Player roles

This might be a rather weird question, so I'll try my best to put it forth without confusing everyone.

So I have 4 strikers. 2 are the regulars, and the other 2 I rotate when the regulars are off form/tired/away. I frequently sub them during games too. Now my 2 regulars have specific roles, one as an attacking forward, and the other as a complete forward.

The problem is, whenever I sub one of my other strikers in, I have to manually switch their roles about. So striker C who is coming in for striker A plays best as a poacher. But I have to go right click, set as a poacher, and so on when I sub him. And sometimes I forget to do it and wonder why he's so ineffective on the field.

Add this to the fact that I play with the "swap positions" box ticked, so my 2 strikers swap positions between themselves. But then the guy who plays best as an attacking forward will now start playing as a complete forward whenever they switch!

Is there a way to allocate specific roles and get them to stick? Like when I sub this guy in, he's automatically a poacher, even if he's coming in for an attacking forward. And he stays as a poacher no matter where he goes.

I've looked for a way to do this as well but haven't been able to find this. The same you I change roles depending on what striker I have on the pitch and also set different options like wide play, playing with ball/from deep etc.

Between my strikers differings roles i've pre-saved 3 different tactics so can change it quickly and easily without having to faf about loads.

I don't think there is as you are setting a role for the position, not the player

The only way you could do it, and it would be time consuming, would be to set up and save specific tactics for each of your possible formations/player selections.. So, you'd have 'tactic a' for your normal starting 11, then 'tactic b' for when striker 'c' replaces striker 'a', and so on and so forth..... Quite possibly more annoying than just changing player roles manually.

And if you change to another preset tactic, you also lose your OI's.

I think that this is something SI should look to include in next years game. Would much prefer something like this to faffing about with agents and conversations

Yes I thought this last night.

I play with 2 up top, a DLF and an AF. My 3rd choice striker plays as a Target Man, so I thought it would be good if whenever he was put in the team the position changed to that.

But then I realised there are too many variables. If he plays up top on his own I might have him as a Complete Forward. With 1 other striker he might be set to support, but when played with the other one I want him to Attack.

Truth is you could spend hours setting up scenarios, the best method is to check your team for each match. Tweak little things specifically for that game.

what i would love to happen in FM regarding player roles/instructions would be for the game to remember what individual instructions each player had. it would instantly remove a whole lot of micromanagement. you would still have control over what the player did in each match but you would remove so many mouse clicks and tedium.

Guess its back to the old manual change. A suggestion for the future, maybe?

yep the issue you've brought up here has been one of my pet peeves with FM for years. would be nice if someone from SI could respond to see if this could be added in with an update or at the very least in the next version of FM.