Australian Football Coach 2023-24 News

Today's patch is very small but has two big impacts: more behinds, and more options on custom league start!

There was an issue with the behinds code which was causing fewer behinds than you'd expect. This has now been fixed. Also, the custom league code changed between versions, meaning that you couldn't create a custom league with a fantasy draft or choose not to be fired. This was another oversight, and you can now start your custom league with custom settings!

There is also a hot-fix for a couple small oversights in the last patch with regards to modding. Everything worked fine, but the game ran code later on down the line which reset any user inputs with regards to custom player generation parameters in Settings.csv. Also, you couldn't script teams to switch stadiums in a scenario, another oversight - this has now been added.

Finally, attendance was added to the match center screen.

Hope you enjoy these simple but important fixes!

Change log:
- Fixed: New Settings.csv player generation parameters were being overwritten before player generation
- Fixed: Created new code for whether a kick is a behind to increase the number of behinds, this could have some odd knock on results
- Improved: Added fantasy draft/preseason skipping/other options to custom leagues
- Improved: Match center now shows attendance
+ Added: Can now script stadium moves

The newest patch for Australian Football Coach 2023 has just been released and while it's really one for the modders, the game adds functionality in the direction of the overall franchise road map. One of AFC2023's core features is its customisability. For those users wanting more than a custom league, all of the database files are simple tab-separated text files and almost all of the image files are editable, and several users have already created some amazing mods as a result.

While this was expected to be a 2024 feature, this patch will let users create scenarios and then define future events, such as league expansion, adding or removing drafts, or even merging teams, as the league plays out. There's even a new dynamic merge feature which will merge the two worst-performing teams!

There's also updates for player skill generation. Users can now define the maximum upper and lower skill limits for generated players each league in a mod.

While the vast majority of coaches won't notice much (unless a crash was introduced and missed, which is always sadly possible), this is a big patch for moving the game along its development track. Look for future improvements such as adding back in more historical rules, including some from the original Australian Football Coach such as the veteran's rule, to provide more realism to historical simulations.

Apologies to those waiting on a more robust online multiplayer module - it's still coming, it's just a slog to make work correctly. Hopefully the basics will be available in the next update, including setting user passwords!

Full change log:
- Fixed: Game would sometimes crash when writing career end news stories
- Improved: Scouting reports on players on human controlled teams will always be generated when that player is recruited (via signing a contract) for the first time
- Improved: changed player peak age weights
- Improved: Added parameters for player skill generation in the scenario Settings.csv file
- Improved: Re-created veterans rule variable, though it doesn't do anything noticeable yet
+ Added: Zoned players can now be added just like draft picks
+ Added: Game now recognises Events.csv in a scenario file, allowing you to program automated league changes over time

AFC2023 has been available just under a month and thanks to your support, a number of improvements have been made across all aspects of the game.

This week's patch focuses almost exclusively on long plays. Player development has always been a strange issue in the Australian Football Coach series, as the AI is programmed to make the best possible decision it can (given parameters), so previous versions had strange bugs where the AI was drafting over-age players with the top pick in the draft. This has been mostly fixed, but there was an additional problem: players weren't retiring normally. Some would stick around for years, which is clearly not how the way player attribute modelling was supposed to work over time. However, player potential's also been designed to be a fairly complex game element, where you are able to develop young players, but not every player will necessarily reach their potential.

This version should fix that. Several tweaks were made, several long plays were conducted, and player potential was modelled and compared to expected, and it's working well now! If anything, players are now retiring too early, but that's better than having 40-year-old duffers clogging up your lists.

Most players will still progress either up to a certain age or a certain skill level, but you should see more rapid improvements in your promising youth and more rapid declines in your aging players across all save files.

The lack of updates over the past week or so was due to a lack of reported hard crashes (the primary concern with patches) and due to testing ways to improve simulation speed. This was done on a different code set and the results meant that it's more of a future project. As a result no substantial improvements have been made. This includes the online mode, which is still a work in progress. Some minor improvements to game speed have been made, but unfortunately you probably won't notice them unless you've played a long time, as the game's started to clean up some data bloat that was dragging game speeds down.

Hope you long players enjoy the new version!

