TOEE - of the benefits of spears

If you recall from my initial party setup, I deliberately gave my Dwarven cleric a 10" great spear. Which allows me to setup situations such as the below.

While wandering around some bogs looking for bandits, my party came across an old and seemingly deserted castle. Upon wandering inside, we soon discovered that it was inhabited by bandits (as if any old castle in D&D wouldn't be inhabited by monsters).


Improved initiative allows most of my PCs to act first

Edwin, my mage, immediately casts a sleep spell into the room to thin out the number of attackers.

Although 5 bandits are in the spells range, the spell's power means that only 1 or 2 will fall under

My paladin and druid then move into position to block the door. Meanwhile, Falgur, my Dwarven cleric, moves up behind them. This means that the door is completely blocked which only allows 1 or 2 bandits through. And as soon as they come through, they are immediately hit with three readied actions.

:)

Setting up an unbreakable defensive position

With my team in place, the only real danger is going to come from the bandit leader who went berserk at the sight of us (you can identify him in the next screen shot as he is glowing red). However, a ray of enfeeblement promptly reduces his strength by six.

Haha!

At this point, all I need to do is hold position and slowly wipe out the bandits as they come through. I love it when a plan comes together!

You can already see the bodies piling up by the door

FM 2010 - World Cup 2014

Just in case the title of this blog post wasn't clear enough, 2014 is a World Cup year. The English FA were expecting me to lead England to the quarter finals. Was I up to the task? Or, to be more precise, were the plonkers masquerading as England Internationals going to bottle it in a major competition (again)?

Group Stages
The draw for the group stages actually put me in a pretty good group. I didn't have any real opposition as I had Colombia, Montenegro and DR Congo.

woohoo?

As you can see, I managed to win all 3 group matches and didn't concede any goals. Good start right?

Well, not as such. Despite managing to win all 3 group matches, the reality was that my England team were consistently outplayed. The only reason that I didn't concede any goals was because the opposition didn't have any strikers worth talking about. Even one on one, they somehow contrived to miss.

By the time the group stage ended, my only hope was that my team would play better as the tournament progressed.

Knockout stages
Our first opponent in the knockout rounds was Egypt. And for once, my team completely outplayed the opposition. To be honest, I don't really know what caused my team to start playing - all I know is that we kicked ass!

Of course, this result also meant that we managed to make it to the Quarter Finals which is what the FA expectations were.

Finally! A performance worth writing home about!

The bad news is that our performance against Egypt was going to be the highlight of the competition as it was the only match where we would actually outplay our opponents.

Our next match was against Brazil and, with a couple of rare exceptions, we basically played the match in our half. Despite being completely outplayed, an outstanding performance by our GK allowed us to hang on until Walcott managed to pop out of nowhere and score a goal on the counter!


Brazil must have been furious!

With Brazil out of the way, we moved onto the Semi Finals and France - who were the No.1 ranked international team in the World (oh well, I guess the FM scouts don't always get it right...). Just as with Brazil, France completely dominated play. Alas, we weren't able to repeat our heroics and were duly knocked out.


Bugger

Although we were knocked out by France, we did manage to get to the Semi Finals so we had one more match to go. We would be facing Italy for the 3rd place play-off.

The match against Italy was an interesting one. Basically, we were completely outplayed at the start of the match. Then, one of the Italian players got sent off in the 54th minute and at that point, I ordered my England team to attack. Most of our shots on goal actually came post the 54th minute. Alas, my players couldn't hit the broad side of a barn and we ended up going to penalties.


England's luck in penalty shoot-outs remains true to form

Still, having managed to get into the Semi's can be considered a good result for a team who were ranked 7th in the World at the start of the World Cup.

Closing comments
Overall, despite making it to the Semi Final's, I have to concede that it wasn't a great world cup campaign. The fact that we were so completely outplayed by so many teams was unacceptable and we could just as easily have gone out at the group stage.

Still, there were some highlights:


Ben Foster, after only conceding 1 goal, picks up the World Cup Best GK award!

Also, despite my own thoughts, the FA seem to be happy.

Woohoo! That should keep my job safe for a bit longer!

FM 2010 - Season 2013/14: The awards

One of the noticeable improvements that FM2010 has made over FM2006 is in relation to the awards. In FM2006, with the exception of the Manager of the Year award, all of the other awards were nearly impossible to get. It never seemed to matter how well my players played - they never picked up awards.

I'm not sure when SI games fixed this particular issue, but its clear that they cleaned up the code around this as my players picked up a slew of awards this year.

Premiership awards
With that said, one thing which doesn't appear to have changed is the manager of the year award. In FM2006, it felt like the award always went to the manager who won the league. So far, FM2010 seems consistent with this.


After winning both the league and the League Cup, it's no surprise that I picked up manager of the year

You may recall that I started to put a much higher focus on my youth policy last year. This focus really started to pay off in the current year as my youth players won a raft of awards.


Proving that you can have a good youth policy while still winning things - Wenger would be envious


I managed to sweep the young player of the month awards in April as well :)


Ian Jones loses out on the young player of the year award despite winning more young player of the month awards than any other player


Torres - despite only making 19 appearances (due to injuries), he still managed to place as 3rd top goalscorer


For the first time ever, one of my players gets the goal of the season (and can you believe it was Babel?!?!?)

