You messed up match engine

[sporadicsmiles]

53 minutes ago, RBKalle said:

But you have to concede the TC/UI doesn't say a damn thing to the user about how not-even-remotely-good that formation is...

The formation is fine, it is the roles that are wrong. I agree that the UI is not good at showing this, but I am not sure what it could do. This is down to bad role and duty selection coupled with the TIs.

54 minutes ago, RBKalle said:

And frankly at face value there doesn't seem to be much wrong with it. Sure, 2 playmakers, one of which as AMC may feel redundat, and two IFs are likely a fair explaination for the "player shoots instead of passing" annoyance, but it looks like a perfectly viable and "normal" formation.

I have to disagree. At face value there is a huge amount wrong with the way this is set up. It does not require a huge amount of depth of knowledge to see it either. It is the combination of TIs and roles/duties that make it bad. The roles/duties could work well if the team were set up to play deeper and look to counter attack. To me (and no offense meant here, I am making a general statement rather than criticising you directly here) the problem is treating each role in isolation, and thinking "yeah, seems alright". But this is doomed from the start. It is how the players interact that will determine whether something works or not. Here the players are not interacting well, and it is quite clearly the case just thinking about what each player does.

I think this could be solved by either having more sensible default formations (ones that have been shown to work well with the TIs/PIs) and/or having a tutorial in the game explaining this. Something that animates what players actually do, and explaining how the interaction of different roles is very important. You can illustrate with one example in the tactics introduction, for instance. At worst it gets people thinking along these lines from the offset.

[Svenc]

15 minutes ago, sporadicsmiles said:

The roles/duties could work well if the team were set up to play deeper and look to counter attack. 

The reason why counter attacks would work was because they're counter attacks. Upon a counter attack, some Default behavior is overwrittenyways, as Players surge Forward upon one such is triggered. Any positional attack with the roles/duties interacting the way they do would imo spring similar issues. How much so depends also a bit on how the Opposition lines up exactly. However, rather than arguing About specifics: Your quality thought process -- same as me arguing about the influence of the Opposition -- more than anything else Highlights why the AI likewise will never be quite up to par in the current tactics module. The AI is and Always will be incapable of "thinking" in Terms like this.   (Nor would they log on to philosophize about the value of playing deeper when assigning specific roles/duties to Players, as opposed to pushing up). General rule of thumb, the more factors to consider, the bigger the gap between Ai and human Manager -- that is one who somewhat "gets the game"... which seems another issue on top of it.

Edited November 22, 2019 by Svenc

[enigmatic]

1 hour ago, RBKalle said:

But you have to concede the TC/UI doesn't say a damn thing to the user about how not-even-remotely-good that formation is...

And frankly at face value there doesn't seem to be much wrong with it. Sure, 2 playmakers, one of which as AMC may feel redundat, and two IFs are likely a fair explaination for the "player shoots instead of passing" annoyance, but it looks like a perfectly viable and "normal" formation.

Yeah, tend to agree with this. If anything, the UI is more likely to encourage this sort of thing by the roles graphics suggesting your AMC is more naturally suited to the AP role than, say, an SS which might actually be more effective in creating chances.

It has an obvious flaw in lack of defensive cover and more subtle flaws in the form of a lot of players wanting to occupy the same space in the middle of the pitch just outside the box, but it also looks a lot like [1] a pretty regular attacking football setup in terms of roles and [2]  the sort of tactic that has often overperformed against the AI in recent FMs, especially the overloading the middle bit which people are reasonably arguing is illogical.

Edited November 22, 2019 by enigmatic

[Rashidi]

1 hour ago, RBKalle said:

But you have to concede the TC/UI doesn't say a damn thing to the user about how not-even-remotely-good that formation is...

And frankly at face value there doesn't seem to be much wrong with it. Sure, 2 playmakers, one of which as AMC may feel redundat, and two IFs are likely a fair explaination for the "player shoots instead of passing" annoyance, but it looks like a perfectly viable and "normal" formation.

Hmm i mean if the AI ever came at me with that formation it is in for a massive scoreline in my favour.

[westy8chimp]

Just now, enigmatic said:

Yeah, tend to agree with this. 

It has an obvious flaw in lack of defensive cover and more subtle flaws in the form of a lot of players wanting to occupy the same space in the middle of the pitch just outside the box, but it also looks a lot like [a] a pretty regular attacking football setup in terms of roles and the sort of tactic that has often overperformed in recent FMs, especially the overloading the middle bit which people are reasonably arguing is illogical.

Any attempt to try and pigeon hole a formation as right or wrong would be incorrect in itself tho. As sporadic says... The formation is fine. 

 

The players might be wrong, or the roles, or the instructions, or the mentality... Or elements of each. Then there is the biggest variable, the opposition. 

This all before a ball is kicked. 

