Australian Football Coach 2023-24 News

Australian rules football is back from another long off-season, and with the new season comes a new game update!

Australian Football Coach 2023 will become Australian Football Coach 2023-24 in the next few weeks as the game updates for the new season.

The 2024 database will fully update the men's league for the upcoming season and also re-enables the women's league, though with a more limited database at the moment. Some additional tweaks for modders have already been completed, including more control over player potential for replaying previous seasons, and the ability to add custom images for different stadiums when watching matches. There have also been some user interface tweaks and improvements.

There's a couple more features and additions planned and not implemented yet, so keep an eye out for the update to see what else is new! If you've already purchased the game, all you need to do is sit back and wait for another couple of weeks, and then click "play" once it arrives to embark on another season of footy gameplay.

Hope you enjoy the new additions!

Starting to transition over to planning for any possible future releases, but that doesn't mean the game won't receive any necessary patches!

This patch fixes one quite rare crash but also some other minor issues and tweaks around training and attempting to solve a problem where the game occasionally freezes after a goal.

Full change log is below:
Updated: possible bug when loading custom fixtures file
Updated: coaching impact on training (doubled coaching skills per math so should be twice as impactful)
Fixed: bug with quick play final scores
Improved: quick play simulation code for more realistic results
Improved: code for checking if players are ready to play after a goal, especially when a player is injured
Fixed: Game would crash in a specific parent-child pick situation
Improved: Teams would generally get financially secure after many years, made a slight tweak there

Just some simple fixes today. Nothing much to look up from the clipboard for.

Version 2023.1.22 (released 14 June 2023)
- Fixed: Colour red was being saved in custom team editor, but would appear as white if you switched to another league and switched back (foreground colour)
- Fixed: Colour teal was being saved as foreground when background was selected by user
- Fixed: Rising star and leading goalscorer were switched in player biography generator
- Fixed: Player skills were going through the roof during the offseason
- Fixed?: Grand final stadium was not holding on league editor panel
- Fixed: One of the consecutive goals article feeds was substituting the designated home team in for the away team
- Fixed?: Goal leaders were showing distinct goals scored (so if player A and B led the league with 10 goals and C had 9, would show A:10 C:9)
- Fixed: Injury frequency and trade frequency were updating correctly but not "sticking"
- Improved: Rucks now get a bonus when determining form adjustments
+ Added: Drafts to league selection in league editor

This week's patch focuses on mostly quality of life improvements, but makes big changes to fitness and player development. Players will now develop more quickly during the off-season and fitness will be regained more quickly at the start of the new season, and a player's overall stamina level will dictate at what point fitness starts to get harder to earn.

Injuries have been adjusted too as the default setting was accidentally set to "rarely" instead of "normal." Several bugs have been fixed as well with the remaining bugs around children especially have been cleaned up. Coaches should also get more information around delistings and contract offers in the off-season.

There's still a number of other improvements and fixes planned in the short term which will hopefully be done in the next couple weeks. The game's been out for three months now so development should start slowing down soon and preparing for 2024 and beyond, but if 2023 can be improved, that's still a priority!

Version 2023.1.21 change log:
- Fixed: 3-team finals format contained a data error
- Fixed: Color red was being saved in custom league editor, but would appear as white if you switched to another league and then switched back
- Fixed: Promised draft improvements from 2023.1.20 weren't quite working
- Fixed: Player career information was displaying "and has also 0" instead "has also kicked X goals" due to a coding error
- Fixed: Children have proper height/weights
- Fixed: Children have proper states
- Fixed: Default game injury frequency was being set to rarely and not normal
- Fixed: You could sign free agents outside free agency signing windows
- Fixed: You would not be notified if a player had signed an extension when they were out of contract (not counterintuitive, situation exists in off-season)
- Fixed: A couple typos
- Improved: Custom team nicknames, including additional hard-coded colour schemes (so Blues are always blue)
- Improved: If you change a team's name in the pre-game editor, their stadium name will now also change
- Improved: Fitness is now easier to earn
- Improved: Players should now change skills more quickly during the off-season
- Improved: Slightly better information in a player's career bio
- Improved: You are now notified which players have not been delisted
- Improved: You are now notified when a player likes a better offer
- Improved: You can now see whose child is whose in the player log

The newest AFC2023 patch provides the biggest database update since the game launched, enforces some rules which weren't being enforced, fixes a few bugs, and makes minor improvements to save game sizes.

The database contains some additions and some fixes to incorrect data, which a number of users had asked about.

In terms of improving the game's difficulty, you could go over your player limit during national or rookie drafts - the game should now strictly enforce these player limits and warn you that you may forfeit draft picks in the process! It's perfectly normal not to make every draft pick in real life and now it adds to the challenge of building a flag-winning list.

A couple very rare crashes with some save files have been fixed and a bug where trades were being rejected for draft pick reasons has also been fixed, which was the number one issue since the last patch.

Save games are also a little bit smaller, which shouldn't matter at all in this era of large hard drives, but the game's designed to be as lean and mean as possible for something as intense as simulating the decisions of 44 players every tenth of a second over and over again...

Hope you enjoy the new patch!

Version 2023.1.20 (Released 2 June)
- Fixed: Best Young Player award was not calculating correctly
- Fixed: Crash when the game would pick an active team which wasn't in a league on game load
- Fixed: Game would occasionally crash in very specific midseason/rookie draft situations
- Fixed: Trades could not be initiated
- Fixed: AI Trade Frequency drop-down options box was re-setting to normal
- Fixed: Player limits were not being enforced for human coaches in the national or rookie drafts
- Fixed: Names now sort bi-directionally on Player Selection screen
- Improved: Changed the file format to make save files smaller, new saves will not completely work with older versions (4-5% decrease in file size, will probably void stats if you load a current file with an old version)
- Improved: Database update
- Improved: Added a few cities + Australia-NZ joint custom geography
+ Added: A debug option for scenario loading when it's not working properly (debug_file_loading=1 in Settings.csv)