European awards
In addition to Prem awards, my players also picked up a raft of European awards too.


Torres is the third top goalscorer in the Champions Cup - despite only having 5 appearances!


Good ol' Stevie G - Class is permanent!


Torres - consecutive European striker of the year awards!


So close to sweeping the European footballer of the year awards!

World awards
And even more honors as we go to the World stage!


Torres - breaking Messi's stranglehold on the World footballer of the year award


:) Sweeping the World player of the year awards :)

FM 2010 - Season 2013/14

Season 2013/14 has now wrapped up and, despite some setbacks, this will go down as a successful year for Liverpool.

Going into the new season, there was one main concern that I had about the squad. If you recall, Skrtel got tapped up during the 2013/14 preseason. This meant that I only had 2 experienced CBs and, although I had several up and coming future stars, I wasn't sure if they could make the step up and was worried about the defensive backbone of my team.

Champions Cup
I started the Champions Cup extremely strongly. Torres was in top form and we walked the group stage. Unfortunately, both Torres and one of my key CBs got injured just as we got to the first knockout round. We were up against Fiorentina who, despite having a weaker squad on paper, must have fancied their chances.

They promptly wiped the floor with me 6-2 on aggregate (beating me 3-1 both home and away). The annoying thing was that Stefan Jovetic, an attacking midfielder who I had previously tried to sign, was the key player in both legs and was the main reason I got pwned. As you can imagine, neither the fans nor the board were particularly impressed.

Premier League
The other key competition I wanted to win was the Premier League. And just as with the Champions Cup, my team started strongly with Torres in absolutely scintillating form and by Christmas, we were 10 points clear at the top. Unfortunately, the same injuries which led to Liverpool getting knocked out of Europe also allowed Man Utd to close the gap.

By the time we got to March, Man Utd were only 2 points behind me. What a time for us to face-off in an early title decider! We managed to beat them - but only just.


A marginally better performance allows us to win this critical match


Two weeks later, Bobby Charlton leads a takeover of Man Utd - no doubt displeased with how Man Utd are no longer a powerhouse in the Prem
Although we only just managed to beat Man Utd, this match would prove to be critical in more ways than one. Despite their run of good results to catch up with me, this defeat knocked the spirit out of them and they subsequently had a run of bad results.

In the end, we ended up walking the Premiership. :)


Consecutive Premiership titles has the fans dancing in the streets!

The Premier League title, coupled with the League Cup and the Club World Championship, meant that we ended up with a historic treble. It was a shame that we couldn't add the FA Cup to that (we got beat by Arsenal 2-0 in the final). Still, a decent year overall.

The squad
Final squad ratings below.



Check out the stats on Torres!

As you can see, Torres has been outstanding this year. In fact, the only reason those numbers aren't higher is because he picked up several injuries throughout the year which, in addition to limiting his playing time, also meant that he sometimes played even when he wasn't fully fit. Even so, 32 starts is nothing to be sneezed at.

Stevie G continues to be an excellent captain. With that said, his form clearly dipped during the second half of the year at which point, I played Sneijder and Ozil a bit more. I suspect that he will be playing a much smaller role next season (in his defence, he is 34 now).

Lastly, as you can see from the stats, my team were pretty good when going forward. Unfortunately, they were rather less impressive when defending. I really need to make one more CB a priority for my off-season.

A look at the squad value. The addition of Ozil and Sneijder mean that I now have 7 players valued over GBP10m (as before though, a huge caveat around how values are now calculated).



Although there are still some old players, I now also have a pretty impressive mix of youngsters too

Finances
The money side of this game has always been a problem for me. Even last year, when our club received massive prize money from the Premiership and the Champions Cup, we still ended the season with a loss. With us getting knocked out of the Champions Cup at an early stage, I had a real concern about what our financial situation was going to look like. As such, it was a nice surprise at the end of the year when I realised that I actually ended up with a profit!


We made a profit this year thanks to a reduced net transfer spend

As you can see, our turnover for the year did indeed drop compared to last year. Luckily for me, the extra income from winning the Club World Championship was able to slightly offset the reduced Champions Cup income.

However, the key reason for our profit this year was a reduced net transfer spend. Although I spent a fortune on players, this was partially offset from player sales. In particular, the sale of Fabien Ritter for GBP8.5m was a great piece of wheelin' dealin' as he originally signed on a free transfer at the start of the season.


Harry Redknapp would be proud of me


The Board
With a treble to my name, the increase in stature of Liverpool FC means that the Board love me. In fact, they just offered me a new deal with a weekly wage of GBP150,000 (up from GBP110,000). :)


Bloody fans - you would think they would appreciate me a bit more!

Overall, I have to admit that I do like my new board. I've been bugging them in recent years about expanding the stadium. However, we have never been able to do anything as there was no room for expansion at Anfield. Fortunately for me, the Board decided to go out and build a new stadium instead. Unfortunately for me, my interest payments just shot up again.


Liverpool finally get their new stadium