@FootyManager Arsenal Save: September 12 – Tactical Tweaks

Results
Liverpool 2-4 Arsenal (Prem)
Trabzonspor 0-2 Arsenal (CL Group Stage)
Arsenal 3-1 Newcastle (Prem)
Villa 1-5 Arsenal (LC 3rd Round)
West Brom 3-1 Arsenal (Prem)
Arsenal 4-1 Ajax (CL Group Stage)

Sitting 5th on 10 points after 6 games

5 wins out of 6 yet the loss to WBA really grated on me – WBA had far too many opportunities to score and me too few. Injuries have plagued the side this season too and Sagna just picked up a 5 week injury at the end of September.

I decided to use a counter philosophy away from home to Liverpool and Trabzonspor – it worked incredibly effectively against Pool but I was lucky they only scored 2 as I conceded far too many chances. Trabzonspor was a game I should have won regardless so I decided to go to a more Standard philosophy away to Villa – reaping huge dividends as we were clinical in a more even game. However away to WBA the standard philosophy didn’t work. Well I say it was the philosophy that didn’t work but that probably isn’t the case – I just haven’t had enough cover through the middle with players tracking runners. It doesn’t help that I’ve had to play Coquelin on the middle neartly all season due to injuries to Arteta and Rosicky (Ramsey playing AMC at the moment). So for future games I think I will drop Song back from MC to DMC and keep the MC and AMC at home (this worked against Ajax) yet away from home I think I’ll drop to a more conventional 4-5-1 4-3-3 whichever way you look at it – this way I hope to get a bit more tackles in and have my mids tracking runners more frequently.

@FootyManager Arsenal Save: August 2012

Results
Blackburn 2-0 Arsenal (Prem)
Arsenal 6-1 Dynamo Kyiv (CL 3rd Qual)
Arsenal 3-0 Bolton (Prem)
Dynamo Kyiv 2-1 Arsenal (CL 3rd Qual)
Arsenal 0-0 Fulham (Prem)

Been stung by injuries early on this season (typical Arsenal) – no RVP, Doumbia, Walcott, Vermaelen, Rosicky at the end of August. Displays were hit and miss as I tried to play attacking from the off at Blackburn and it just didn’t work against their 4-5-1 with 2 DMs formation.

I tweaked a few things, made our philsophy ‘counter’ away from home and went from a fluid to a more balanced system that seems to be more effective. Staying attacking at home and creating many chances yet not converting enough of them.

Drawn against Trabzonspor, Ajax and Valencia in the Champs League group stages.

@FootyManager Arsenal Save: Training & Tactics

Training
So first things first – I start by importing training schedules (Dunc’s schedules if you’ve heard of them) – for those of you that haven’t, he has specific training schedules for most positions instead of just general, keepers, defenders, mids & attackers. Allowing for a bit more specialisation in training. I then tweak each schedule to make them slightly more intense. I’m happy to do this as long as the players don’t complain of being overworked. Hopefully in the future when I bring in some quality regens and get some good youth through I will create individual training schedules for each player – hoping this will help develop the player better than a bog standard schedule would do.

Tactics
I plan on playing a 4-2-3-1 with bombing on full backs – a holding DM and Deep Lying Playmaker, with 2 wingers or inside forward if Theo plays – RVP as Trequartista and Doumbia as a poacher. What I’ll say now is that I am experimenting: Fluid philosophy, Attacking strategy, Shorter passing, Expressive Freedom, Press More, More Cautious in the tackle, Deafult marking, crossing and roaming. Not playing offside and playing on the counter attack.

From a personal player point of few I’ve tweaked a few player instructions. I’ve asked my 2 centre mids to be less ‘attacking’ in their mentality as I will need them to do their fair share of defending. I’ve also toned down the mentality of my two wingers so that they support my full backs in defence more. Doumbia as poacher is all out attack, RVP has a free role with plenty of through balls. All players are set to long shot ‘rarely’. Hopefully this will be a winning tactic – but I don’t know. As Song is injured along with Walcott my idea of a defensive MC has gone out the window until he returns. For now Arteta and Ramsey will have to bare the defensive responsibilites.

