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[Silent_Thunder]

So, as the title says, it's around that time of year again, and the pre-release beta is in full swing. And I've taken it upon myself to do the impossible. Save Stockport County. Why is Stockport so doomed you might ask, well, mismanagement both on and off the field has lead to them performing one of the most spectacular nosedives in English football, coming from the 2nd highest league in the land to well...

Spoiler: Oh dear (click to show/hide)

So yeah, dropping 4 levels in 11 years. Essentially a complete death spiral, and my gameplan is to try to save them. More likely I will be fired halfway through the season, and they will fail to avoid the drop.

However, this isn't the challenge you need to do of course. A huge variety of nations and leagues are playable, so chances are you will be able to play as your favorite team. It even includes my country's bastardized, overly complex stab at the sport, Major League Soccer. Protip: Do not play as MLS. Their setup is a nightmare of labyrinthine rules.

Of course, you could always try managing a National Team for the World Cup or Olympics if that's your cup of tea. Or you could start unemployed, with no experience other than playing every sunday with your mates, and attempt to both convince a club to hire you, and then propel yourself to greatness.

As an aside, I can not for the life of me stay interested in an actual real life soccer match, but I love this game. If you don't like soccer, but do love management games, I do recommend you give this a try when the demo goes up, which should be when it has it's full release, as it has in the past.

Finally, here are the few (but large) downloads I consider an important aspect of the FM experience. The last two downloads are the most important, especially if you intend to play as "small market" nations like an obscure Eastern European nation.

Spoiler: Silent Thunder's FM Essentials (click to show/hide)

It should be noted that for all of the "packs", you only need to do the big download once. After that, whenever the pack updates, you only need to download all the changes between the current version and the last one you downloaded. They also work for new games, as well as the new updates working for old games, so it's a one time download investment, so to speak.

The MegaFacepack 6.0 Size: 6GB
The MegaFacepack is a graphics pack containing over 100,000 faces of the real life players in a huge variety of leagues, which is essential to both make their player pages look decent, as well as to actually remember who the hell they are. Download available in both standard browser based, and torrent.

Metallic Logos Pack 2014 Size: 3.3GB
Similar to the MegaFacepack, the Metallic Logos Pack includes logos for nearly every team in the game, including ones that will likely never reach the playable leagues in a standard length playthrough. More importantly however, is the fact that it includes logos for teams and competitions in the top tiers that SI does not have the rights for (They are able to have the real names of teams and players for almost every nation, but not trademarked logos) , meaning without them, the game has to use a generic colortone crest.

FM14 Real Names and German National Team Fix Size: Negligible, not even half a MB
AKA The "Stop Generic League Names" pack. This gives many leagues in the game their real name, as FM can't have them for sponsorship reasons. For example, England's top league goes from being called simply "Premier League" to it's proper sponsored name of "Barclay's Premier League". This applies to many other national leagues that FM couldn't get a license for from the sponsor holders. In addition, it makes the German National team not use "ghost" players instead of a real team. Again, Germany's national team for whatever reason has a copyright holdout or similar, so FM had to make their national team only use generated players that don't really exist in the league. This file also fixes that.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

That face pack.

I will try this challenge in FM2013. [Also PTW for my future ownership of FM2014]

[evilcherry]

That fact that it finally recognizes centre-half/half backs, false 9s and wide target men is very, very important both for gameplay and realism reasons.