herne79

Press conferences; training & match preparation; player rotation; pre-match & half time team talks; substitutions. However, if you are getting “FM’d” every single time against slightly inferior opposition, your issue is tactical.

It just gives him options. If you like it don’t change it.

For me, the calculations are the Match Engine, so I’d have thought any differences needed for how people move etc would be done via different inputs (such as player attributes). But hey, SI are playing their cards very close (too close?) to their chest which will just continue to breed conjecture. We’ll find out at some point. Maybe .

That doesn’t answer the question? Visual differences relate to the Graphics Engine, not the Match Engine. The ME just takes various inputs and spews out a result via some clever calculations, but we don’t “see” the ME. There should absolutely be differences to the inputs and in the graphics, but to the ME and its calculations? I don’t know, perhaps SI are indeed working on two separate MEs or perhaps two “tweaked” versions due to some coefficient differences as @santy001 mentions, but isn’t that still just variable inputs to the same ME? Two different Graphics Engines and different inputs for sure, but two different Match Engines? I’d be surprised.

Because you’re using the same tactic for different teams. Your players are different (players may not be as suited to the tactic across different teams); Player morale will be different (team A you win loads so players are happy, team B you lose loads so player morale takes a hit); Teams will play differently against you (opponents tend to play differently for many reasons such as your club performance). Basically you got into a downward spiral with team B and because this is a “test” I imagine you didn’t do anything to redress the slide (holidaying maybe?). That being said it’s worth noting that both your teams exceeded expectations so the tactic might be fairly solid.

Lots of factors influence training Traits such as Age, Versatility, how many Traits they already know, quality of coaches/training facilities, Personality and so on. (Adaptability is about foreign players settling at a new club). Two things to mention in terms of footedness training: 1) A player improving their footedness doesn’t actually start until after the Trait has finished being learned. The Trait only gives the player the ability to start developing their weaker foot, so it’s a two stage process. 2) A player cannot develop their weaker foot beyond Reasonable (10-11 on a 1-20 scale). If a player is already at or beyond this point it’s a waste of time trying to teach him. Players can only get beyond Reasonable if they are “born” with it (for newgens) or have been allocated it by a Researcher (for real players). (btw, point 2 above is also why the impact on CA/PA is much much smaller than some believe).

Back in the day I wrote, with SI dev’s input, a basic guide for Touchline Shouts (found here). In a nutshell they are Match Engine modifiers, designed to influence player body language and Morale. They’re pretty situational, short term and are influenced by various factors, so not all shouts would affect different players in the same way. In the right circumstances they could make the difference in the outcome of a match. Clearly things have moved on since that guide was written but - anecdotally - the way I play most saves now tend to use very few (if any) tactical instructions, focussing more on using Shouts. I do pretty well. So personally I’m disappointed Shouts are being removed, not only for that reason but also I find it odd to think that a football game pushed as “realistic” will only let us make tactical changes during a match and not let us offer encouragement/berate our players etc from the sidelines. Hopefully a new improved version will return in the future.

Mentoring doesn’t affect consistency, although it can change (slowly) over time.

High pressing systems is not the same thing as merely using the High Press instruction and I agree, such systems can be too effective. Part of that can still come down to someone’s choice of using such a system of course, although I also agree when you say it’d be good to have a more capable AI. I appreciate I may be arguing semantics here, but people can easily read an exaggeration or take someone else’s experience and translate that into how the game works rather than how it may play out. I don’t recall making comment on this? You’re right, it’s not a benchmark. It’s a help forum. You’ve found high press etc to be overpowered, I just point out there are plenty who don’t. If you don’t know how others are not able to massively overachieve you could always head over there and pass on your knowledge . The bottom line is I don’t deny “aggressive” systems (if I can term it that way) can be overpowered. My only argument is that many other tactical systems can also be overpowered, so such “aggressive” systems are not necessarily the only way to overachieve, which many commenters make it sound like. The difference with other systems is they tend to be harder to set up and maintain effectively.

Using High Press is not “god mode”, nor will our team suddenly become too successful if used. Likewise High Press + Short Passing is not necessarily a way to overachieve to the extent it feels like cheating. Spend 2 minutes in the Tactics forum and you’ll see there are plenty of people who struggle with tactics even though they use those instructions. I don’t deny there are certain strategies that we are free to use (or not) which may make life easier when it comes to setting up tactics, but what you highlight here are by no means instant win buttons.

