And my grand starting strategy is...

Now that the old GW's have closed, everyone is giving lots of thought to how they are going to approach their new world. Many people have been discussing starting strategies from Jakswan to Rik Stewart to a long discussion on the official forums about skill specialisations.

So I thought I'd use this post to reveal that my grand starting strategy for my new GW will be... (drum roll please)...

Not to have a grand starting strategy.

Huh, I hear you say. Well, let me explain. When I first stumbled across FML in January 09 it was just after the initial retail launch, and the game was full of beta testers who were used to starting new GWs over and over and over again. All the strategy talk was about how to start in a new GW to give yourself the best chance of doing well. And therein lay one of the big problems about the old FML - too often it was all about being in the know about how to start a new world and get ahead. If you did that right, you didn't really have to take any strategic decisions further down the line - you were set up for life. So the only strategy to discuss really was starting strategy.

Now SI have tried to make it different. They don't want it to be about the first week or even the first hour; they want the game to be a long-term one where you're constantly faced with strategic decisions. Hence the initial squad pools, restrictions on cash for the first few seasons, and higher wages for top teams later on. Yet all the discussion is still about what the best grand scale starting strategy is. I think that's dangerous, because I think that this time if you start off with one strategy and stick to it rigidly you're going to come badly unstuck. So I plan to be flexible.

All that said, you still obviously need a bit of an initial strategy. Mine will be to be fairly cautious for two seasons, not spending prodigously but building a squad with some reasonable players and hopefully at worst making it in to the middle tier of the final season of qualifiers. After that I can judge where to take things - if I've been more successful than expected I'll want to build my stadium and use the cash from that to buy top-end players. If I do worse than expected, I'll start flinging up youth academies across the globe and try to build for the future.

However, the one catch that I see with my non-strategy strategy is the fact that I'm carrying over some 11.4 million bonus skill points. These need spending, and with the new system of specialisations I'm going to have to pick before I'm really ready to which skill areas to focus on. Ironically, if I were starting from scratch I could use my first two seasons to build up to 3* in every skill area, and then decide where to specialise after that. But I'm too greedy to give up my skill points ;) So the question becomes, for a player looking to hedge their bets, which skill specialisations leave most doors open for you longer term? I'll look at that in my next post.