 

@FootyManager Arsenal Save: July 2012

Ins:
Jairo (Racing) £2.5m
Seydou Doumbia (CSKA Moscow) £18.5m
Diego Perotti (Sevilla) £10m
Vaclav Kadlec (Sparta Prague) £7m

Outs
Manuel Almunia (Espanyol) £2.5m
Marouane Chamakh (SLB) £8m
Chuks Aneke (Rochdale) Loan

The theory behind my signings are that I wanted a poacher, and there aren’t many better than Doumbia with his finishing, pace and power. Walcott isn’t quite good enough for that role full time (and is currently injured for 3 months in my save). Perotti was brought in purely for quality cover on the wings and also made easy by Walcott’s injury. I plan to play a 4-2-3-1 with RVP in a trequartista role but I’ll go into that a bit more in the next post.

Jairo is a 4.5* potential young winger so for £2.5m – a complete bargain in my eyes – and someone I can try and groom with my new, more individual training schedules – something that I will again, explain in a future post. Kadlec is brought in for young cover up top and can also play wide, as Chamakh is gone and Park is potentially leaving on loan.

Friendlies have gone well but again I don’t control them – just letting Pat Rice get on with them whilst I wheel and deal and bring in staff – which is hugely important. I’ve brought in staff who specialise in each of the key training categories to try and get at least 4* on each category.

I’ve also managed to convince the board to build better youth facilities for a cool £2.7m.

Next post I’ll delve into training and tactics before the season kicks off.

@FootyManager Blog: Arsenal Save Intro

So I’ve decided I am way overdue in writing some consistent blogs with regards to my Football Manager gameplay and experiences. I read a few blogs here and there and some of them are fantastic and offer a great insight into tactics and training. Hopefully I can do the same to my 1000 odd fellow FM addict followers on Twitter and get some good interaction and comments.

First up: I’m aiming to blog as each month passes in my game, giving a breakdown of what I’ve done in that month with regards to transfers, matches, news etc…whilst also providing an up front take of my training and tactics before the season starts.

So next up: I’m starting a save with my beloved Arsenal with aim to being with them for a good few years and bleeding through some excellent youths and regens, here goes!

Football Manager 2012 (PC): Review

270 hours…

The game has been available for only 16 days now, and 6.5 of those days have been spent playing FM12…and it is for that reason that may review of the game comes somewhat belatedly. It is however a testament to the sheer addictiveness this game can succumb people to.

Every year around October & November there are a whole host of huge titles that many a gamer cannot wait to get their hands on; this year Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Skyrim and Arkham Asylum are 4 such games. Yet without fail there is also a very large, loyal fanbase waiting for their annual fix of Football Manager and Sports Interactive have come up trumps once again.

As I write this review I am currently managing Chelmsford City; a lowly club predicted to finish 2nd in the Blue Square South Division. Naturally the board saw my ambition when appointing me as their manager and I have so far lived up to and exceeded expectation as we currently are flying high at the top of the division halfway through the season. Safe to say I’m feeling good about myself.

My early success has not been achieved through a big spending and an awesome youth academy but by shrewd free transfers and small tweaks in my 4-4-2 formation along with finding the right strategy, tempo whilst constantly dictating the way my team plays. FM12 gives you complete immersion allowing you to tweak every facet of your team and each individual player giving you the feel of being right there in the dressing room.

What makes FM12 yet another improvement in the ever popular series is its ability to cater for new players whilst catering for its hardcore players. A new tutorial mode separate from starting a new game allows new players and old alike to familiarise themselves with the new layout, tactics, training, transfer centre and match screen. The new interface has just the right amount of information on it at any one time and can tailor itself to your screens resolution – it is fun playing the game in a 22″ monitor and even then you aren’t overloaded with boxes and menus. It can take a while to become accustomed to the new streamlined menu system but once you’ve got the hang of it it’ll reap dividends.

