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I have not seriously played Football Manager games before FM2005. I started my first game pre-patch with Stalybridge, the nearest Conf North team to where I live. In that first save I only completed one season but made the play-offs and lost in the Final.
I then re-started with the same club post-patch and this time got promotion through the play-offs. I'm now in Feb in my second season in the Conf National. To be honest I expected that my team would be relegation battlers and that we would be in for a long hard season. I brought in a lot of free transfers over the summer and after something like 25 games I am now top of the Conference and unbeaten in 15.
Now I am not saying this to boast, the opposite in fact. If I am new to this game genre and not a football expert IRL, if I choose to start out with a broke LL side with no players worth over £3k, if I don't know anything about tactics and assessing players - how come I am now looking at my second successive promotion?
I love the game but can't help thinking someone like me should be finding it more of a challenge. I now have a squad of 25 including two EPL loanees. I have £0.25m in the bank and am making a shed-load from gate receipts. I have managed to sign players worth £65k for free. And now I can't remember the last time I lost a game.
Surely in real life being an LLM should be more about survival and solvency than back to back promotions?
How many of the free £65k players were found by your scouts?
Are you playing in accordance with our LLM guidelines?
Have you used the GPG or Tactics fora to give you help?
The way I have approached new signings is either to have scouted them OR if a player appears in the news section as having been released I might ask him in for a trial and ask my asst. mgr's opinion of him. I've never just searched the available list for players I might fancy. To be fair I have only found one 65k player but I have picked up a number of good signings for nothing in the summer.
I have read the odd thread in T&T, mostly to try to understand what the sliders actually do. I haven't ever downloaded anything from there though, the fun is building your own tactics isn't it?
So in short I feel like I have been a good boy however I am prepared to be corrected.
You're probably at an advantage. I've been a footie fan all my life but a complete newbie at management sims. I like to think I'm pretty knowledgeable about the game but I totally suck at LLM.
I picked Kettering because it's where I first went to a football game and because I know that IRL the club good enough support & facilities for League 1.
It's a disaster. I started broke and got broker. I'm doing everything right - classic formations from RL, detailed training regines, meticulously planned set pieces - but I just lose all the time.
It takes me hours to prepare for and play a game. I'm completely hooked, but after more than a month I'm still mid-way through my first season. Expect my update thread sometime in 2006.
I still haven't figured out some of the sliders in the team instructions, but then again i don't care. Steer clear of TT, the game will only be more fun if you succeed or fail using your own mettle.
In a word - its much much harder. before you found a tactic that worked and a team to play it and off you went up the leagues, now my table topping Conf South team at Christmas went on a rapid plummit and nearly got relegated - that never used to happen before
Your initial talent matters much more than it used to. Especially if you happen to have a team that can't draw players, like I have this game. I had to scrape to survive my last season, and turned around to season 2 to find my promotion odds unchanged and 'still' odds on for the drop, with no one who wasn't otherwise on their way out of the game willing to come to my side.
i've played as stalybridge before, tho not on fm05 yet. For me, they were not hard to get promoted to the old Second Div (now league one...) but then we foundered and flopped around there for a few seasons before i finally got the sack. So the hard part may yet be in store for you.
I don't see it much harder in the Conf national than in the conf. north/south. Much as the second and third div in scotland are pretty indistinguishable. If you can win one, you can win both.
it's not until you start playing teams with multimillionaire players where you really get out of your depth, so until that happens, i'd say you may be premature in concluding that LLM is "still" (though you say you've never played before, so i don't quite understand the basis for this reference point) too easy.
it's not until you start playing teams with multimillionaire players where you really get out of your depth, so until that happens, i'd say you may be premature in concluding that LLM is "still" (though you say you've never played before, so i don't quite understand the basis for this reference point) too easy.
You could be right. By 'still' I was referring to the fact that most LLaMas seem to enjoy playing this way because running Chelski is 'too easy'. (Never tried it myself.) So I was trying to suggest that even going the supposed hard route might 'still' not be difficult enough.
The way things are going I may well get the chance to find out whether League 2 will be Celtic's undoing.
Meanwhile I am starting to think about popping down to Bower Fold on a Saturday to see what they are really like!!
Is LLM still too easy? 
Linear Mode
