Same Match, different result.

I started a game as Preston North End recently and played through my pre-season friendlies winning 4 games away from home against lower league teams including 4-0 against Tranmere and 4-0 against Bamber Bridge and drawing 0-0 with Everton. I kept the same 4-4-2 attacking tactic in all the games and didn't concede a goal. I did tweak it to a 4-4-1-1 mid way through the Everton game as I was hanging on and needed a link between midfield and attack.

First match of the season comes around and I'm at home to Sheffield Wednesday so having a tactic that seems to have worked I stuck with it. I was confident I could scrape a victory by one or two goals as my team had superb morale and were in form.

I didn't see what happened coming at all. I got demolished 7-1 by a team that looked average on the player stats. 4 goals from Deon Burton (subbed on 56 mins) including 3 long range piledrivers! They only had 8 shots on target all match. I subbed 3 players at half time as I was 4-0 down and needed drastic measures and to my horror was down to 10 men 2 mins later when one of my subs got stretchered off!

The player rating were shocking. I had 4 players on a rating of 4.5 or there about and the rest were 5 or 6 at most. The frustrating thing was the amount of errors my team were making? Missed interceptions, passing to the other team and 3 long range wonder goals???

So... I thought out of interest I would replay the match with exactly the same tactics to see if I was at fault for being naive enough to think I could play an attacking game at home. None of my sliders were over about 75% one way or the other. I played attacking, direct, fast football with the def pushed up so as not to create a gap between Def and Mid and I set players few varient tactics exept setting my CB's to closing down in own area and GK to distribute to Def to attempt to stop him constantly gifting possession to the other team.

I even looked at the opposition threats and set my team to hard tackle their less brave players and put their strikers and wingers on their wrong foot.

The result of the reloaded game? I won 2-0 without too much of a problem from Sheff Wed? Has anyone else noticed wildly different results from the same match? I've not tested this other than in this match so It may just be a one off? Any thoughts would be appreciated. I'm pretty good at the game to be fair and usually get some good results from tactics so that's what surprised me about my 7-1 drubbing. That's the worst result I've ever had and I've been playing since the beggining of the CM series.

Incedently I kept the 7-1 game incase people rightly think I'm a glory boy!

I started a game as Preston North End recently and played through my pre-season friendlies winning 4 games away from home against lower league teams including 4-0 against Tranmere and 4-0 against Bamber Bridge and drawing 0-0 with Everton. I kept the same 4-4-2 attacking tactic in all the games and didn't concede a goal. I did tweak it to a 4-4-1-1 mid way through the Everton game as I was hanging on and needed a link between midfield and attack.

First match of the season comes around and I'm at home to Sheffield Wednesday so having a tactic that seems to have worked I stuck with it. I was confident I could scrape a victory by one or two goals as my team had superb morale and were in form.

I didn't see what happened coming at all. I got demolished 7-1 by a team that looked average on the player stats. 4 goals from Deon Burton (subbed on 56 mins) including 3 long range piledrivers! They only had 8 shots on target all match. I subbed 3 players at half time as I was 4-0 down and needed drastic measures and to my horror was down to 10 men 2 mins later when one of my subs got stretchered off!

The player rating were shocking. I had 4 players on a rating of 4.5 or there about and the rest were 5 or 6 at most. The frustrating thing was the amount of errors my team were making? Missed interceptions, passing to the other team and 3 long range wonder goals???

So... I thought out of interest I would replay the match with exactly the same tactics to see if I was at fault for being naive enough to think I could play an attacking game at home. None of my sliders were over about 75% one way or the other. I played attacking, direct, fast football with the def pushed up so as not to create a gap between Def and Mid and I set players few varient tactics exept setting my CB's to closing down in own area and GK to distribute to Def to attempt to stop him constantly gifting possession to the other team.

I even looked at the opposition threats and set my team to hard tackle their less brave players and put their strikers and wingers on their wrong foot.

The result of the reloaded game? I won 2-0 without too much of a problem from Sheff Wed? Has anyone else noticed wildly different results from the same match? I've not tested this other than in this match so It may just be a one off? Any thoughts would be appreciated. I'm pretty good at the game to be fair and usually get some good results from tactics so that's what surprised me about my 7-1 drubbing. That's the worst result I've ever had and I've been playing since the beggining of the CM series.

