FM2013 now with added FM Classic

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2012/sep/06/football-manager-2013-classic-mode

I love November. It's too cold out and I'm poor coming up to Christmas, so its always great wasting a month ignoring that girl that likes me and trying to find the perfect regen.

i've been thinking it might be time to buy a new FM

bollocks to this FM Classic thing tho, play hard or go home imo

Aimed at footie fans who no longer have the time to indulge in mammoth sessions of virtual management, FMC is a condensed version of the game that automates much of the backroom detail and allows players to race through a season in around eight hours. You still get to sort all the on-pitch tactics and pinpoint transfer targets, but AI assistants take care of the media and training.

The new mode can be played in two ways, as an open season or in challenge mode, which provides players with a series of specific objectives such as saving a struggling side from relegation within four months. It's an idea imported from the successful smartphone versions of the game.

In a nod to console game design, the mode also features unlockable power-ups, providing managers with extra transfer budgets or removing the need for player work permits when certain milestones are reached.

none of this is FM, fuck off and play FIFA if you're an attention-addled 12 year-old

yeah power-ups do sound awful but besides that i am the epitome of the consumer they're trying to recapture, have recycled binned the last three or four editions within weeks out of pure tedium

2005 is about my cuppa

^^
count me in as well

obv i have a lot of spare time on my hands :( more so over the next few months while i'm drying out

tbh more than anything i just miss getting the scoop on si's dope scouting system and the subsequent relationship with irl players

in seven years time i'll have no equivalent of my old trusted lieutenant freddy guarin finally getting his big heart-warming move to inter

i always enjoy googling the 3nd tier underachievers i've carefully assembled for my 4th tier club

tbh I felt the perfect balance, as far as I was concerned, was reached around CM/FM 04 - after that things got too complicated and prob my life got in the way of things.

the recent ones have had a nasty learning curve, mostly about navigating a new interface but also working out what a lot of options actually do, but i love that sense of near-unmanageable complexity, FM is almost masochistic for me and i don't want to be able to beat it with any consistency

^^^^this. especially as in the past couple years i've started to play this game w/ lower league clubs. (that said my first run is always w/ arsenal).

always play with lower league clubs altho for a change at the moment i am playing Aarhus in the Danish Prem

I play the mobile version on the iPad cos it's much closer to the original game. It needs a bit more detail, I think - I used to like negotiating contracts when I signed players - but it's much closer to what I loved than the last full version I bought, on which I seemed to spend about 12 weeks playing before the season even fucking started.

yeah tbh I think the iPad version is a bit too basic - esp. regarding trasnfers - so I hope FM classic will got a bit further than that

Cannot wait for this, but I'm kinda wary as well. I've played these games way too much over the years, and like so many others I've become uncomfortably familiar with the way they can completely derail almost every other aspect of your life. Tbh I think anyone who's been involuntarily single for 3 months or more ought to be banned from these games entirely until they sort their love lives out (is three months a bit much? six maybe). Sensible amounts of FM with a girlfriend, a job and other hobbies is the ideal really.

Having said that, I'm less worried about it now I'm not a student anymore. No more whole weekdays spent lying in bed, smoking weed and painstakingly scouting out the best ball-playing centre back I can buy with Lecce's £2.8 million January transfer budget. Glorious days.

The one thing they could do which would completely hook me in would be to introduce different formations for when you're in and out of possession. The hours that could be spent tinkering with tactics just doesn't bear thinking about.

Oh yeah, fuck that FM Classic thing. The games aren't that hard to pick up if you delegate sections of it to the AI until you've learned the basics

the more time you give to the game the more faith you implicitly have in the developers that they understand and can simulate the mechanics of footy well enough to fully account for your own understanding and imagination and to reward your commitment of time. but not even ultimate tactician brendan rodgers can truly claim to have such a complete comprehension of those mechanics, the variables are so numerous as to be almost infinite. the more time i have had to invest game week by game week in iterations of footy manager, the less comfortable i have been with this and gradually the less i have wanted to play. there was an honesty back when you could fuck around with formations until you found one that broke the algorithms and you could play thru a season in a weekend, with nii lamptey skewered on the middle prong of an attacking W to become the greatest footballer of all time as was written.

