I'm in year 2125. Previously I was able to get AI to sign up assistant coaches but ofc it doesn't hire due to this issue.You're a legend Grenville.
My footy game is going pretty well. I haven't actually ended up taking anything from PC2011 as it turns out (got about as far as getting it to compile then got busy and never went back), and I think that's appropriate because I think they're going to be fundamentally different experiences anyway. But this is the Premiership Coach thread so that's the last time I'll mention this.
So now I'm going to shift back into "fan of PCXX" mode.
I have STILL got my original save file that I started when I first played PC2011 and it's still going strong. Everytime I go back on a PC2011 binge every 6 or so months, I just play this save. Gold Coast are in 2094 now and have won 52 premierships. I have played every single game as real time match day. I'm really not sure if this is the oldest consistent save or not. I think it wouldn't be too difficult to sim all the way to 2094, but the distinguishing thing about this save is that I have lovingly played every single moment of it. Not a single season was simmed. Not a single game was skipped. Not a single team was assistant picked. Not a single draft was recruiter selected. Not a single contract was AI managed.
At the end of this, the main thing that I feel the game lacks is meaningful statistics. Top 10 lists just don't cut it for me. But for this, I've gone and made my own and that suits me well enough.
However, I'm going to try and raise some meaningful points about the state of the game that I play here in 2094.
Anyway an hour later this is too much to keep going now I'm going to stop here. Great game Grenville and I still love every second of it.
- I do not win every game, and certainly not easily. I won about 17 premierships in a row at one stage, and barely missed a grand final up until around the 2050s where the clubs all somewhat balanced out. While this took a while, it's frankly a whole other game when you get here.
- Staff were the first to break. This is going to be the first of a few of these similar sounding issues. I simple cannot offer anyone enough money. Even the duds. The input just doesn't let me. For a while, I could get around this by letting the AI sign my staff. However, now, even the AI has given up trying to fit the staff expected salary into my weekly budget. Since the staff have all unanimously rejected my club, this means I no longer get the rich recruiting experience. To be honest, this wasn't too bad. I had to pick players off of their position, height, weight, age and agility, etc scores. I also use a "trick" which I'm not sure if it really works, where I go to the F/S area and make sure the list is ordered by potential descending. I've somewhat purposefully never tried to figure out if this does work or not. This whole point may have been a reason why the competition got stronger, but I don't think so, because I still did wonders on the trade table and just focused on ready made players more than youth.
- Finances took a turn for the horrible. It pains me to say, but I regularly edit the .xml file of my club just so that I don't have the worst facilities imaginable. I cannot get the weekly allowance to stick, because the club just won't let me turn a negative weekly balance. I haven't got any staff. I have got over $400million in reserves but I can't pay within barely 30% on my facilities as is required to keep them level. The inputs let me put in the right values, but every week the game changes them for me back to small amounts. It's as if the club just won't let me lose money. As a result, if I get lazy, I get to watch those overalls decrease, and that's painful. Every other club in the game has A+ everything. However, I think this plays a major role in the equalisation of the comp. So it's a blessing and a curse.
- Player contracts are no longer micro manageable. It's as simple as I simply cannot offer any player a contract worth more than $50million. So, over 5 years, that's $10mil a season. My good players are expecting upwards of $12mil. I have absolutely no trouble fitting them into the salary cap. But I just can't sign them for an extended amount of years anymore. The only way I can sign these players is by accepting what they want, which is working fine for me so far, but is definitely going to contribute to equilisation in the future, because...
- In my opinion, the best way to succeed in this game is to front/back load contracts. I regularly end a season with my weakest 22 player 82+ rated, at least a couple 90s, 31 players signed for the following season and 70% of the salary cap free for that off season. This goes in tandem with...
