2022-05-06, 10:29 PM - Word count:
Time for the grand finale of the simming arc 1.6k words. Mostly ranting and various mumbling ideas TLDR: XG dumb, don't do trades, drink water.
Use grammerly to take notes and google docs for spreadsheets. Learning basic exel-fu is a good life skill so learn how to make formulas to find averages and trends. don't go too far into things but simple ones like tracking how passing directness and tempo work into your posession+-50% and how you are churning that into shots/shots on goal. you can upload tactics and screenshots on discord quickly and for free.
I can't tell you what your team is good at or what the "best thing to do" is. Every team is different and needs to do different things to win. Teams with High TPE from their full team of perfectly placed actives need to figure out how to break down defenses. Winning leagues requires winning games, winning games requires scoring more goals than the other team. A team that isn't in a great position and won't be able to catch up to the top teams needs to figure out how to be defensively sound while hitting the other team on the counter. These require you to focus on different stats of the team as some of them really don't matter. A defensive team that has a good shape can give up crosses into the box while offensive teams need to keep their offsides down, raise possession to take advantage of their TPE advantage, keeping width and depth to their attack while making sure they have the players in position to deal with counters.
Yes the NA sportspeople will tell you you should either win the league or tank for draft picks. Ignore them, being on a losing teams sucks and the difference between picking first and picking 4th in rounds isn't worth the misery of being worse.
I regret every single trade I ever made and the other GM's will try and take advantage of you at every possible step. If someone offers you a trade out of the blue it means they are trying to scam you. Keep in mind that they want to "win the trade" and care nothing about you or the work you put into the league. They are not your friends and have no reason to treat you with any respect or fairness, they are trying to defeat you by making their team better and your team worse. Stick to your options and the plans you have tried to follow. Moving from a situation where you have information into a situation you do not have information is never an equal trade.
Did you know that refs in the league aren't equal and don't do a good job even by the games standards? For as much as the HO does they don't have the ability to see into the backend and manipulate the refs. The game is, by the makers of the games own words, allowed to have the refs make mistakes randomly. If you see one of your players get a red just stop the game and start a new one. If a player gets injured stop the game and start a new one. The BOD do the best they can to minimize these issues but to do any more would require them to make a mod for the game that no one else has made. In IRL CONCACAF has always had terrible refs that has created a culture of doing bad things to win games. They could solve this issue by issuing fines after the games like how the NBA solved flopping but at this point its a verb. Sometimes you just get CONCACAF'ed by the refs.
Ranting back to where I started from, don't get lost in the sea of statistics. Pick the metrics you want to be good at and minimize the abstract things that you tract sim to sim. things like XG ccc's hcc's rating WAR key passes require a level of context to understand that you do not need messing with your head. Grind more games and focus on the basic things that make your team better like possession shots/shots on goal posession in the final third touches in the box.
XG is dumb. XG is even dumber. "sermo that doesn't make sense you just said the same thing twice" But I didn't reader. the XG in IRL and XG in FM are two completely different stats. They work on completly different combinations of stats. For one SI's version of XG takes into account defensive actions by your team. No dear reader this also isn't Defensive XG that you may see in the post game box for various IRL games. Its a completly different cocktail that uses different math to find a new number. You see this in a lot of different sports after sabermetrics became such a thing in baseball. Spinrate exit velocity swing angle ERA WHIP (Walks+hits/innings pitched) even slugging average (1B + 2Bx2 + 3Bx3 + HRx4)/AB) are simple things that directly corelate with better play. ERA+ FIP WAR WPA wRC+ (yes the lower case w is correct) are dubious at best and outright nonsense at worst. Even so this has gotten into every other sport in the world. heck WAR is also even into historical statistical comparisons. https://ethanarsht.github.io/military_rankings/ This needs to stop and you need to stop paying attention to these things so they don't control your attention. Napoleon isn't the best general beacuse the math says so. His WAR is inflated beacuse he fought in so many more battles than anyone else. A lot of other generals have a higher WAR average per battle. egypt and russia were both complete failures yet he collects a lot of WAR from these campaigns. If anyone is reading this far you did not need to know anything I posted for a few sentences for that I am sorry you read them. xg is just dumb please stop trying to just increase your xg. my teams always had good xg and better xg than my opponents yet my team was at the bottom of the league both seasons. xg is dumb and hurtful.
