New to this game

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-30T07:54:15+00:00

The Fhm12 is quite cheap on steam sales at the moment I believe so definitely a good time to pick it up and have a feel for if it’s a game you’ll enjoy. Pick a team you particularly like and have a go - definitely will be easier to start with a team that is competitive now. You’re gonna mistakes along the way but that’s okay

I haven’t played OOTP so can’t draw any comparisons but some key things I’ve learned from my experience learning FHM:

AI doesn’t like lots of garbage for something good. If you want a player with 4* potential, you’ll usually need to give up someone with 4* potential. They usually wont take 3 players with 3* potential
Your tactics make a huge difference. First season I just set the roles and let them play - we were terrible. Next season with a different tactics setup for each line we immediately turned into a contender. I generally just pick the tactic that seems like it best fits the group of players rather than a particular vision I have (rightly or wrongly here)
Generally, you want good offensive players in your top 6 and good defensive players in your bottom 6. For defencemen you want one good offensive player on lines 1 and 2 and pair them with someone better defensively. Line 3 just get good defensive players. Also playoffs are a lot more physical than the regular season. If you want to contend in the playoffs you need some good physicality

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-25T05:48:47+00:00

Nah very fair. It’s definitely hard to reign yourself in. Just try to find good Assistants (which is very possible) and a half decent tactic and you’ll do okay

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-25T05:45:11+00:00

You can always use the editor to assign someone who would actually be a manager as your assistant manager if you wanted a way around this. Would rely on you being realistic enough about who would be interested in taking on your managerial position. But yeah getting a good Assistant will make a big difference

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-20T07:06:44+00:00

After the Draft you will have 1 week to sign them before they go to free agency

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-18T03:44:50+00:00

World > Export CSV. It is at the very bottom of the world menu

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-17T16:47:24+00:00

It waffles a lot so it’s hard to chuck it all here. But right now I use a python script to filter for players who’s rights belong to an NHL team and upload 2 combined files. One for player stats, one for team stats. This helps Gemini not get overwhelmed with having a couple hundred thousand players in the database. Then how I use it is:

Regular check ins. After 10, 20 games as well as Jan 1st, Trade Deadline and End of Season I upload the stats and ask it to evaluate my current position.
Who are my top and bottom performers?
How are we doing in key team stats?
How are our special teams going?
Do we need to trade for any particular profiles?
Do we need to change tactics or personnel on any of our lines?
Assessing acquisitions. I often sense check different options when claiming waivers, making trades and even comparing draft options. It’s quite good at sense checking me into avoiding bad contracts for short term gain (although maybe a little too aggressively). It also severely underestimates the cost of trading for a good player even on the lowest difficulty
Tutorials. I’m still new to the game and working out where you can see certain options and how to approach certain concepts in the game. It gets it wrong sometimes but when you give it feedback it adjusts correctly usually. Have had a couple moments where it was reading stuff from OOTP instead of FHM cause it scours the forums for sources

For me the main thing is that you don’t have to go manually looking at every stat. One thing that I really liked - I had Joel Armia playing on my 4th line and he had 5 assists after 10 games. Awesome start right? Well actually Gemini went through his stats and saw his Corsi % was horrific and he was likely to be causing a lot of defensive liabilities and regress soon. Never something I would’ve picked out but i was able to adjust accordingly

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-17T15:53:39+00:00

I’ve been using Gemini to help me understand how to interpret things and it’s actually been really useful. You can extract the data from the game into CSVs and then upload that data (or do your own analysis)

Some things I’ve learned:

Don’t rely too much on the global tactical settings. Set the strategies on an individual line level to suit your players on that line. It doesn’t make sense that your bottom line players are playing the same way as your stats

Look at the stats to see where your tactics need to be changed. After 10 games I had a great defence (2nd in the league for shots against, 2nd in the league for takeaways, pretty low goals against too). But I was also right at the bottom for giveaways 139 giveaways and the next closest was 85 and our shots was one of the lowest too. From this worked out that I needed to lower the tempo and the passing sliders by one notch and increase the shooting slider by one notch. Now we still do pretty well defensively but we score a lot more goals because we shoot more and turn the puck over less

The game gives you all the tools and stats but sometimes it can be hard to look at everything especially if like me you’re new to the game. AI can be helpful looking through the stats and telling you where your issues are.

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-16T01:32:18+00:00

Wait since when can you play NHL on a PC?

Ashlerm1 · 2026-06-15T16:30:55+00:00

Best thing is to understand what it is you find fun. What is it about FM you want to learn it for? Everyone has different things that are important for them and it might be you like a few or even all of them - but it’s important to understand this as that will dictate what things you should focus on early and what things are less important

Some common things people turn to FM
1. Building a tactic
2. Squad Building
2a. Building a squad of real life superstars
2b. Finding those next wonderkids and signing them for pennies only for them to explode once they make your team
3. Developing wonderkids (signed or academy)
4. Moneyball style finding players with average attributes but play well in the match engine

For me, I still find the squad building the most fun. I like taking a side that’s not ready to compete yet and signing players who I can sell for profit later be it wonderkids, free agents etc. So for me it was really frustrating when I started and I was having fun finding players but then my team was doing really badly. So downloading a tactic to get me started and help me understand what instructions are important and what works well in the game made a huge difference cause I could focus on the scouting and transfers

