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A few tears today, as this is the last of the new feature round up blogs. Not much point doing others now that you are all playing the game, after all, although hopefully you'll find a few things in today's blog that you haven't seen yet.
That doesn't mean the end of the blogs though - oooh, no. There's some related-to-game-but-not-related-to-gameplay stuff for a few days, which will be followed by some indepth guides to some of the new features, so still lots to go until the game is released. At which point whilst you are playing it, I'll be sleeping. Which at this current moment in time, I'm looking forward to quite a bit.
So, what to talk about today. How about finances? And some loose ends that I haven't covered elsewhere? Sound good? Then let's begin…
Finances first. Now, this stuff is "under the hood" but shows how deep we go into this stuff to make the game as realistic as possible. The finance module has been hugely revamped to reflect the changing face of football globally, with Riz (creator of Eastside Hockey Manager who has now moved over to the FM team) looking after it along with other stuff. With lots more money flowing around in football, whether from larger TV deals or foreign investment, and bigger sponsorship and corporate deals, we have to show all of that without just making it so that every team has huge amounts of money.
Now, I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs, as you should find that out for yourself by playing, and seeing what happens to transfer values and wage values in the longterm of the game. And this would be different for each league and club anyway.
However, I have picked out a few examples of things that have changed or been added to help the finance module be the most realistic yet.
Corporate Match Day income now better reflect the amount of corporate money coming into the club.
Sponsorships are also modelled better, with figures researched being used from our database, aswell as the possibilities of not just kit sponsors, but also stadium and general sponsors, so it's possible to have multiple sponsors all putting money into the kitty.
There are lots of new fields in the database for income and costs too, to ensure that we aren't just making stuff up! Sorry, I mean "predicting using very clever equations".
You're now told how many season tickets you are selling, which is nice, and this has the correct boost to income. But if you make too much money, you might find your club investing the money elsewhere to bring more in in the long run, on top of the Directors taking money out of the club if they want to. Just like real life.
OK - enough about money stuff. Here's something else. I call it "bits and bobs" as it's stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else!
For those who have played the demo, you'll know about this already, but for those who don't, we now have season expectations in the game. And this is kind of linked to finances too, as if you tell the board you're going to do better than they expect, they might give you more money to spend. It also increases the expectation of supporters and the board, so the extra pressure on you mounts up, and if you don't do as you say, you're likely to be out on your ear pretty damn quick. If you want less pressure, suggest you're going to do worse than you want to, and have extra time to build things up. But do keep an eye on the boards long term goals, as these need to be taken seriously if you want to keep your job.
A feature I use a lot, being the kind of manager who likes to bring players through from the youth team, is having the chance to get one of your more experienced players to mentor a younger player. Sometimes though, I got it badly wrong, and ended up having time wasted for both players, by "marrying them up" incorrectly, so both got annoyed. Now, if you have a coach with good youth stats, if you go to a players training screen, they may well recommend someone to mentor them for you.
What else? How about the ability to build up a good backroom team together, and having them work together for a while, creating a good bond between them, and you could find them moving with you when you move to a new job.
If you're a big player of network games, you'll find it faster, as we've reduced the workload on the server on matchdays making your own computer do a bit more work.
Feeder clubs have also been improved a lot, with a little thing such as being able to search for a new parent club without having to cancel your original, the work permit display stuff that I mentioned earlier in the blogs series, being on loan for a season counting as a whole year, rather than the shorter time, which will help with getting dual nationality, but more importantly, once you've been in a job for a while and the board are happy with you, you'll get the option to choose what kind of feeder club to look for.
There's still lots of other bits and bobs, like being able to choose between decimal or fraction betting odds, using Ctrl K (PC) or Cmd K (Mac), or being able to have more foreigners at your club that the limit in a country, and loan out the others, but I'd rather let you discover those for yourself, and I look forward to seeing the posts on our forums when new things are discovered with the full game.
Now, today promises to be exciting. As if all goes to plan, we should actually know our release dates later this morning.
http://fm08.footballmanager.net/en/article/101/1684.html |
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