AndrikoDS

The Xg really isn't a good representation of what I saw, which were several one on ones against their keeper, shots blasted over the bar or smacked straight at a defender, loose ball not picked up etc. The shots are a mix of inside and outside the area, and I do account for the odd stupid piece of heroics from 30 yards, but a lot of the chances are pretty close range. The opposition do tend to get a lot of players back in the box, which I have found someone of a work around by upping the tempo and making the passing more direct. As for the thoughts behind the tactics - Quite a lot of advice says that support role IF's are still goal scorers, but with attacking mentality they will waste good chances with aggressive shots, which I did see some of so set them to support. The Shadow striker is a big threat, getting a lot of chances which he then likes to kick straight at a defender. The complete forward is doing what I want him to, which is basically wonder around and be everywhere, which he wasn't doing as a false 9. The 433 works fine except for the lack of goal scoring mentioned. Generally, the team plays as I would want and expect them too, and they play well, just can't score and don't make the most of the chances they have. I did have a lower tempo, this just let the opposition pull all their players back before my team could get a good attack in. Work ball into the box just allows the same, and my team is weaker so such things just gives them ample opporunity to give the ball away.

I am running two different tactics and both have been having the same problem for over a season now - they get plenty of chances, win on Xg but can't score to save their lives. The Inside Forwards always blast it over the goal like they are trying to hit the moon and the center forward always makes the opposition goalie look like some kind of unstoppable hero. At the same time, the other teams either can't miss or sneak in a lucky goal. For one season I suspect this was the low quality of my team, but I've upgraded them now, and they play better but with the same outcomes. This is a stats screen from a match I lost 4-0, but shows a fairly typical story (my team is Blackpool). The shots on target isn't a fair reflection of the amount of good chances they had: These are the two tactics I am running: Morale is pretty high, as is squad cohesion. I've waited for things to balance out and return to the mean, but at this point I am starting to feel like the game is bugged or simply just has it in for me. I'll take any suggestions at this point!

I run the game through a laptop also and find everything works much smoother when it's plugged in and not using the battery.

From a tactical perspective, watch the game in extended or even comprehensive highlights and look for trends and tendencies over time - for example, do your attacks get bogged down on the edge of the area or what ever. If the same sort of thing keeps happening, then that's something you can tweak, but as said above, don't over do the adjustments otherwise it turns to chaos. Beyond the game itself, there seems to be a lot of factors that can go into why the team do well or not that I don't entirely understand and aren't entirely clear. Even the match engine stuff is not always obvious. You are winning the league, so it maybe that such a weak team as you were playing chose to shut you out of the game and wait for a lucky counter attack. They could also have better intangibles, such as form etc going into the game that you can't do anything about. Also, it's one defeat and you are top of the table. It does happen to the best of them from time to time. Maybe your team were wearing grey jerseys or something.

Sounds like a threat!

Hi all, I may have seen a thread on this, but can't find it (and I think it got closed anyway), but I am trying to get a better idea of what the passing range and tempo settings actually do, because I think it's not obvious or intuitive from the description, and I am starting to wonder if they maybe two of the most important setting in the tactics screen. Tempo would imply something to do with speed and energy, but what I think is actually the case is it's more about 'aggressiveness', so a high tempo setting really means a more attacking approach (ie. an attacking vs defensive mentality). Passing similarly doesn't actually seem to me short passes versus long balls. Pass it shorter seems to actually play out as the team making more conservative passes and keeping possession, whilst more direct seems to mean going for more progressive passes, not necessarily long ones. Does this match other people experiences? Is it essentially the old mentality setting hidden with two innocuous sliders?

Keep at it @HanziZoloman - it can't end like this! In my own (non-YAC) game, I am finding the Championship a very tough division to crack, and very frustrating. It must be hell trying to do it with youth players only.

At a guess, I would say playing narrower and playing out of defence is what is giving the opposition the time and space to 'suffocate' your team, and the tactic alread seems to have a lack of width anyway - the WB or W on attack might help open things up. A more experienced player will know better, but from my on experiences I think that might be what is happening.

