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The problem with Football Manager
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05-11-2010 12:14pm#1First off, sorry for the long post. If you're not obsessed with CM/FM, you're probably best escaping this thread before reading any further!
Right, I just got the urge to post this thread because I've had loads of questions about the 3d match engine since it was first released, but never asked them.
I was a huge fan of Championship Manager back around '99/'00/'01 period. I would buy it as soon as a new one was released and it was the most exciting thing in the world loading up a new version. The text commentary was brilliant and you really felt the coding going on in the background must be amazing. You felt all of what is happening during the match is based on thousands of different factors that the developers have all taken into account in the code. Player x in the right full position comes up against player y in the left wing position. Players x's one on ones stat goes up against player y's, along with player y's dribbling vs x's tackling, x's form v y's form etc. etc. right down to the weather affecting different types of players differently until we have a result of either x taking the ball, or y skipping by x. Now there would be these very complicated incidents to be calculted in every second of every match. A LOT of very good coding.
I always felt the reason they didn't have a 3d match engine back then was because to have animations that could work well with the thousands of factors that come into play in every second of a football match would be almost impossible to do.
With this belief of thousands of factors all being in play every second of the game, and the amazing text comentary with seeimingly uncanny real life outcomes to games and seasons, it really felt like you were in this simulated football world that was as realistic and dynamic as the real one.
Then came the new graphical match engine. You could watch your players run around as little dots and it still seemed to have the same realism. I could get my head around how they could represent their complicated match coding in this simple radar like view. The illusion was still strong, but perhaps fading for some reason. I was startin to play less and less around this time and not buying the games straight away as the excitement seemed to have gone.
I spent hours playing games on slow pace wiatching the entire match from start to finish trying to spot exactly what my players were at on the field. Their positioning, passing, tackling in regards to my directions and their stats. I would watch all the one on ones between players closely and then examine why player x is beating player y almost every time down the wing by studying their stats/form/other conditions I felt were a factor. Now I know all this might sound crazy to a casual player or non player of this game. I was obsessed. As a lot of CM/FM players can become.
But, the more I studied it the more I started to think perhaps the coding is not all that in detail. Perhaps not as many factors come into play during a match as I thought. Perhaps, god forbid, some of the game was scripted based on a code to keep things realistic. So in fact, when player x has all stats/form on his side verses player y, player y might be getting the better of one on ones because of a simple script allowing his team, which is the better team overall, win the game to keep it true to a real life result.
A simple example of what I am talking about that has come to light is the fact that now leagues have a dynamic rating. Meaning over time a leagues rep can improve, making better players more likely to join the league, in-turn making the teams in the league more likely to push on and exceed what is currently possible for them in real life.
I always thought that was the case. But it was just an illusion.
The fact is, it was set up so that no matter how hard you try, how sucessful you are over many years of improving the team/ground/financial side of the club, you could never really improve an Irish league team to battle competitively with the likes of Real Madrid and Arsenal.
Fair enough, it is in the game now, but it should have been in the game from the beginning. It's not that hard to code dynamic league ratings. The reason they didn't, is because their code was probably not all that genius, and things could probably go out of wack pretty quickly if everything was as dynamic as we all believed. This kind of thing might have been spread throughout the entire game in order to keep scores and leagues 'realistic' to current scores and leagues. That thought sucked the fun right out of it for me.
I'm not bashing the game. Just putting what has been stopping me playing the game out there, in the hope that I can be proven wrong and shown that in fact there are thousands of factors coming into play every second of a match to make things as realistic and dynamic as possible.
So I guess the questions I want answered are actually quite simple: I want the developers to release an in detail description of how the match engine works. What factors come into play exactly in each situation. I don't want the code. Just a worded explanation of how situations in the match engine are decided.
Is there anything out there with this information that can help me 'believe' again? Or is it all just an illusion?1
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diarmuid05 wrote: »Even with the new match engine.... i still use the text commentary...
My imagination is way better than anything they could code
I think that's where the problem comes from. The visual match engine has created all these questions.
But before, our imagination during the text only era made the game so realistic. We just believed everything was as complicated as we could imagine it. So really it was just an illusion we bought in to?0 -
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They will never reveal the inner workings of the ME to the public Believe me, I've been playing Football Manager Live a long time and spoken directly a number of times with the Devs and the likes of Ov, they're in house secrets never to be revealed !
FML has had the Match Engine that's in FM2011 now for a short while and straight up from what we've seen, 4-4-2 is probably the strongest tactic to use in this Match Engine while 4-3-3 narrow tactics and variants have had their over powering effects lessened.
Biggest team making/breaking changes we've seen in FML with this match engine not particular to FML only, were the morale changes having a bigger impact on performances (more so than they ever had), wingers becoming an awful lot stronger in the game and performance of Defenders focusing more on Mental stats rather than just Physical ones, though high pace/acc and jumping still have an impact, a lot of the mental stats weigh more heavily in the performance of defenders.
They've lessened a little the effects of Morale in the most recent FML patch last week I think it was and which all the changes were included in the latest FM2011 patch too.
There's no obvious match engine "exploits" as such with the latest match engine, other than what I've mentioned that 4-4-2 and variants of same seem to be the strongest tactics at the moment to use.
I use a variant of 4-4-2 (1 DM anchor, 1 MC Ball Winning, 2 x Attacking Midfield Wingers AM L/R) very successfully in this match engine in FML, and FM2011 so far so good too and that same variant of 4-4-2 (or 4-2-4 really) is used a lot by the most successful teams in FML - which again uses the same Match Engine as FM2011.0 -
They will never reveal the inner workings of the ME to the public Believe me, I've been playing Football Manager Live a long time and spoken directly a number of times with the Devs and the likes of Ov, they're in house secrets never to be revealed !
I suspected that'd be the case alright. It just makes me think the actual calculations going on in the match engine probably aren't as complicated as the illusion makes us feel with all these attributes and stats we are bombarded with.
I wish I could just play the game and not worry about this. It was an amazing game when I just believed.
I think my best bet is to get a job with Sports Interactive and find out the secrets behind the match engine 0 -
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