A Change in Mentality

[ricardomac]

I've been too quíte. But now, a something came to my mind. So I decided to create this little thread. Both to seek for help and, hopefuly, to start a discussion.

A few years back, I guess it was the 2011 version of the game, I watched a vídeo, made by Uncle Sam, on how he played. His idea was that what you needed to do was, simply addapt your team's mentality acording to the match events. I decided to follow and ended um há vingança lots of success. Lately I read that Cleon does the same thing, sometimes, I guess.

I wonder, is it possible to just change your team's mentality, o is the game, these days, só complex that you need a lot more than that?

What do you guys think?

[Cleon]

Changing mentality alone is fine a lot of times, that's all I ever do when I'm not writing guides and such.

[Rashidi]

I generally play with one tactic for an entire season and then make a new one for the next, as long as a tactic is solid, well thought out and you have the right players you can to some extent just change mentalities, the most I have done in one game i think was 4 times...cos it was such a crazy match.

[Dr. Hook]

To add a different perspective, I typically don't change mentality in matches. I make adjustments with team instructions, and roles and duties when I am looking for something different. That said, I will if necessary, so never say never

[RTHerringbone]

Supposing that you keep the same formation,

when you change mentality in game ,you must change some of the roles and the duties too

Why?

A change in Mentality is quite a significant change, so why do you feel the need to change Roles and Duties too?

[RTHerringbone]

because its a different philosophy

And why does that matter? If I have a standard, flat 4-4-2 with very generic Role / Duty settings, why should I need to change them just because I ask the team to move from Counter to Standard? The truth is this: you just don't have to do it at all. There would be a decent reason to do so if switching from Counter to Attacking, but not a single shift up/down the mentality scale.

[Dr. Hook]

because there are some roles that provoke urgent build-up-play and some others patient build-up -play

you can't play counter with slow build-up play

Look at it this way: the mentality governs how much risk vs reward you are willing to tolerate in terms of getting forward (in its most simplistic form). Your system can remain intact with roles and duties and all you are adjusting is how high your d-line goes, how often players push into more attacking areas etc. There is no reason that you have to change the mechanical working of your role and duty allocation. They are going to the same things basically just more or less attacking. You might want to change roles and/or duties if that is where you need to fix a problem, but there is no need to automatically assume a change is needed.

[Jambo98]

In my simplicity approach, mentality is just about the only tweak i make. Not only that, i use it an entirely "predictable" way - If i am ahead at a certain point in the game i will go "defensive", if i am behind i will go "attacking". In a real urgent situation i might go "overload".

My starting mentality is always "standard", and the 2 moderate adjusters i never used (counter and control).

Its a bit "basic", and previously not how i would play - Previously i always changed things individually - Adjust the DLine and tempo for example, or width. I didnt like that the mentality modifiers change so many things "under the hood" when all i wanted was less or more risk taking. That said, the basic approach has worked pretty well for me. More often than not, the mentality change has the desired effect.

[ricardomac]

So, I guess we can say that a simple change of team mentality, adapting it to the current of the match, is enough, I guess. I just beat Sporting CP, 2-0, and only changed my team's mentality. Ok, I'm Benfica, and am a lot better, but that is not the point. I'll keep on going this way and see how the league ends.

[Rashidi]

To put things in perspective, you may need to change some TI's around, but you can use the same system with changes in mentality. Facing up to Barcelona, a team we were expected to lose to, I changed my default mentality by playing counter, made 2 TI changes that included going narrow and playin more direct and we hammered them 4-1. Ordinarily I am playing the system on Attacking mentality and wide with no passing TIs

[ricardomac]

Yeah! I probably should be looking at some of my TI's, but since coming back to this system, in the Sporting CP match, I have only lost one. In the penalties, to Paços de Ferreira, for the Portuguese Cup. That kind of sucks.