Usually I just focus on getting the team I am at promoted, or at least over achieving. This tends to draw interest from teams in a higher league who come along and poach me. The other thing to do is to keep an eye out for mid-season openings in teams in the bottom half of the league above you and make the odd application, but as others have said and as you have intuited, don't spam the job applications! In short, keep doing well in your current job, pick your next job well and your meteoric rise will take care of itself. These are fun saves to do, and allow you to be a bit more brutal about dumping under achieving players and bringing in improvements. You have to manage with ambition, pragmatism and ruthlessness.

That's good, look forward to seeing how it turns out! This has been a bit of an issue in one way or another since the 90s! I was having a go at CM97/98 the other week for fun, and I was amazed at how the visual match engine today is pretty much just a depiction of the old text commentary from CM2. I'd be curious to know how much old code is kicking around in the current versions of the game.

None of the roles really match the descriptions anymore, which is one part of the problem. None of the info the game gives us really tells us what is going on. On top of that, it's never clear what is exactly going wrong in the match engine, it just throws up the same markers of some sort of 'problem' - suddenly players can't pass the ball properly; strikers get loads of chances but miss them all or hit the cross bar; the AI will not get a shot on goal all game then win 1-0 from a set piece or penalty etc. And the solution isn't always tactical either, it could be bad morale, an unhappy player, team cohesion or something like that. So I'd say there is something 'wrong', and it's the way the match engine and UI represent the numbers underneath the system, but I don't think there is much SI can do about that, though it is time they did a review of all the text descriptions in the game.

I've been finding in my games that it the lone striker is very reliant on how high up the defensive line is, and how high the press is. For example, an AT on a high press tactic gets far to isolated, wondering all the way up the pitch away from the midfield, or on a mid block a DLF or F9 can sometimes be too bunched up with the team on the half way line whilst the opposition pulls all it's players back. When the striker stops scoring or being involved, I suspect that the AI has 'adjusted' (certainly not cracked!) the tactic you are using, and it might be worth playing around with those elements at first.

The problem is that it's not always clear or intuitive why things happen. The match engine isn't perfect, which is fine, but sometimes it does feel like it's out to get you for no reason, like your cohesive team who've been playing 433 and winning all season suddenly can't pass the ball without giving it away, or every shot hitting the cross bar. And then you change one thing, like an IW(s) into and IF(s) and it all seems to be 'fixed'. Often times the same thing seems to happen, which gives the impression of the game being scripted, which is likely not the case. It's just the way the game represents all the numbers being crunched in the code, but when your players always seem to give away a penalty in the last ten minutes after a 0-0 game in which they were dominating, it feels like something is up.

If you want those jobs apply for them. Otherwise I don't see the problem - every job in my current (FM23) save was one where I was head hunted, but I was in lower leagues. You're situation is a bit like Pep Guardiola getting annoyed because Napoli didn't ring him up begging to manage them.

The Youth Challenge thread completely blows away any idea that developing youth is pointless in this game. If anything it is too easy - the class of '92 was a freak occurrence that doesn't happen very often, and as someone has pointed out in this thread, it is incredibly rare any youth players in any academy will ever be anything other that a future sports coach or something. If they manage to get a few years in the Vanerama regionals, they were probably the most successful kid in their class. To follow on to this discussion, I play the game on and off over years, and don't follow actually football, so there is a lot of I have to learn or relearn every time I start a save. A proper explanation of what I am doing when setting up the game world is not handholding, and is definitely not something I want to 'discover'. It is not clear at all what would make a 'balanced' game world, or one that would suit a long term LLM save or whatever. I've heard that having a database that's too large just causes a glut of players and destroys the transfer market, on the other hand having a database that is too small will ramp up everyone's price. But what is a large or small database anyway? Does that mean total number of players, or whether I have chosen the 'large database' option? Is it players per team loaded etc. etc. Stuff like this should be better explained, especially by this point when the game is over 30 years old.