SiDolman

In my current game i am upto the 2015/16 season. I have found that the AI especially for the top clubs is very bad. My current game in the english league i have found that the op clubs do the following;

1. They dont buy enough players (liverpool didn't buy a single player for the first 3 seasons!).

2. If one of their top players are sold, they dont seem to have any urgency in getting a replacement and quite often play a below par reserve player.

3. When they do buy players they very often buy old players (30/31) for big money.

4. They never buy young talent.

In my current game i managed to win the permiership last season with a team i do not believe that would have won in the first 5 seasons, i believe that the AI does not think about future and i can see the follwoing seasons becoming very easy. I am buying much of the worlds young talent (what there is of it) with no competition from any other top clubs. And no i dont want to have mnove clubs just to make the game harder.

Please Si could you fix this for the new patch to make long term games more enjoyable

tomistuck

In real life clubs are always picking up lots of youngsters all the time, however this never happens in FM

daveduerson

This always used to be a problem with CM/FM games, but seemed much better with FM07.

I've not got very far in the current version, but so can't comment, but it would be a shame if the long term AI has got worse again.

isuckatfm

Those two lines I’ve quoted are in my experience very closely linked. In previous posts I’ve moaned about how the AI is constantly bidding for my players and how I have the most wanted squad in the game, particularly my youngsters. So either something is wrong with the game (the AI teams have too much awareness of Human controlled teams players) or I am doing something that is causing this.

Basically I’ve come to the conclusion that it is my behaviour, coupled with how the AI appears to scout, which is causing this imbalance across the game in the distribution of youngsters (i.e. I have most of them):-

1. the fact I have only the English leagues running with a large database means there isn’t a large volume of regens being produced.

2. the quality of these regens is related to the existing database so while the real players of high PA are still in the game, this means there will be less regens of a high PA produced. This in turn affects the number of regens that are of sufficient quality that the big clubs would be interested in thus the lower number of younger players signed.

3. I have a “get every youngster I have found of high potential ability” and then sell them on if they don’t make the grade or if they are deemed surplus to requirements. I basically hoard them like the commodities they are

4. I have a set way of scouting that exploits how the game works. As soon as the ‘regen date’ passes for a particular country I send my scouts there to find any regens of high PA. Then I keep making offers until the player agrees to join me, typically after they have spent one season with the club at which they were generated.

5. The AI does not appear to use as calculated a method as I do in 4, and seems to only discover top quality regens when the game deems their reputation is such that they are discoverable. There are exceptions to this but from keeping tabs on players this appears to be the general pattern.

All of these 5 points have led to my game experiencing the same things you are describing (I have a higher quality and volume of youngsters than any other club in the Premiership). The size of my database means not many high PA regens appearing and of those that do I tend to grab the majority because of my strategic scouting, leaving everyone else to pick up the scraps. Not knowing the set up of your game (playable active leagues, database size) or what your approach is to scouting I can’t say whether or not these 5 points are causing this to happen in your game. It might just be a coincidence that we are seeing the same pattern in relation to top quality youngsters at top AI clubs.

In my current game not one of the big clubs in the Premiership has spent big on a player reaching the end of their career. There’s been a few regen players that they have bought where it’s made me wish there was a button to interact with scouts like “I pay you good money to find me players. You spent three months in that country, so how in the hell did you miss him?”. I just finished 2012/2013 season so whether things change when I reach the same year as you remains to be seen.

So far it’s been the opposite with older players getting replaced by younger models in a fairly consistent manner.

Man Utd:-
Rosina for Giggs
Nasri, Dave Jones for Scholes
Vela for Saha
Akinfeev for Van Der Saar
Quality regen for Gary Neville

Chelsea:-
Quality regens/youngsters to replace
Carvalho
Belletti
Shevchenko
Ballack
Essien
Pizzaro

Arsenal:-
Only seem to have let players go when surplus. Bought the following all aged less than 25 at the time:-
Belluschi
Maxi Rodriguez
Steven Thicot
Iriome
Guardado
Kompany
Craig Gordon
Corradini (GK)
Balotelli
plus 4 quality regens

Liverpool are the only club of the big 4 who have had problems refilling their squad but still have the usual suspects playing for them.

I’m not disputing what’s happening to you, but saying it’s not happening in my game so far so it might not be a bug as such (or I might just be lucky ). Like I said maybe the 3 years time difference is having an effect (I’m in 2013 compared to 2016 for you).

I do agree though that they aren’t as strategic as Human managers in planning for the future. Maybe they could be coded to behave more like we do in searching out 16 to 18 year old regens rather than just relying on their own academy, although I don’t know how difficult it would be to get the AI managers to be proactive rather than reactive. For example every single person who plays this game has a different definition of 'over the hill'. I have different ages for different positions. For strikers when they reach 27/28 I start looking for potential future replacements. How you would code these particular strategies and Manager specific variations might prove difficult.