Jack Joyce

Every corner and wide free-kick is set with a swing - inswing or outswing. So for example you might just create one in-swinging near post corner routine. Your takers are set by foot - so left foot and right foot takers (either footed players can be set to either or both sides). Then it's quite simple - based on where the set piece is being taken from and the type of swing the routine requires, we then know what 'foot' player to use from the takers list. In cases where a set piece requires a e.g. left footer but you don't have any set in your takers list: We check for a different attacking routine you have set which needs a right footer in this position. If you don't have a different routine, we just use the best taker of the 'wrong' foot, doing whatever swing is natural to them. Using this knowledge you can do things like having only inswingers from the left and outswingers from the right, or vice versa - by creating an attacking inswing and outswing routine, but only setting either left or right footed takers.

Set piece coaching is absolutely a 'real thing' and a vital component of most team's backroom staff. Every team works on set pieces in training! The specific 'set piece coach' job title has become increasingly popular in recent years, however even before that it was (and still is) very common for set piece duties to be assigned to an assistant coach or goalkeeping coach in cases where the specific job title does not exist. Even if a team does not have a specific 'set piece coach' job, it's very likely that some other coach is doing the job as a dual-responsibility. Set pieces contribute to over 30% of goals in football, so it's a vital aspect of the game that teams are always making sure to pay attention to, and certainly not just at Premier League level either - Italy won the Euros in part thanks to Gianni Vio, but at club level many sides in Denmark, Italy, England, Germany, Spain etc. all have dedicated set piece coaches, including some teams as far down as the conference level in the English pyramid.

The Q&A is just for creating a default set of routines, there's more options available don't worry.

Yes you can save, load, export all routines or individual routines as you like. Set piece tactics are now completely disconnected from your other tactics, so no matter what change you make to your 'main' tactic, your set pieces will be unaffected. You can even just have your set piece coach completely manage everything set pieces, and you can just worry about doing the open-play stuff. Yep

All gets added when you load the save game. You will lose your old set piece tactics, since the old system is replaced by the new one. But you'll be taken through the Q&A to get new ones.

Every coach has a set piece ability attribute and their own preferences for set pieces, and yes can be delegated to. e.g. you can have your assistant doing everything for you like some clubs do in real life. You can also try to ask the board to allow you to hire a dedicated set piece coach.

We review every single feature request posted in the feature request forums and have big backlog of good ideas from the community that have been approved by Miles + the team. That doesn't mean that we'll implement every idea right away, but we're always listening and a big portion of the features we do every year is driven by community posts and feedback.

This is just an illustration of a team's shape changing due to the role behaviour, sorry to be the party pooper but you're a bit off the mark. (But we do have some really cool stuff to show later as you can see on the roadmap! Watch this space)

There's an incremental increased chance of injury across any stamina level, but once you hit the lowest level it's a significant jump. To be honest, the majority of the feedback we get about stamina drain is that it's not harsh enough, and that intense tactics such as gegenpress etc. are too easy to play without doing much rotation. If you're seeing a lot of stamina issues, it may be worth reviewing how you're asking your team to press relative to how much time they spend without the ball - teams like Manchester City can press very intensely off the ball IRL because they spend the majority of the time with it.

Player condition has an incremental effect that gets increasingly strong as it gets lower. So it's not a sudden drop/change at specific levels and the 'fair', 'poor' labels are just that - labels. The only caveat being that if your player reaches the lowest possible condition level then there's an additional significantly increased chance of injury if they continue to play.

Your overall team strategy will have a big impact on how your BPD behaves. If you're telling the team to play much shorter passes, they're not going to launch long diagonals as often. It's probably more accurate to say that your BPD is less afraid of taking risks on the ball - whether that be carrying the ball forward, attempting a long diagonal or attempting a line-splitting pass on the ground. Whereas a no-nonsense CB is more risk averse, so when put under pressure they're more likely to take the safe option, which oftentimes can just be a clearance or hoofed ball forward.

Instructions in FM tend to be modifiers on the existing level rather than overriding - e.g. if your team is told to play short, but you have a PI telling your DM to play more direct - they're still not going to play as direct as if your team was balanced passing directness with the same PI. PIs are assumed to be e.g. 'play more direct than the rest of the team is'. The same applies to more or less any kind of instruction in the game, but I can't go into exact detail because we tweak/improve a lot of this every year and I don't want to give you any info that is then invalid in the future. But generally, a team told to play short and carefully will behave differently when told to work ball into box compared to a team that was told to play direct and quickly.

