I'm currently playing through a season in the Conference with Chester. When you start you're asked to select your previous playing experience and qualifications - it makes a recommendation based on the club you choose (i.e. if you're going to manage in the Premier League, it suggests you don't say you have no qualifications and were a Sunday League player)... But you can tweak this for a quick and easy boost to how well (or not) your players listen to you and/or train when you train them (you're automatically set as a coach but you can disable yourself if you feel you're of no use to anybody).
I mention this because I chose the realistic/recommended setting, and I do think it makes a big difference. The players are listening to me but don't believe in me, yet. Which, in turn, affects results.
Each player's comments and body language give the game away pre-match, mid-match and post-match, and you can see where bigger players might not care what you're saying, and where the youth players are hanging on your every word because you gave them a chance.
What's your impression in terms of the variety of oppostion from team to team? Like if you were to play a League 2 season, would you really find that each match is different because each cpu team is really a different entity?
At the moment there's too many goals at a lower league level (which SI have admitted and said there's a launch-day patch that will fix this), but it's also an insight into how much the tactics matter, because you're punished severely for getting it wrong.
I gave individual instructions to each player on the tactics screen to bring out their best qualities, and I've got a front three who are working beautifully together, but because I'm trying to teach them to play a short passing game and work the ball into the box rather than humping it, I'm giving the ball away too often because they're just not good enough yet. I'm trying to get them to run before they can walk, because I'm impatient.
Every tactic has a "comfortability" rating if you like, and after 10 games they're still only half-comfortable with playing a sensible short-passing game. But if I switch to a long-ball tactic then they're much more comfortable with it and the results become closer. I want to try to move them away from that, but I simply don't have the players, and I can't "force" it because they're just not good enough.
Team-to-team, I'm seeing certain opposition players causing nightmares for my defenders who struggle with marking (bit like every defender in FIFA then), and different styles of passing occasionally. Not *huge* differences, but certainly some teams are clearly more used to playing good passing games, and other teams do just lump the ball forward (and again, it's more the key players that stand out, and you can tell players to double-up etc. and snuff them out but only if the rest of their team won't be good enough to take advantage of the gap).
You certainly see the difference if you play as, or buy, a team of good passers for example. But even then, if you buy them, you need to get them used to each other before they just start playing like Barcelona.
And then how does the game play out if you're an EPL team playing against a lower league team, nd vice versa? Does it feel credible? Can you play long-ball?
There seems to be a pretty big motivation factor in those games. In a different game as Tranmere, I held Everton to 1-1 until the 80th minute by playing a long-ball game, before it fell to pieces and finished 3-1. They certainly feel totally different from league games, and occasionally I've thought "why don't we play like this in the league", but then I don't think it's unrealistic. See Shrewsbury v Chelsea etc...
Does the cpu play long-ball?
Yes, not often but usually at certain points of the game where a team gets desperate (rather than from the start). Or, alternatively, when you're playing non-league opposition. They love lumping it up-front.
Do defensive/counter attacking tactics play out credibly? Do substitutions have real effects. Do changes in tactics mid-match have a real effect?
I'd say the tactics play out credibly except for the overload of goals at the moment. They've made the gap bigger between top-level players and Conference players, but it's a bit broken at the moment, especially with the goalkeepers (which again they've admitted, which is the most important bit - imagine the FIFA Facebook page posting "yeah there's a couple of things that are broken").
Changes in tactics have an effect as long as you're not undone by the morale. For example, losing a league game 3-0, I switched to a defensive tactic I'd set up (you can store a bank of several, like FIFA's teamsheets function) to try and limit the damage. I could see that as much as we were tighter positionally, the morale had gone, so in that situation you HAVE to just go "there's nothing I can do to bring this one back". Which I think is realistic. Sometimes your hands are tied, especially as a manager.
Same thing applies to substitutes. I've seen them make a difference and I've seen them make a negative difference (my keeper was having a nightmare, I lost my head and replaced him at half time, and that was a mistake).
I'm acutely aware of the cpu cheats in FIFA and PES and find them intolerable so is there any evidence of such underhand goings on in Football Manager? Like you dominate every match and have tons of shots, hitting the post time and again, miraculous saves, and then the cpu scores it's only chance, but this becomes a recurring theme during the course of a season? Or does it feel like the game plays with integrity and the "luck" is about 50/50?
This is the most contentious area I think...
There are countless amounts of people who will report games where they've had 12 shots to the opposition's 1 and lost 1-0, three or four games in a row.
I don't agree with the argument at all. I've had plenty of games like that but I can see that it's been bad luck and not "cheating", because it's happened the other way around too, and/or the shots have been crap shots from miles out and/or scrappy moments of play. The stats aren't the whole story.
With everything being governed by the CPU for both sides I don't see any element of cheating whatsoever. I think in FIFA and PES it's to make up for a lack of processing power to do certain things organically. So it goes "I know I'm supposed to stop you in this situation because of my stats and you didn't dribble away quick enough, and you set the difficulty to 'superstar' so I need to beat you to that ball, but I'm not intelligent enough to predict and position myself where I need to be, so I'm going to suck you towards me and your legs are going to turn to lead, sorry about that".
In Football Manager there's no need for that because there's no human controller of players it has to outwit. So in my eyes, everything always plays out fairly.
The one thing you do see is the ball flying off without the animation matching up to it sometimes, and you have to go into it with a good imagination because there's so much number-crunching going on (the game overheats every platform I've tried it on) that the match engine is secondary to the simulation. If you watched it as little 2D radar dots, you wouldn't notice anything wrong, but in 3D you see those little things. But you don't think "that wouldn't happen", you just realise the animation isn't there for the way he kicked that ball, at that specific angle or with that specific timing.
So in a word, no, I don't think it cheats, and it's very satisfying masterminding a win if you're the kind of player who can be arsed actually delving through the opposition report and comparing their players to yours.
It's the kind of game that you can play two ways - you can either give your life to it and reap the benefits, or you can play the "classic" mode and do ten seasons in a couple of months but without ever looking into too much detail. I played it like the latter on the Vita, but can't go back to it now because it's so much more satisfying when you delve into the depths of it.
It's not even the satisfaction of winning - it's the satisfaction of seeing that, for example, that slow opposition midfielder you told your fast, niggly player to keep closing down is having no luck, and that dribbling opposition winger you told your players about is having his legs nearly broken every time he gets a touch, which is calming him down.
