I want to change the 'no brainer' situation of SS1, where picking your squad and setting your training are almost automatic now, since fitness and morale just go up and up to the point where you can turn off fitness training for the rest of the season.
I also want to introduce more squad rotation. There will of course be more injuries and suspensions, which will make that more likely.
But when it comes to fitness and morale, what I really want to achieve is a situation where it never reaches max (although that's not a bad thing if it comes towards the end of the season and you're on a roll maybe). In general, they should fluctuate, so that you need to keep your eye on training routines and need to keep at least a few fitness routines running most of the time.
Also, I've changed it to 2 training sessions per day, so 10 in total now.
So, my plan is to have fitness work as a combination fitness / fatigue. It works out fine, the only problem is that it's slightly counter-intuitive in that players should get fitter by playing in matches, due to 'match fitness'. The way I'm looking it would be something like this....
Match - Lose fitness (tiredness), gain morale, form fluctuates. Skills / Comp training - Lose fitness (tiredness), lose morale (boring training), gain form. Fitness training - Gain fitness, lose morale (training), no form change. Rest - Gain fitness (rest), gain morale (rest), no form change.
So the idea here is, if you over-play a player (youth players could handle it of course), he'll get tired and you'll need to either rest the squad, or throw in more fitness training. So in general, what you'd be getting is, your match players would gain enough morale to balance up the training, the training (probably 2 or 3 rest/fitness sessions) would balance up the match tiredness and players on the sidelines would be extremely fit, but would be losing morale due to nothing but training (the reserves will probably help to restore a bit of their morale though).
The overall idea is to get rid of the no-brainer approach and also to ensure that you can't just spam 10 competitive training sessions each week with no consequences.
As I said, the major stumbling block for me (apart from balancing it), is that losing fitness in a match sounds counter-intuitive.
Also, it may sound complicated, but honestly it's not. I'd try to balance it so that in general, you just have something like 3 fitness sessions, 2 rest sessions and 5 skills sessions and that keeps everything balanced nicely. But if you really want to cut a few corners here and there, you might be able to sneak in an extra skills session and get away with it.
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