The season wasn't going too badly in all honesty, then as I mentioned in my last post I was going to be away on Saturday.
On my return I found my AI had lost 8 games in a row which pretty much relegated me. My AI has something like a win ratio of 20% compared to my online win ratio of around 55%
If I had been there to play the games i'm convinced this wouldn't have happened. The other problem was I couldn't reselect my players returning from injury so I play around 6 games without my first choice players because they had been injured for one game.
We have match plans, but i'd much rather have some way to select your first choice 11 depending on certain criteria like fitness and the likes. So if a striker gets injured while i'm away I would be able to select who the AI should play instead of him. This is another reason why I don't like playing XFA competitions because it means I have to reshuffle my team for every game to put the injured players back in the starting 11. I'm not trying to sound lazy, but it causes issues if i'm offline because i'm not playing my best 11.
My match plans, while basic, essentially replicate what I do while online so I don't really understand why my AI is so terrible. I don't know why people always whine about losing to AI teams because they are so much easier to beat.
While typing this i've just logged in and found that technically i've not been relegated and there's a fair chance I would stay up if I win my last 2 games, especially as one is against another team in the relegation zone. Alas they both have AI rights over me and I was moaning about previously.... I had 3 MCs get injured and stick in the last couple of games and another is suspended. So once again, the game has decided to make every player in one position unavailable...
I'm not going to bother playing the games because it's false hope, once you are at this stage of the season the finishing positions are pretty much set in stone, predicted points is rarely wrong and things don't change much. I'll just hope for some AI ME magic as my AI must be due to actually win a game sometime soon.
Anyway the EFA season appears to have finished 3 days before the actual GW season ends so i'm going to take a break for a few days before seeing what I can do in wage auctions. As i'm on bad form now, I pretty much need to buy an entire new team, which I probably needed to do anyway.
So all in all a fairly enjoyable and eventful season. Two promotions and one relegation so i'm still up on where I started from.
On an unrelated note i've noticed that most of the active bloggers seem to be on GW
Turkyilmaz, with me, Jak, Rik and Thom. It's a bit of a strange GW compared to the others I have been in and seems fairly relaxed and sensible. It's not as busy as Butragueno was and there was always something mental going on there which I do kind of miss but it just seems a more mature crowd on Tmaz. I've not really got involved much in anything due to time restraints and a lack of interest in things these days though.
The mods seem good too compared to other GWs I have been in, probably the best in fact - I've not really seen them do anything or talk complete balls/provide misinformation. Being seen but not heard is the way to moderate... Other GWs take note.
We also have a GW blog which is worth checking out STUFFED and I wish them all best with it.
I went through a phase of having two squad teams, one was the normal squad that I would pick the best eleven and it would never deviate and would be used to enter all comps. I'd also have a second "matchday" squad that would be like a current squad, which took into account injuries and suspensions.
ReplyDeleteWhen it came to match, I would also select the matchday squad and mess around. Then if I logged out, the AI would try to pick my best eleven if I wasn't able to play.
More recently I've been using the Auto-select (also auto-selecting in the match plan) and swapping out the obvious ones when I am there. This seems to work OK. Is also interesting to see who gets benched!
Yeah I think that Tmaz is blessed with some proper old school managers and I understand that it is the variety in nationalities that is the main reason why it doesn't always appear as chatty as in other GWs. I'm still well chuffed in there and have high expectations of the Stuffed blog! :)
T-Bag, I'm with you on the substitution bug bear.
ReplyDeleteI remember suggesting to Ov back on the v1.3 podcast that having "depth charts" would help out a great deal in combination with the match plans.
I've never minded leaving a single tactic running for 90 mins playing AI games... but it was always frustrating returning after a day or two and seeing that when my AMC playmaker got injured, we lost 3 league games since he was replaced by a 17 year old kid just because he fit the position better - instead of a player 5x better that I would have put in the role.