What’s clever about FM12 is it’s innocuous way of making you delve deeper into each aspect of the game; every news items has further links to it with the new scouting reports based on real-life reports, training is a lot more user friendly with a more simpler structure making it easy to designate your wingers to focus on their crossing as it really was dire in that recent 0-0 draw.

The transfer centre has had a revamp for FM12 and along with lockable clauses in contract negotiations is my favourite new tweak as it groups your transfers in one place allowing you to quickly accept/reject numerous bids at once instead of ciphering through countless e-mails like in previous years. Contract negotiations now allow to lock-out certain parts of the contract if you refuse to budge on what you’re offering, this stops you from having to pay over the odds for a player you desperately want in order for them to sign for you and can allow you to make-up the drop in wages with other performance related perks. Naturally the odd one will still demand excessive amounts of money due to their agents, however if you constantly buy from one agent a rapport can be built up. This way he may be less demanding in future transactions.

Communication with your team and players is playing in ever more important part in Football Manager games, with introductions of team talks and player interaction in past titles, this year sees the introduction of team meetings and now managers can set the tone of their voice when issuing team talks or meetings. The options are Aggressively, Assertively, Passionate, Calm, Cautious and Reluctant. What you say to your team is still quite unvaried with limited options but the addition or tone allows for more combinations that can either increase or decrease morale. Safe to say I’ve already made my team’s morale ‘Abysmal’ after a few team meetings.

FM12 has now integrated the use of Facebook into its interface. FM11 was the first to see Twitter integration yet it was slow and automatic tweets were fairly sporadic. However this year sees much improvement and along with the ability to upload highlights and matches to YouTube, it’s never been easier to gloat to your friends just how great (or bad) you are at Football Manager.

Safe to say I am one of the many addicted to Football Manager (though some say I take it to new extremes, so what if I wear a suit on cup final day?), Football Manager continues to improve year on year and I know that I will be playing it a hell of a lot…until FM13 I guess.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve a crucial top of the table clash to attend and the press won’t hang around forever, bloody conferences…

Pros: Whole host of new features, New interface, Team Meetings, More in-depth gameplay

Cons: Can I say none? I’m saying none, if I wanted to pick holes the graphics aren’t what you might find in games like FIFA, but that in no way takes anything away from the gameplay experience.

Score: 10/10

Football Manager 2012: Chelmsford City – Part 1

So FM2012 has been out for 19 days as I write this and I still haven’t written a blog or anything about it! (Though I’ve now written a review that I’ll upload shortly). I put this mainly down to the fact that I’ve already clocked up an insane 170 hours of gameplay in this time. Unhealthy.

I’ve been dabbling in a few network games that are without a doubt the way forward I feel, the enjoyment you can gain from obliterating friends and enemies alike via sheer tactical genius is second to none.
Around these I’ve tried my hand at a few single player games; Arsenal, naturally, were my first choice and I’ve played up until January with them, I also started a few other saves as a variety of clubs but no specific save had me chomping at the bit to get back on it.

To cut a long story short I’ve plumped with Chelmsford City in the Blue Square South – whom I’ve just taken to promotion in my first season. Here’s how I got there:

Now I don’t know about anyone else but one of the first things I like to do is to clear out the god awful staff that you no doubt inherit – especially at lower league clubs, and also bring in 1 if not 2 scouts with JP/JA of at least 12 each. This can often by tough down in the BSS but there is a man Gokhan Keskin who you can nab without paying him a wage. Safe to say he was snapped up.

One of the bonuses of bringing in new scouts is that they will often come ready with a list of players they have already scouted and will recommend to you, very handy when they pick out a few high starred players.

I also had some bloody awful backroom staff, but I wasn’t paying them any wages to decided to keep them, even my shocking ass man. Money talks.

