retired_taustin

To be clear, i'm not reloading the save game. I'm reloading the state of the machine via VM Ware. The random seed therefore stays the same throughout, so any 50/50 situations will always come out the same.

To give another sillier example, suppose you're flipping a coin. You flip it 5 times and get heads every time. After the 5th one, i slap you in the face. From that point on, you get 5 tails in a row.

If i reloaded that "state" with VM Ware, as long as i remembered to slap you in the face after the 5th flip, you will once again get 5 heads followed by 5 tails.

Get it?

suitechic1979

oh right cool. sounds like a good idea too

propilot5000

I wonder about taking the best and worst results from each game. Testing only outliers strikes me as slightly flawed in that, although the most interesting scenarios, and, perhaps, the scenarios in which we would most like to know the effects of team talks, it leaves the most likely scenarios out of the experiment.

Sorry; that's a bit garbled. Essentially, I am curious about situations that we have all encountered, like:

-Outplaying the AI, but down at half-time only to go on to get trounced in the second half.

-Trying to hold on, up 1-0 at half against a superior side

I suppose my concern is that the extremely good and extremely bad halftime results are the situation in which the team talk seems to matter less. Up or down 3-0 at half, there is not much a manager can do. On the other hand, closer halftime results could be made or broken by team talks.

I also wonder if you have any plan to test the aggregating effect of team talks. The hints and tips suggest that repetition of team talks through multiple game stretches desensitizes your team to them. Is there a good way to test this?

Marc Vaughan has also suggested that the results of team talks are linked to morale (both team and individual?). If you can make some sense of the team talk AI, it would be interesting to see how one or two individual talks modify things.

This is already a laborious endeavor, but it makes curious. Although I have not had too many incidents in which I suspect my team talk was at fault, I wonder if I have missed some opportunities to turn things around.


Sorry. I'm a bit wordy, but I am quite interested in what you find.
Good luck. I hope you have a lot of coffee/beer/ganja or whatever it is that fuels your FM addiction.

:p

retired_taustin

I'm running the initial tests, and i see that running 6 (really 12) teams simultaneously is going to be very difficult in terms of record keeping (not to mention every save state is about 4 gigabytes).

I will conduct the test with one team at a time. When i've completed 30 matches (i don't want to get into details, but 30 is a magic number in statistics that makes experiments "valid"...anything more than 30 is considered overkill), i will move on to the next team.

I'll start with Chelsea.

retired_taustin

You raise a great point, JR. I didn't think about that before.

I will test all half time scenarios. The description of the match situation (outplaying them, but trailing, leading a stronger team, etc) is going to be a bit subjective, but i will try and cope.

I could test the effect of desensitizing the team, but it would have to be in a different experiment.

Thanks!

retired_0PETE1

I really like this.

Good luck with it, I will definitely read :thup:

propilot5000

I definitely understand your reluctance to apply subjective labels to different scenarios. I think you understand the value of investigating the more nuanced situations, though.
Clearly, this is a critical experiment if any other questions about the team talk AI are to be answered. There is really no other place to start. I commend you. Hooray for systematic empirical analysis of trivial things!

And, WOW, 4 gigs per save state! You must have extensive hardware. In order to run a VM, you still need the 'real' memory in order to log the save states, right?

retired_taustin

Correct.

I could make my save states smaller if i start with a fresh VM and install nothing but Windows and FM (that's really what i should do), but instead i'm using an existing Windows VM that i had already been using for other things. It has about 4GB of stuff on it (including FM 07), so it all gets saved when i save the state.

I'm currently holiday-ing the Chelsea game to October so the team will have match practice and be ready for guinea pig status. With only the EPL loaded and minimum detail, the game is just flying!

propilot5000

Looking forward to preliminary results!

retired_taustin

As an update, i've come up with the idea to use the pre-match odds as a determinant of the level of difficulty of the match. So a 1.03 suggests a match i should easily win, whilst 50.00 is a match i shouldn't bother turning up for. Now the first half stats will actually mean something.

For the second half, i'm not sure how i'm going to measure the match situation. I could use average match rating of the players, or some kind of goal/possession difference factor...not sure.