Over two hundred Open Alpha builds – what has become of Startelf

Over Two Hundred Builds Later

When I opened the Open Alpha at the beginning of September, Startelf was a manager game that worked. Since then, more than two hundred builds have been added, and I want to show you what it has become — not build by build, but what you actually notice when you start a career now.

One thing first, and it is an uncomfortable one: Your old careers no longer work. I completely rebuilt the save-game format and redesigned the club facilities from the ground up. Old saves are cleanly rejected when loaded instead of giving you a half-working career. Please start a new career. I know how frustrating that is — but the foundation is now in place for everything that follows.

The Summer Is Yours Now

Until now, pre-season was nothing more than a period that the game managed in the background. Now it is its own part of your season.

You plan the summer on the calendar. Training start, end of pre-season, as many training camps and friendly matches as you want — click on a day and assign an event on the right. Two short camps in July are just as possible as one long one.

Training camps now have a goal, a programme and a location. Twenty-two goals across seven categories, six programmes, plus the duration from your calendar — and the three influence each other: building basic endurance in the high mountains provides significantly more benefit than a tactical training session in a mountain hut, and if a goal is scheduled below its minimum duration, it provides no benefit at all. Every goal also has a real location: the Costa del Sol in Marbella, the altitude camp in Merano, or a short camp in a town near your club. The booking window shows the location, distance, means of travel and the weather on the first day of the camp.

And your team is actually there. The weather shown in the header comes from the camp location. If you travel from the camp to a match, you travel from there. A home friendly is played at the training ground at your camp — no spectators, no ticket revenue. If a camp has no pitch, mountain hut or boot camp, there is no such facility.

The friendly-match search has become a summer schedule. Instead of two tabs with tables, you now see the entire pre-season as one timeline: training start, camps, played and scheduled friendlies, free dates and the start of the league. For every possible opponent, you can see what actually matters — their strength compared with your team, the travel distance, whether they accept and, if not, why. Because the opponent now calculates too: Anyone travelling to you expects their travel costs to be covered, and a flight has to be worthwhile for the match. CPU clubs also book their camps in July and arrange regional friendlies with each other — if they are with you in Marbella, they may end up playing an opponent just around the corner.

The Club Facilities: From Buildings to Levels

A facility is now a progression ladder. A small, large and prestigious club house used to stand as three separate buildings on your grounds. Now they are three levels of the same club house. This applies to eleven types of facilities, from the scouting office to the youth academy, while the scouting network has the longest ladder with five levels. You can skip levels — but then you pay for all the levels in between. You save time, not money.

And the prices are finally affordable. Until now, almost every facility had a flat price of 500,000. More than half of all clubs never had that much money in their account and could build nothing during an entire career. The first level now costs between 20,000 and 120,000 depending on the facility, with maintenance costing half a percent of the construction price per month. Even as a third-tier club, you can now start improving your facilities.

Your pitches now get their own equipment — and it is not a bonus, but insurance. Floodlights, irrigation, drainage and under-soil heating are built individually for each pitch. Snow, frost, heavy rain, heat and fog can make a pitch unplayable on certain days, while worn-out pitches are affected more often. When that happens, the training session is cancelled, and the daily log tells you which pitch was affected and why.

Seven development targets from a village club to a world-class facility show you what belongs to each target, what you already have and how much everything missing will cost in total. One click queues everything at once.

The World Now Has Distances

This is the change that looks least like a feature but changes the most: Clubs, stadiums and training camps now have an address, and there is a distance between any two locations.

Away trips cost money. Bus or plane, accommodation, meals — all booked from the "Travel, Accommodation, Training Camps" budget. How expensive it becomes depends on the size of your club and the distance: A local derby can be handled by bus, while a long journey can cost several times as much. Your board sets the travel budget based on the actual opponents in your league and knows that a European away match means a flight, not a day trip.

And travelling takes a toll on your players. The further you travel, the more tired your players start the match. You will not necessarily notice it at kick-off, but later in the game as their energy starts to run out. If your team collapses late in the match, it is worth taking a look at the journey. Beforehand, you can see the distance, means of travel and cost in the match preview and the calendar.

Finals now take place at a real location. At the beginning of the season, the association selects a stadium for every final based on its size, modernity and condition, while also making sure that the same stadium is not selected every year. On neutral ground, neither team has home advantage. If you reach a final in your own stadium, you have it. If your stadium is selected, the board will notify you of the approval and the amount you receive for hosting the final.