Yeah, the most obviously gaping hole in the match engine is still that if you play a flat, narrow three up front against a back four, the AI never works out how to pick up the middle man and If he's any good at all he's gonna score silly numbers. Not much fun playing that way though, particularly because no one really plays like that in real life

Also my pet peeve, a libero never advances far up the pitch no
mstter what, even in possession. Completely defeats the purpose of the role

4-1-3-2 is certainly the only way in 05

3-4-1-2 in whichever the tonton zola moukoko edition was

my biggest pet peeve with fm tactics outside the norm of today is that wingers don't score enough, even when it is cron and everything will go through strikers

Does anyone else voluntarily resign from jobs with no new post to go to? Have done this a few times when I, ahem, feel I've taken a club as far as it can go. Normally when I've got them established in the PL but can't then make the next step, or if after a couple of good CL-qualifying seasons, I find the team seems to have gone backwards.

i think the first time i resigned was when a chairman sold my superstar AMC from under me and i had a hissy. abandoned the game after 6 months on the dole.

I do that pretty routinely. Found I don't like starting with a top team very much anymore, prefer career games where I start out with no experience and see where I get to. Its good fun building up a rep all over Europe in the lower leagues. Having to fashion a winning team out of no
Money and no talent is a great challenge when you're not hanging around long enough to bring through youngsters. Also makes it nice when you finally get a really top player after a few seasons of managing dross.

Tend to resign from any post whenever I fell my reputation will suffer if I stay. Got a track record of abandoning teams I've just got promoted who have no
Chance of survival.

Just taken QPR to the L1 title after five years at Charlton, having taken them into CL from L1, and resigning after the team stopped living up to my expectations. Fucking livid at the QPR board, who are dissatisfied with my management because of the "spiralling wage bill" which is lower than when I took over. And it's not my fucking fault Anton Ferdinand was being paid £40k a week in L1 - and the board wouldn't let me get rid of him because he is an "essential" player.

diego and kaka each just signed on a free. Oh well, simon davies, you had a good run in the aforementioned lamptey role (42 goals in two seasons lol)

AGF in the Champions' League qualifiers, struggling to fill my Danish player quota, still can't persuade many genuinely great players to come to Denmark or sign any genuinely great Danish guys. starting to really hate Kobenhavn who i've yet to beat in about 10 meetings.

kobenhavn a laugh

1st two games of the season, draw at home to local rivals after playing them off the park cos they equalize with a 35-yard free kick in injury time. play a weakened team on the Sunday before my first Champions' League qualifier - drew Sporting fucking Lisbon, gah - and dominate the game only to lose to an 89th minute breakaway goal. gonna play the Champs' League tonight. nervous. fuck this game.

had a terrible session last night, last year's league champions failing to integrate world class youth mido, diego and kaka successfully. Picked up slightly after christmas but trailing henry-powered arsenal by 13 points already. 2004 could be a long year for spurs fans

starting to suspect that the Danish Premiership is a one-team club, which considering it's Stale Solbakken's main claim to success is a little worrying

this league is small, this league is the product of bad algorithms and has no value in judging irl footballers, managers or teams

la la la not listening

heh it's like the opposite of blinkers with you and wolves imo

this isn't a Wolves thing so much as a Football Manager thing.

i like Stale irl, i think we're gonna be awesome when he sorts out the defensive half

Just found out that it's only 24 hours or so till the beta of this goes live, and me on a week off and all. Sometimes, quite out of the blue, the world just throws you a bone. Can't wait to make the current Villa team play good football.

when is this coming out officially?

2nd Novemeber I think

I'm still halfway thru the first season for FM2011. I don't know how you lot do it.

Also, am disappointed FM classic doesn't feature Kevin Toms:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekplay.cgi?title=Football+Manager&pub=Addictive+Games+Ltd&year=1982&id=0001823&game=/games/f/FootballManager.tzx.zip&emu=3&aspect=3

Well my enthusiasm for this has taken a knock after approximately 20 minutes of gameplay. First by discovering that Villa had £0 in the transfer budget (which I was half expecting tbh) and then that I'm still expected to get top-half at a minimum (which I was NOT expecting).

Put out my strongest 11 against the reserves and went down 2-0 following a cross which flew in over Shay Given's thick Irish skull from 35 yards out and then a comedy own goal by Nathan Baker in injury time where he somehow contrived to round his own keeper before coolly slotting it into the bottom corner.

By about the 70th minute Charles N'Zogbia's body language was noted as developing from "looking very frustrated" to "looking furious". This frustration/fury manifested itself in a variety of forms - a number of mazy runs where he ended up taking it to the corner flag/into touch, all the while pointedly ignoring good passing options. There was also the booking he received for a vicious scything tackle through the back of my darling youth starlet (4 and a half star potential). And then there were those three pointless 30 yard efforts, one of which was last seen heading out towards Longbridge and still rising.

