bit out of touch with the fans and what people want in the game. I have hopes that they will change this and realise that there are other ways to achieve what they want, without having to punish customers that want to be able to play custom dbs using the FM Classic mode. It's not a huge thing to ask for.

I did however find a way around this problem. Apparently if you have the original release version of fm13 there is a glitch where you can load up a database on the regular game, exit the game and create a new FM Classic (FMC) game and it will hold the same database. Therefore, now I have my regular steam FM13 game as well as a pirated cracked copy of the first release game, just so I can upload my database to the steam game. It works for now and I hope they don't take that away as well. If anyone else is trying to get around this problem I can try to help. Just message me and send me your DB, I'll convert it to classic and send it back to you.

+++

I started to work on this database I've been talking about, and some of the info on it can be found on a reddit post Here (original) and Here (update)

MK Dons - wrapping up my FM12 save and moving to FM13

It was a good save but after FM13 came out I was a little too tempted to jump to the new game. I particularly like the sound of playing the classic mode since I do find the regular game a tad too time consuming for me. For that reason I never get that far into my games, I'm hoping FM13 classic will change that.

Anyway, my next little project will involve creating a new database for FM13, which I will expand on in a future post.