Stadiums now have their own file just like clubs and players: seating and standing capacity, covered areas, condition, value, who plays here and how much they pay in rent. The "The Structure" tab displays all fourteen stands surrounding the pitch. And the "Finals" tab breaks down the association's decision — so you can see why your stadium was passed over. Modernity is no longer a fixed number: renovating your stadium actually makes it more modern and brings you closer to hosting a final.

You Can Now Share Your Data: The Steam Workshop

If you work on your own database with the editor, you can now publish it directly from the editor to the Workshop — with a title, description, preview image and visibility setting, private by default, so that a first attempt does not immediately become public.

In the game, a "Workshop" button in the footer of the main menu opens a window for browsing, subscribing and unsubscribing. A subscribed database then appears in the database selection, and you can start your career with it. When uploading, only the database and the images from the images folder are transferred, and you are shown beforehand what will remain behind; in the game, a subscribed database is checked before it is offered to you.

The Game Has Become Significantly Faster

You cannot take screenshots of loading times, but this is the change you will notice most often. Measured using a save with 226,000 players:

• Loading: from 27–34 seconds down to 8.7 seconds
• Saving: from 19.6 down to 7.3 seconds
• Creating a new game: from around 40 down to 12.9 seconds
• Save-game file size: from 331 down to 231 megabytes

The matchday itself has also become faster: Matches involving other clubs are now calculated simultaneously across all CPU cores, with each match processed in one go until the final whistle instead of progressing second by second. "The players are warming up" no longer keeps you waiting for long.

Matchday Looks Different Now

Above the matchday and during the live match, you now see the same banner in the colours of both clubs, separated by a diagonal seam, with the crests, names, league positions and form — and the kick-off time in the seam. Next to it are the competition, matchday, stadium, expected attendance and the weather at the match location, which is a different city when a final is played at a neutral venue.

In the live match, momentum, duels, zones, statistics, line-ups and match events now use the actual club colours instead of a fixed red and blue. If both clubs are too similar, the away team switches to its secondary colour.

The form trail finally counts everything: league, cup, super cup and European competitions combined, sorted by date. Hover over a box and you get the competition and round, both clubs, the result and the goalscorers with the minute they scored.

And Almost Every Screen Has Been Rebuilt

This is by far the largest part of this Alpha in terms of sheer volume, and it is difficult to list everything. Among other things, the club dossier, country dossier, inbox, career, boardroom, squad overview, match report, negotiation table, transfer list, player profile, staff profile, your staff and the personnel market, the header, statistics as a ranking, training reports, the weekly progression as a diary and the calendar as a planning board have all been rebuilt.

The guiding principle was the same everywhere: Numbers should become meaningful statements. A screen should not simply show which values are stored in the save game, but what they mean for your club.

Small Things That Make Up Everyday Life

• Austria and Denmark have been added — sixteen playable countries, both with split seasons.
• The national Super Cup is being played for the first time ever. It existed as a competition in thirteen countries but never generated a single match.
• In the squad planner, you can drag players with the mouse, and change shirt numbers directly below the squad table.
• Free agents were automatically fully scouted — exact strength, exact potential, every attribute, regardless of how far your scouting had progressed. They now follow the actual progression rules too.
• Vacation mode now shows the actual weekly progression in fast-forward instead of a progress bar above a frozen menu.
• If you click out of the game while in windowed mode, it continues calculating normally — only the controls are locked.
• And the game takes up less space: graphics that nobody ever saw and libraries for Android, iOS, Linux and Mac have been removed.

What Comes Next

The next step is not a new system, but a major playtest covering several seasons. Much of what is described here has been built, but has not yet been fully balanced — construction prices, travel costs, the effects of training camps, home advantage. That comes next.

If anything here seems fundamentally wrong to you, please tell me. Almost everything described above goes back to something uncovered during the tester round: the third centre-back who was invisibly standing behind the defensive midfielder. The construction prices nobody could afford. The form trail that, before a cup match, somehow hid the last cup appearance. That is exactly what the Alpha is for.

I would like to sincerely thank everyone who has accompanied me this far, especially the people helping with the Alpha test. I would especially like to thank BollBo by name! On his YouTube channel, he described the game in detail. Seeing the game through his eyes showed me what needed to be improved, and that is why I completely focused on redesigning the UI of almost all menus. I hope you can see the difference in the game!

And now: I am looking forward to more feedback, and I am incredibly happy with how Startelf has developed!