Anyway I sent my 2 scouts off here there and everywhere, that being just roaming the UK & Ireland, it’s not an exotic lifestyle, in order for them to find me some free transfers, fair to say they did their jobs pretty well. Here’s a list of who I brought in:

Most notable of these was Pablo Counago – who would go on to be crucial to my success this season. Though to be honest, they all played there part, especially the defence.

A lot of people ask how I sort my training and tactics – with regards to training I do very very little and often take the advice of my staff in the backroom advice screen, despite their awfulness. I have on occasion downloaded training schedules from FM fansites to apply to my squad but I’ve never found them to make too much difference to bother with at times, especially with poor players in low divisions. If I was managing I team like Arsenal and brought in a bunch of potential wonderkids I’d want to make sure they were training right so as to achieve their maximum potential! Alas there aren’t many of those about in the BSS.

Tactics are key however, I do like having as pacey wingers as I can with 1 target man and a poacher alongside him if possible. This season for the most part I used Cliff Akurang as an attacking Target Man and Pablo Counago alongside him as an attacking Deep Lying Forward. I play a 4-4-2 with wingers, an automatic central midfielder in the MCR position and an Anchor Man in the DM postion, makes the formation a little lob-sided but I’ve found it has worked well. Back 4 as normal (though I used Trent McClenahan as left back all season, he was fantastic).

At this low level I don’t tweak the philosophy but use an attacking strategy at home and standard away. A more direct passing style (find those attacking men as soon as possible) and have man marking – the rest I leave default. I tick the counter attack box as I feel any team should counter given the opportunity. I set Counago as my target man and to play it to feet as he was my best player I wanted him to receive the ball as much as possible.

My breakdown of this season will be short and sweet with the aim for more frequent updates of my 2nd season in charge of Chelmsford. I quickly realised that I had a superior squad to my BSS peers so that’s when I decided straight away to be attacking at home. My new signings quickly settled in and despite having no natural left back, the Aussie Trent McClenahan did a fantastic job averaging 7.14 in 45 games.

At the start of the season it was clear I’d be up there challenging for the automatic promotion spot, however Havant & Waterlooville went on a fantastic run at the start of the season, only to massively fade away around Christmas. From then on it was just us and Salisbury pulling out a large gap away from the chasing pack. We swapped positions a few times but essentially we were the more consistent and my big 3-1 away from home against them saw me take a 6 point gap that proved to be unassailable.

Eventually I clinched the title with 2 games to spare, Counago the star man of the season with 39 goals in 43 games, averaging 7.52 overall. Here’s the final league table:

As you can see my GA column was pretty awesome this season, rock hard defence + Counago was a winning formula.

So into season 2 I go with a £2m debt thanks to board deciding on building a new stadium! Increasing my capacity from 3000 (1200 seated) to 5000 all seater. Great for the future of the club but bad for my finances right now. As a result my initial budget has been set at £0 transfer kitty and £5k wage budget. As I’m already spending £5.5k on wages – there is work to do, contracts to try try and try again to renew whilst trying to improve on my squad – a tough summer awaits!

OnLive (Eurogamer Expo): Hands-on Review

When visiting the Eurogamer Expo if I didn’t do anything I knew I had to grab myself a free OnLive console that the lovely people at OnLive have been giving away each day of the Expo, thankfully I was lucky enough to be at the front of the queue on Saturday and grab myself a console.

So for those of you still new to the OnLive scene; OnLive is ‘cloud gaming’, an alternative solution to your Xbox & PS3 consoles, OnLive is different as no discs are required as all gaming content is streamed straight to your TV, PC, Laptop & soon to be iPad, iPhone & Android tablets.

Whilst many see OnLive as the future of gaming, I see it as an ‘alternative way of gaming’. True it has great potential and should exponentially improve as technology and internet speeds do, but where it will struggle to compete is the fact that simply it isn’t an Xbox or a PS3.

