Stadiums Again: A Hard Cap?

There does appear to be a hard cap on earnings:-


The stadium above is literally money no object, I knock a stand down and my earnings go down by £1k a day.

Stadiums a more detailed look

Once you start fiddling with stadiums everything is fairly intuitive but it remains difficult to explain in text and pictures.

Headline Figures
For every £1million invested in the stadium you can expect ROUGHLY a 10k a day increase in Income.

Preview Reputation

In the screenshot you can see that the Jak Swan Stadium has a planned capacity of 15,230 and is currently 12,480, with the preview reputation button clicked you can see the decrease in income (this team are showing as a 3 star but are slightly over that hence the higher income).

For the walkthroughs I'll be using the preview reputation box please bear in mind these are worse case scenarios for corresponding reputation, a real life club will be showing as 3star but will in reality be somewhere in between 3 and 3.1/2.

I have No Money!

In this case I've just upgraded the seating and not built any new stands and bought electronic Ad boards pitch side.

Taking this route is a desperate measure as upgrading in the future will mean knocking down a stand you've put money into. How good your strategy is with regard to stadiums is going to depend how long you can make use of your stands.

Lets look at this stadium across various reputations:-
As you can see it's not too grim, with media money a club can expect to earn £175k - £185k a day and this doesn't include FA League Prize Money.

Three Star Clubs Practical
Next I looked at a more practical solution for 3 star clubs and also looked at it's effectiveness at 3.1/2 star. So these figures are for a Two Tier Mercantile stand (click to zoom)

As far as I can see it's not possible to really generate cash to version 1 levels but as long as you haven't been careless in wage auctions this shouldn't be a problem.

Three and Half Star Clubs Practical

Using this stand allows you to cater for the corporate fans which start rolling in from 3.1/2 star on, as you can see this option is quite scalable.

Money No Object

Ok lets assume your rolling in it:-



As you can see you need the reputation in the first place to really scale up so anyone just mindlessly chucking money at their stadium is going to be a waste.

Stadiums Much More Gentle

It's very confusing currently working the beta as I've semi upgraded stadium and I have to downgrade it then upgrade it to make any sense....

Assuming your a 3.1/2 Star Club and note there is no such thing (you will be somewhere between 3.1/2 star and 4 star) here are the new figures. IT IS EXTREMELY ROUGH!

If you were a four star club then all the income figures go up, how much depends on how far you are on your way to becoming a four star club.

It's not too grim actually as with Media Money and even a £177k wage bill could be covered with just a £1m spend and these are worse case scenario, if your a three club and have high wages then clearly you've gone silly in wage auction and sadly it doesn't look like SI will be bailing you out.

Sorry I must apologise for this gratuitous statement that follows MUAHAHAHAHA.

Shearer - Season Two End

Overall a great season for the Jakswans! Numerous youth titles and 3rd in the Premiership, for some time we looked as if we were in with a shout of winning the title, the season ended with the squad having a total wage of roughly £125k.

We need a new right back for this season and would swap Scott Parker for a proper AMC but I'm so nervous about how much stadiums are going to cost, it's rabbit staring at headlights mode :)

Richard from Hairys was moving gameworlds and he had a 22year old £725k Aq Fee DC on £7k a day up in auction, he went up from £1.6m to £3.3m in the last few minutes with me sticking the cash up. My old DC went up for £1 auction on £20k a day my wage bill now £112k a day and still firmly in the top 100!

The latest beta stadiums figures are way down on those posted earlier I was going to do a piece on it but I don't know if their final, a test or temp. They seem pretty much perfect to me but I would not be surprised to see them change again, I've no idea how close 1.1.1 is to release SI have said they want it out prior to month end.

Players Sales for Shearer Peeps

Another Podcast

Jakswans FM Live Podcast Episode 2

A bit of controversy in this one? Anyway it's me mumbling on for twenty minutes, if you need sleep listen to this :)

Balls as Big as

I think you have to salute SI, I've played a lot of games and when I played Battlefield 2 it was like the game was designed by the most vocal community. EA games were just so wishy washy, SI have always seeked and appreciated feedback from the community but you can be left in no doubt SI have a vision for the game which won't be changed no matter how many toys fly out of the pram.

Although they do need to get the release notes spot on! The change so that in 1.1 you can't sustain more than 50 players is a fair kop. I've always seen youth part of the game as great fun but it was frustrating to see the same managers bid £2k a day when they already had five or six players that could do that job.

I'm sure in 1.2 this will be opened out but you'll need to invest to follow that path on the infrastructure of your club.

Anyway needless to say those with 75/100 players were not happy and many toys were thrown about but SI made it pretty clear there was no turning back.

I think they've caught me out as well looking at my spreadsheet it's flawed... The 5.4million invested at 3 star should be less the 1m already invested and so on. So I'm looking at the ground going well yeah ok you had it more or less right all along.

Still I'm going to carry on a little bit of criticism doesn't do anyone any harm.