Why is it a problem? ok sure, SI keep telling us the game is aimed at “realism” therefore we shouldn’t be able to do such things, but if we want to be realistic in the game us managers wouldn’t be using such tactics in the first place. It’s up to us, as “managers”, to choose how we want to run our clubs. If we want to play in eezee mode gegenpress we can. Equally if we want more of a challenge we can do this also. Further, there are a significant proportion of players who just want to kick back and have some fun by taking their favourite team / relegation candidate to championship glory without waiting lots of seasons to do so. Good luck to them I say. In the mean time the rest of us don’t have to follow such strategies and are free to play by whatever means we wish. The AI managers we come up against don’t follow the principles of this “problem” against us or each other so again, where exactly is the problem? You are arguing in favour of taking away choice from how we play the game which would not only alienate a significant proportion of the player base but also make this game very one dimensional. It’s just a game. Play it as realistically or not as you want - which we can do right now .

You can. However your chosen role/duty is just one factor to consider. As @HUNT3R mentions above (welcome back btw) formation is important here as well, as are Mentality and the player’s own attributes. So for example if you set an IF attack in the AML position with an Attacking mentality and use a player without much Work Rate, don’t expect him to track back much (if at all). But start to feed in some differences relating to the above, and even if still using the IF(Attack) role/duty things will change. Consider the overall effect in your chosen combinations of instructions, rather than just focussing on one thing .

Some questions and observations: 1) What add on are you using to alter player attributes? If it’s not an SI approved/supported product that “may” cause unexpected issues (that’s been shown before). 2) Regardless of 1), when you altered player attributes, did you also change their hidden CA value and also kept CA within the maximum 200? 3) If you changed their CA, did you also change the hidden PA value so that CA did not exceed PA? If you haven’t changed CA and PA the game will change CA back to within PA limits. 4) You’ve noted and questioned comments above regarding unrealistic inputs. Having looked at your included file in the opening post, there are perhaps some issues there. Your use of “14” across the board is puzzling - strikers and inside forwards with 14 for tackling and marking for example? 14 may well be an average, but that’s applying an across the board average to everyone - I’d suggest it needs to be much more targeted than that. Further, a 195cm striker with a Jumping Reach of 10 is another concern. It’s noteworthy that Researchers have guidelines directly linking JR with Height - I don’t know the limits but 10 seems very low (too low?) for a 195cm striker. That’s just a couple of examples of how things appear somewhat unrealistic. 5) To an extent you are correct - if we increase a player’s attributes we should expect to see an improvement in their performance accordingly and it can be puzzling why that may not happen. It’s impossible to say for certain what’s happened here without examining the underlying code (which only SI can do) however from a layman’s point of view we normally expect players to grow organically, rather than just zapping through a whole bunch of changes using an editor as you have done. So normally speaking we’d see players developing at different rates with attributes developing in a non-linear fashion over a period of time. The game essentially stress tests this development so that players don’t just develop exponentially and within set limits. When you step outside of these “rules” there can be unforeseen consequences, which is perhaps what others above are alluding to. Personally if I wanted to test if player passing might improve I’d probably try using different players from the database rather than trying to make or alter my own. Even then that may still throw out issues, such as a new player may not gel with his teammates, he may not be suited to the tactic, he may not form good partnerships with others and so on. It’s a bit of a minefield tbh and the only thing I can say for certain is that it’s by no means as simple as changing player attributes and running some test matches.

Agreed. With SI’s ethos being one of “realism”, removing our ability to talk (shout) to our players during a match seems a backward step, regardless of how effective (or not) Touchline Shouts actually are.

In reality, non-elite teams and lower division teams can play a form of gegenpress. It is of course relative to the level at which they play - this is true both irl and in FM. So Naff Utd FC playing gegenpress in FM 4th division is not the same thing as Elite Club FC playing gegenpress at their level. That’s perfectly reasonable imo and reflects reality. The issue for me becomes when we pit a newly promoted / relegation fodder / low to mid table team against an elite team in the same division and can successfully pull off a gegenpress system. That’s not reflective of real life, which is SI’s stated intent after all. There is of course a decent sized player base who don’t really care how they play, so long as they win. So do SI just shut that off to be truly reflective? I doubt it, they’ll exclude a fair amount of players and I personally wouldn’t want to see that either. So where does that leave us? For me it’s about choice. If we want to simply play to win and don’t care how, we can choose to do so. On the other hand, if we want more of a challenge and try to win by other means (more realistically perhaps) we can do that as well. As previously said, the Tactics forum has been full of guides and articles for years demonstrating how non-gegenpress tactics can be every bit as successful. In my opinion gegenpress is nothing more than easy mode and no more overpowered than many other well thought through systems. So I think we’re agreeing here, I’m just throwing in the “it’s all relative” angle .