Incedently I kept the 7-1 game incase people rightly think I'm a glory boy!

I'm assuring that sentance I highlighted refers to the original game as well, otherwise you clearly weren't using the same tactics both times!

There are a huge number of events in a game though that are determined using random numbers so the result of "the same" match should be different each time you play it. It shouldn't be that different admittedly, but maybe if a few things go differently early on the morale of the two teams will become vastly different to the first time it was played and so the match would turn in a very different direction. If that is the case it does tend to indicate morale has far too big an effect though.

Maybe its just one of those freak results that happen sometimes in football, How many times do you think Boro would have beaten City 8-1 last season if they had played the game over and over?

Im glad results sometimes come up like this.

I would expect it to be different both times. No 2 matches are ever the same.

i am a bit stumped with this on here its a bit of a running joke when people say its your tactics and i always think the same but clearly here you chose the same team and used the same tactics so you still should of lost maybe not by that many goals but the result should of been the same shouldn't it ?. whats worrying is if it wasn't your tactics that decided the match then what the hell was it would like to see the replies this gets as i have never reloaded a game so cant say i have seen it before i know people cheat and reload after losing but i always thought they changed the players or the tactics round to get a better result

Like I said, a match is made up of a vast number of individual events. If some of those key events are different early on in the match then that could affect the whole of the rest of the match.

Oh please this is totally evident in 09. I have played the same game half a dozen times with the same players and instructions and had results range from 2-0 to 0-3. Its way too random.

It's impossible to judge. You can't simulate the same situation in real life so who can say how different results would be in real life if you could replay a game 10 times? Playing the same game multiple times is just a totally unrealistic situation so it's not all that relevant what happens.

I'm pretty sure the game relies on percentages, sorta like real life. A team can have a very high chance of winning but that doesn't mean they will definitely win every time. Think of it like playing the monopoly board game. you somehow roll doubles 3 times in a row and go to jail but it won't happen again for ages when you actually need it.

I'm assuring that sentance I highlighted refers to the original game as well, otherwise you clearly weren't using the same tactics both times!

Yeah the original game too. I set the tactics up exactly the same in both matches, even hard tackling the same players etc... obviously I didn't make three subs at half time in the second match, I have never done that before either, so maybe that contributed. Looking back at it I see something else that worries me too. I conceded 2 goals off corners where the player marking the scorer moved away from the ball instead of following the flight of the ball?? When I check what instructions the player had for corners I noticed they were set to marking tall players! I'm not sure running away from the attacking player & ball constitutes marking at all?

Oh please this is totally evident in 09. I have played the same game half a dozen times with the same players and instructions and had results range from 2-0 to 0-3. Its way too random.

:confused: Have you ever -seen- a football match? It's not random, but its chaotic. One rebound at one end of the pitch can result in a goal at the other end 5 minutes later. Seemingly trivial free kick or throw in decisions lead to sendings off or concessions.

Maybe its just one of those freak results that happen sometimes in football, How many times do you think Boro would have beaten City 8-1 last season if they had played the game over and over?

Im glad results sometimes come up like this.

I Hope that's the case. I may try and replay it a few times to see what results I get over the course of say 10 games? In the second game where I won 2-0 my players got generally 6-7.5 on their ratings while Sheff Wed got 5-6 and even a 4.5ish.

I did a test on a lower league norwegian match with my team in Div 2 against a Div 1 team.

I useed tha same tactic (4-1-4-1) in each reload of the match and did not do any changes during the match.

Did not make any notes of the tactic used (or changes of tactics) by the opposition in these matches.

Won 7-0

Won 2-1

Lost 1-3

Draw 1-1

Won 3-1

... conclusion; The result of a single match are pretty random.

:confused: Have you ever -seen- a football match? It's not random, but its chaotic. One rebound at one end of the pitch can result in a goal at the other end 5 minutes later. Seemingly trivial free kick or throw in decisions lead to sendings off or concessions.

