Hello everyone,
Thank you very much for the great feedback and nice ideas so far!
Update 1.5 (BETA) includes some new mechanics for a more complex management of your team. They are completely optional and can be switched on and off anytime - even during a running match. You can find the settings on the right border of the screen.
Taking the desire of the community to have a more engaging match experience, for example, by making substitutions, the following idea was born:
Every player now has a new attribute besides their strength: fitness! You can say that fitness is a rough indicator of how many minutes a player can play a match without disadvantages and how well he will regenerate during the week following a match. During a match, this is indicated by his endurance. As long as the player has endurance left, he can play with his full strength. After that, it gets harder to run or execute precise passes, so his effective strength is diminishing. A player playing one half at his limit will degrade his performance to 55% at the end(!) of the match.
If that changes the team strength, you will be able to notice that in the match stats.
What to do about less fit players? In the player's screen, you can now decide on the balance of the training between strength and fitness. You can also choose to train fitness using the focus training for one player. An individual setting for each player does not exist, because I think this will result in letting players with little fitness train fitness and players with low strength train strength. This can then be automated by a button and become completely uninteresting as a decision.
The focus of the training can now be set to certain parts of the team. Do you have a weak row of strikers and can't afford to renew them with transfers? Change the focus to strikers at the cost of less training effect for the rest of the team. You can also boost the training effect using the intensity slider. Get some heavy workouts done, but be careful: the regeneration of endurance will be limited, and players may perform poorly in the next match. Give them a week on the bench, though, and they will recover quickly.
Furthermore, injuries may now occur during a match that will require the substitution of players. Some players are more feeble than others, so if you have a super talented player who is injured all the time, it might be wise to sell him before anyone notices ;-) In a later update, there may be a special athletics training to counter that, but right now, it is not included.
Also, cards during a match are now a thing, so the dynamic of a game can change more quickly than before.
Whenever the strength of a player goes down or an injury occurs, or you want to make a tactical substitution, you can do so using the new substitution button near the controls. Here you can see your team with additional information regarding endurance and effective strength. Those are also displayed visually: if the endurance is going down, the colour of the bar behind the player is losing saturation. When the player hits his limit, the bar begins to change to grey (half a bar means half the player's strength). You can sort the new columns as well.
All new events will be shown in the match ticker and can be filtered using the green buttons as usual.
Probability and duration of cards and injuries are coupled to the chosen difficulty level as well.
Those changes demand a bit of replanning. You need more reserve players, which increases salaries, training fitness becomes important when goals against your team occur late in the match, keeping an eye on the endurance during a match is needed etc. But as I mentioned before, if that is too stressful, you can disable those additions. Players will still have fitness, but they won't lose endurance. Increasing the intensity of your training is not possible, though, because that gets "financed" by lesser regeneration of endurance.
More changes in this update include:
- Tidying up the pinboard: in the settings you can choose between organic or neat arrangement of paper, in case you get stressed by the lack of tidiness ;) (Thanks to Peter for the idea!)
- The currency can be changed anytime if you want to use custom teams, and don't want to use Pounds. Right now, you can select Euro, Pound, and Dollar (no exchange rates are applied, just the currency symbol is switched!) (Thanks to Chapi!)
- Teams will now get 16 instead of 14 players generated if they don't have enough players made from the editor. This will help compensate for the new changes a bit
- Fix for pop-up windows for elements that were not visible on the screen
- Contract duration of 1 season for new players has been renamed to "rest of the season" for more clarity
- Fix of a rare savegame bug (Thanks to Lia!)
- There are a lot more names for the generation of new players
- There is now an entry in the diary if a player gets a transfer offer (Thanks to raoulduke55!)
- The usual small bug fixes here and there are included as well, of course ;)
IMPORTANT: This update is on the 1.5-BETA branch at the moment, because I want to gather a bit of feedback about the balance first. In a few days, it will be released officially. If you want to test the changes right now (please!), just activate the beta branch in the properties for the game on Steam.
I hope you are having some fun with the changes. It is a slightly different game feel now, so I am eager to hear what you think!