Selling the same Story

Like pyramids I'm done with stadiums I've blumin built about 40 of the dam things testing the code looking at it from a new users point of view and established gameworld point of view. I've tried to raise awareness of the issue on the forums and in game you just have to cut your loss's at some point.

Whilst I'm in ranty mode and it's a 'told you so' morale, the game badly needs Alpha & Beta servers. 1.0.1 released with issues, 1.1 released with issues and wait till we see the sparks fly when stadiums release if they stay in their current form :(

On a more positive note we managed to win the SFA U17 & U19's and it looks like we'll be at least runners-up in the SFAU21 League and Cup. I can't imagine that we'd repeat last seasons clean sweep of youth comps but, five titles in two seasons is impressive I'd say.

With our status as a premiership club secured and title hopes beyond us I decided to move in the transfer market and start looking at next season. A few sales later and we've a nice cosy sum in the bank and a short auction for Grafite should bag us some more.

I could have kept Grafite as he didn't need a lock this season but what's the point of finding a 17 year old who's already got an Aq Fee of £160k and having him on the bench barely getting a sniff of first team action.

Exactly what to do from here all depends on stadiums but we're not talking about that anymore!

I really do think the youth locks are not enough I have Scott Parker in a forward thinking MC role at the moment but I suspect a kid who's 21, and suffered from age bug, so signed at 19 but is now 21 (thanks for that bug SI) namely, Fidel Martinez, could come on a fair bit. Sadly by the time he's a starter for the first team I think I'll be juggling locks again so will need to move him on.

Staduims

Staduim Screenshots - WARNING

The new stadiums are a big, read BIG change in FM Live. I logged into the Beta looked at my Jakswans Rep and thought how much would it cost to build a stand that suits the team.

A few screen grabs for you to look at:-
If you select the Preview Reputation box it changes projected income, required capacity and fans demands for seats. So as the Jakswans are over a 3.1/2 star club I need to build a stadium that's bigger than this. I'm not playing with this that much so maybe I could tweak it to give me more.


Ok capacity is about right and income is £121k (still get 25% of my former income as well) so new total income £173k a day (was £218k a day).

So if you have no cash and are not making a daily profit? It's simple you either release players or go bankrupt, I don't want to flower it up for you.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Deflation - HUGE!

Stadiums are back in the Beta with a New and improved UI. I logged in and attempted to see how much a 4star stadium would cost, you can preview reputation and see crowds and income. How much? £20 million to give me a bit of room for expansion and sustain my current daily profit.

After the panic I got to thinking.... Everyone is in the same boat so the economy is going to deflate and I think the price of players will drop almost to Aq Fee maybe even lower! So actually I don't need to sustain my current earnings I just need to get to profit, current wage bill is £144k.

Let me just ram that point home a little currently I'd say the Shearer Gameworld economy is, at least, if not more, 10x Aq Fee (assuming you can sign the player on his wage demand) so a £100k Aq fee player is going to cost £1m. Once stadiums kick £100k will buy you a £100k Aq Fee player PROVIDED his contract is close to his wage demand. Players over wage demand will become a liability!

It's going to be a short sharp shock for many, and many managers will be going ballistic (even though they've been told about it well in advance) but I think it's a pain barrier the game has to go through. I guess SI could bottle it and cave in some way but they seem fairly committed to this change.

Whatever happens it's going to be interesting.

1.1 and 1.1.1

Well 1.1 is due this week it's not 1.1 as we fully hoped as it was going to include stadiums which will be included in 1.1.1 to follow a week or so later.

The general changes mean that the game now firmly moves away from being Fantasy Football into being more FM09 like. Still very distinct in it's own right but the massive success that the Football Traders had will now not be quite as strong.

Those that haven't listened to my woeful podcast effort will know the vision I hope that SI have the game is where 100/200 new managers are put into gameworlds every season and you progress from there.

If you start in a new gameworld the level of players that you have end season one would be pretty much the same at the end of the first season in an established gameworld.

You'll need to juggle a lot of balls to stay there and unless you invest in stadium and youth you'll start to be uncompetitive.

The Jakswans meanwhile continue their rise up the Premiership table and have me now dreaming of UFFA Qualification. The youths have been decimated by injuries (every time I log on, it's injury, injury, injury) but the seniors have remained pretty unaffected.

We got knocked out of the Gameworld Cup by one of the very good traders, their team was better than mine but we got a respectable 2-1 defeat and wasn't as bad as it could have been.

I've got a player (screenshot below) who I signed as an AMC with Scott Parker taking the defensive role in a 4-4-2. I thought I'd try him as a DM and he's gone from satisfactory to very good, problem I have now is that I need an AMC so to Scott Parker I might be looking to move in the close season.

The Podcast - No Really this time

I can't actually beleieve anyone would want to listen to me for any length of time but it was good fun like having a debate with someone where there is no one to answer you back!

Jakswans Football Manager Live Podcast