Goalies are incredibly hard to figure out if they're good or not. They're dependent on the defensive shape around them as much as any of their skills. We've seen a thousand balls that end up being sent right to the goalie for some infuriating reason. xg-xga is a particularly dumb stat but is probably the best we will get for goalies. So why do we never see DSC on team of the week except for the NYRBvsMNUFC week when he was POTW? Hes working with a defensive line that is never able to play the same players more than twice it seems. god forbid them being able to play in the same position more than two games in a row. yet he gets no respect despite putting up better xg-xga than gaga. Play your goalie as a SK-D and don't ask questions.
If you're a manager you're never going to be able to play your own games of FM. Simming is going to take up all the FM time you can take and playing only during the offseason is impossible because you need to fit in long-term planning and draft prepping. Its okay. Just treat your SSL team as your fm save.
You need to download a few different saves to get a good idea of what you're dealing with. I'm putting this way down here as a special reward for anyone who is crazy enough to plod through all this. The old files will have,on file, the old tactics that a team has used over the season. Understanding their changes and reactions to particular teams and expected tactics can give you a better idea of what to expect. you can go to the team you're simming against's manager and save the tactic they used in their last game to reuse for them when you're simming your latest game. simply simming with the tactic that they have can work if they don't post in the team changes thread that they've changed their tactic but if they change anything you can get a step ahead of them by figuring out what other tactics they've used over the season.
You might be expecting that I'll tell you to go no highlights no goal replays and just go for the end stats as fast as possible. thats not true. I think you should watch how the goals are scored and see if you start seeing patterns in the how.
You arn't ment to enjoy simming. Having a war room full of people to sim with and/or to discuss your simming is critical to keep your own morale up to keep simming. I'll go into more about war rooms in another article.
Don't listen to a movie/tvshow/podcast those will take attention to enjoy while music won't require it yet will ocupy your hearing sense that you don't need to use. Only crazy people have sounds on.
Drink water while simming. Its a classic study trick to not eat and to just drink water. It will swell your brain preventing stress-induced pain. It will require you to get up and go to the bathroom providing breaks that you didn't plan for.
Alright its after midnight so I'm going to go to bed now. Any questions comments ideas is greatly appreciated. Even just someone posting in the thread to make sure that anyone actualy read this would make me happy.
Use grammerly to take notes and google docs for spreadsheets. Learning basic exel-fu is a good life skill so learn how to make formulas to find averages and trends. don't go too far into things but simple ones like tracking how passing directness and tempo work into your posession+-50% and how you are churning that into shots/shots on goal. you can upload tactics and screenshots on discord quickly and for free.
I can't tell you what your team is good at or what the "best thing to do" is. Every team is different and needs to do different things to win. Teams with High TPE from their full team of perfectly placed actives need to figure out how to break down defenses. Winning leagues requires winning games, winning games requires scoring more goals than the other team. A team that isn't in a great position and won't be able to catch up to the top teams needs to figure out how to be defensively sound while hitting the other team on the counter. These require you to focus on different stats of the team as some of them really don't matter. A defensive team that has a good shape can give up crosses into the box while offensive teams need to keep their offsides down, raise possession to take advantage of their TPE advantage, keeping width and depth to their attack while making sure they have the players in position to deal with counters.
Yes the NA sportspeople will tell you you should either win the league or tank for draft picks. Ignore them, being on a losing teams sucks and the difference between picking first and picking 4th in rounds isn't worth the misery of being worse.
I regret every single trade I ever made and the other GM's will try and take advantage of you at every possible step. If someone offers you a trade out of the blue it means they are trying to scam you. Keep in mind that they want to "win the trade" and care nothing about you or the work you put into the league. They are not your friends and have no reason to treat you with any respect or fairness, they are trying to defeat you by making their team better and your team worse. Stick to your options and the plans you have tried to follow. Moving from a situation where you have information into a situation you do not have information is never an equal trade.
Did you know that refs in the league aren't equal and don't do a good job even by the games standards? For as much as the HO does they don't have the ability to see into the backend and manipulate the refs. The game is, by the makers of the games own words, allowed to have the refs make mistakes randomly. If you see one of your players get a red just stop the game and start a new one. If a player gets injured stop the game and start a new one. The BOD do the best they can to minimize these issues but to do any more would require them to make a mod for the game that no one else has made. In IRL CONCACAF has always had terrible refs that has created a culture of doing bad things to win games. They could solve this issue by issuing fines after the games like how the NBA solved flopping but at this point its a verb. Sometimes you just get CONCACAF'ed by the refs.