So basically initial impression = 10/10 for realism, minus several million for being a relentless, miserable grind. Already. I play these games for escapism dammit! It's not even fun pretending to be involved with this club. at the moment.

I'm going for a smoke and a rethink. What would Brendan Rodgers do?

Does FM13 have secret envelopes?

Just lost my second friendly 1-0 to Hallescher FC, a third division German team about whom there was so little information available that my assistant couldn't offer a scout report.

Sod the envelopes. I singled out N'Zogbia in front of the team and have told my new director of football to sell his lazy ass. Stephen Ireland too. Gonna hit the free transfer market for some ageing journeymen to shore up the squad a bit.

Heskey available probably

didnt he go to oz?

yep. BIG showdown between his newcastle team and del piero's sydney FC last week.

sounds great already

alex isnt a big

the beta is great

yeah? wd's descrip is giving me cravings

Have hit upon the winning formula by playing McLeish football. 4-5-1 rigid defensive. Ugly stuff. Beaten Stoke and Wigan back to back though, Darren Bent on 7 from 4. Really enjoying the game so far, lots of nice tweaks have been made.

our Elliot is taking the piss

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/616214_10151455828243060_1006039287_o.jpg

Lol
Kompany retiring while Barry seeks a loan move.

nah that yellow "Rst" means he needs a rest

can see why Barry wd want to fight for a place

I used to know someone who played FM on his ZX Spectrum. Nice to see it's still as impenetrable as ever.

How much did Messi/CRon cost? Also does the new FM incorporate financial fair play rules?

dunno about FFP, i'm playing as Port Vale. it doesn't sound like it does but i'm not sure. Messi was £217 million which was his minimum release cause and he's on £425,000 a week, CRon i think was £160 million-ish and gets about £350,000 a week. think Elz said he barely spent any money in his first season and the board kept chucking it at him so he thought "what the hell"

lol. i miss fm, gonna have to wait two or three weeks to get my disc and upload it to my new laptop.

http://www.footballmanagerstory.com/2013/08/football-manager-2014-announced-see-the-new-features-in-fm14/

No idea if anyone round this way is interested, but tbh this is always a significant event in the Davies household

i'm always interested but i'm not due a new FM for a couple of years yet i think

Yeah I'm kinda concerned actually, new Rome Total War is out next month and there's no way I'm missing that, factor in the new GTA and this'n, looks like my (so far) highly successful resolve to spend less time arsing about on video games is about to be sorely tested

is the handheld version of this worth the money? i'm not sure i have time for the full version (not that i ever did), but i could see this eating up my commutes on my phone.

Erm, dunno tbh dude. I used to play the first FM Handheld on my PSP quite a few years ago, and I remember it being quite fun but also really unrealistically easy (able to win the league comfortably with teams predicted for relegation, for instance).

I would have thought that the game will have developed quite a bit since then so that sort of thing probably happens less, but I couldn't say with any certainty.

I would say that if you don't feel you can put the time in for the full game, the new-ish FM Classic game mode is definitely worth the outlay. I wasn't very keen on the idea at all when it was first announced but I started using it when I got a new job and it really is very good.

Depending on how quickly you play you can quite easily rinse through between half-a-dozen and a dozen matches in about 90 mins / 2 hours, and you actually don't lose very much at all from the gaming experience. Just gets rid of press conferences, team talks, complicated training screens and so on. Streamlines the whole thing nicely

Football Manager craze has matured into a full-grown national obsession

I've never played any of these games since my days with the BBC 'B' but that piece (and this thread) make it sound like I've missed out on life.

That goes the other way around too though, I can tell from first hand. Spent so many time playing this a couple of years ago I too missed out on life...

FM is what's left of my life

:-(

+ much as i'm not a fan of Jason Mumford i've also experienced irrational grudges against irl players as a result of FM shenanigans

Yeah I defo recognize that. Was a time when my whole existence revolved around that bloody game, reality and FM would blend together in a weird way when watching actual footy

still get that moment when youth player gets a game for his PL team and i'm like "i had him on loan at Rochdale, he's shit"

i was gonna reopen this just to point out that this week i spent 3 mil on Nathan Dyer to spearhead my Champo promotion campaign with the Wolves, and he tore a fucking hamstring in the FIRST PRE-SEASON FRIENDLY and he's out for 3 months. hate this game.

hehe, yeah i know that feeling. i can grow to hate real players if they bitch and moan and always want to leave and are never satisfied in fm. like fucking nani.