Its such a subjective area too, no game could ever be coded to say yay or nay to a formation? We could have 100 different opinions and suggestions if 10 of us sat in a room. The joy of FM is observing, tweaking, learning, developing. Not being spoonfed the winning formula

[Nikola75]

I've played 7-8 games so far, but have noticed big number of offsides. I am still tweaking tactics, but this is way too much, not only strikers and wingers, my wingbacks are getting caught too frequently. 

[enigmatic]

5 minutes ago, westy8chimp said:

Any attempt to try and pigeon hole a formation as right or wrong would be incorrect in itself tho. As sporadic says... The formation is fine. 

 

The players might be wrong, or the roles, or the instructions, or the mentality... Or elements of each. Then there is the biggest variable, the opposition. 

This all before a ball is kicked. 

Its such a subjective area too, no game could ever be coded to say yay or nay to a formation? We could have 100 different opinions and suggestions if 10 of us sat in a room. The joy of FM is observing, tweaking, learning, developing. Not being spoonfed the winning formula

Tend to agree about not being spoonfed the winning formula and especially about the opposition being the biggest variable [in a match engine that doesn't have glaring flaws]

Doesn't help that FM does try to spoonfeed you information which isn't that helpful though. You do get assman advice on how to deal with the opposition, but it's basically play the tactical style the assman is set to prefer rather than why are you trying to play through the middle when they're set up narrow with two DMs? And then there's all those UI elements which suggest you must select a player as an AP because they will underperform in any other role...

[s0ni42]

I’m not trying to be rude, but this tactic screams of an inexperienced player. That’s ok, there’s loads of content to help someone learn, tweak, and improve. I would suggest any new player to get out a pen and paper and sketch out any formations with movement arrows and “principles of play” before going into game. 
 

As others have said, there are far too many team instructions. Simplify to give you a better shot at finding the right tweaks. Remove contradictory/duplicate instruction (shorter passing and passing into space?) Imagine saying those two instructions out loud to a player.

I’m sure there’s a situational tactic that makes sense for two playmakers (killing a game with huge lead) but I’d agree it’s going to grind your tempo down to nill. They are just going to play catch for an hour and a half.

Way too much going forward up front. There’s no guile involved to pull and tug players out of position to create space. 
 

I would recommend finding inspiration from a real life team to get started.

 

 

Edited November 22, 2019 by s0ni42

[RBKalle]

4 ore fa, sporadicsmiles ha scritto:

I have to disagree. At face value there is a huge amount wrong with the way this is set up. It does not require a huge amount of depth of knowledge to see it either. It is the combination of TIs and roles/duties that make it bad.

Sometimes it's just default tactics/TI that create messy and contradictory setups and users, especially newbies and/or semi-casuals (or those who don't have time or inclination to watch 10 pre-season friendlies on Extended highlights to fine-tune a couple of TI/PI).

If you can't "trust" the in-game wizard (and much less your staff) it's pretty obvious many will be tempted to overcomplicate or will simply fall for one of the many pitfalls

4 ore fa, sporadicsmiles ha scritto:

the problem is treating each role in isolation

Once again, the TC is to blame...

You decide to play Gegenpress because it's all the rage since its intoduction, you pick one of the 3 recommended formations and then you find out that half of your Starting XI isn't suited for those roles... So you can either leave it at that, with all the yellow circles, or you're obviously tempted to "fix" it, getting as many Green circles as you can and inadvertently screwing the original setup beyond recognition and repair.

I think SI should just get rid of those horribly confusing circles, leaving the Tactical Familiarity bar as the only indicator of how well a player is suited for the position he's being played in.

After all, you can have the world's best Poacher playing as a poacher, but he'll be shockingly ineffective if placed in a formation that requires a False Nine or a traditional Target Man. He'll be "Accomplished" and Happy in that position, yet he'll perform like Ali Dia because he doesn't fit.

Multiply it for 3 or 4 more players, and it's easy to see why things go south quickly.

Also a "1 Playmaker only" warning should be in order, alongside "maybe 2CFs (A) are overkill" etc...

It's not saying that FM should spoonfed us every tiny tactical detail, but at the very least NOT CONFUSE users with conflicting and misleading data. Assistent Manager should definitely point out blatant tactical flaws besides "if you play 2 DMs and 1 AM, the cental area of the pitch will be exposed".
Stuff like "2 IFs and two AFs in a narrow formation will crowd get into eachother's way and produce very little" and similar scenarios where the tactical prowess is much smaller than the sum of the individual parts (due to fitting individial roles not fitting into the picture they create) should definitely be pointed out in tactical analyses and briefings.

[isignedupfornorealreason]

11 hours ago, RBKalle said:

But you have to concede the TC/UI doesn't say a damn thing to the user about how not-even-remotely-good that formation is...

