Match strategies for Player-Managers

I thought I d share this with other SWOS players, and I m curious to see if anyone else have developed similar methods for playing SWOS.

My approach to matches is to rotate, play ...

- one match as Player-Manager
- one match as Coach
- one match just View Result

... then repeat.

The only problem to this approach is that I always handicap my team in the Player-Manager matches - I put this down to the simple fact that I am somewhat disadvantaged against a PC opponent ... insofar as the PC always knows 100% of the time which player it is controlling, whereas in contrast, I spend at least 30% of my time in every match determining which player is currently under my control!
As a result, outcomes for Player-Manager matches are nearly always worse than if I d played them as Coach or View Result.

So I have come up with the strategy below to try and level the playing field and offset what I see as an unfair advantage for PC oppenents:

Whenever I have a Player-Manager game coming up I ...
- reload my career and play the same match 4 times in View Result mode, to see what the probable outcome should be.
- reload a 5th time and play the match as Player-Manager.
--- if the result equals or is better than the 4 previous View Results I let it stand.
--- if the result is worse, I play a 6th match as View Result and accept whatever the outcome of that match is.

The reason I ve adopted this approach is that playing matches is an important part of SWOS for me - without it, it s just another soccer management game. But it s annoying if my team is handicapped by my participation as a player, it s just spoils the overall game experience.

I guess some people might see this as cheating (or that I am just crap at spotting which player I currently control )
But the intention is to offset the inevitable handicap a wetware player has against a PC opponent ... because the PC always knows instantly which player it controls, and no human player can hope to match that all the time.

Anyways, that s a few thoughts for you there ...

Cheers.

Well, it s darned useful to know the View Result will always be the same! That means I only have to reload once using this method, so thanks for that tip.

You re right, I ve never seen anyone else play this game at all ... I ve only ever played single-player games against a PC opponent (when I originally played SWOS many years ago network games didn t exist). And that s still the case at the moment.

True, I certainly wouldn t consider myself a good player at all, though I think that after playing against PC opponents for a long time, wetware opponents would at least disply some variety in their ability to control players. Whereas a PC opponent is ruthlessly efficient in controlling it s own players at all times ... it never tires or makes mistakes in that respect. And in that respect it s good practice for two-player games.

Anyway, I ll check out that link ...

Cheese Mite!

Hey, thanks for the invite Pallister ... I guess the only thing I d have to lose is my dignity!

Though I understand I d have to install the Amiga version to play online ... I actually had a go at that about a week ago and couldn t get it to run full-screen on my PC at all, only in a tiny window. I couldn t see some of the configuration settings either, they extended beyond the border of the configuration window, and there was no way to access them (I notice someone else had this problem too and posted some images of the problem on here).

So anyway, I got fed-up with mucking about and deleted it from my PC ...

Yes, that database is very handy, though I m playing SWOS as a small New Zealand club ... with a current financial balance that is well into the red ... so the flash players are well out of my league!

I might have another go at the Amiga install after I ve notched up a few more games against the PC version, so thanks again for the invite!

Pallister i want an online game with you weekend its possible ?

Thanks very much for that link lobo ... that looks like just what I need to fix the Amiga problem.
So I will download it again and have another go at getting it to run!
Second time lucky eh ...

Problem for him to play online with us is that he lives in New Zealand if I understood it right, and there s no way a decent match could be setup against european players due to pings
So unless he can find someone to play online on New Zealand, maybe Australia too, online play will only bring frustation

But it s true, you can t get better practice then playing against other human opponents, pc gameplay is very very predictable.

Yes you re right daimaou, I m in New Zealand, so it could turn out to be a problem ... mind you, I ve played Empire Earth online with people in North America and Europe without any noticeable problems ... though I suppsoe that is slightly less real-time than SWOS.

I don t know much about data overhead, but I wouldn t have thought there d be that much data to shift given that SWOS is fairly blocky graphics-wise ... so perhaps it would be do-able.

I still hope to put a local league together with EreWeGo, though as there s a small population down here compared to Europe it ll probably be a fairly small league, maybe half-a-dozen teams, unless we can drum up some local interest via local gaming Forums.

But who knows, maybe one day we could sort out some kind of SWOS World Cup if the bandwidth requirements don t prove overwhelming!

All The Best.