Mido was the worst FM player i ever managed

Oh Mido! I'd like to form a team of players like that.

Am I alone in sometimes completely fucking with a player? Transfer list him, retracting that again. Promising he'll play, but then leave him out of the squad etc.

I need to get out more...

i was gonna role play a game as Roy Keane one time, i need to resurrect that when i've finished making Wolves the greatest in the world

Thinking back to the pool of 24(!) players in the Football Manager I played as a nipper - S Lee, P Mariner, N Spink among them - the game must've been ancient already by the time I got it, those guys were never current at any point in my life that I can recall.

pshaw, when are you talking, around 86/87? they were all still playing in div 1

i am still playing the game i mention upthread... on cm4 ffs

i must've had 4 or 5 different football managing games on the Spectrum alone

Lotta love for Ultimate Soccer Manager '98 which was probably my first management game.

Matches played out in shoddy but fun 2D/3D engine, with possibilities for crowd trouble and rioting at big games and derbies played out on-screen. You could bet on games and take bungs, but woe betide you if you got caught. There was also a Theme Park-style element where you got to lay out burger stands and official shops and what not around the exterior of your stadium to boost revenue. Cracking game.

There's just no way I could countenance not getting the new FM really, I don't play anywhere near as obsessively as I used to but it's still a wonderful time-sink if you're bored on a Sunday afternoon. My chosen style of game these days is usually the 'start unemployed w/ zero experience and work upwards' route. It's supremely satisfying when a tactic you've made from scratch comes together perfectly.

was it premier manager 96 i remember on the megadrive?

Am I alone in sometimes completely fucking with a player?

one time I tried to fuck with a whole club, doing everything I could to destroy Liverpool with my only rule being that when I got fired I had to wait until the next season to rejoin. By the time I couldn't be bothered any more I think they were in League 1 with £500m of debt.

I haven't played FM for a few years now, I guess at some point I decided that doing that kind of thing wasn't really the best way to spend my time. I had more ILXing to do.

It's the kind of success story we hear too little Merdeyeux, screwing up a club. Have to admit I did it with Ajax too, selling the whole first and second squad at the start of the season and then abandoning ship.

I think I sold everybody and then bought an entire non-league side for ridiculous fees with ridiculous contracts and lots of ridiculous unsustainable add-ons. Still better than Kenny tbh.

Lol. Oh yeah ridiculous clauses tying useless players to a club for years and years, I had a lot of love for them.

when everything comes to pass these will be the things we're remembered for. :')

I think my first managerial game experience was Kevin Keegan's Player Manager. I have fond memories of that game, which I'm sure I'd quickly lose if I ever played it again.

Maybe that or some Commodore game where everything would be going well until your star striker died in a car crash.

think i've finally kicked the fm2005 habit

in all my years playing it i have never seen repeated the hallucinatory moment managing inter when edgar davids attacked the ref and got banned for a year

Mine was an old Italian football manager thing on MS-DOS but I've no idea what it was called. It was monochrome without any visuals. You just clicked on 'play match' and three seconds later it gave you the result.

I think it was an earlier version of this one: http://www.ifm2.com/scrshots.html

http://worldsoccertalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/football-manager.jpg

That's way too advanced to be the first one I ever played, but awesome nonetheless

http://www.atarimania.com/8bit/screens/football_manager_2.gif

http://s.uvlist.net/l/y2011/11/90639.jpg

these games, i played them all

not in german necessarily

That last one looks absolutely amazing

I used to play my dad's/uncles' FA Cup card/board game when I was at my Gran's. The instructions were long gone and I didn't know what the KO card meant - I thought it stood for Kick Off - so it was a perplexment that I won the cup every time I played

xp yeah you played the board game part and then input resulting values into the game. players were on cards, colour coded by gk/df/mf/st and they'd had a rating. so you might play 4-4-2 and put kerry dixon (7) and pat nevin (8) up front, and then the game would ask you to input your total for forwards, and you would enter 15. or you would have no mates or integrity and skip the board and cards, and just put the highest total in each time. i am imagining that latter scenario took place.

