Idea for a new tactics system:

i think its sad that in a football management game the weakest area of the game by a long long way is the tactics, is far too intricate and over blown.

I still say there should be tick boxes with position specific with ball and without ball 'ppms style instructions. For example you have the option for full backs such as 'dont cross the half way line' 'get forward at your own discretion' 'overlap the winger' 'go forward on all ocassions' etc etc, the defensive options could be 'show the winger down the line' 'show the winger inside' 'mark the winger tightly' and then in possession you could have 'play it short to the nearest available player' 'play it direct down the wing/thru the middle'. There should always be a 'use your own judgement type' option as well where by the players own stats and decisions rating influence the play. The amount of 'micro instructions' you gave a player would obviously be the equivalent of creative freedom.

Under the bonnet the slider system could still be present buut instead of having to tweak for the magic formula with nonsensical slider combinations you could use proper instructions that actually mean something to most people.

You could probably have several of these for each position based on having the ball and not having the ball.

Individual instructions with check boxes within an overall team structure is all you should need, that would do away with the need for most if not all sliders on individual players. The sliders on the team instructions page could stay but with fewer notches but the player instructions could all be through tick boxes.

with ball and without ball

No. Just no.

No. Just no.

player instructions not the old wibble/wobble system do read it properly son

I can read very well, father, but the answer is still no.

For the rest, you'll be glad to hear, I like the idea very much. The less numbers/notches I can see, the better it is. I would also be in favour of a system where players don't have attributes from 1 to 20, but are gauged by your coaches in terms like 'quite poor' to 'world class'.

why no???

it seems sensible that as a manager you would give your players instuctions as to what you expect from them in attacking and defensive situations. anyway whether you name it with/without ball is a side issue what i am talking about is an option to say to the player the following:

1) over lap our winger/wide midfielder when we have the ball

2) when defending stay on your feet and show the winger inside

i should be able to tell the full back to do this without fiddling around with sliders.

EDIT: just read your next post and think we are aiming for the same thing which is less of the damned sliders especially on player instructions, i have no problem with more general sliders on team instructions with less notches but there are too many variants on the individual slider and no clear discernable way of knowing how one effects the other

I can read very well, father, but the answer is still no.

ok luke calm down a bit. still made me laugh tho

Football isn't so, err, let's say 'binary'. If we lose the ball because their defender wins it off our striker, it's quite a different 'without ball' situation than if we lose the ball because our keeper hoofs it up to midfield and one of their midfielders manages to head it back towards our half.

So hard to define posession. So any with/without ball instructions are going to be very artificial, if you know what I mean.

yeah i do. i think i would say no too but in less of a starwars way

The problem of too many tactical options is that it gets too easy to beat the AI. So there's no point in that, you'll create some highly detailed tactic to play against something that can't hit you back?

Football isn't so, err, let's say 'binary'. If we lose the ball because their defender wins it off our striker, it's quite a different 'without ball' situation than if we lose the ball because our keeper hoofs it up to midfield and one of their midfielders manages to head it back towards our half.

So hard to define posession. So any with/without ball instructions are going to be very artificial, if you know what I mean.

i understand what you mean but I dont mean with/without ball in so strict a manner that if you set your full back to mark the opp. winger tightly that if the opposition fullback 'in possession' was penned into his own corner your full back would suddenly trot back to mark the opponents winger because that was what he was set to do 'without the ball'

I am talking about a set of general instructions you want your player to carry out, whether your player then carried them out correctly and made the runs at the right or wrong time would be down to things like judgement.

The problem of too many tactical options is that it gets too easy to beat the AI. So there's no point in that, you'll create some highly detailed tactic to play against something that can't hit you back?

You have completely missed the point.

You can basically do all the things I have stated anyway its just a nightmare to configure correctly with all the damned sliders. Your argument seems to be based on the fact that if we could tell our players what to do properly the game would be too easy, if that is the case then then i would argue that the solution is to improve the match engine and the AI rather than rely on bamboozling the user with a load of silly sliders that only serve to frustrate and irritate.

What I like very much is that the lack of sliders makes the game lots more realistic. 'Hang back a bit more, lads' as opposed to *set slider 'push up' from notch 7 to notch 6*.

I guess the better wording for with/without the ball in this instance would be defensive/attacking instructions.