I thought the red/green patches on the pitch was a decent step forward in solving that. Plus, the pre-made tactics. But, in FM20 I don't think the pitch suitability map is working appropriately at all, and furthermore, that only really covers positional strength/weaknesses rather than patterns of play.

 

11 hours ago, Lempicka said:

I always felt that this is where an Assistant Manager should help more in the game. Nothing too drastic, but more of a heads up in extreme cases.

Yes, this is what the AM should be there for. But, I think it's pretty much lore that he's useless and should be ignored. Like, the advice to combine the defensive/support/attack duties with the match mentalities is something I think people on the Tactics forums said not to follow because it is misleading at best.

I think the big issue with tactics and roles is the language used by the game and the language used by football fans can be at cross-purpose. It also feels, for me anyway, that outside of a select few who 'get it' and post lots of running commentary on how to set up tactics and whatnot, the vast majority rely on rather unusual, unbalanced tactical set ups that do the job from sheer quality at times. That's my experience of looking at tactics on Steam, Reddit, sometimes here and on other FM fansites, and also my friends who play the game, they always go for fairly aggressive set ups that feed into the "I got FM'd 0-1 loss" sort of incidents. 

IMO, I think the tactics induction needs to be bigger, more inclusive and more educational, but as an optional part for users to go through. I certainly wouldn't mind going through something like that to learn more about the tactical set ups etc. For example, I can usually do well with a 4-4-2 or variants thereof, but for whatever reason I simply can not get a top-heavy formation to work as well as the majority of people seem to do, I've no idea if it is my role selection that is the issue or whether I'm too passive in the team instructions/mentality etc. 

But anyway, I think that would be an exhaustive thing for SI to work on, so I can't see it happening, I think it's just easier to pass players off to the Tactics forums and see if they can survive that.

[Svenc]

31 minutes ago, isignedupfornorealreason said:

But anyway, I think that would be an exhaustive thing for SI to work on, so I can't see it happening, I think it's just easier to pass players off to the Tactics forums and see if they can survive that.

Which is curious, given that there's usually also a share of the negative Feedback that you can track back to suspect tactical picks…And also to the many illogical Downloads having the occasional 60+ crapshot match without scoring once (These numbers are not made up, in particular on Releases without set piece exploits shared alongside), and so much more curiosities (magical AI Comebacks, immediate replies to Goals, and so on.) They're shooting themselves into their own foot here. 

But indeed, that's Always been SI Policy. Actually, it was the tactical community that had driven much of the changes in Terms of the game's tactical Gameplay in the past.

Edited November 23, 2019 by Svenc

[Artin]

On 21/11/2019 at 06:18, Prej said:

Actually, the match engine seems to be one thing they really polished, compared to FM19.

agree with this. the ME is the best version yet. feels like real-life football to me.

[SmurfDude]

My team is dominating, I'm winning almost every match. But I still think the attacking play in this ME sucks. So many missed 1 vs 1 chances, so many ridiculous shots, so many wasted chances. Attacking wingers are pointless because all they will do is shoot at the side netting. 

As I type this I'm beating PSG 2-0 and I've seen Mbappe twice dribble past my defence and in to the box only to take a pointless shot from a tight angle. It takes the fun out of winning because it feels broken. 

Edited November 23, 2019 by SmurfDude

[Ras]

I actually agree in it’s current state it’s the poorest match engine for a couple of years.

The players do unnaturally stupid things and there seems to be a lack of variety.  

I’m not sure if it was the last game or the prior 1 but thought the match engine seemed excellent.  Currently there’s big flaws that are badly effecting my enjoyment of the game.

[Ras]

My penalty taker had 19 for pens and he’s missed nearly every penalty bar 1 and I’ve got a lot of them.

When I set players to be in position for attacking corners they don’t stay there or go to odd positions.

When I set to distribute to the target man it distributes to the advanced forward instead.

Basic things aren’t being done, the players seem unrealistically stupid.  

I think it should be clearer to get the players to do what you want.  At the moment seems big flaws with the match engine from my experience.  

Still getting an abundance of penalties happening as mentioned and nearly all the ones for me are being missed.

I think I read it was revamped this year, at the moment not sure it’s been for the best, over recent additions I’ve noticed improvements, this is the first 1 that feels like a backwards step and is hampering my enjoyment of the game.

[hazzabish]

On 21/11/2019 at 12:53, Mr U Rosler said:

Basically its much more realistic

 

The end result might be, but the in game action of how they get there isn't. Ridiculously easy one on ones constantly missed and the very well known issue of wide men shooting from the byline instead of crossing means that it's hard to watch games, even if the end result numbers seem more realistic.

