Poachers and Roaming Playmakers

[Lillywhite Dean]

I'm finding the game is saturated with Poachers and Roaming Playmakers.

I often want to find players who are trained specifically in other roles such as a deep laying forward or box to box midfielder.

I scouted a player who was an Advanced Forward. Great! Signed him and when he arrived, his role turned into a Poacher.

Anyone else found this to be an issue?

[DW19]

Playing in the Mexican Expansion League, I find a lot of Roaming Playmakers. I use that role in most of my tactics, so I don't find that a problem. That also lines up with my conception of Mexican footballers (whether that is true or not) that there are lot of that type of player produced there. However, if you are playing in a more structured European league, I would expect to see fewer of them. 

As a pretty experienced player, do you find that re-training them, if they have the main characteristics you are looking for in another role, works for you? For example, I sometimes train poachers as "complete forward"s and then play them as advanced forwards as their overall game rounds out. I don't know if this is an optimal strategy, but it has worked decently for me. 

Ideally, you would want the game to produce a distribution of players that was somewhat reflective of a given footballing nation. I don't now if that is at all what happens beneath the hood. 

[passenger58]

On 17/05/2021 at 17:15, Lillywhite Dean said:

I'm finding the game is saturated with Poachers and Roaming Playmakers.

I often want to find players who are trained specifically in other roles such as a deep laying forward or box to box midfielder.

I scouted a player who was an Advanced Forward. Great! Signed him and when he arrived, his role turned into a Poacher.

Anyone else found this to be an issue?

Yes, I can vouch for this.

I've found most central  midfielders seem to be roaming playmakers, and most strikers are either poachers or target men. 

I've started scouting for players with the right attributes for other roles (i.e. DLF or BBM) and training them myself. 

The only problem is that I don't see their recommended roles changing with training, even if their attributes would make them a perfect fit. 

Edited May 18, 2021 by passenger58

[ElliottMS]

I've stopped paying attention to their recommended role and just choose by attributes against the roles I want in my 11. Train all my players to fit one of the roles. I've changed the settings to show the highlighted attributes as those for their trained role rather than recommended role which helps.