Let’s focus on the positives of OnLive, for £6.99 a month you can access 100+games ready to play at any time you want at the click of a button, some of these are ‘old’ (I use this term loosely) classics that you may have never had the chance previously to play like ‘A Bard’s Tale’ & the original Hitman & Just Cause, ranging to the more recent Borderlands & Homefront multiplayer.

Aside from the bundle there are a number of other titles including Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, Deus Ex & a variety of new upcoming titles to be available on release giving a great range of titles to choose from.

One of the things I like about OnLive are ‘brag clips’. These are short snippets of video you can upload to OnLive for all other users to see, most people upload incredible smart or funny kills, crazy glitches or just any old rubbish. It’s like having a small ‘gaming YouTube’ available and has the scope to become so much more.

The way clips are so easily recorded and uploaded are using your controller. It has 5 multimedia buttons running along the bottom, simply press the record button after you’ve acted out your feat of glory and it will record the last 20 seconds of action, it’s incredibly satisfying to be able to show off some of your gaming ability to other gamers this way.

Another great feature is the ‘Arena’. If you’re unsure about buying a game, or want to see what a game looks like before you buy it, you can jump straight into the arena that shows every other OnLive player online at that moment playing their game, you can scroll through the multitude of gamers and jump in and spectate whoever you like. See someone playing a game you a thinking of buying? Then watch them for as long as you need to convince you to buy it (or not!). Part of spectating is cheering and jeering, so when you’re watching your friends get constantly humiliated you can jeer or cheer them, depending on how much of a friend they really are of course.

Whilst OnLive gives great accessibility to many gamers and current non-gamers it does have a few draw back currently.

OnLive is dependent on how good your ability is to stream content to your TV/PC etc. Basically the speed of your internet. OnLive recommend at least a 2MB connection, with an optimum of 6MB. Now I’ve played OnLive at 2.5MB and it is bearable but hopeless if you’re playing a fast paced multiplayer game like Homefront, you just won’t compete and the image quality is very poor.

This situation however I feel is a temporary one, with internet speeds constantly rising and more and more people gaining access to fibre optic broadband, slow internet things will be a thing of the past allowing many more people to experience the full gaming goodness OnLive can provide, however for current users of OnLive, this may be frustrating unless you can upgrade your broadband speed – which I am seriously considering doing myself!

Also there have already been a couple of occasions where it seems OnLive has struggled with the amount of people online at the same time as I have not always been able to log-in straight away, and sometimes when I have I have been unable to access the games at all. Hopefully this is just a small current problem and won’t be on-going.

I was lucky enough to interview Bruce Grove, Director of Strategic Relations at OnLive (this interview will soon be up on DBR, watch this space!) After speaking with him the future of OnLive looks incredibly bright in my opinion. They aim to eventually have no need for a console, use OnLive as a library for all games, be in partnership with top developers bringing all the latest and greatest titles to OnLive. One main aspect they hope to bring, which sounds like fun, is the ability to use different devices as controllers for the same game, for example you’re with 3 other mates playing Homefront multiplayer on your TV.

You are using the OnLive controller while one friend is using their iPad, another will be on their Laptop whilst your 4th friend plays using a universal controller (something OnLive plan to release before Christmas 2011). More details and interesting gossip can be heard in the interview coming soon to the Death By Robots site where I contribute.

Overall I’ve had a lot of fun with OnLive already, and if I upgrade to a quicker broadband, that fun will only increase.

I think it has great potential and I’m really excited to see what the future brings for OnLive and cloud gaming. Stay tuned to DBR to listen/watch our interview with OnLive, it’s worth it!

Football Manager 2012 (Demo): First Impressions

Safe to say I’ve been one of the people over the last week or two to be constantly monitoring the tweets of @milessi (Miles Jacobsen, MD of Sports Interactive) to see if he’ll finally give us the release date of the demo so we can all whet our appetites before the official release on October 21st. Yes, being a hardcore gamer, I am ever impatient.

