Another Save Ends Prematurely
Rimyongsu Bites The Dust
Another Save Ends Prematurely
It’s sad to say this, but I’m going to have to end this Rimyongsu save prematurely.
There are a few trends in this save that make it extremely frustrating and difficult to play.
We Can’t Make Progress
The first problem is that we simply can’t make any progress.
This part is pretty simple. We’ve spent the entire save at the bottom of the table:
This ordinarily isn’t a huge problem — but we’re on pace to finish worse this season than we did last season. And, because of a player issue, there’s really no end in sight.
Nobody Wants To Play For Us
This is a Youth Academy Challenge save. We don’t have to worry too much about attracting talent.
However, the problem we have is that every good player wants to leave once he hits 19 or so.
Over half the starters on my team tell me this when I try to sign new contracts with them:
It’s going to be impossible to make any progress if we keep this cycle going. We’ll continue to play poorly in the first half of the season, barely eke out a few wins in the second, and will likely never finish higher than 18th.
And that leads to financial issues:
We Have No Money
This part is actually my fault. I inadvertently gave Rimyongsu a German stadium instead of a North Korean one. We wound up spending a bunch of money building a North Korean stadium. Once we moved in, our finances disappeared:
The projection is even worse:
Now, the worst part in all of this is that we need money to improve our youth setup. That’s the only hope we have of finally piecing together a club good enough to compete.
Once our wage budget falls apart, we’ll be in a perpetual downfall.
The problem, by the way, comes from travel costs — which increased dramatically when we moved back to North Korea:
How To Fix These Problems
If you’re like me and actually want to make a Youth Academy Challenge save work, I’ve got a few pieces of advice:
Give your club a sugar daddy owner. I don’t see anything wrong with this. It will help quite a bit if you fall into one of these financial holes — especially if you’re doing a worldwide league and your team is far away from the others.
Improve your youth setup before the save starts. I don’t see anything wrong with doing this, either. Giving yourself a perfect youth setup will be boring, of course. However, giving yourself a little bit of an advantage will help you push through the boring parts at the beginning of the save.
Increase your reputation. The young player problem is because our reputation was ridiculously low. None of the other playable teams were interested in any of these players — and yet the players were content to leave our club and retire while still young. Reputation does increase, but that increase is very gradual — and some of us don’t have the patience to stay in the lower leagues for 20 or more seasons.