ceefax the cat

Yes. Mentality should purely be a function of other instructions. Positions/roles should pretty much be a function of attributes.

The tactics creator genuinely seems designed to make the game seem like an impenetrable black box at times. Select 'Extremely direct' passing and watch as your passing options for fullbacks, midfielders and strikers disappear to be replaced by the single choice: "shorter passing". The one thing you have specifically asked your team not to do, with no option to change it. What the TC means, of course, is 'shorter passing in the context of extremely direct passing' which makes almost no sense. If 8 outfield players are described as passing it 'shorter' then that's not 'extremely direct passing' is it? You'll also find your NCB's hardwired to 'more direct' passing. More direct than 'extremely direct' is that? "Alright lads, we're going to play a VERY ATTACKING style of football, only much slower and with much less closing down, lots of timewasting and a very deep defensive line, and shorter passing for almost all of you, not forgetting of course that we will as a team be playing extremely directly." This is how the TC asks you to formulate your instructions. I don't think anybody would ever describe a team's tactics in that way and if you heard those instructions as a player you'd simply get changed and make your way to the car park, so why is the Tactics Creator doing it? As often as not, it's preventing users from being able to think clearly about their tactics, rather than making it simpler.

This tells me that defensive line, like a few other things, is misrepresented in the TC

Not particularly - behaviour of wingbacks in a 5-3-2? I'll decide what I post and where, thanks. Yes, and it's impossible to get the right effect. Man-to-man marking brings further problems with it... True, and teams normally try to mitigate that by asking the fullbacks and MLC/MRC to work together to cover the space - something they're not doing very well in FM24.

Relax, with gegenpressing you'll take over the world pretty much no matter what you do. Couple of transfer windows and you'll be flying

I find another problem with wingbacks, (or fullbacks, particularly in narrow formations like 4-3-1-2), is getting them to defend aggressively enough to stop wingers from turning. They go back and stand in the defensive line, and then have a hard time anticipating a pass to their winger, leaving a big space in front of them for the midfielders to cover. IRL they'd be ready to pounce on their winger the second the ball was moved out to him to stop him from having any space to turn. This lack of anticipation means it's too easy to force a 5-3-2 back just by switching the ball. With dominant teams you can get the right effect by playing the wingbacks as MR/L but, as above, that creates other problems when they fail to get back into the defensive line.

On the topic of juego de posicion etc at lower levels, it has started to appear to an extent. Mike Williamson's Gateshead played an incredibly progressive style in the National League for example. But it was discernibly a LOT slower than the elite equivalent, and very prone to problems if they were pressed well. That really should be the risk in FM - try to do it too quickly or with poor players on poor pitches, and you'll start losing it at the back with your defence spread wide open, and giving away simple goals. It's the riskiest, hardest-to-execute form of football there is, and that should really be reflected. Even at the top level, teams who play that way will regularly give away awful goals where the keeper plays a defender into trouble etc. It should take by far the longest to train and gain familiarity with too, whereas every pub player basically knows how to play 4-4-2 and lump it long. That'd make it more rewarding if you can actually get your team to the point of playing that way, rather than just pressing the button. This is why managers who are short on time or under pressure 'go back to basics'.

Absolutely every available lever has been pulled to the max, yes. Here's something: do we think there's more chance of an optimistic long ball to the big man on 'Very Attacking' (because it's the least safe, most direct possible pass) or 'Very Defensive' (because passing it about at the back is inherently risky and it's easier to just get rid of it)?

At the absolute highest level, yes, increasingly you have to press and you have to try to dominate territory and possession - although Conte and Mourinho say hi. Part of the problem here, though, is that, at any level, you can just casually ask your players to play a possession-hogging, gegenpressing system with a rotating back 4 and they'll boss the league. Even in the lower reaches of the Premier League there are teams who can't afford to play that way because they just don't have the players who can play well enough under pressure. And all around the world there are teams overachieving or pulling off giant killings by going long, playing in low blocks etc etc. I agree it would be unrealistic if playing on the front foot wasn't the obvious thing to do when challenging for the Champions League, but there's a lot more to it than that. The game would be much, much richer if you genuinely had to adapt your style to the level you're at and the players you have. It's arguably not much of a management sim otherwise!