I fully agree though. The sliders need to be done away with if we want the tactics to progress.

yeah i agree as well. tactics in real life arent set-up like it is in FM. It would be ideal to replace the indiv sliders with instructions, but i guess the ME isnt smart enough yet to create realistic gameplay just based on simple instructions and letting the player decide on the pitch. But I guess we r heading in the right direction with the autonomy given to forward runs now. I also believe we should get rid of the 1-20 attributes in the game interface, make it hidden and replace it with qualitative ratings such as 'excellent passer' etc and improve coach/scout reports to compensate. 1-20 is simply too arbitrary and isnt a realistic reflection of real life.

Yep the sliders are highly artificial way of telling your players what you want from them. I sencerily doubt that Alex Ferguson says to Cristiano Ronaldo err. you will be 17 mentality and you should be 18 creative, he is more like "ok Cristiano I want you to stay upfront all the time and wonder about to find space for a deep run". To translate this into the game you should have a simple 5-pos slider for mentality, for creative freedom find space/hold position and etc.

I guess the better wording for with/without the ball in this instance would be defensive/attacking instructions.

I fully agree though. The sliders need to be done away with if we want the tactics to progress.

Again I believe that defensive/attacking is to vague, for example is your possession of the ball on your 20 meters an attacking situation or a defensive one? I would say something in between yes we are on the attack but we should still be cautions to not lose the ball.

That is why I have always loved the on/off the ball positional screens back in the days before CM04. I believe that was a better way of controlling your player movement, although that is way to rigid way of specifying where your players should be.

I think there's value to the "less binary" and more "coaching instructions" argument. Currently, tactics and attributes are displayed in a very, very micromanaging and uber-precise way. It seems like much more a science than an art, which I don't think should necessarily be the case. I'm interested to hear how this conversation continues to develop...

I think as managers we should have as much information as possible. We aren't average joes sitting in the stands during the game, we're professional coaches. Even if it's less than realistic it makes up for the other limitations of the game. Bring on the many many options until we get true AI!

Maybe if somehow you could see what the sliders effect was... eg on LMA the sliders had a little pitch that showed how much shorter/more direct a pass was as you moved the slider one way or the other. Same with Defensive line... it would show how highup/low down the pitch the defenders line is... the wider you go the pitch with players shows the team spreading out. you then adjust the slider till you see visually what you would like. Does this make sense?

As an example, I think it would help users understand how wide is the first notch of wide and how much wider is wide when on notch 20. I think this would help the confusion significantly. The little display could show so much. When setting player instructions for say passing it would create an arrow that gets longer from that players position depending on how direct or short your setting it(this would only be on the little display not the normal tactic screen).

With regards to the player attributes, saying hes world class or a good passer doesnt mean anything, instead of having numbers your have an essay on each player, saying hes a good passer his tackling lets him down sometimes his tecnique is blah blah hes weak in the air etc etc.

You shouldnt need coach reports on players YOUR supposed to be working with day in day out you would know 95% of what your players abilities are and this is the current best way to display it. I agree that coach reports could be better though.

You can do all this in tactics already, although its a bit hit and miss. but the way your suggesting would be similar, you would need to give him 10s of individual instructions if you didnt have the current sliders, doing this for every player would be tiresome. Sliders are a good way and I think having it go from defensive to attacking is better than say 1 to 10. Id rather say to my team on a sunday we need to be more defensive than we need to play a 1 or a 2 today mentally.

What would be good though is the sit deep or push up option, should give you some sort of line on the tactics pitch where you want your defenders to hold their line. In training IRL we train the defenders to hold a line at a specific point on the pitch, it makes it easier for defenders to know whree they should be in relation to ball position. Against quicker forwrds you would hold you line slightly deeper, but you dont want them camped on the box, so a line on the pitch showing you where your telling your players to hold their line would be cool

Maybe if somehow you could see what the sliders effect was... eg on LMA the sliders had a little pitch that showed how much shorter/more direct a pass was as you moved the slider one way or the other. Same with Defensive line... it would show how highup/low down the pitch the defenders line is... the wider you go the pitch with players shows the team spreading out. you then adjust the slider till you see visually what you would like. Does this make sense?

As an example, I think it would help users understand how wide is the first notch of wide and how much wider is wide when on notch 20. I think this would help the confusion significantly. The little display could show so much. When setting player instructions for say passing it would create an arrow that gets longer from that players position depending on how direct or short your setting it(this would only be on the little display not the normal tactic screen).

I like the idea you could see instantly however slightly inaccurately what your instructions you do.

