A thought on how to make it easier for people to get going

[Andy J 82]

To give some quick context: I'm totally in favour of the removal of the sliders and the move to the TC, despite helping me get many a minnow to be European Champions over late nights during the past few decades.

I've really been focussing on trying to get a certain style working this year, firstly in a Crewe save and now with Burnley. I'm slowly starting to get exactly what I want and it's incredibly rewarding.

From reading the complaints about the new tactics, a lot (but not all) seem to be where people have a fairly logical arrangement of players, good players but it just doesn't seem to be working quite right. I started off like this with a system that to me seemed very similar to a lot of 451 styles around at the moment and couldn't understand why I was constantly conceding similar goals. Help on here quickly pointed me in the right direction and I started to make progress.

One thing I actually really have liked is the use of roles in the past few editions - I would rather add an Advanced Playmaker than mess with a bunch of sliders to try and recreate that.

One area they could take that approach in the future could be a much clearer set of default tactics to start with. I'm trying to avoid over-dumbing down this this but you could essentially have a description that points out this particular formation is Sacchi's 4-4-2 (including the pressing, high line etc.), Venables' infamous xmas tree, Guardiola's Barcelona team etc.

I'm not suggesting it needs to be dumbed down, almost FIFA style, but I think it would help people find a similar style to the one they're looking for to start as their base for adjusting. Maybe keeping it to broad descriptions (short passing, high levels of pressing etc.) and a 'teams used' type field that says "made famous by Pep Guardiola's Barcelona team c.2011" or something like that.

What do people think?

[RTHerringbone]

I don't think it is a bad suggestion at all.

People who like to pass themselves off as "purists" will inevitably argue that it is dumbing things down, but I think it's a reasonably intermediate step between building your own tactics, and just downloading one from the forums. Those purists wouldn't need to use the new templates, in the same way as they don't have to use FMC.

One word of caution is that whatever these templates would be, they would be SI's subjective interpretations of the example styles you give.

However, given that SI presumably know how the games hangs together better than most/all, it should be a robust interpretation.

[Andy J 82]

Now you come to mention that - the times when I've been most interested in downloading tactics has been where some has managed to recreate a particular team's style. I would agree that SI would be best placed to hopefully replicate that system and include the relative strengths and weaknesses fairly accurately.

[RTHerringbone]

As long as they get that interpretation right at a Team Instruction level, then at least people will be able to see what that level of Instruction could/should look like.

I'm not sure that it would be appropriate for the templates to include Player Instructions, and this is where the idea may flounder a bit.

As an example, in Guardiola's Barcelona Dani Alves would have specific instructions, which might not be the same as those given to his replacement if Alves was injured or suspended.

[Andy J 82]

Yes I think that would need to be handled careful - both individual player instructions and even the instructions for a role. Perhaps it would need to be a bit clearer where a person wasn't playing just as a standard setup for that role.