- Trading. Back loaded contract? Trade him for the last year, where 100% of the contract was loaded. Can't get a club to agree? Give them a draft pick and take all their aging verterans. All you have to do is check that their contracts are expiring, and simply don't renew them. What's better is you can sometimes even offload them individually to other clubs to get back more draft picks than you lost. All in all, you got a player for free for four seasons and ended up swapping him for draft picks. Granted, the picks aren't normally very good (40s) but this works because you only do this when the player is ~33yo in the last year of their contract. However, this isn't even the best way to get an advantage out of trading, because that's left for...
- Signing as many preseason drafts as you have picks for. Since I've got so much cap space, I can use every single one of my preseason picks even if I've already got 39 players drafted. I think if I have 40 it doesn't let me, but it only seems to check at the start of the draft. Most other clubs only pick once if at all, but normally there are still a bunch of Excellent or at least Good rated players still available. The kicker, though, is that a lot of the time these are players I traded away for draft picks during the trade period that had just passed. It's scandalous.
But to be honest, I did away with a lot of these techniques after trying them for a while because it's just not any fun if you're effectively cheating. I front load contracts only now, so I pay for the 5 years up front and then get 4 free years. This does wonders for building a salary cap advantage and keeping it. I also always make sure I use every bit of cap space, sometimes restructuring contracts that are set to expire the following season. This sometimes results in paying more overall, but lets me keep the advantage.
- The match stats are all dead. Once every few seasons, a player from an opposition club will have a remarkable game where they did something like kick 17 goals. This is a great accomplishment on its own. But the game goes a step further and wants that accomplishment remembered not once, but up to 10 times, where week by week the accomplishment counts again as if it happened again. Really, it happened once, but now the top 10 goals kicked are 19 goals by Player A, 18 goals by Player B, 17 goals by Player C, 17 goals by Player C, 17 goals by Player C, 17 goals by Player C, 17 goals by Player C, 17 goals by Player C... you get the idea. This has happened to practically all of the match records, except now when I notice it happening I immediately save and quit so it stops, and I've manually cleared my match records to resolve some really ugly ones. It even happened to my own player once! He got 71 possessions, and that was outstanding, but he only did it once, despite what the game wants to believe!
- Quirks of the real time match engine. I'm going to brush over this quickly. But in summary, to be honest, this is actually really charming and I kind of love it. It produces some really interesting scenarios sometimes and some feel good stories.
- Inside midfielders are the best LFPs the game has ever seen. Regularly kicking bags of 7. I had a player called E.Nother who kicked 1100 goals and had a Small and Tall Forward rating well below noticeable, but he was a 88 inside mid and practically nothing else. I loved imaging the commentators explaining "He's got E.Nother!". Another player of mine, similar, kicked 133 goals in a season as a 84 inside mid and not much else. Once I discovered this, instead of trading them I started keeping these sort of otherwise unversatile players as if they were my next Eddie Betts. It "feels" right too.
- Small defenders are the best forward flankers / wingers, and they're rare. It is so hard to find a good small defender rated over 75. I'm pretty sure I always have them all. But sometimes you find gems that are 84 rated small defenders, and good inside, and that's when you put them on the wing. 700+ possessions season after season.
- Tall forwards are the best midfielders. This is so much better than the small defenders, and much more exciting. They're also tricky to find, but S. Stuthridge is a good example. At his peak, he was an 84 in Small Forward, Tall Forward, Inside and Outside Mid. This made him an absolute ball magnet. He was the player to get 71 possessions, and in that game, he also kicked 6 goals on a forward flank. Later in his career he played rover as a 34yo, rated 74 in his highest rating and still knew how to collect 28 possessions a game. Freak.
- Opposision tall forwards can get on hot streaks and that's what kills you. When an opponent's key forward kicks 3-4 goals in the first quarter, I know I'm in for a management challenge. I can't swap anyone onto him to stop him. He will end up with 15 goals and I will struggle to win. It's electric.
- Pretty sure I have never, ever actually had a player who was "called" a Small Forward. Do not rate them at all.
At the current stage when I go to AI hire assistant coaches it now crashes.
How do you resolve this issue.
The only workaround is potentially manually signing assistant coaches to all 18 clubs. But even then idk if that will bypass the issue.