I feel that you should not be able to micro manage the hole tactics thing with 20 notches for each slider since IRL managers can't do that, so for a game which wants to be a simulation this would be the wrong way to go. You should be able to give general directions how you want to play and the rest would be influenced by PPM's and player specific behavior.

Let me get this straight...

You're complaining about intricateness and overblowedness, and to remedy that you want to double the intricateness and overblowedness??

Let me get this straight...

You're complaining about intricateness and overblowedness, and to remedy that you want to double the intricateness and overblowedness??

Great addition to the discussion. Thank you so much for your enlightened and elaborated input.

Maybe if somehow you could see what the sliders effect was... eg on LMA the sliders had a little pitch that showed how much shorter/more direct a pass was as you moved the slider one way or the other. Same with Defensive line... it would show how highup/low down the pitch the defenders line is... the wider you go the pitch with players shows the team spreading out. you then adjust the slider till you see visually what you would like. Does this make sense?

As an example, I think it would help users understand how wide is the first notch of wide and how much wider is wide when on notch 20. I think this would help the confusion significantly. The little display could show so much. When setting player instructions for say passing it would create an arrow that gets longer from that players position depending on how direct or short your setting it(this would only be on the little display not the normal tactic screen).

thats an excellent point..

that way you could adjust your settings accordingly.. it would simple put, enhance our awareness and knowledge of the language, that fm tactics speaks..

but i must say, that i agree with the OP too..

Atleast its a solution that leaves the current system in place but gives the user that little bit more understanding of what they are doing with the sliders. Surely this makes sense at least for now until they think of a different(not necessarily better) tactics system!

No NO No and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I have made many threads about how crumie the tactics are but the system as a whole is very good and has far better potential to play any formation. The only problem wrong with the tactics is that it doesn't work. You tell someone to cross they don't cross, you tell keepers to distribute to winger he doesn't. The problem is with the engine itself not doing whats its suppose to do, but overall the concept is by far the best.

No NO No and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I have made many threads about how crumie the tactics are but the system as a whole is very good and has far better potential to play any formation. The only problem wrong with the tactics is that it doesn't work. You tell someone to cross they don't cross, you tell keepers to distribute to winger he doesn't. The problem is with the engine itself not doing whats its suppose to do, but overall the concept is by far the best.

If you have a great tactic engine in which you micro manage things and adjust all the players instructions to 1/20 of a degree and that does not translate into the ME accordingly, like you have said keeper distribution is big problem for me, what it the point of having such an elaborate tactics system.

The instructions that you give to your players are somewhere translated in the ME to something that player will or will not do, why shouldn't we be able to see that at the time we are designing our tactics.

Sorry I don't really understand what you are getting at. The current system concept allows different formations to be played and tweaked that's why it's better to have sliders rather then defined set rules. Mmmm hope that sort answers you. Anyways things like ability to overlap, cut inside, the "with or without" system can still be implemented by the current system.

For example you have the option for full backs such as 'dont cross the half way line' 'get forward at your own discretion' 'overlap the winger' 'go forward on all ocassions' etc etc

Forgive me if this has been responded to, but isn't this basically what forward runs are for? No forward runs = 'don't cross the half way', mixed = 'at your own discretion' and often = 'over-lap the winger'?

the defensive options could be 'show the winger down the line' 'show the winger inside' 'mark the winger tightly'

Don't we already have this to some extent with the opposition instructions screen? Show onto weaker foot would presumably show the winger inside, tight marking is already in on both the tactics screen and opposition instructions screen.

I like the idea of having more tick boxes and specific options for tactics, but these things are already easy to implement with the current system.

I think there should be a visual representation of your organization while tweaking your set pieces, especially corners. In other words, I'd like to see a pitch (just like in the positions screen) in which I can drag and drop my players (like the positions screen). So if I want to assign my backs to the near and far post, I just click on them and drag them to the near and far post respectively. If I want my wingers to stay up front, I place them near the middle line, etc. etc.

And also during offensive corners. If I want my DC to challenge the GK, I just drag him onto the opposition goal line. If I want my big strong FC to do a near post flick on, I put him next to the near post. If I want someone to attack the ball from deep, I place him on the edge of the box with an arrow (assigned by using right-clicking like in the positions screen) pointing towards the opposition goalmouth. Short option? Place him just in front of the corner flag. Lurking outside area? Place him just outside of the area. Attack far post? Place him in the box with an arrow pointing at the far post.