Edited November 23, 2019 by hazzabish

[robinthebest]

1 hour ago, hazzabish said:

The end result might be, but the in game action of how they get there isn't. Ridiculously easy one on ones constantly missed and the very well known issue of wide men shooting from the byline instead of crossing means that it's hard to watch games, even if the end result numbers seem more realistic.

yes, the 1v1 misses and wingers shoots to byline looks so forced to make the end result looks realistic, but in fact not

[westy8chimp]

9 hours ago, RBKalle said:

Also a "1 Playmaker only" warning should be in order, alongside "maybe 2CFs (A) are overkill" etc...

This is where we get into tricky ground. I'd say this is false information and completely dependant on what the manager is trying to achieve. Playmaker are essentially used to control the pattern of play when your team have the ball. (they have secondary purposes like creating overloads by drawing in the opposition more than a standard role etc)... But its quite normal to have 2 play makers. Common setup is a dlp in the defensive half to control how you move from the defensive phase, and an attacking playmaker in the opponents half to control the attacking phase... Ap/tq etc. You could use 3 playmakers if you are a team with 3 standout technicicians... You telegraph the passing lanes and become a little one dimensional, but if you have 8 Titus brambles and 3 pirlos in the team, perhaps being one dimensional is the lesser evil. 

When it comes to CF you've picked the worst example lol. As a role that will attempt all aspects of the game, why not have 2? Instead of saying to one striker you are the one who comes deep and holds the ball up and the other is the one who plays on the shoulder... If you have two similar strikers with good decision making... Give them freedom to decide between themselves based on the situation. 

[Dagenham_Dave]

3 hours ago, hazzabish said:

The end result might be, but the in game action of how they get there isn't. Ridiculously easy one on ones constantly missed and the very well known issue of wide men shooting from the byline instead of crossing means that it's hard to watch games, even if the end result numbers seem more realistic.

 

2 hours ago, robinthebest said:

yes, the 1v1 misses and wingers shoots to byline looks so forced to make the end result looks realistic, but in fact not

Any chance we could leave the hyperbolic nonsense in the feedback thread please? I'm trying to enjoy other areas of the forum without this guff cropping up again and again. My game's 1v1 conversion is fine, and I've not seen the 'winger shoot from the byline' since the original beta build, so it's not the same for everyone. Post in the bugs forum if you feel it's wrong, this thread is about helping the OP get the best from his tactic. 

[hazzabish]

1 hour ago, Dagenham_Dave said:

 

Any chance we could leave the hyperbolic nonsense in the feedback thread please? I'm trying to enjoy other areas of the forum without this guff cropping up again and again. My game's 1v1 conversion is fine, and I've not seen the 'winger shoot from the byline' since the original beta build, so it's not the same for everyone. Post in the bugs forum if you feel it's wrong, this thread is about helping the OP get the best from his tactic. 

How is it 'hyperbolic'? It seems to me this is the most appropriate thread, don't you? There has been an abundance of examples of it happening. It happens every game.

Edited November 23, 2019 by hazzabish

[Dagenham_Dave]

4 minutes ago, hazzabish said:

 It seems to me this is the most appropriate thread, don't you? 

Well no. If you think it's a bug in the game, oh I dunno, maybe there's a whole section on here for that. Just a thought. 

Every issue in the game is magnified to overblown proportions on here. Always has been, likely always will be.

[hazzabish]

7 hours ago, Dagenham_Dave said:

Well no. If you think it's a bug in the game, oh I dunno, maybe there's a whole section on here for that. Just a thought. 

Every issue in the game is magnified to overblown proportions on here. Always has been, likely always will be.

I'm posting in a thread about the match engine, with posts about the match engine. I haven't used any hyperbolic language whatsoever. The one having a hissy fit here is not me.

Edited November 23, 2019 by hazzabish

[dom.march]

Le 22/11/2019 à 03:43, extremeskins04 a dit :

These are my 3 main tactics.  The 5-1-2-2 Gegenpress is the one I use against Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal, etc.  Works wonders.  They don't know what to do lol.

The other two I use on the other teams in the EPL.  The 4-1-4-1 is insane.  Scores alot of goals.

 

 

Hi, could you share your tac ?

[El_sambo]

Mate I feel your pain. I'm actually doing really well in my game but watching this match engine is just awful tbh 

[Bakiano]

I hope they will fix at least shooting from thight angles. I could score so many tap ins but never scored in that way. 

 

Last night AI scored a goal where I thought it was a tap in (watching games in 2D and replay of goals in 3D) and when I watched the replay, the player who assisted the goalscorer, was actually shooting from there!!

[shirajzl]

On 23/11/2019 at 00:55, isignedupfornorealreason said:

the vast majority rely on rather unusual, unbalanced tactical set ups that do the job from sheer quality at times. 

You just described 90% of successful FM Youtubers. If you couldn't brute force your way to success in FM, I wonder how many of them would still do YT videos.