any suggestions?

so you carefully set your tactics up for a big game - they work to perfection and in the second half you go one-nil up. the tactic you are using is quite attacking, so you immediately go to the tactics screen and make some adjustment to mentalites/defensive line etc and restart the game.

after the replay of the goal, the opponents kick off and go straight up the other end and score - before the match engine processes your changed tactics. as i understand it, responding to the game situation and adjusting tactics accordingly is pretty much the main way you can impact on the individual game you're playing, and the whole concept of football manager.

all the work you put into looking at scout reports etc to decide what to do in any given situation is essentially a waste of time - and the satisfaction you get from out-witting a much better team is taken from you because of a very basic glitch in the programming, and leaves you feeling cheated

this has happened three times to me in the last 10 games - once i decided just to use touchline shouts to adjust my fullback roles after going one - nil up, thinking this would process much quicker. 4 1/2 minutes later i let in a goal, because my full-back was pushed too far up the pitch, and the touchline shouts still hadn't processed.

apologies for the rant but this is a problem that the match engine has had for years now - it's infuriating and seems so obvious...

I agree completely. Sorry I don't really have any suggestions, as this is quite annoying when it happens.

IRL you would tell your team before the game if it was going to be a narrow match: "If we go 1-0 up, immediately be cautious", but you cant do this in FM.

I too agree that this is frustrating and needs to be addressed - perhaps SI should introduce a scoreline tactic, so for a number of select scorelines you can choose a relevant set instruction.

On a side note when your watching your own team play and they go 1-0 up, do you then get frustrated to see them go defensive and sit back on the 1-0 scoreline ? Or would you rather they pushed for more goals. ?

when i'm watching football in real life, i get annoyed at teams who go 1-0 up and sit on their lead. it makes sense to go and get a second goal to kill the game off.

football manager is different for a couple of reasons - firstly i'm playing with exeter and after successive promotions, we're in the premiership. if we go 1-0 up away to liverpool then i don't want to be going all out attack and looking for a second goal.

also, the fm match engine reacts very differently to real life. there are a lot of games in fm, especially against teams with higher reputations, when you know that as soon as you take the lead, they are likely to score straight from the kick off. it happens far too often. the fact that the game won't let you change your tactics before the inevitable equaliser is a big problem. it's also annoying cos you spend a few minutes altering everything and by the time the match engine processes the info, the score is 1-1. so then you have to go back to the tactics screen and change everything back again:thdn:

pause the game when you score....before the replay happens and make changes. Your tactical changes will be made before the re-start.

agree its very frustrating but as Jedaye said puase it as the goal goes in and it should be all set by the time they kick off

It's certainly frustrating to have the game turn around like that on you. I think for the most part the delay in changing tactics is ok in that it takes some time for it to work around the pitch and for all the players to 'change gears'. However during actual stoppages in play it should go right away, and they often do in my experiences. like when setting up for a corner or a kick-off, but it's not 100%.

That being said, my mentality is that if a specific tactic got me the 1-nil lead then I probably don't want to change to a new tactic the opponent might be able to exploit all the sudden. About the only time I change tactics when my team is playing solidly (not just leading in score) is to start wasting time. Now if you get a lucky counter goal or something that's another story.

So while I understand the frustration I think there is a certain amount of realism to how the game handles tactical changes. Besides, if the opponents scored that quickly then I doubt a more defensive stance would have made a real difference, sounds like just a breakdown.