Force Inside/Outside - Outside of your defensive third, where do you want to attempt to win the ball back? Outside - Players will screen/protect the middle of the pitch, forcing the opposition to play the ball wide during build-up. The theory is that it's easier to win the ball back when the ball is wide, because the opposition have less available range of options due to being near the side-line. Inside - Players will cut access to wide players, trying to encourage the opposition in to trying to play through the middle. The idea being that if you manage to win the ball back in a central area, the resulting counter-attack is more dangerous than one that starts from wide. Note that these instructions don't just change the width of your team when defending, but also affect pressing decisions and the angle in which a player presses from. Then you have invite/prevent crosses for your own defensive third, allowing you to have different engagement instructions for different areas of the pitch. When choosing your force outside/inside instruction, think about: In my shape/structure, where are we most vulnerable? How do the opposition like to build play? Do they have a particular weak link in the build-up who isn't as good on the ball? When choosing cross engagement, think about: Do we have an aerial superiority? What's my opposition's strengths? Are they better at working the ball patiently or do they look to get early crosses in from out wide as much as possible?

The 'tackle harder' instruction can make your players attempt more tackles yes, it's not just how 'hard' a tackle is, but also encouraging your team to be more proactive with their defending and 'nibble' more. Overall though, bear in mind that these defensive stats aren't possession-normalised, so if you keep a lot of the ball most games, you don't have an opportunity to tackle as much as other teams so your stats would naturally be lower there.

It's a question that gets asked fairly often but it really doesn't solve any problems. The Match Engine has been constantly iterated, improved and refactored over the course of many years. Every year we spend time refactoring older parts of code in the engine anyway, and starting from scratch doesn't really help to make balancing much easier than it is now. The reason why balancing the ME takes so much time and effort is more to do with the complexity of the simulation we're working on, rather than a sign of the engine itself 'aging'. Looking at headers here - as someone said earlier, it's not really just a question of changing some numbers since the numbers are reflective of the AI decisions playing out in a certain way. To begin with, we'd have to do a comprehensive analysis of where headers are coming from in engine vs real life, and then make targeted improvements to off the ball movement, passing decisions, risk assessment. All of these areas of course having their own knock-on effects in a fairly major way that need to be thoroughly tested and balanced themselves. e.g. if you make changes to how players move/show for the ball, then that has drastic implications on how passing in general plays out, since every pass needs a receiver moving for the ball. Then you have to factor in all of the team instructions, player attributes etc. all needing to have the right effect in these situations at all the different levels as well. Then there's the small matter of making sure any new logic we add to the AI isn't slowing down the processing of the engine too much, since the game needs to be able to play hundreds, if not thousands of matches over the course of a career save. Think about how fundamental passing and movement is to football - changing that can have huge implications on how the entire match plays out and feels as a whole! We have to be careful and assess knock-ons, and fix bugs that come up as a result of any changes we make (fixes that also have their own knock-ons themselves). This is what Neil means when he says that we have to be careful of not throwing out the overall balance of the engine when fixing certain issues. Complexity is the reason why some issues take a long time to solve, but we don't want to make the engine more simplistic or 'dumbed down' to make our balancing work easier either. We're constantly working on our working processes to make sure we're able to react to issues better and faster. We understand it can be frustrating at times, but believe me, it's not through a lack of effort, the team works so hard all year to make the engine as good as it can be and we're more critical than everyone of our work behind closed doors. But we do think we can do a better job of communicating how we work, which we're trying to do more and more and hopefully helps you to understand a bit more about how the engine works and what we do.

Hey, do you have save games from before these matches were played? If so, could you upload them for us to look at (feel free to send me a DM!)

Hm, if the attributes aren't changing then I'm not sure why the style would change. Seems like a potential bug as well. Managers without tendencies in game have fall-back calculations to work out whether they should use those instructions e.g. If a manager has low directness, then they're more likely to use play out of defence even if they don't have the NPT set. I would suggest if you want to control how a manager plays, then using the IGE to change their attributes such as directness, pressing, attacking should do the trick, regardless of what the style string is telling you. NPTs and preferred roles are the other big factors, which you may be able to edit in the pre-game editor but I'm not 100% sure on that.

The AI manager 'playing style' is an approximation based on their tactical data. Essentially what happens is the game plays a 'dummy match' and compares the tactic the AI manager would play to the tactical templates to find the closest match. We do this approximation because in actuality, the AI managers don't use style templates at all. The key things that will dictate how your manager plays are: Tactical attributes - directness, pressing, attacking etc. Tactical non-player tendencies - play out of defence, works ball into box etc. If your manager is changing style when you sign them, I'd check if any of these attributes are changing before/after you sign them (off the top of my head, I think there's a concept of staff gravitating towards your own playing style over time which would adjust these). However, based on some of your screenshots the approximation system definitely could be improved and I'd suggest raising a bug in the gameplay bugs forums in situations where the label clearly doesn't make sense e.g. route one with lower directness, or gegenpress with lower pressing.

