Plans…

One of my favorite phrases of all time is “Custer had a plan too….”. Those of you who may need a little historical context, I suggest Wikipedia; but at the end of the day, it’s a very apt quote. I used it at work a couple of weeks ago and the VP of Ops laughed so hard he had to sit down and put his head between his legs, which may or may not reflect positively on my upcoming review.

FM 21 has been very interesting for me. My most successful project thus far is one I didn’t even put together at the end, I simulated 1000 years of Football with the Top Six leagues and Brazil Active. Took two computers and about four and a half months to process, you can watch the results of that video here:

There’s also a thread on Reddit about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/footballmanagergames/comments/mffdhb/six_countries_1000_years_in_the_future/

It was fun to do, and I’ll do it again next years as well.

Personal save wise, I was kind of all over the place. I had a personal save with Palace that was fun, and then did a personal journeyman save that was fun as well, starting in England, and ending up in Brazil via Poland and Germany. My primary Youtube save was with a club I had seen play in person when I lived there in the 80’s, 1FC Kaiserslautern. It was a fun save, we took them from the 3. Liga to the Bundesliga, and while we didn’t win everything, it was still a good time. I play that save offline from time to time, because I had scouted my tail off and had a great squad of potential, and I want to see if I could do better with them than the computer. Long story short, sort off.

My save for the second half of the FM21 year is proving to be pretty fun, it’s a Journeyman save, but I’ve limited it to the 25 countries I would consider to be “Eastern Europe on the other side of the Old Iron Curtain.” It’s been very fun so far, and challenging in a good way. But it also got me thinking about what I want to do in the future, especially with regards to Youtube.

I don’t have the biggest channel. There will always be bigger channels, and I am happy to be a contributor, and am quite happy that I have had positive, if slow, growth since I started creating. My goal with the channel was never to try and turn it into something I could make money off of, and while streaming does have it’s appeal, work and family life make that impracticable. I love my day job, and I make too much money to walk away from it to try and be a full time streamer. But I have been thinking about what I like doing within the FM community, and how to become better at it.

I think the two dedicated saves a year, with a projected schedule of uploads M-T-Th-F is a good fit for me. The Beta/Release save will be a signal club save, almost always a Lower League Club/Fallen Giant save, which will end somewheres around the New Years, and then the second save will be a Journeyman similar to this years in that it will be regional. I also like doing the occasional experiment with a twist.

That said, “Custer had a plan too…” in that I’ve already decided on my FM22 Beta save. It going to be with my favored team, the one I follow more than the others, Crystal Palace. Now, I’ve already done a Crystal Palace save for YouTube, the Palace March, for FM19.

There are a few reasons I am doing another Palace save for FM22.

1. Roy Hodgson is retiring, and a new manager is taking over. Personally I’d love to see what Wilder could do there. And part of me would like to think I can do better. 🙂
2. The team is going to look entirely different next season, as they have 17 players whose contracts are expiring on June 30th, and those who are still going to be on the roster are older (Milivojevich) or looking to move (Zaha).
3. There isn’t much left to build around. Eze and Mitchell are both solid young players with promise, Mateta is on loan until 2022, but I think depending on the summer moves they may exercise their option to sign him from Mainz, and that’s pretty much it. Whomever the coach is next season is going to be hard pressed to keep them up, and that’s a challenge I like.

I’m also planning on going a bit more in depth with scouting and training, the spreadsheet may see new life in FM22. And then comes the Journeyman, South America, Asia, South America, I am not sure, but it will be fun.

So that’s the plan for now…let’s see if it comes to fruition.