That's a fair point. But good teams are consistent and that isn't the case right now.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though, and don't get me wrong I don't want to start moaning about the ME. I'm just saying what I see, that my team wins and loses apparently at random. Maybe the external variables are a little too prominent in the match calculating process? I don't know. Perhaps I am missing something, such as player form or ai player form. Without knowing precisely how matches are calculated, I can't blame SI.

Such kind of "proof" is for nothing. Every match has it's own dramaturgy. 10 centimeter could make the difference between a 0:0 and a 1:0. And one goal can change everything. Morale of players, the "momentum". And this leads into a complete different game with the same players and tactics.

That's a fair point. But good teams are consistent and that isn't the case right now.

Yes, but there are 2 kinds of consistency here. One is game to game consistency which is obviously what results in challenging for titles. The other is this airy-fairy "consistency" that can't really be measured against anything tangible that comes from replaying the same game over and over again. Real teams don't have that kind of consistency or lack of it because it is an impossibility.

Football is a game in which every action can lead to a whole load of different reactions and good manager have to react to those each game individually, as do good players.

The outcome of a football match can differ widely depending on what happens in the match. Say for example your team score four times in the first half hour - your players are on a high, the other teams players are crushed, the losing manager adopts a really defensive formation to try and limit any further damage.

You could run in another two or three goals in the second half and win 6-0 or 7-0.

Now say you concede two goals in the first 15 minutes and get your best player sent off - the reverse applies.

People are not reading enough into factors which should be obvious to the outcome of a match like morale - these things can snowball and cause wildly different results.

All good points.

The main thing to remember is, tactics is not just what you set up before the game and then forget about, tactics is also how you respond to in match events. Fractional differences can be the difference between a goal and not a goal and then maybe your tactics are fine while you are doing well in the match, but as soon as the players face a little adversity, whatever flaws are in your tactics can be horribly exposed. Given the right choices, you probably could still have won the 7-1 game, if you had responded before the game was lost (at 2-0 or whatever). But obviously you didn't make those choices. In the 2-0 game, your players never faced any problems and the game played out according to your game plan.

The main thing to remember is, tactics is not just what you set up before the game and then forget about, tactics is also how you respond to in match events. Fractional differences can be the difference between a goal and not a goal and then maybe your tactics are fine while you are doing well in the match, but as soon as the players face a little adversity, whatever flaws are in your tactics can be horribly exposed. Given the right choices, you probably could still have won the 7-1 game, if you had responded before the game was lost (at 2-0 or whatever). But obviously you didn't make those choices. In the 2-0 game, your players never faced any problems and the game played out according to your game plan.

I agree. I think the issue I have is not the fact that I lost so heavily but I just felt out of control of the result. I haven't played enough games to pass judgment on the match engine or the tactics yet. Don't get me wrong I usually tweak things during the game, such as closing players down or going more narrow when I looked exposed in the middle etc... I pay close attention to the finer man-management details of the game when I'm playing. More so than ever before tweaking things during the game is all important I think now. I think I'll play a few more games and see what I think after a run of 5 or so games.

My main issues from the match engine after this game was I could do nothing to stop thunderbolt shots and my players didn't seem to be following my instructions for corners.

I hope this was just a freak result. I'll keep you all informed how my tactics improve or not over the next few games.

Just a quick update, my copy of FM09 went back to the shop today as it's just running too slowly on my PC so no more updates for any that were interested. I did manage to win my next match in the Leauge Cup against Notts County. 2-0 again!

I agree. I think the issue I have is not the fact that I lost so heavily but I just felt out of control of the result.

aside from another problem I'm having with the game running slowly, this thread pretty much sums up the other major problem i have with fm09, and antmanbrooks' last comment sums it up exactly! there is a feeling of just really not being in control of the result. and i have specifically tested the same game over and over again with no variation of tactics and little difference in in-game decision making with wild variations of results - grimsby vs tranmere in league one - 2-0, win, 1-0 win, a 2-0 loss and a 4-0 loss!! no variation in players either.

i'm not one of these non-footy people who think that it should be exactly the same every time. i play 11-a-side twice a week and am only too well aware that tiny details can change a match - even something as daft as an argument between two players, or a freak gust of wind! but there has to be some rhyme and reason to it, otherwise you may as well just go back to the very first ever version of football manager on the vic 20/spectrum where you could pretty much just chuck a dice to see who won!