Football Manager is a series of football management simulation games developed by Sports Interactive and published by Sega. In this game, you will play a role of a football club manager and conduct your team to chase championship titles. As a football team manager, you need to take responsibilities for tactics developing, training arrangements, on-pitch commanding, player trading, etc. One of the most important things is to select your starting line-up.
According to the rules of football matches, there should be 11 players in your starting line-up, where one of them must be a goalkeeper. Besides the goalkeeper (GK), there’re three classes of positions: defender (DF), midfielder (MF), and striker (ST).
When a manager is selecting his starting line-up, he usually determines the formation first. The football formation is usually noted like “4-4-2”“4-5-1”“4-3- 3”, etc. For example, the “4-5-1” formation denotes that there are 4 defenders, 5 midfielders and 1 striker. Note that every player has his preferred positions, and they will always refuse to appear at positions he does not prefer, while some excellent players may be qualified for several positions. For example, C. Ronaldo can play as both a striker and a midfielder.
In the game, players have two important attributes for each of his preferred positions: CA (current ability) and PA (potential ability). The CA of the line-up is defined as the sum of the 11 players’ CA in the formation. Similar to CA, the PA of the line-up equals to the sum of 11 players’ PA. Then your task is to select the proper players to reach maximum CA of your line-up. When a tie occurs, the one of maximum PA is required.
Beyond these requirements and limits, the relationships between players also make sense to the CA of your line-up. Every player may like or dislike some of his teammates. When he and the one he likes are both on the pitch, the CA of the line-up will be increased by a specific value. On the contrary, when someone and his disliked player occurs on the pitch concurrently, the line-up’s CA will be decreased. Be careful that the like and dislike relationships between players are unidirectional. Not surprisingly, Plane.Gao likes Messi very much while Messi may not know Plane.Gao at all.