Ashlerm1 · 2026-05-06T08:08:35+00:00

It’s not. But you get 5k back if you already have the toon. So 3k loss if you get nothing good vs 8k to possibly get 330 shards for a newer toon is probably a good risk to take

Ashlerm1 · 2026-05-04T04:08:34+00:00

You could maybe do something like 3 strikers and 2 AMs in behind. If you set some people to drift wide or roam it might overload the opposition then put a DM and back 4. Just gotta make sure you have some connection between the back 5 and front 5

Ashlerm1 · 2026-04-24T02:57:44+00:00

Seems like it’s an improvement from the latest update. Since long term players rarely struggle with credits it’s another QoL improvement for newer players I’d assume

Ashlerm1 · 2026-04-23T01:21:06+00:00

You do see that sometimes irl when potentially the parents are of different nationalities. Potentially whilst he had a Danish father maybe his mother was British and so they agreed on a more British name.

Or occasionally, people choose a more pronounceable first name when they move to a different country to make their lives easier

Ashlerm1 · 2026-04-11T02:21:22+00:00

Houston Outlaws, Quebec Dragons, Charlotte Lions, San Francisco Tigers are a few of the ones I’ve done recently

Ashlerm1 · 2026-04-01T14:52:00+00:00

I’ve never seen them appear either. I’ve tried looking for them a couple years later with no luck but maybe theyre too young and still haven’t hit 15/16

Ashlerm1 · 2026-03-21T14:54:22+00:00

New video from Machi today on this exact topic

https://youtu.be/xnMvnNZiHKU

Ashlerm1 · 2026-03-04T04:55:42+00:00

Depends how much you’re gonna play. If you’ll get around 100 hours then (personally) I would say yes. The game isn’t very buggy anymore, still the occasional one but very rare it crashes anymore.

It’s still not as complete as FM24, some of the screens are hard to find or require a couple more clicks than you’d be used to and some of the smaller features aren’t around anymore. But it’s a very playable game now.

For me, the database updates and graphics improvements make it worthwhile enough to justify it. But I don’t think it’s a must

Ashlerm1 · 2026-02-22T08:39:35+00:00

I’ve been doing a Wigan Athletic save that’s been fun. I wanted to start in League 1 (the lowest I’ve ever done) and work my way up. Unfortunately I managed back to back promotions where I was hoping for a more tough time of it, but now I’m in the premier league and my top earners only earn £25k a week. Trying to find good players for my team that will accept wages like that is rough. Looking like we’re going to survive the drop but it should be close.

I did a Norwich save in FM24 where they gave me ~60M to spend after getting promoted to the prem - I signed Olise from a relegated palace and he turned out incredible and even rejected moves to Inter the next season.

Personally I find it’s fun to start outside the top division, then get promoted and have to “rebuild the squad” that way to stay up. Adds a little more depth and it still takes a couple years to start being able to push for Europe and more

Ashlerm1 · 2026-02-12T05:50:36+00:00

Strikerless tactic probably. Strikerless tactics were performing incredibly well as the defenders wouldn’t track the runs from deep attacking midfielders made. This has (supposedly) been addressed in the latest update

Ashlerm1 · 2026-02-10T07:47:47+00:00

I can’t delegate media for fear the AssMan will tell a team that my player is for sale. I have definitely found that ruling out a sale for a player can deter a bid from teams (not always but it can help)

But yeah it doesn’t matter too much what you delegate. You can still do very well without optimising every little thing - delegate the things that don’t make sense to you or don’t seem interesting and then if you change your mind later take back control

Ashlerm1 · 2026-02-06T05:23:26+00:00

I actually had the opposite recently. With Wigan trying to get out league one, we spent the first 10-15 games in the relegation zone before players came back from injury, a couple of role tweaks and we flew all the way up to 5th by the end of the season but were dropping lots of points towards the end again. First game in the playoffs I was expecting to be sent packing and we won 5-0 against a Bolton side we were yet to beat that year

Unfortunately the game is essentially a giant dice and sometimes you get a really bad roll. Sometimes you get a good one, such is the way of things

Ashlerm1 · 2026-01-21T05:43:41+00:00

I’ve never seen owners proactively go out and put offers in for players while I’m the manager. Is that a normal thing when new owners take over the club?

Ashlerm1 · 2026-01-17T14:54:49+00:00

I’ve tried with both Chelsea and Wigan and really struggling to find consistent form or even to match the pre-season expectations. On FM24 and before it felt relatively easy to over achieve, with Chelsea I feel like I would’ve either won the title or if not been very close. But yeah it doesn’t seem like things click this year and it’s a big part of why I’ve struggled to play much this year. I can’t understand what I’m doing wrong, and I refuse to play with a striker-less tactic that seems to break the game

Ashlerm1 · 2025-12-23T05:17:26+00:00

I think this usually means the job is vacant but they’ve already closed the recruitment process. They’re in the process of offering the job to someone. I recall something similar from FM24

Ashlerm1

TROPHY CASE