The developments in release 2.0 of SaaP 2010 fall into the usual two categories. The first are developments in the challenge the game makes on the gamer from the point
of view of football management. In this case there are new demands on his tactical skills. The boot-room team talk now requires that the manager get over to his
players the style of play he expects from them. The top screen (right) gives the off-the-ball (defensive) options he needs to communicate to the players. There are similar
on-the-ball choices.
But that's just the start. The gamer-manager will now need to integrate his tactical styles with his formation choices, his team selection and, long term, his building
of the squad - no sense in filling the squad with hard-tackling head bangers if you intend to play an intricate passing game etc.
So there are long term decisions to be made here - how are we going to play this game and just what sort of squad do we need to best implement the style? It's an
opportunity to stamp your personality on the team and take it in the direction you choose.
The second area of development is in the interface - by which I mean the actions you take and the way information is presented. The idea is that these should
correspond as closely as possible to those of the real-world manager and not simply be convenient computer actions. The screen shown bottom right is the "office"
screen from which the manager operates and carries out much of his non-match and non-training ground actions.
The data that fills the centre of the screen can be customised between three different data sets. The traditional "next match" data
is still one choice but the squad and their contract status or a club statistics summary set can now be displayed. Whichever is set as default you can simply click
through all three quickly. The screen here is the squad player-contract data.
Significant changes have been made to this "office" screen to better reflect the options the real-world manager has. You can speak directly to your assistant manager
and senior scout or change locations to the training ground, data centre and boot-room. On-going contract deals and lists of transfer-listed and out-of-contract players
have been brought together under one easily accessed group. Operations from here should be much more intuitive and natural.
