RSL in the WSL Part 2: My Setup
A few more notes about my save setup
One thing that drives me nuts when I read computer game and simulation projects that others set up is when people don’t talk about their setup. Yes, this stuff is kind of boring – but it’s really important if you want to understand exactly what is going on.
I’ve gone kind of heavy on the addons for this save – so heavy, in fact, that I wasn’t able to get a clear screenshot of them when I first started the game. I figured that I’d give you a quick explanation today while I get the game progressed to our next match.
Not Cheating
First and foremost, here is evidence that I am not cheating. I took this screenshot when I started the save:
The key here is that the in-game editor is turned off.
I’ve played around with the editor for fun before. I’ve learned that it’s actually not all that much fun to wave your hand and just create a super team that can automatically beat everybody else. Challenge is what makes this game fun.
If you are curious, here is my manager profile:
I gave myself the highest level of experience and badges. I know that this takes away some of the RPG aspects of the game. However, I’ve found the badging experience to be an annoying distraction – and that team morale can decline quickly if you don’t have the same experience and reputation as your players. I’m not interested in dealing with that, which is why I’ve set it up this way.
To offset any of these gains, I have turned myself into a 19-year-old, choosing the youngest possible age that I can at the start of the game. I’m not certain how much of a difference age makes; I suppose we’ll find out.
What I’ve Already Covered
As I detailed in this post, I’m using DarthFurion’s World Super League, as well as DF11’s Legends of the Beautiful Game.
There’s more to it than just that, however. DarthFurion’s package contains more than just a restructuring of the worldwide football landscape. There are a few other important elements, including:
A general boost to AI manager competence
A general boost to the potential ability of all players
An improvement to patience among fans, which is important because you’re much less likely to finish up at the top in this league
Improved training facilities for all teams – my understanding is that this is supposed to create a more even environment among teams from different regions
An across-the-board maxing out of youth recruitment
Rebalanced youth ratings
Rebalanced transfer values
Most of these modifications are intended to make the World Super League a more equitable experience for teams outside the big 5 countries. The changes in transfer values are also essential to prevent teams with less money from selling their big stars for nothing – a problem that most people take advantage of in the vanilla version of Football Manager.
Anyway, there are no other leagues to add when using DarthFurion’s patch. Here are the only active leagues in the world:
Not many, right? All you’ve got is a fictitious “England” that just so happens to encompass the entire world.
I’ve also enabled every player in the game:
Football Manager warned me that my game would be very slow as a result, though I know from past experience that it won’t make a huge difference.
Improvements to Japan
One problem I’ve had with the World Super League addon in the past is that Japanese teams tend to be at a severe disadvantage.
This is a licensing problem, actually. Football Manager does not come with a license for Japanese players. I believe this is because the J.League has an exclusive license with Konami.
The problem is that the few Japanese teams that appear in the World Super League come with no players by default. You can tell the computer to create full rosters on its own, yes – but the players are usually underpowered relative to the general World Super League strength.
So, instead of doing that, I went over to the Sports Interactive forums and downloaded the final J League players patch for Football Manager 2021. For fun, I also picked up the “new stadium” pack from the same thread.
Other Realism Changes
Daveincid is one of my favorite FM editors. I’ve been impressed with every one of his creations, and am a little bit sad that he didn’t do as much for FM21 as he did for FM22.
I’m using his “geographics and languages” update here to try to add some realism to the languages in the game.
I’ve also used a few of the old MajesticEternity addons – in particular, an additional AI boost, as well as an excellent weather mod that makes extreme weather changes more common.
And, finally, I decided to use the entire stack of Sortitoutsi license fixes. Some of them aren’t really going to impact us in any meaningful way, but I figured I’d add them in anyway.
Tactics
Now comes the controversial part.
I’m not a very good Football Manager tactician. I also didn’t want to do a lot of tactical fiddling in this save. It is therefore my sad responsibility to announce that I am using a downloaded tactic.
My favorite FM21 tactic by far is “Phantom Menace,” a tactic by Ryan Cassidy that was originally featured on Omega Luke a few years back.
I’ve used a number of different tactics while fiddling with FM21, but always found myself coming back to this one. It scores goals efficiently and elegantly when paired with the right players. There are some defensive weaknesses, and the players foul like there’s no tomorrow, but I still prefer it to the other options.
You can see Omega Luke’s introductory video here. And, if you are curious, here is a quick snapshot of the tactic itself:
By the way, I don’t entirely agree that the most “realistic” way to play Football Manager is to come up with a tactic from scratch. If I were a first-time manager of a football club anywhere in the world, I would take some time to study the tactics of others to try to figure out what would likely work. I have a real hard time envisioning myself going up to a blank chalkboard and simply starting things over at the very beginning. I’d imagine that I would need years of experience to develop the confidence to even attempt doing it on my own.
Anyway, though, because this tactic has the potential of exploiting certain aspects of the Football Manager code, I’ve penalized myself by putting in the Legends of the Beautiful Game addon. We’re not going to simply bowl over everybody and win it all in 2 or 3 years, no matter how good this tactic is.
Training
One more point – I’m using an experimental approach to training.
Evidence Based Football Manager is one of the best Football Manager YouTube channels out there. Max’s videos are easy to watch. His research is impeccable, and his presentations are very engaging and fun to watch. If there were any justice on the internet, he would be up there with the likes of Zealand and Lollujo, not limited to under 5,000 subscribers.
I’m using the Evidence Based Football Manager approach to training. You can learn about it in this video. Here is a screenshot of the training setup itself:
That’s it for now!