In my opinion it would be a much easier to use set pieces interface then the drop down menus we have now. A visual representation of your defensive organization might me tricky to design, but I'm sure SI are perfectly capable of designing such an interface. And I believe I've seen it before but I can't remember which game. Was a long time ago though.

I'm sure it will feel much more "human" when you actually see a visual representation of your set pieces instructions then when you just use drop down menus. What's more, call me stupid but sometimes when I'm doing all my set pieces instructions I forgot who I assigned to the first post. So to check who's there I have to highlight all the players 1 by 1. With a visual representation you'd see it immediately. Also, it's much more like the way managers do it IRL. They don't use drop down menus, let me tell ya.

I realize that there are many different types of set pieces, but I think that if you use instructions for the following set pieces you'd cover them all.

Long Free Kick Left

Long Free Kick Right

Short Range Free Kick (shouldn't make much difference, left or right)

Left Corner

Right Corner

Mind you, I think the lists of set piece takers are fine as they are now.

what if the sliders where still there but they had different meanings..

as in the tackling its simple. soft, medium, hard

a player could have a slider which says attacking options 3 setting's, ie:

1. get forward every available moment down the line overlapping winger

2. get forward and cut inside to feed more threw balls

3. get forward but dont overlap

Defensive setting's

1. dont go forward at all.

2. go forward but never go beyond team x's winger.

3. stay inline with last defender..

i think the instructions could be endless. the thing with real football as apposed to FM. IRL you can tell a full back to bomb forward but only do this depending on opposing teams possitions on the pitch. in FM to get them to bomb forward its either attack or defend, nothing depends on opposting teams player possition's. there is an eliment based on players decision making etc, but that dirtectly has nothing to do with match day tactics..

To me, the tactics simply have to make sense. What does it mean when I tell a player 'today, you can be creative 16 on a scale of 1 to 20'? How much more creative, in real life terms, is he when I tell him to 'be creative 17'?

IRL, I'd tell him

-'stick to the plan religiously, no fancy stuff today' or

-'if you see an opportunity, try something different' or

-'go for it lad, dazzle them'

Maybe someone could come up with a few phrases that fall somewhere in between these, but there is no way that there is an almost sliding scale from 'rigid training plans execution' to 'total artistic freedom'.

It's unrealistic. As OP says, you get the feeling that a certain combination of these sliders yields the magic formula, that there is a mechanical puzzle to solve.

Football isn't that predictable and players aren't that fine-tuneable.

What's more, call me stupid but sometimes when I'm doing all my set pieces instructions I forgot who I assigned to the first post. So to check who's there I have to highlight all the players 1 by 1. With a visual representation you'd see it immediately. Also, it's much more like the way managers do it IRL. They don't use drop down menus, let me tell ya.

You can do that on the tactics screen now. Showing how all of them are set up. You click on the tab above their postions and then scroll down and you should see attacking corners and defensive corners and it'll show you who has what assigned. Not visual though.

Ah cheers mate! Can't wait till I get my hands on that manual! It always takes ages before I find all the new little features in new versions.

To me, the tactics simply have to make sense. What does it mean when I tell a player 'today, you can be creative 16 on a scale of 1 to 20'? How much more creative, in real live terms, is he when I tell him to 'be creative 17'?

IRL, I'd tell him

-'stick to the plan religiously, no fancy stuff today' or

-'if you see an opportunity, try something different' or

-'go for it lad, dazzle them'

Maybe someone could come up with a few phrases that fall somewhere in between these, but there is no way that there is an almost sliding scale from 'rigid training plans execution' to 'total artistic freedom'.

It's unrealistic. As OP says, you get the feeling that a certain combination of these sliders yields the magic formula, that there is a mechanical puzzle to solve.

Football isn't that predictable and players aren't that fine-tuneable.

I started a topic about that 2 days ago, describing what you just said, but nobody responded lol. It's called FM Tactics system.

http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php?t=58551&highlight=Tactics

there ya go

Yep the sliders are highly artificial way of telling your players what you want from them.

I dont think we have the technology yet to actually jump into the screen and personally tell ur wing back to snap ronaldo's leg next time hes on the ball.

I dont think we have the technology yet to actually jump into the screen and personally tell ur wing back to snap ronaldo's leg next time hes on the ball.

We do have the technology to make team talks, which actually influence your players. Why not use a system like that for individual tactical player instructions?