Ranting back to where I started from, don't get lost in the sea of statistics. Pick the metrics you want to be good at and minimize the abstract things that you tract sim to sim. things like XG ccc's hcc's rating WAR key passes require a level of context to understand that you do not need messing with your head. Grind more games and focus on the basic things that make your team better like possession shots/shots on goal posession in the final third touches in the box.
XG is dumb. XG is even dumber. "sermo that doesn't make sense you just said the same thing twice" But I didn't reader. the XG in IRL and XG in FM are two completely different stats. They work on completly different combinations of stats. For one SI's version of XG takes into account defensive actions by your team. No dear reader this also isn't Defensive XG that you may see in the post game box for various IRL games. Its a completly different cocktail that uses different math to find a new number. You see this in a lot of different sports after sabermetrics became such a thing in baseball. Spinrate exit velocity swing angle ERA WHIP (Walks+hits/innings pitched) even slugging average (1B + 2Bx2 + 3Bx3 + HRx4)/AB) are simple things that directly corelate with better play. ERA+ FIP WAR WPA wRC+ (yes the lower case w is correct) are dubious at best and outright nonsense at worst. Even so this has gotten into every other sport in the world. heck WAR is also even into historical statistical comparisons. https://ethanarsht.github.io/military_rankings/ This needs to stop and you need to stop paying attention to these things so they don't control your attention. Napoleon isn't the best general beacuse the math says so. His WAR is inflated beacuse he fought in so many more battles than anyone else. A lot of other generals have a higher WAR average per battle. egypt and russia were both complete failures yet he collects a lot of WAR from these campaigns. If anyone is reading this far you did not need to know anything I posted for a few sentences for that I am sorry you read them. xg is just dumb please stop trying to just increase your xg. my teams always had good xg and better xg than my opponents yet my team was at the bottom of the league both seasons. xg is dumb and hurtful.
Goalies are incredibly hard to figure out if they're good or not. They're dependent on the defensive shape around them as much as any of their skills. We've seen a thousand balls that end up being sent right to the goalie for some infuriating reason. xg-xga is a particularly dumb stat but is probably the best we will get for goalies. So why do we never see DSC on team of the week except for the NYRBvsMNUFC week when he was POTW? Hes working with a defensive line that is never able to play the same players more than twice it seems. god forbid them being able to play in the same position more than two games in a row. yet he gets no respect despite putting up better xg-xga than gaga. Play your goalie as a SK-D and don't ask questions.
If you're a manager you're never going to be able to play your own games of FM. Simming is going to take up all the FM time you can take and playing only during the offseason is impossible because you need to fit in long-term planning and draft prepping. Its okay. Just treat your SSL team as your fm save.
You need to download a few different saves to get a good idea of what you're dealing with. I'm putting this way down here as a special reward for anyone who is crazy enough to plod through all this. The old files will have,on file, the old tactics that a team has used over the season. Understanding their changes and reactions to particular teams and expected tactics can give you a better idea of what to expect. you can go to the team you're simming against's manager and save the tactic they used in their last game to reuse for them when you're simming your latest game. simply simming with the tactic that they have can work if they don't post in the team changes thread that they've changed their tactic but if they change anything you can get a step ahead of them by figuring out what other tactics they've used over the season.
You might be expecting that I'll tell you to go no highlights no goal replays and just go for the end stats as fast as possible. thats not true. I think you should watch how the goals are scored and see if you start seeing patterns in the how.
You arn't ment to enjoy simming. Having a war room full of people to sim with and/or to discuss your simming is critical to keep your own morale up to keep simming. I'll go into more about war rooms in another article.
Don't listen to a movie/tvshow/podcast those will take attention to enjoy while music won't require it yet will ocupy your hearing sense that you don't need to use. Only crazy people have sounds on.
Drink water while simming. Its a classic study trick to not eat and to just drink water. It will swell your brain preventing stress-induced pain. It will require you to get up and go to the bathroom providing breaks that you didn't plan for.
Alright its after midnight so I'm going to go to bed now. Any questions comments ideas is greatly appreciated. Even just someone posting in the thread to make sure that anyone actualy read this would make me happy.
![[Image: 0HMDG8L.png]](https://i.imgur.com/0HMDG8L.png)