CHANGE LOG
- Fixed: Leagues without any sort of feeder source (draft, zoning) now have additional automated youth intake
- Fixed: Completely reworked player development - players should now progress and regress as intended, most player development was pretty flat and players weren't cycling into retirement
- Fixed: Fitness was being treated similarly to other actual attributes and has been reworked to increase more quickly
- Fixed: Game would sometimes crash calculating attendance - not sure how widespread this was
- Fixed: Game was not loading club best and fairest winners from save files
- Fixed: Could not figure out where children were being duplicated, but wrote code to de-dupe them on save game load
- Fixed: Shortlisted players not being on a team would occasionally crash the game
- Improved: Game now unloads out of date scouting reports on saving or annual turnover
- Improved: Game now unloads out of date shortlists on annual turnover
- Improved: Slight, again likely imperceptible improvements in game speed. Haven't noticed anything in testing but may cause issues with screens not refreshing
- Improved: AI Training logic

Another day, another small patch! This one simply fixes a number of odds and ends which may have reduced your enjoyment of the game.

Version 2023.1.11 change log:
- Fixed: game would crash if you tried to create an expansion team with 3 colour hoops as a jumper
- Fixed: Suspended players weren't being removed from their team's selection
- Fixed: Debuts sometimes weren't displaying
- Fixed: Wrong columns were being centred
- Fixed: Auto-selecting a team no longer messes up which player you click on during selection
- Fixed: Players who were slightly homesick would display homesickness as a minor issue even if they were in their home state
- Fixed: Bug which caused you to accept the wrong AI trade due to a sorting error
- Fixed: A single letter typo was causing any under-21 year old to be rising star eligible
- Fixed: Scheduling bug with the odd game bye option was causing havoc
- Updated: Minor player database fixes
- Updated: Tasmanian teams should play an even number of games now
- Improved: Game scoring algorithm now uses effective disposals, not disposals, for its game calculations
+ Added: Teams must now confirm their selection by default

As the daily bug patching slowly comes to an end, today features a slightly bigger update than usual!

To start, there's a new feature for those of you who don't want to be tempted by editing, and some quality of life improvements for the free agency period!

A feature that's been requested for awhile was turning off player editing. This is now an option on game start - "hard mode." You cannot turn editing on once you've turned it off! This will likely be extended to team editing as well in the near future - don't worry, player name editing and number editing hasn't been completely removed.

Some quality of life things have been done around the off-season, including more notifications about free agency and draft days which weren't triggering, and a fancy new chart on the list management which shows you which players you've offered contracts to. There's also a fix for bidding on players who have been offered contracts by other teams - you'll be told they have an offer on the table, and they'll make a new offer that's higher than whatever their initial offer was. There's also more information about what period of the free agency window you're in, and an option to stop the game when the trade period opens. There's still an issue with some free agency notifications but those'll be sorted shortly.

Work's also been done on the online multi-player module, but it's not quite ready yet.

To start, this patch fixes several crashes and bad bugs. First the crashes:
- The game should no longer start off screen or partially off screen. Thought this had been fixed before, but it wasn't, so hopefully that's the case here, but it worked perfectly on all of the testing computers. Most users weren't impacted by this, but it was a really bad bug for the ones that were.
- The game was crashing when shortlists were being saved and then re-loaded, this was newly introduced from a couple patches ago. Your save games should return without any problem, but you may have to re-create your shortlist.
- The game wasn't randomising coaching attributes properly, so when some specific coaches were loaded from the database and got hired, they would crash the game.

And the bugs:
- Team statistics weren't saving at all.
- Sometimes interchanges wouldn't clear properly if they were cancelled. If this happened right at the start of the game, the player on the bench would be flagged to interchange but the on-field player wouldn't, meaning the player would never interchange in and play 0:00 for the game.
- The AI team selector was having difficulty with selecting multiple rucks and then substitutes not getting playing time.
- If you accepted a trade for draft picks, the other trades with those draft picks wouldn't go away.
- Expansion teams couldn't trade draft picks
- Fouling wasn't utilising the entire 1-100 attribute scale, you probably won't notice since it's not a huge change, but this has been fixed.
- The AI list manager code was occasionally delisting players who won awards. This has been named the Doug Rattray rule, after a completely ordinary fictional player in someone's fantasy draft game averaged 40 disposals a game in whatever league he played in, won the Best Player in the League award after getting drafted mid-season, and was then unceremoniously delisted. (It's unclear why he was so dominant. That's something to look into.) AI list managers will now keep players around if they're award winners.

There were a couple small tweaks to the database, and youth players had their skills reduced as they were coming into the league too powerfully.

But wait, there's more! League editors will find a couple fixes - the stadium screen shouldn't jump to the top anymore, commissioner mode should let you draft for every team again, and 24-team leagues now let you edit every team at the start of the game.

Glad you're still enjoying the game and please pop in the game hub or the discord if you have any issues or suggestions!