Make the set-piece creator more stable and possible more user-freindly

[Atarin]

One of the most, potentially, useful parts of the game, set-pieces, is also one of the most glitchy and the least enjoyable to use.

Its especially frustrating that the icons seem to have a life of their own, taking up odd positions on the pitch which just makes making sense of what's in front of you all the more confusing. Is there a way to ensure that the icons remain in the correct shape across the penalty box? Could there also be a system for ensuring that players listed as Go Back or Man Mark (generic settings) are numbered or ordered so that you get your bigger players exactly where you want them?

Its also quite fiddly and time consuming to have to program in so many different settings. Could I recommend an assistant manager function where you can select from options like

• Man to Man, Zonal or combined,
• Defend front post area, central area or back post area.
• Set by Size (so the Ass Man would order your defenders based height and jumping reach) or set by marking (so he orders your defence by Marking & Positioning).
• You can select how many men you like to leave up (1, 2, 3.etc).

You could do the same for attacking set-pieces.

• Choose Front Post routine, Central routine, Back Post Routine or Short Routine.etc
• You could, again, select your players to be ordered by Size or Finishing (OTB + Finishing).
• You could choose how many to leave back.

The set-piece creator could even come with handy presets with easy to understand names representing different set-piece philosophies.

This could be further developed so that you could have generic variations like Overload, Standard and Cautious set-piece templates which were easily switched between mid-game depending on how much risk you wanted to take during the game.

All of this would be designed to save time, enable to the player focus on game-play and not on the mind-numbing minutia of the set-piece creator.

[Harper]

Absolutely think there should be a more intuitive and custom set-piece designer.

Save each designed play independent of tactics and toggle whether they are active or not. As you say, have the set-pieces positions ordered tallest to shortest or designated attribute or combination of attributes (anticipation + jumping + heading, etc) so they are a little better auto-maintained when there are changes to the lineup. Have designated players that stay back to prevent a counter, and the rest are involved in the designed play. A threshold for when the keeper and designated defenders go forward for more bodies in the box (e.g., trailing by 1 with <5 minutes remaining, etc)

Possible even more involved with me being able to design unique routines in which I indicate a player's starting position and arrows indicating their movement and timing of movement

1. Slow move before ball is kicked with they hopes their marker has bad concentration and fails to pick him up (e.g. the Brentford goal against Arsenal)
2. Run around before kick and cut towards destination when kicked
3. Start at the near corner of the area and run toward the near post.
4. Start at the far edge of the six yard box and move toward the penalty spot.
5. Maybe I want everyone to start in a single line from the penalty spot to the penalty arc and explode to different locations?
6. perhaps have my best header run towards the near post and have another player run across their route with the goal of obstructing a marker's tracking run?

Edited September 13, 2021 by Harper

[Harper]

More thought to this: an interactive or simulation of set-pieces that allows you to watch your team practicing the routine you've drawn up.

Each routine would have a familiarity bar, similar to tactics.

When you add any of the set-piece sessions to your practice schedule, you are given the option of going into the match engine, and given an opportunity to watch your set-piece, and tweak it.

You can practice up to three routines in a session (could be the same routine three times or three different routine).

When you introduce a new routine, it takes more time in practice to set up, so you get fewer repetitions during the session and fewer opportunities to tweak the. As familiarity increases, there's less set up time and more reps.

E.g., in an hour long session there are twenty minutes per routine. So less familiar routines will result in fewer reps because they take longer to setup, reset. Imagine the setup time being the coaches physically pulling places to their starting location and destination. Reset being coaches having to adjust players as they return to starting positions

With more familiarity, more time is dedicated to reps of the routine, because setup and reset takes less of a time.

In this chart, the first row is players familiarity with the routine and each row is amount of time spent on setup, reps of the routine, resetting between reps, and cost of a tweak to the routine. Making a tweak would result in losing a repetition of the drill (and potentially lower familiarity if too many tweaks are made at one time)

Just spitballing here.

Doing the same routine consecutively would save the setup time, allowing for more reps, and more familiarity.

Edited September 13, 2021 by Harper

[lamp]

To add one small and tangential point to this: something teams routinely do is take a variety of corner plays (short, etc). If you don't want to run the same corner every single time, you have to go through an absurd amount of detailed effort, updating across all tactics and seasons as personnel changes. At this point I've simply given up: I'll never run a short corner and just have one main corner tactic, that I try to keep updated but of course a sub or B team throws that all out the window.

It would be better for there to be a fixed number of possible routines, where players are auto-selected based on their attributes unless you manually override one or two selections (i.e, Player A has to be near post).

Then, as manager, the Set Piece screen lets you check off anywhere from 3-6 (for example) corner types and then select how often you want to practice them and how often you want to use them in games. For example, let's say I install four corner plays, A B C D and focus on them in a even 25-25-25-25 split in training. However, C and D are gadget corners and so my gameplan will see them used in a ratio of 35-35-15-15. A similar thing for set piece defenses and free kicks.

Additionally, whenever the tactic setting has 'time wasting' on, teams should just automatically take short corners usually. And if it's near the end of a game while protecting a lead, almost always they will take it short and keep it near the flag. This is something that should be automatic for all teams, no need to figure out which dials and knobs to turn to make routine and logical things happen.

[Kyle Brown]

We've got something similar in our Features DB already that will cover a lot of the points made, thank you for raising all this.