Tactics: A Discussion to end all discussions

Before I start a couple of things. Firstly all the views in this thread are my own and I may have made mistakes. If so please point them out and I'll change them.

Secondly to the mods. The rightful place of this thread might be in the tactics forum, but I think there will be more discussion here. Feel free to move it if you want.

Anyhow I shall begin

In the last two versions of the game ( I can't go back any further than that, as I wasn't around) there have been numerous complaints about tactics. There are two different groups that these tactical complaints fall under; It's too hard or It's not realistic.

The " It's too hard" group are normally people who don't understand how the tactical

system works ( I don't mean that in a patronising way) and are frustrated that they can't get their team to play how they want and win. The things we can gather from this are that the tactical system can be hard to understand, and that even if you create a tactic that looks like the way you want to play, it isn't necessarily going to work.

Let's now look at the " It's not realistic" group. The members of this group vary. There are some who have understood the tactical system but don't think it is the right way to approach tactics in the game. Some don't understand the tactical system and want a clearer, different tactical system.

So I've looked at why people don't like the current tactics system, now it is time to look at how to improve/change it. Firstly we need to consider tactics. A tactic is the formation you give your players combined with the instructions you give them. The idea of a tactic is for it to control how you play.

The way SI do the tactical system at the moment is in a numerical fashion. If we forget about the formation for the moment, as that will be pretty similar however you implement it, and consider the instructions both team and player. There are currently 108,134,400,000,000 different ways of setting up your teams instructions and 93,312,000,000 different combinations for setting up each player. Obviously this is quite a large number.

The team instructions are what sort of football you want your team to play overall as a team. The player instructions control two things; how the player moves/positions himself, and what he does when they have the ball. The instructions you give your players in any tactic, should arguably always contain these three things and SI's way of doing it does.

However there are a few problems with the way SI do it. Firstly the scale of the sliders. It is plainly obvious that there is a difference in the way you play if you play with the mentality at opposite ends of the slider. But what's the difference between 14 and 15? With such a vast array of options nobody really knows.

The second problem is how the sliders actually make your players play. What is the difference between having a player on a mixed mentality and frequent forward runs and having an attacking mentality and mixed forward runs. How do you know which one you want your player to do?

The third problem is that it isn't really very realistic. As is pointed out time and time again around the forums there aren't sliders in real life. Sir Alex Ferguson doesn't say " Lower your mentality a bit today" to Wayne Rooney, Wenger doesn't tell Fabregas to " Add two notches to your creative freedom". Instead the managers are much more vocal with their players, but that unfortunately is not possible in FM.

The formation system at the moment I think is fine.

What I've really written this to talk about though is how to change/imrpove the system.

Personally I don't think changing the system is a good thing. From what I've been told the previous tactical system ( the wibble wobble board?) was very easily exploited and SI have improved their tactical system by making it harder to come up with an unbeatable tactic.

The other option as I see it would be to have some sort of array of tick boxes for player instructions in which you select the options of how you want the players the play. E.g. for wingers there could be a cut inside option and for midfielders there could be a hover in front of the defence and so on. However I feel this would be easy to exploit, and a bit of a mess.

So I put this to you, you football manager playing forumites. What are the solutions to the tactical problems?

Do SI leave it as it is?

Do SI make improvements to it and if so what improvements?

Do they completely change the tactical system and if so how?

They say they moved the 'wibble-wobble' lines for realism... But is it realistic to have a numerical value to represent how you want your team to play? No.

In CM 03/04 we had the following for mentality:

Ultra Defensive

Defensive

Normal

Attacking

Gung-Ho

This is fine to me and changing Gung-Ho to All-Out-Attack is all that is needed to improve this for those who don't know what Gung-Ho means.

Personally I don't think changing the system is a good thing. From what I've been told the previous tactical system ( the wibble wobble board?) was very easily exploited and SI have improved their tactical system by making it harder to come up with an unbeatable tactic.

The truth is, the game is'nt any harder than previous versions, although it IS harder to get the required result.

This i think is the main annoyance for many FM'ers such as myself.

All i see is more and more games that i have completely dominated, but end up losing or drawing, if the game was harder and i was getting outplayed more and more fair enough, but the way it is at the moment is a nightmare and coupled with the state of the ME is pretty close to being unplayable.

The truth is, the game is'nt any harder than previous versions, although it IS harder to get the required result.

This i think is the main annoyance for many FM'ers such as myself.

All i see is more and more games that i have completely dominated, but end up losing or drawing, if the game was harder and i was getting outplayed more and more fair enough, but the way it is at the moment is a nightmare and coupled with the state of the ME is pretty close to being unplayable.

I'd say that probably isn't the tactics but the match engine. Although I suppose tactics play a part.