The game seems to be geared, understandably, towards simulating the ubiquitous short-passing style of football that we generally see at the very top levels of football. As a result, the 'route one' style, or even the 'get it forward and turn their defence' style that characterises the lower leagues isn't really possible. With mentality, passing and tempo maxed out, you're still basically looking at an attempt to play tidy, short-passing football as seen in Europe's top leagues, just a bit more rushed with an occasional long through ball if it's on. It's impossible to get the defenders to launch it to the edge of the box, or to position players to get to the resulting knockdown, and extremely difficult to get them to smash it into the corners / channels, which is what a lot of less gifted defenders and midfielders still routinely do! In elite football terms, it'd be nice to be able to play Pulisball or Ventura's 4-2-4 or Schmidt's system with RB Leipzig, which are largely about long balls to a part of the pitch you've overloaded. But the main benefit would be adding authenticity at levels below the top couple of leagues and making it more interesting to play your way from the bottom to the top level, which raises the other point: you simply can't tell your players to play juego posicion or counterpress at those levels, where it's more about getting the ball up the pitch or behind the defence and then seeing if you can play from there. There isn't currently much of a difference watching an FM match in the Northern Ireland Intermediate League and the Champions League final because the team from Ulster are probably pulling off a possession-based gegenpressing system with a rotating back 4 when they should be keeping it simple. Trying to play Pepball with Chelmsford should really, if we're being remotely realistic, result in disaster, and cultivating an advanced style of play like that should really be more about finding the players who can do it and then training them. A move in this direction would also address the problem of gegenpressing being insanely overpowered in the game.

Probably worth a feature request isn't it

It's quite difficult to convince the fullbacks to launch that diagonal ball to the big man with any great regularity isn't it. In theory a very attacking mentality and maxed out passing focused down the middle should probably do it but no.

The UI certainly does a great job of making the game into more of a black box than it needs to be. Also, this is another reason why mentality shouldn't exist

Again, I wouldn't describe correcting the game's many bugs and gremlins as 'cheating' but: yes. Well worth it. My favourite is correcting bizarre, illogical player positions, eg: a newgen who's an expert at playing right back and AMR but has absolutely zero clue how to operate at wingback, even though he absolutely is one, or MR. Sod being restricted in my tactics and waiting months to train him in a role he's already great at - whip the editor out.

The interactions aren't worth bothering with. Players turning on you because you congratulated them on their first international cap etc etc. Just ignore or breeze through them and correct it in the editor if they irrationally flip out. If you can resist the urge to cheat (which isn't hard because the game is ruined as soon as you do) then the editor is great for just debugging as you go and taking some of the stress out of those broken features.

what's that then? I've heard of DaveIncid's 'Increase Realism' megapack with lots of extra leagues etc (which is absolutely fantastic and a must-have) but nothing that affects the AI / difficulty of the game overall

I did that once, and used DF(d) to make 1 or 2 of the strikers defend a bit, if I wanted to mitigate against wingbacks or a DLP. Worked pretty well

Looks like I'll have to wait for next year to be able to shuffle the midfield 4 across into a 3 when space is vacated by the WP or IW. Been trying to do that for years, in order to do Ancelotti-type 442--->433 or 442-->Xmas Tree. I like the idea of defending in a 4-4-2 no matter what, and just having different systems with the ball... Man City do it quite a lot... Barcelona did it a few years ago too, with Neymar dropping to the left wing and the midfield 3 shuffling across without the ball. @Jack Sarahs Do you think these positional shifts might appear at some point? I'm loving inverted fullback so far mind. Allows me to fit one more beastly, clogging centre half into a dour 4-4-2

I simply refuse to counterpress, spend all my time trying to play negative-but-effective football, and have a great time at it. Who cares what everyone else does

Are there features of the new ME that make this easier? We know you can now have the back line shuffle across and move between a 3 and a 4, but will the midfield line do the same?

