How can SI make the match engine more flexible without zapping its stability?

As a huge fan of FM, I was wondering it what ways SI can further improve the series. Besides progress that could be considered less fundamental, or 'quality of life' focussed, such as agents, 3d match view and the liked bug/glitch hunting, how do people think the actual mechanics of the game can be pushed on?

Thinking about recent comments about how Messi's true level of ability cannot be represented in-game, and the difficulties in realistically replicating his role for Barcelona (along with truly recreating their team tactics), i was curious whether people would welcome a more flexible, and with it, more complicated tactics and formation engine to not only try and reproduce the more progressive footballing ideas out there, but also to try and innovate some of their own too?

Thinking about the higher level of complexity and difficulty that would be involved, would it really be all that different compared to the current tactic screen options of 'basic' and 'advanced'?

A more open tactics editor could lead to some pretty horrific exploits if the game mechanics could be subverted to make unrealistic outcomes possible. This is, of course, something already possible with our current, more rigid match engines with the corner bug etc. With this in mind, would the advantages of a more realistic account of player roles, real life team tactics and even more possibilities for experimental ideas and tactical concepts outweigh possible cheats and sidecuts that, just like now, could be ignored by players able to play the game without taking the cynical route.

Bit of a long post, but hopefully the start of an interesting discussion. What do people think?

Contain, Defensive, Counter, Standard, Attacking, and Overload are far too limited! You should be able to change each positions status without heading through all the tactics.

If one thing has been consistently well maintained and tweaked with improvements over the years of development, it's been the match engine. Although I strongly dislike the current tactical interface that interacts with the engine itself.

The development of it seems to work off player feedback a lot more than any of the other features.

I don't think we'll see ground breaking improvements in the game for a long time. It would need genuine artificial intelligence, and the player would need to dedicate far more time than most people have, if they wanted to create a system like Barcelona's but slightly different and totally different to anything ever seen before.

When genuine AI is invented, this game will move forward leaps and bounds. Until then, I think PaulC and his team will improve the ME every year until they have something that just about passes for AI, but isn't really and it still flawed, just less obviously flawed than the current version (not that the current version is obviously flawed).

However, SI would then need to spend a lot of time making the game friendly to the casual user. To draw a parallel, if FPS games like CoD had genuine AI that was focused on killing the human, the human would be massacred. If they had genuine AI that was focused on re-creating the actions of humans, then the game would be challenging, but not impossible. Obviously that doesn't work in a game like FM which has a "random" factor, and indeed is calculation based rather than skill based, but the AI would need to do some work for the human. I can't really voice what I mean to, apologies.

but when genuine AI is invented the machines will take over and kill us all

If one thing has been consistently well maintained and tweaked with improvements over the years of development, it's been the match engine. Although I strongly dislike the current tactical interface that interacts with the engine itself.

The development of it seems to work off player feedback a lot more than any of the other features.

Interesting. Could it be that the engine already has the capabilities to beter realise the more complex systems its just that the ability to interact with it on that level for the player isn't available at present?

I don't think we'll see ground breaking improvements in the game for a long time. It would need genuine artificial intelligence, and the player would need to dedicate far more time than most people have, if they wanted to create a system like Barcelona's but slightly different and totally different to anything ever seen before.

When genuine AI is invented, this game will move forward leaps and bounds. Until then, I think PaulC and his team will improve the ME every year until they have something that just about passes for AI, but isn't really and it still flawed, just less obviously flawed than the current version (not that the current version is obviously flawed).

However, SI would then need to spend a lot of time making the game friendly to the casual user. To draw a parallel, if FPS games like CoD had genuine AI that was focused on killing the human, the human would be massacred. If they had genuine AI that was focused on re-creating the actions of humans, then the game would be challenging, but not impossible. Obviously that doesn't work in a game like FM which has a "random" factor, and indeed is calculation based rather than skill based, but the AI would need to do some work for the human. I can't really voice what I mean to, apologies.

I understand what you mean. Who knows though, maybe in a couple of years we could see more coded-in personalities, traits and favourite tactics/formations for computer managers and clubs to counter the lack of genuine AI? It wouldn't of course be real 'AI' but the more static, presets available for a player to come up against, the more of an illusion will exist of depth, challenge and in-game progression.