ME in FMH - how is it being processed?

Marc, question about the ME in both, FMH and FMHi:

Is the match being processed on the fly? Or before the match is kicked off? I never see any processing going on once I make tactical changes during a match, hence my question. I'm sure that the changes (formation change, team/player instructions) do have an impact on the result, don't they?

Ok the way the match works is that it processed 'on the fly', the match plays a six second slices of time continually buffering the last few minutes of play so that when something it deems 'exciting/interesting' happens it either displays commentary or the 2d view (depending on how 'exciting' it deems it is) and shows you a short clip of what occurred and its build up where practical (this is why once a clip starts you can't do subs in the middle of it).

If you do a sub/formation change/team instructions/whatever then this is applied onto the match engine itself and obviously it will affect anything which occurs in the match after that point as you'd expect.

The FM PC game works in roughly the same way but recreates the match result from base processing each time which is why it 'pauses' to process when you do tactical changes and suchlike; the advantage of the PC approach is that it allows you to rewatch matches after they have been played ... however it comes at the cost of the 'pause' when you do changes, on a handheld device that pause would be considerably longer and thats why we chose the approach we have (ie. no pause at the cost of not being able to rewatch old matches).

Thanks for the insight; another question: are results ever fixed or always genuine? Had a FA Trophy match, after 1st half it was like 0-3 for the opponent. Changed my tactics, could draw level, scored another goal in the 80th minute. Went from attacking to defending, 5-4-1, to save the result. They scored a late equalizer. In the second leg match at home, they basically destroyed my team with 5-0, no matter which tactics I threw at the ME. I was slight favorite in both matches.

Not complaining, such is life and football; just asking if the game in the background would ever do some fixing for things to be interesting/realistic, etc. Otherwise, the big teams would always win, wouldn't they?

Results are ALWAYS genuine ... errr there wouldn't be any point playing otherwise would there?

You will find that some teams will 'buck up' in a second leg naturally, for instance some big teams might be cocky against smaller opponents in a two legged match and lose the first leg (happens irl as well) and then go and crush their opponents in the second leg, this isn't the game being rigged - just that their motivation/mentality was off for the first leg and the loss focussed them for the second leg.