I post these every year, pretty much, so I think I'll just combine them into 1 post this time. Sorry, I have no idea why this post is in bold but I can't disable it. POSITIONS The game is riddled with bizarre preferred positions - players being a world expert at AMR and RWB but having absolutely no clue what a right-sided midfielder or right back are, and requiring months of training even to begin to pick it up, for example. Even worse that they then forget the previous position they learned, even if it's incredibly similar to their natural one. Creative false 9-type strikers or wide playmakers who can't play AMC, cultured DM's who can't play MC, combative, defensive MC's who can't play DM, deadly finishing IF's who can't play up front - there are loads of little absurdities in every single squad and all they do is unrealistically prevent you from being able to use various formations. Football isn't like that. If you play on the wing, are rapid, great at marking and tackling, can run all day, dribble and cross really well then by definition you will be good at full back and wingback, and probably a very useful winger. There isn't some mystical training process required to make that happen, beyond basically being familiar with the system you're playing in. Attributes should pretty much completely dictate positions. If you're big, strong, great in the air, good off the ball, have a lovely first touch, can finish a bit and have some vision, there is no universe in which you're not effective playing as as target man, should your manager put you there in training and in matches. You are literally already good at it. Positions require players with certain attributes and it would be both much more fun and much more realistic if that was the case in FM. MENTALITY Just as positions should pretty much be a token of attributes, mentality should pretty much be a token of team instructions. There is no such thing as a system that is slow, uses direct passes to very few attacking players while keeping a back 6 in position, wastes time and plays for set pieces, that is 'Very Attacking'. Similarly, if I tell my players to make lots of forward runs, press high up the pitch and get the ball forward and into the box as quickly as possible, we already know how attacking that is - very. There isn't any need to apply some kind of filter to the tactic to make it that way. "Lads we're sitting deep, wasting time, and trying to feed off one or two chances on the break. In a VERY ATTACKING way". Sounds fairly mad, no? But if you want to make a system that gets the ball forward with purpose, you might well end up saying that in the Tactics Creator. This weird, opaque, mislabeled instruction (that affects ALL of the others under the hood) is by far the single biggest issue with making the Tactics Creator intuitive to use and there's surely no need for it to be there. Everything that Mentality currently does should be a part of other team and player instructions. We used to have 'shape' and I think mentality should go the same way. It's a way of describing a tactic, not an instruction in itself.

I should add that the save has been moved across from FM23.

Currently, there's no point trying to embrace realism by scouting or selecting your team based on performance stats, because the game wipes them at the end of each season. As a result, your sample size is so small that you're flying completely blind, save for a brief period towards the end of each season, so you might as well ignore them completely and just stick with attributes and star ratings, neither of which exist IRL. If that data remained accessible, the user could take a massive step up in realism by referring to and crunching performance data. Perhaps an option to export player stats to Excel / Google sheets at the end of each season would be a good start.

As things stand, a player can be a natural wingback but clueless at fullback or on the wing, a natural ballwinning MC who has no idea how to play DM, a natural deep lying forward who doesn't know what an AMC is, etc etc etc. It makes no sense, doesn't remotely reflect reality and massively restricts the user's ability to change between systems once they've built a squad, not to mention vastly reducing scouting options. Positions should be expressed more as a heatmap, with players preferring to play in certain zones and do certain jobs, with their 'suitability' declining as you get further from their preferred zone. A natural wingback would automatically have some aptitude for playing at fullback or on the wing, and might have some inkling of how to be a carrilero. A natural AMC would automatically be assumed to have at least some ability to do a playmaking job starting from the wing, or from MC, or to play as a false 9, as long as they're operating generally in that zone behind the striker. The degree of versatility would obviously vary from player to player and be influenced by their attributes (a DMC who's good in the air would be more inclined to play DC etc) but, just as in real life, it would always be a sliding scale according to how well any given role fits his natural game.