Completely new to the game - some questions

[Willowfarthing]

1) Can I cancel contracts at the start of the game? If so, how?
2) How useful is an investment in youth? I play FM a lot and I invariably invest in youth. I'd like to do it here too but only if it's worthwhile.
3) Can I set my own field placements?

Is there a handy guide to the game somewhere? I have looked but with no success.

[Yorkie]

1. Not at the start no, but at the end of any future seasons yes.

2. There’s some really good, average and terrible youths appear. Supposedly investing more brings better talent (50k) is the max, but I’ve had amazing youths from £30k investment. (No way of telling).

3. Yes you can, these can also be named and saved too so you don’t have to use preset defaults. Move the fielder dots on the fielding screen then ‘save’. You can also ask the game options to provide your ‘saved fields’ over the games preset fields.

There’s guides within every version, accessed by 3 finger pressing on that particular screen. If you search online there’s also a downloadable pdf of the 2015 version (still relevant today) as the core fundamentals haven’t changed.

[Willowfarthing]

1. Not at the start no, but at the end of any future seasons yes.

2. There’s some really good, average and terrible youths appear. Supposedly investing more brings better talent (50k) is the max, but I’ve had amazing youths from £30k investment. (No way of telling).

3. Yes you can, these can also be named and saved too so you don’t have to use preset defaults. Move the fielder dots on the fielding screen then ‘save’. You can also ask the game options to provide your ‘saved fields’ over the games preset fields.

There’s guides within every version, accessed by 3 finger pressing on that particular screen. If you search online there’s also a downloadable pdf of the 2015 version (still relevant today) as the core fundamentals haven’t changed.

Thank you so much! This is helpful.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is 3 finger pressing?

[Yorkie]

Lol, I play on IPad and automatically presumed you are. So on iPads 3 finger pressing the screen brings up that particular help guide in game. It’s brilliant.
Maybe this is a right mouse click on PC I’m not sure?
Someone with a PC will come on and tell us shortly!

[Wilted]

Guides for each screen are accessed with F1 on PC.

Investing in youth development is definitely worthwhile but as Yorkie said, there are good, average and terrible youth players. The good ones will be some of the greatest players to ever play the game though so it's always worth picking a few up early on. The other option to spending the budget on youth development is to just poach the best available youth/'regen' players from the contract screen. Either way, you'll need youth players after a season or two to keep up with other teams using youth players.

[Yorkie]

There you go, thanks Wilted!

Just to add too that an easy way of knowing which youths/regens are going to be the more promising ones, it’s the ones normally asking for higher salaries. As a newbie you may not realise this and remember there’s no abilities etc to view like FM. So when viewing the ‘Youth’ contract screen look for players salaries, it’s a bit of a giveaway but generally correct.

[Willowfarthing]

Thanks for the help. Realy appreciate it.

[Sureshot]

There's some pretty good information in here:

https://www.childishthings.com/forum/forum/current-and-future-games/cricket-captain-2019/66759-rough-guide-to-formats