Tactic Development

[Fisher310]

One of my favourite parts of the game is playing with a lower team/ underdog and overachieving. This is fairly easy to do in the first season as you are able to go out and attack teams because they think of you as weaker. In following seasons this always seems to become harder for me, I don't think that the AI learns my tactics, just that they realise my team is decent so they change the way they play against me. I was wondering what everyone does to adjust their system to fit this. Change formation? Change system? Use different shouts? It's so frustrating seeing your tactic being less effective

Sorry if anything like this has already been posted.

Cheers

[furiousuk]

Have a look here

I go into a fair amount of depths of one way I dealt with the exact problem you're describing. The first 433 is a smash-mouth tactic that attacks with a sledgehammer so is great against teams who will come at you or teams you can physically dominate, the 2nd tactic presented (at the end) shows a more cunning and complex 433 that is more useful for the stronger teams playing against negativity. I have a few different systems to deal with smaller, negative teams but the thread presents my thinking behind creating any of those other systems.

[Karnage94]

I was going to say something along the lines of what furiousuk posted. From what I've learned from my own teams rise, you have to make the very most of the space you are given. The opposition aren't going to leave so many gaps to exploit so your going to have to break them down and each team will be different. I had a game that I played last night vs Osasuna, a team that play with a back 3, wing backs and a narrow diamond midfield with a lone striker. It's not a formation that pops up often but the natural place to exploit them is down the flanks.

My problem is that whilst I had a couple of good out and out wingers, My team isn't great at getting on the end of crosses and since they were playing with 3 centre backs (and for most of the game had 8 players in and around there penalty area) Getting past the wing back and whipping a cross in wasn't working.

So I eventually decided to push my wingers inside and told them to attack the box. I also pushed my full backs forward to wing back and gave them an attack duty, something I hadn't done before. 3 minutes later my right wing back motors past his man and fires a low ball into the box. The extra players hanging around the box gave my striker less defenders to wriggle free from and he tapped in the only goal of the game.

It's things like changing the angle of attack to exploit a defensive weakness that will get you wins against very negative teams. Hope that helps you out.

[DEERHAUNTER]

I did have a tactic for this on FM11 whereby I played a 4-5-1 in the hope I could have more mids passing it between each other which means they drag out the defenders so there's space behind for the ST/Wingers to run into. Worked rather well but I've uninstalled FM11, so I doubt the tactic will still be there.

Also I found crossing low into the box helps significantly as there are loads of defenders they sometimes get in each others way, botch their clearances and it lands in their net or too one of my players! Or at the very least I get a throw-in/corner out of it!