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  1. Hi all. Long post incoming! Hope it doesn't bore you to death 😅 I've been playing CM/FM for about two decades now, and while the game has obviously improved a lot in terms of polish and realism, as a tactical nerd I can't help but feel that we also lost something along the way: the ability to tell our players where we want them to be in each phase of play. We more or less used to have this option in the form of the infamous arrows, which got removed at some point in time. Some examples: One Two I know these were taken out because: They created a rather "robotic" behaviour, by which players quickly moved to a different part of the pitch as soon as their team won/lost the ball. The total possible number of combinations was pretty much infinite, which meant it was impossible for SI to prepare the AI to counter every possible set of roles and arrows. This means people would easily find "god-like" tactics that the match engine simply couldn't counter. As a result, SI decided to switch to a "closed" role system, in which the behaviour of each player can only be one of the predefined options in the list of roles for that position, which are of course pre-tested and balanced before releasing each game. That way the rival AI can deal with them in a realistic manner. This did indeed reduce the chance of unrealistic results and god-like tactics (although it didn't completely eliminate it, as we can see every year). Unfortunately, it also had a massive drawback: it makes it impossible for us to innovate as managers. If I come up with a new role idea that I want to implement in my tactics, or I see some new player movements in real life that I want to emulate, I simply cannot do that. I have to wait for Pep to make it popular so I can start using it in-game two years later, when it's no longer new or innovative and half of the teams are also using it. I know we can still experiment by combining the existing roles in new ways... but I really feel like we're missing out on half the fun by not being able to dive deeper into the player role itself, telling them where we want them to be in each phase of play. E.g.: At goal kicks, I want you to move HERE and offer a passing option. When we're in possession on our own half, I want you to move wide right HERE. Once we lose the ball I want you to stay HERE. This is pretty much exactly what real life managers do, and it's how "roles" are truly defined. Sometimes they become popular and receive fancy names, like "inverted full back" or "false nine", and they make it to FM. But managers aren't telling their players "Hey, go out there and be a trequartista, ok?". They tell them exactly where they want them to be in each situation, which rival players to follow, etc. By now you probably have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to suggest, but here it goes: I think it would be great if FM allowed us to edit player positioning in a graphical way, so we could define where they should be in each phase of play. Preset roles would still be there, and they should be the "default" way to play the game. But we would be able to open the role of a specific player and edit the details in a tactics screen, where we could define his positioning in the most relevant phases of play: goal kicks, posession at different heights (own half, midfield, rival box), out of posession at different heights, etc. Instead of a position, we could also specify a rival player to mark in each of those positions, which would allow me to tell a player to mark someone only when I want him to, not all the time... which is another pet peeve of mine with the current marking system. We could of course save these new "custom" roles to use them regularly, but I think it would also be very helpful to simply tweak some of these settings temporarily during a game to adapt to changing circumstances of play. I know this would of course open the door to people exploiting the tactics system a bit more and possibly creating more supertactics. But doesn't that already happen anyway? People who want to cheat will continue to download pre-made supertactics like the do today, and those who don't will continue to play on their own. I hope that doesn't prevent us from making the game all that better for the second group of people! 😉 Is this something SI could consider for future versions of FM? Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
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