No, no cheating...it's a common criticism of fm15. I play as Athletic Bilbao and I'm a very experienced FM player (maybe 600-700 hours per game since CM 03/04) - Athletic are usually my long term save on each FM and I dabble with others as side projects. I've spent a long time within previous versions learning about how to create tactics so I'd like to think I know my stuff and I certainly don't look for exploits. When I'm in control of a top team I have a philosophy I like to stick to. 4-2-3-1 with a physically strong CF. Wide forwards who cut inside and can score, wing backs who overlap to create width, a midfield duo who are good tacklers, with one being a good passer, one being simply a holding player, and a disciplined central defensive pair. I'll give you a brief overview of my save.
Took me 3 seasons to win La Liga for the first time, bearing in mind only Basque players this was a bit quicker than in previous FM's for me with Athletic. Real/Barca usually provide a very stern challenge for the duration of the save. I then won La Liga, Champions League and Copa del Rey for the next 3 consecutive seasons. That included a season scoring 156 league goals and 67 champions league goals. In the Champions League final vs (still Pep's) Bayern I won 6-1 and had 47 shots on goal, 65% possession.
I was a bit confused by the whole thing as it was far too dominant and I didn't feel my players should be able to do this. The players I had were very good certainly, but not outrageous. I decided to download a scouting tool to look at how good my players were compared to some others - perhaps I'd just got lucky, or more likely, my players are just the perfect fit for the way I play. I know it's a very limited way to judge it and it doesn't tell the whole story, but my best player had a CA of 171, and I only had 4 other players with a CA of above 160. So I certainly had a very good team, but not exceptional. I figured, well perhaps they just fit perfectly into my system, I'll try something else. I won't go on about what I did next in the save, but over 5 seasons I went to a few clubs of different levels and had a bit of fun with that.
Then I noticed Athletic (with the same group of players I had), hadn't won a single trophy in 4 years despite consistent top 4 finishes in the league. They were scoring a normal amount of goals and finished the season with very good, but not exceptional points totals. I also noticed their finances were 'okay' (I'd left them 100 million in the black and a projected balance to keep rising). The job came up so I thought I'd jump back on board, 5 years on with an ageing squad and a new batch of young players who hadn't won anything for while, with only okay finances I thought it would be interesting to play the 'hero'.
They were 100 million in the red.
What on earth had gone on since I left is beyond me. It took me one season to reorganise the wage structure and secure the finances a bit and then it was business as usual.
Sorry a bit of a long story to illustrate my point but what I'm trying to say is:
1) If you like managing a big club, you might find fm15 boring because you can just steam roll through teams more easily than in previous versions, with extremely high goals/shots per game. Obviously a certain amount of that will be how effective your tactic is, but regardless...for me, no tactic should be able to put 40+ shots past the opposing team in a Champions League final. I'd love to see FM tweaked a bit so the higher end teams are bit more difficult.
2) Poor management from the AI. I found it amazing the club had within 5 years gone through such an enormous financial change, and without any exploits, I was able to generate so much more from the team than the AI manager could.
SI must have a near impossible job to create an intelligent AI, hopefully it will continue developing over the next few years. But certainly FM15 has it's downsides in this area in my experience.
A lot of people will simply say, well just play lower leagues...it's tough there. Yeah I agree it is more difficult in the lower leagues, and managing a big club in a big league is easy in comparison. However I don't want to manage in the lower leagues, I want to manage my favourite club and be challenged in the process.
Personally I found fm13/14 harder to maintain dominance, but perhaps I've just improved at the game and my view is a bit biased!
Sorry that ended up being a bit of a monster post!