Safe to say I had the demo downloaded in double quick time, thankfully not succumbing to many peoples issues of a slow connection or downloading it at peak times. The game gives you the option of a ‘Quick Start’ as with all previous Football Managers, I naturally chose to load up the English leagues – as it this stage you can only use one ‘set’ of leagues.

Being a gooner I naturally chose to manage Arsenal as my first venture into FM12 as I had done with all previous titles, and I’m already itching to check out the new features.

Interface
Every year FM adapts or tweaks its ‘look’ or interface ever so slightly but never moving too far away from the normal layout. This is again the situation with FM12 but there are noticeable changes to the menu structures and have certain pages view compared to last year.

For most people this will take a time to get used to, but that’s to be expected with any new game. I personally feel it’s an improvement on FM11, but the one page I’ve quickly grown to dislike in the ‘Overview’ page when viewing a player. On my laptop, which has an 11.6″ screen, the overview is split into 5 different columns with garish writing in one and hard to read content in another. Most of the time all I’d like to do when viewing a player is see his attributes; although these are displayed in the overview they’re in a very small scale so another click is required to see them in full screen. A slight annoyance for me but no doubt a good improvement for others.

On the whole I like the new layout, tactics screen, transfer centre, scouting and player/staff search and much more suited to what you require to do on those pages. The constantly updating filter on the player/staff search with dynamic results each time you make a change is a big plus for me.

New Features
FM12 offers a range of new features; here’s my summary on a few of them I’ve tried out so far:

Shouts – these are preset commands you can set up at any time to use in any given circumstance, essentially an array of instructions (pump the ball in the box, shoot on sight etc…) that you can group or use individually throughout a match or for a given moment in a match without having the ply through the range of shouts available whilst the match is taking place. I hope that makes sense!

Team Meetings – loved this feature. It anytime you can meet with your team and speak to them regarding a few aspects. You can set a tone to each thing you say and each comment and tone will gauge a different reaction from your players. I personally met with the Arsenal team when I joined the club (as morale was ‘Abysmal’ for many of them) and ‘passionately’ (one of the tones) told them I believe in their ability to do well this season. Most of the players responded well and I then asked captain RVP to have a say to which he commented that he believes the team can win something this season, further boosting a lot of morale. This I could see was a lot of fun and a great way to boost morale when its low (instead of playing needless friendlies).

Contract Negotiations - A great new feature when negotiating contracts is being able to ‘lock’ any part of the contract that you won’t budge on. For example if Tevez wants £250k a week but I can only offer him £150k a week then I’ll ‘lock’ that part of the contract and his agent will either reject or try and negotiate an improvement in another part of the contract. In my case a 50% yearly pay rise – WTF?! Greedy bastard.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about other features as it’s always best to experience them for yourselves.

As for Arsenal, we had a shocking pre-season losing to Malaysian teams left, right and centre. However I did bring it a few promising youngsters (I like to build a legacy), but maybe the surprise transfer of the summer was ‘transfer listed by request’ Carlos Tevez’ arrival at the Emirates for a cool £15m (though a huge wage + bonuses). First game – West Brom 3 -5 Arsenal. A win is a win, naturally defensive problems as ever with Arsenal but if you score more than your opponent, you’ll win.

Overall the demo is a great workout ready for the full release on October 21st, majority of new features are great and the updates that already integrated features have received are all for the better of the game.

Football Manager 2012 Demo is here!

For those of you still living in hibernation and have not heard or seen the hot topic of the last 24 hours – the demo for Football Manager 2012; the most anticipated game of the year (in mine and no doubt many others opinion) has been released.

Safe to say I was ‘on it like a car bonnet’ and promptly downloaded it (once I was home from work of course).

If you haven’t downloaded it yet it is available from Steam or the Football Manager 2012 website.

First impressions to come soon!