Amazing. I would have loved that when I was young.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/093c10d6-b7b3-4efb-bd2c-e248c1a22aae_zpsd9673005.jpg

i swear to god i only asked for £750,000

That other news item noting that Forest have put in a bid is hanging so tantalisingly out of reach. So, are you a rich man?

nah they offered a derisory half a mill, told them where to stick it

http://www.fm-base.co.uk/forum/attachments/football-manager-2013-discussion/382707d1377641504-funny-random-things-fm2013-graham-graham_-overview-profile.png

not mine, but quality

dereck mardell otm

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-10-03-keeping-the-game-alive

amazing, tempting

this was the tonton zola mokouko / kennedy bakiroglu one right?

think i can still remember most of my old teams on there

uefa-cup winning norwich side with a midfield of simao sabrosa, phil mulryne, mark gower, lee cook

i think my favourite one was much earlier, like 97/98 maybe? the first one where you didn't need the cd for it so a guy at school passed it around to everyone.

knocked my brother out of the wc with norn iron, and he was italy. got him sacked.

after years of west ham/derby county prem seasons, sparring our way into cl places.

01/02 was indeed killer (Tristan Todorov alone helped me win all there was to win). But then again, I suspect your favorite is always teh first one you play.

One of the things I miss most about those early games was the way that it was perfectly possible to hammer out a multiplayer season quick-smart on the same PC. Used to be able to get years in over the course of a summer holiday or whatever.

I tried doing a multiplayer game on a local server on the last one, and it really was good trying to snaffle each other's signings, seeing bad results come up and the head-to-heads were fantastic fun, but the whole process was just soooo slow.

I think excessive fiddling with tactics and players roles is what lost me - the early games were all about the thrill of snapping players up and get them playing asap

excessive fiddling with tactics and roles is why it keeps getting better, for me

it definitely makes it more fun, just takes so much time tho. you could do a season in the old ones in about 5/6 hours.

yeah, a single season takes me a long time now. from looking at forums i reckon there are plenty of shortcuts if you wanna play faster tho.

Still playing FM10 which is the first, and only, one I've played. Will probably get FM14 'tho, 4 year cycles seems about right. Been about 2 years since I played with 'real' players, it was prejudicing how I felt about players irl!

I'm with NV on this.

When I get properly into a game I'm all about the extensive pre-match scouting, sussing which opposition full-back is slowest, which midfielder loses his composure when you press him on the ball, whether to push a winger inside or out, and so on. Ludicrously satisfying to see 20 minutes of pre-match mucking about all come together in the game but it is such a time drain

xpost - agree completely with the game affecting how I feel about real life players, both negatively and positively. Atm I'm depserate to see Erik Lamela get a run in the Spurs team, he was my Newcastle team on FM13

So this is back then, Beta went live last night.

Abolition of the sliders is an interesting move, makes everything vaguer and less precise, though probably more intuitive and accessible for new fans. Seems easier to watch the game on screen, see that your defenders are too high and just give the shout ‘drop deeper’ than it was to fiddle with the 20 different settings on your 'Defensive Line' slider and work out the precise level of your backline to the nth degree.

The old uber-realism is still in place though, for better or worse. An intense pre-season of hard work trying to mold my Villa side into a solid defensive unit that could provide a platform for lightning counters, all wrecked within half an hour of the opening game of the season. Ciaran Clark scuffed an underhit backpass and Shane Long snaffled it straight away before rounding the keeper. Idk how the SI guys do it, it's uncanny

No takers? Elimination of the slider-based tactic system is the best thing to have happened to this franchise in donkey's years

it sounds promising and is another reason why i might be in, but i can't afford it just yet and i'm happy to wait for the official release date at least

I think excessive fiddling with tactics and players roles is what lost me - the early games were all about the thrill of snapping players up and get them playing asap

― licorice oratorio (baaderonixx), 08 October 2013 10:45 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

excessive fiddling with tactics and roles is why it keeps getting better, for me

― Bap & Ounge (Noodle Vague), 08 October 2013 11:04 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

arry/avb

still playing cm4 btw

Excessive fiddling with tactics and roles coming off more Ranieri than Veeyas Boyash atm

i don't pronounce villas-boas like that btw, trying to type whilst hiding it from marauding boss means proof-reading is off the menu

i'd love to get this new one, but my piece of shit laptop is too old for a new fm.

FM the documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqnKxF4PnJI

it is fucking dreadful so far!

that moment where you blow 5 mill in fees and wages on a 36 year-old Ibrahimovic just so you can see him in a Wolves shirt