This is the ultimate simulation game. This is the one game that taught me so much about simulations and my current job and interest in simulators.
The number of ways I could affect a match was insane. It was great to understand the game and second guess how to beat the opponent (which meant studying the opponent's form, tactics, key players, injuries besides your own).
I created excel sheets of players that I would scout and make averages of key attributes (like Pace, Dribbling, Heading, Finishing). These averages decided my player purchase decisions.
With FM2007, I think I took Hull City from being a scrappy team to a team of Real Madrid's caliber within 5 years and then maintained that till season 2018. I could've gone further but memory leaks caused the game to go slow.
I spent years of my childhood playing this. Could I have learned something more productive in that same time period? Yes.
Do I regret studying this game inside out? No way.
I can totally relate to the impact of FM on my life. I'm CTO of Workshape.io and some of our UI elements were inspired by the interface that was present in some of the older versions of Football Manager and Championship Manager. The concept of the radial plot for comparing player's skills was an idea we applied to our matching service.
To echo the parent poster's comment. It would be very cool to extend this blog into a series and see an analysis like this applied to the most recent version of Football Manager.
In my teens, I used to play the original 80's Football Manager [0] on my BBC Micro for hours, in fact days on end....and I can't stand football :)
I know it's not the same game, and was never as sophisticated as modern FM, but damn it was addictive, even for a non-footy fan. I might have to take a look at modern era FM.
The number of ways I could affect a match was insane. It was great to understand the game and second guess how to beat the opponent (which meant studying the opponent's form, tactics, key players, injuries besides your own).
I created excel sheets of players that I would scout and make averages of key attributes (like Pace, Dribbling, Heading, Finishing). These averages decided my player purchase decisions.
With FM2007, I think I took Hull City from being a scrappy team to a team of Real Madrid's caliber within 5 years and then maintained that till season 2018. I could've gone further but memory leaks caused the game to go slow.
I spent years of my childhood playing this. Could I have learned something more productive in that same time period? Yes.
Do I regret studying this game inside out? No way.