Wardy11

Hi, I'm relatively new to FM08. I've been playing the demo for a while and continued that save when I bought the full copy of the game.
I'm at a point where I want to restart my FM career, but I'm a bit confused as to how to set up the new game.

My plan is to start off managing in the Australian A-league until such time as either I get the sack or decide to move. I'd like to be able to manage in England and Europe, but realise the chance of being appointed by a Premier League club in my early days is pretty slim, so I'd like to make sure there are enough lower levels available to me.

I'm fine with the process of setting up a new game, it's just the settings I need clarified.

I'm thinking it goes like this:
Nations - Does this determine where I can manage? So if I don't include a nation here (i.e. Italy) it means I won't ever be able to manage there? If this is the case, apart from Australia and England, which European nations would be fun / challenging to manage in?

Lowest Active League - I believe this relates to which leagues are active in the nations I've selected. For England, which leagues should I select? All? It's easy for Australia - only 1 league available.

Database Size - I'm confused as to how this relates to the other choices. The manual talks about a larger database including more players. Would the size also be determined by which nations and leagues you turn on?

Load all players from - This seems to be another option in conjunction with database size to add more players. Would this be useful if I wanted to add players from a European league where I wasn't intending to manage?

Thanks in advance for your help. You can appreciate I'd like to get it right the first time and not have to restart. A couple of other things - I'm running it on a 6-month old laptop so it's got adequate procesing power, but I still would like a relatively fast game. Also, before someone tells me to search the forum, I've done that, watched it for a while, but there doesn't seem to be a lot about this aspect of the game in there.

Thanks again.

Klimowicz

wherever you want to manage, select the league, and make sure its set to "playable".

the lowest active league option is best selected to the lowest if you want to manage an non league english team, for example. i always set spain to the lowest possible so that my reserves play in a lower league to keep up their ftness.

i always select the large database, so i don't know what the difference would be with a small one.

the "load all players from" option should only really be used if you wanted to manage a specific national team or you wanted to buy any player from a particular league without the league running. but i prefer to run the whole league instead.

i'm using a pc with 1GB+ ram, so no slowdown issues for me, although i had to delete my Juve save, which had about 8 countries playable, during the second season because of slowdown issues. strangely, none whatsoever in the first season.

donsutd

I have a PC with 1.25gig of RAM and manage the following quite easy
18 Countries and 30 leagues as follows
Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Scotland, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and USA.
I load the following leagues, England, all available, Scotland All available, France, Germany, Italy and Spain The top 2 leagues. I play with a large database. If I am starting a longterm LLM save I will load all the above as playable but will only take a job in either Scotland or England at the lowest level and the others gives me good scope to travel. My other 2 main games are and Aberdeen save and Man Utd save where I only have that particular league as playable and the rest as view only. It works good for me :cool:

donsutd

sorry double post (no edit function) the other leagues i play just have the top division, but you probs guessed that anyway

Amaroq

Some good questions!

In the end, its always going to come down to personal taste + machine spec - ideally, you want as many leagues as your machine is fast enough to handle.

Nations: I strongly suggest that you include at least England, Spain, Italy, and Germany for any long-term game: this will keep the international scene active, keep the Champions League interesting, and provide big-money destinations for the top players. France, too, if you have a decent machine.

Beyond that, any nation you might want to manage in, sure. I'd say "Pick six", of which you've already got Australia, so just wherever else you might want to end up!

Note also that it might be "Anywhere you want to manage the international team of", so I wind up picking MLS even though I wouldn't want to manage in it - you might have a soft spot for Holland, or want to manage Argentina .. in that case, I'd recommend including the top league from that country.

Lowest Active League: The more leagues you have, the slower its going to be - so you probably don't want much more than the top league in most nations you select. That said, if you know a nation that you're highly likely to want to move to, you probably want a deeper league structure for that nation. For England, if you wanted to start at the bottom, I'd say include all levels, or maybe at least to Blue Square National. Since you'll be coming in from outside, I'd say you're likely to want around the League One level: League Two if you think you'll make the move earlier in your career, Championship if you think you'll make it later in your career.

Database Size: Don't do small unless you have to. Medium is much better, and Large is best if you've got a reasonable amount of RAM.

The "players included" is going to be
- a minimum set based on the database size
- every player in a league you have marked as active
- every player from a nation you have said "load all players from".

"Load all players from" - Personally, I'd think of this as the way to get players from a nation you want to manage internationally. For example, if you start a Medium DB game, and set yourself to be manager of the Ivory Coast, you may discover that they don't have any goalkeepers... despite the fact that there are several Ivory Coast goalkeepers in the DB when you look in the editor! The way to make sure that all of those Ivory Coast GK's are there for you is to "Load all players from".

I'd basically use it for any country you might want to manage that doesn't have a league. For example, Jamaica, Ivory Coast, countries like that.

* * * * *

RAM is likely to be your limiting factor, TBH.

512Mb, I'd say Small DB and no more than 5-7 leagues.

1 GB, I'd say Medium DB and maybe 7-12 leagues

2 GB, You're off into Large DB and 15-40 leagues territory.

* * * * *

Assuming you have 2 GB and a good processor, and considering what you've said about where you want to manage, I'd recommend:

England - to League Two
Spain - La Liga only
Italy - Serie A only
Germany - Bundesliga only
Australia - A-League
France - Ligue 1 only
Brazil - top league
Holland - top league
Portugal - top league
Scotland - top league

With the five in italics yours to play around with, if I've gotten them completely wrong.

Amaroq

Actually, those recommendations are probably more aimed at 1 GB; with two, you could certainly afford to run a number more.

fcdallas1982

So if I have 3GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, how many leagues would you recommend? And can I hit "playable" for all them?

Wardy11

Thanks folks. There are some good suggestions here. I'll set it up tonight and start my new career.

Amaroq

Glad to help, Wardy.

About what I listed as a recommendation for Wardy11 should make a good game. For a good MLS save, I recommend U.S. and Mexico be two of your five extra leagues, and either Brazil or Argentina be a third.

Note that you can certainly choose to run more leagues - the problem you tend to run into is "disk swapping" - if you press "Continue" and you can hear your hard drive grinding away, that means that FM's requests for memory have exceeded the physical RAM on the machine. In that case, Windows uses "Virtual Memory", which is a fancy way of saying "It uses your hard drive as extra RAM."

Hard drives are wayyy slower than real RAM, so if that's happening to you, each "Continue" is taking much longer than it would if you had enough RAM. If that's happening, either install more RAM or start a new game with fewer leagues.

(I was shocked how much FM's speed improved when I went from 512Mb to 1 GB - which was what I needed to get out of "Virtual Memory" for the 7-league configuration I'd chosen.)