3 Tactics / Player Roles and Tactical Familiarity

[wazza]

My DNA for my main tactic is to play a posession based style which is the way I want to play and be my DNA for the club based around the following team instructions -

In Posession - fairly narrow, much shorter passing, slightly lower tempo, play out of defence, work ball into box, sometimes time waste, be more disciplined and dribble less,

Transistion - counterpress, hold shape, slow pace down, short kick or roll it out to CB and FBs 

Out of Posession: High Press, Higher Defensive Line, Press much more often, Prevent short gk distribution, get stuck in

These were based upon a video I watched for team instrucitons for the style I wish to play.  I will be looking at a 4231 formation as my 1st tactic.  A 343 and a 433 DM formation also works with posession tactics according to the video I watched.

One question is does it matter what roles and duties I adopt for this as I will need the roles to suit the players that I have inherited and they may not be as per the preset control posession tactic in the drop down - does this matter and what impact does it have.  For example I know that the 4231 formation my team plays in real life the DM on the right is either a DLP or possibly a Regista where as the role on the pre-set is not this.

I always struggle with this at the beginning of FM save and also with determining what my next two tactics should be to gain tactical familiarity on during pre-season. Do I have 1 formation and have a balanced tactic / cautious tactic and positive tactic all as posession based or do I have 1 tactic for home and 1 for away with a sepeate one with another different formation for home games.   Do I have a posession tactic and a counter attacking tactic for away games - do real teams play this way and have two styles of play, which affects the DNA of the club? or do they have the same tactical DNA ie posession but then in that posession tactic be possibly more defensive or have a different formation.  

I guess what Im asking is what is best for your other two tactics to gain familarity on for the game.  I have seen on you tube that certain players will just change there tactics per game and instructions, this though will impact the tactical familiarty so your team may not be familiar with that approach.  In the old manuals it states sometimes its best to start on a balanced mentality and then change to attacking / defensive depending upon whats happening in the match.  I sometimes think that 3 tactical slots is not enough as if you did this with 1 formation and had balanced/attack and cautiious variations thats your 3 slots taken up already without even thinking of tweaking the formation.   What is the best approach for dealing with this and the limitations of the tactical familiarity slots you can use.

[VinceLombardi]

I haven't stress tested this for '24 yet, but based on my experience on previous versions, I don't feel that low tactical familiarity is terribly detrimental to most teams. And I say that with having played systems with 30+ tactics that I would regularly cycle between. 

The most effected players are typically your high mentals, low athleticism/technical players. This is because the penalty, at least in previous versions, largely just applied to mental attributes. Your hyper athletic winger doesn't run slower because of low tactical familiarity, but your midfield playmaker may find his lowered anticipation and decisions has him out of position more often and if he is unathletic on top of it, can struggle to recover. 

One of the best ways I have found to mitigate this is basically set up a primary default tactic as normal. Then use the other two tactics to basically set up tactics that represent the trainings for any other variations you play. For example, if your default tactic is Positive mentality, but you want to be able to push mentality up and down, while minimizing the effect on tactical familiarity, then have the other two tactics be balanced and attacking respectively. Similarly if you have a wide player that you typically play as a Winger, but like to bring inside occasionally, have a formation/role in the 2 training formations that reflect that change. 

Note: These training tactics don't need to viable or used in a match. They just represent the bookends and various variations you might introduce at some point.

This typically isn't enough to keep you at 100% familiarity as you make changes, but you will find that you can make a lot of changes and still be like 85%+ familiarity with the final product.

See these posts for more detail on how you can set up training formations to cover a large swath of options for use in match:

 

Note that these are older versions of the game, but I played a similar system in '21 without issue and I haven't seen any glaring issues yet in '24, though admittedly I haven't gone too deep into the new version yet to confirm. 

Edited October 27, 2023 by VinceLombardi

[wazza]

13 hours ago, VinceLombardi said:

 

One of the best ways I have found to mitigate this is basically set up a primary default tactic as normal. Then use the other two tactics to basically set up tactics that represent the trainings for any other variations you play. For example, if your default tactic is Positive mentality, but you want to be able to push mentality up and down, while minimizing the effect on tactical familiarity, then have the other two tactics be balanced and attacking respectively. Similarly if you have a wide player that you typically play as a Winger, but like to bring inside occasionally, have a formation/role in the 2 training formations that reflect that change. 

 

This is really interesting approach to the issue and I will try it out.  I also really like your ideas in your post

So from what I understand you are saying with regards to player roles you can train a AML IF Support role in a 4231 formation  in tactical 1 slot and also in a 433DM Wide formation have the AML set as WA for training purposes in tactical 2 slot.

During a match you could then mix your tactics up to suit the opposition and play a 4231 formation with the AML role as a WA if you like and as you have trained that role in a 433DM Wide formation the tactical familiarity for that role in the Position Role and Duty.  So they player can perform it, even though its a different formation?

[VinceLombardi]

1 hour ago, wazza said:

This is really interesting approach to the issue and I will try it out.  I also really like your ideas in your post

So from what I understand you are saying with regards to player roles you can train a AML IF Support role in a 4231 formation  in tactical 1 slot and also in a 433DM Wide formation have the AML set as WA for training purposes in tactical 2 slot.

During a match you could then mix your tactics up to suit the opposition and play a 4231 formation with the AML role as a WA if you like and as you have trained that role in a 433DM Wide formation the tactical familiarity for that role in the Position Role and Duty.  So they player can perform it, even though its a different formation?

Correct. 

The last thing to remember when you do this is that changes in Mentality often has knock on effects that you may need to compensate for depending on your tactics. This is most notable in TIs like Pressing, Tempo, and Passing Length. 

For example, if you like a slow, short possession style passing game and you want that in every variation, but still want to change mentality, then make sure the training formations account for it and you have offset the changes that mentality has hardcoded in. Else you will spend valuable training time on variations you don't actually use, and you will often reduce your overall tactical familiarity since the training is formation aren't as close to a match to the final product on the field as they could be. 

Conceptually, I like to think as my 2 training formations as reflecting the most extreme variations of my tactics, with the primary tactic being the average. This creates a range of instructions where the training formations reflect the bookends of the ranges you are like likely to use. Then you can feel confident that so long as you play between those bookends, you will have a reasonable tactical familiarity.

Additionally, if you feel like you want to increase tactical familiarity in the system overall, you can shrink those ranges, but understand that it means that you are reducing the number of variations you can play without taking a larger hit to tactical familiarity.

Alternatively, if you have a particular match coming up that you know you are likely to play more in a variation vs default, then you can change your primary trained tactic to something that reflects that variation so that you get a little boost in tactical familiarity in preparation for that game. 

Edited October 28, 2023 by VinceLombardi