Mrs. AAGunner3 decided to give the game a try. She's in VI.388 with one current player and, including her, 7 brand new players. She's got your run of the mill startup team. She's feeling overwhelmed at the moment and has chosen to train GK. She's got a real good trainee about to pop solid, an 18yo backup and a passable coach, so that's all taken care of. Her team has: a decent defense - 1 inad, 2 passable, 1 solid decent wingers - 2 passables forwards - 3 passables (one quick which is pretty nice) But she really lacks midfielders. And anybody that has any PM skills to speak of is on a respirator. She needs suggestions on her long term match strategy. Keep in mind, she's in Div VI with a bunch of other fresh meat. She's training GK so has formation flexibility limited only by the players she's been dealt. We've pulled our crappy youth pull. We've got a friendly scheduled this evening, playing a 4-3-3 w/ 2 wingers - no CA. For all intents and purposes, she's competitive out of the gate. So, what are your thoughts from here on out? (and this has been interesting, traveling back in time and rediscovering with her just how overwhelmed I was when Mongrel FC was started. Reliving the experience so to speak.) And please feel free to drop her an HT-mail to make her feel welcome.
I would recommend training GK until she has enough money to load her team up with excellent PM trainees, but I'm very midfield-centric. Oh, and make sure she always pulls GKs for youth pulls.
she may want to do a 3-5-2 with both wingers towards the middle to compensate for the lack of good middies. she will also have a huge midfield boost which never hurts. i dunno if you wanna do something that would involve the 3 fowards instead though. it never hurts to have a good back up. maybe she should pick up some 24-27 year old IMs with solid PM, no secondaries, low stamina and train up stamina for a few weeks.
Where are her best young players? If you have a couple good young players in one area you may want to train that, but if nothing supper, then I might consider starting with goalie.
She is training keeper. She has two players under 20. The 19 yo is garbage. The 18 yo I'll likely get her to sell. He's a passable defender with inad PM,Pas,Wing. Hope to use those proceeds to get a decent middie.
Well, there should be some bankroll left over after picking up the keeper trainees, so between that and your 18-yo prospective sale, I'd think she could get some passable-solid-ish, experienced PMers. Unless she's got extra defenders or extra forwards, a vanilla 3-5-2 is probably the best place to start out, formation-wise. At some point, if she's got the forwards to run it, a 3-4-3 may be worth considering. Or, alternatively, she could try to develop a defensive formation for use in turtling, although with a start in VI I'm not sure how much use she'd need to give it.
That's what I figure. She's in a brand spankin' new div VI series. It's wide open. Actually, I got her to run a 3-4-3. I figure with her always improving defense due to her GK training, she'll get a nice offensive punch with the 3 strikers and hopefully we can get some decent IMs in the near future.
My brother was in a similar series when he joined with a bunch of new teams. I had him train stamina his first three weeks and he went undefeated his first season. He easily won the midfield every game because his players had better stamina (the fact that he lucked into 2 solid PM helped a bit as well). Your wife's team lacks mids and she's already training GK so I recommend buying 2 or 3 older passable playmakers with excellent stamina and running a 3-5-2 or a 3-4-3 with 3 IM. Buying the players instead of training stamina will put her a few weeks closer to selling a trainee and having more cash than the rest of her series.
If she trains GK for two to three seasons she can make plenty of money and then switch to a different training regimine. She will have the defense necessary to hold off teams while she builds her new training program.
I'd say forget purchasing PM for now... I'd just go ahead and get a solid/poor coach and 2 17yo keeper trainees... doing well in the rest of this season is not important... if she promotes this season her team wont be ready for dv anyway so its much better if right away the money is poured into 2 damn good gk trainees... if after that there is still money left over then one or 2 PM upgrades would be fine if they are on the cheap side, but no point trying to build a side ready to promote now... leave that to next season and beyond. Once the first trainees are sold, upgrades can be bought in defence/forward if necessary and then after the sale of the next trainee (assuming she keeps 1 keeper for the future) she can buy good PM trainees because by that time she will be financially solvent.
Take an extra season and a half to train a second to titanic. Then you've also got $5.5 to $6 million to play with from selling the first one.
My daughter has a series VI team and is training keepers also (Kansas City Cleats) IIRC she has not done too much in the transfer market other than sell the odd youth pull here and there, but she did train a keeper up and sell him and is sitting on the cash (1 mill or so). She trained her scrub PMs up in stamina when she first started and her passable PMs really perform surprisingly well cos they all have excellent stamina. After she got done with stamina then she bought the 17 yo trainees (so she wasn't wasting their training time) She's #1 in her weak series. Very likely will auto promote and win every game.