The backgrounds are intended to change as the relevant facilities change actually. So if you've got examples where your team has drastically improved their facilities/stadium but the background has remained the same, then it's worth reporting examples as a bug.

To clarify - attacking formations in the data were never used for these situations specifically. An attacking formation is the formation a manager uses as a starting formation against teams that are perceived to be weaker than them. Part of the reason for us changing the formation list, is to avoid this kind of confusion since we don't want managers using unbalanced formations from the start of a match. Managers changing to extreme unbalanced shapes to chase/defend a match very late in the match is something we do want to do in the future though, although currently they do switch to very aggressive roles/duties when a match gets to that point.

Ok, please continue to post the best examples you find to your bug thread. That really is the best thing to do and we can have a look. Thanks!

Hey all, thanks for your feedback so far, especially those who have provided bug reports with PKMs. Just wanted to respond to a couple of reported issues here: You've made 13 posts in this feedback thread about this issue last night, but I can't find any bug report or PKMs provided with examples for us to look at. If you really want to help us work on a fix for your issue here, the best way is to make a bug report and provide us with as much information as possible so we can investigate. This thread is for general feedback/thoughts, one person repeatedly posting the same message over and over just makes it harder for us to gauge public sentiment and isn't fair on other people who want their voices to be heard. We need a lot of examples for these sorts of issues. As much as we want to make sure that every single statistic in the game is 100% in line with real life figures, the most important thing is how the ME plays and feels. There's no point having us balance out every single number if the actual match you see feels off. Changes like this are very risky so please do provide PKMs and we can use them as part of our investigations for the future. Thank you for making a bug report with some examples - please continue to update your thread with the best examples you find and we'll investigate. However I'm a bit confused - you keep saying that you loved the dribbles in the previous ME, but you also made the same bug report about dribbling pre-update, and we've not really made any significant changes to dribbling direction for this update. Is this definitely an issue you're only seeing now? But again, you've posted your feedback about dribbling 8 times last night, we read all the messages so there's no need to keep repeating yourself! You've made a bug report which is the correct course of action, please remember let other people have a chance to post their own feedback and we will look at your bug report. Thanks

Hey all! Hope you enjoy the update - we (match team) posted a more comprehensive list of fixes than usual for the ME because we want to be more transparent about the changes we've made since the Beta went out. If you have any questions about what any of the changes mean, please do ask and we'll try and explain, but honestly usually it's better just to play for yourself and see how it feels. Any feedback is welcome, but remember to also use the bugs forum with PKM examples so we can have a look. Cheers, Jack

The Step up/drop off instructions are intended to instruct your team on how to react to close-call situations where it's a tight call between needing to drop off or hold your line. All defences will drop off in certain situations depending on how much time/space the ball carrier has and if there's any opposition players attacking the backline. In obvious situations, all defences will drop off or step up where its a straightforward decision to do so. Where this instruction comes in is in the grey areas, the close-call situations where you can 'probably' get away with holding your line, but your defender's aren't 100% sure since it's tight: Step up - Team will be more reluctant to retreat - unless its an obvious dangerous situation where any team would. In tight-call situations they'll hold their line, and they'll be more risky/aggressive at looking for opportunities to step back up. Drop off - Team will be more risk-averse - if there's a tight call they'll err on the side of caution and drop off. This protects more against through balls, but does mean that at times your defenders will drop off when they didn't need to, conceding terriority. The instructions aren't designed to be overwhelmingly strong, since most defensive lines will react to situations in a similar way, however there is an effect and we have debug that shows us exactly how many times the instruction triggered the defence to drop during a match. Average positions/heatmaps I'm not sure are a good way to gauge this, since the majority of the time your team will be positioned based on your defensive line height, and them dropping off or stepping up won't make a drastic effect on the average positions over the period of 90 minutes, but can be the difference between you conceding or not in the grand scheme of things.

'Positions' don't really mean as much to coaches as they do to the general public - how a player actually moves and positions during different phases of play is more determined by their role and is much more important to how someone plays. A DM position isn't necessarily defensive, roles such as Segundo Volante and Roaming Playmaker are operating in the AM strata when your team attacks the opposition half, they're not holding roles. For example: Santi Cazorla operated in a double-pivot alongside Coquelin in either a DLP or RP role. Positionally they're looking to receive the ball off the CBs in a deep position i.e. they're starting as a DM. Xhaka - Depending on your preference he's either playing a RP role at DM or as a roaming 8 in a 433. Man City - Typically play a 433, not a 4231. Walker tends to move into DM during the build-up phase alongside Rodri to form a double-pivot shape (similar to Zinchenko at Arsenal). They absolutely can and do if you watch the highlights.