WelshMourinho

Well done fella but that's exactly what the promise was. Add depth. Which is what I said in my initial post. Hence why I added depth. Also, not sure if it's just my skin, but the little preview of how a role moves for both the DLP and the DM is the same, and is clearly intended for the DM role. Not sure if it's different for the CM strata, but for DM that's how it's appearing on my screen.

Promises need to be far more clear with what sufficiently addresses said promise. A few of my players came to me saying they weren't happy with the goalkeeping depth. No issue with this as I had a recruitment focus out on finding a new back up keeper anyway, so as you would I tell the players I was looking to address it. I signed a 23 year old, with his current level being a "decent premier league goalkeeper" with the potential to be better. This should be enough to complete the promise. Transfer window closes and the captain is "unhappy at the failure to strengthen the first team squad in goal" and clicking his profile it says he feels there's a lack of quality in goalkeeping depth. I don't know whether he expected a new no1 or what, or even if it's maybe a bug, but signing a keeper who's at a decent level should be suitable for a backup option.

Is there a fix of sorts for ensuring the squad planner doesn't just jumble up the order of your players after you've spent time putting them in the correct order? Frustrating to see the 4* striker be sent to the bottom of the pile for whatever reason.

3 out of 4 of my attackers are on support roles there and not one of them decides to drop into that absolute ****ing sea of space behind the City midfield. That's the sort of nonsense this match engine produces regularly, and here we are after months with a mere data update.

I don't think gegenpress is the only way to play, but I do think the options a player has in terms of 'reactive' football are far more limited than the more front footed gegenpress type tactic. There's far more room for experimentation and creativity with player roles and how they move, and especially with this years game we're seeing a lot more attacking fluidity with players happy to move up into different lines and positions. The problem that irritates me is that the defensive movements, to me at least, appear to be lacking in that regard. In terms of defensive shape and options, you have the formation you pick which sets your defensive shape, and then you have compression and where you want that compression to take place. To put it as simply as I can, if I want to to press high I'm going to go either 1 striker backed up with 2 or 3 players in the AM slots, or 2 strikers backed up by maybe 1 or even 2 options depending on how aggressive I want to be. If I'm aiming to be deeper and go for more of a mid block then obviously I'm looking at making the midfielders deeper, e.g the ml and mr positions. My focus when I think defensively is nearly always on the players individual attributes because ultimately that's a large part of what I can control. When I'm thinking on the ball I'm looking for combinations and where people can move, and I think that's why large amounts who play this game find the likes of gegenpressing so easy compared to the more pragmatic side, shall we say. You can see how far the game is lacking defensively when you either utilise or come up against a role that has 'moves into the channels.' The defensive movements just completely struggle with how players peel off and move into that space, to the point where your defensive players just choose to ignore the player. I had Jonathan David at Porto, and I used him as a shadow striker. He would slot himself into the left half channel, and bearing in mind I was Porto and faced a lot of defensive systems, at no point would the oppositions DM's (either of them) position themselves in a way that they could eventually deal with David. The RB also wouldn't deal with him, as he'd be tight with Galeno on the wing. This left a massive space between the oppositions RB and RCB and either my SV would find a pass to david running in, or we'd work it into his feet where he had ample time and space to get it onto his right foot and shot at goal. I'm at Liverpool right now, and I struggle every time I go away to Wolves. Their left hand side triangle has a W role in the AML spot and their MCL is a Mezzala. The RB sticks to the winger, the 2 CBs squeeze onto the lone striker, and unfortunately my DM tends to forget the MEZ exists. I will watch the MEZ wander into the channel and just stand there as my RB is literally out of shot with the winger, the RCB is focused on the striker and the DM never clocks on. We have a bunch of fantastic roles that offer so much, but defensively it's clear to me the game can't really keep up with it.

Just had the most hilarious set of circumstances in my save here. In the summer my transfer plans were to sell a 32 yr old Darwin Nunez to Saudi and replace him with a 23 year old newgen from Leverkusen for 83m. Unfortunately Nunez does his ACL while playing for Uruguay, so instead I end up bringing the player in anyway without recuperating anything from the Nunez sale. Fast forward to August and this new striker, just 3 games into his Liverpool career is out for 3 months with a fractured skull from "a robust tackle in training." No idea what we're doing in training, maybe practicing wrestling finishers? Either way I'm down 2 strikers and I'm left with a 21 yr old Uruguayan who I've been developing. He's a good prem striker, but certainly not good enough to lead the line of a title charge. Now we get to deadline day, and a rejected offer from Real Madrid for Romeo Lavia leads the lad furious. The offer would've been accepted had I had anytime to get a replacement sorted, but I tell him to get on with it. A few players on the peripheral side of the squad (including what is essentially my last fit striker) decide to kick off, I, much in the same way I dealt with Lavia, tell them just to get on with it. My next football match at this point was Chelsea away, and this 21 year old Uruguayan is absent because on the friday night before he's gone out on the ****. Absurd, but we have to go without him and we lose 1-0. Sunday morning comes around and he also is absent from training. Because on Saturday night he was out on the ****. I have no idea if it's a relative's birthday, or maybe a mates stag do. The only 'negative' I can deduce from his player profile is that he is supporting Romeo Lavia. I have a striker, my only fit striker, who is so upset that his mate can't go to Real Madrid, he is spending entire weekends on the bevs. I have a CL game in midweek, and then Man City at home. I am intrigued to see whether he continues his binge drinking, or whether he's got it out of his system. Maybe the back to back fines he received will encourage him to live a life of sobriety for the time being.

Find it strange there's no option to tell an agent something along the lines of "sorry mate, but £170M for your player is obscene." Just something that explains that your budget just won't allow for you to progress with a deal. You currently have options to disagree with everything on the players side such as their wage, their playing time, any promises they want made, but nothing that can just end negotiations with "that's too big a transfer fee." I'd also like to see clubs more open to deals where clauses are involved. The transfer value guides are clearly all upfront money, and adding in clauses tends to stump up the deal to excessive amounts.

The amount of things that get introduced into the game that just don't work as we're led to believe is silly at this point. Did I dream the addition of seeing our coaches etc. having attributes increasing as we would a developing player? Have I completely made that up because I've never seen it and we're into February. The attempts at player interaction seem so basic that I wish we'd never gone down this route, and that ties into the fact that promises seem to switch to a different type of promise upon the completion of said promise. Arsenal bid for Ibrahima Bamba. I reject it and he gets unhappy, we have a conversation and he says he wants to go to a stronger squad. I say I will accept an offer of x amount. Arsenal lose interest. The offer of X amount never arrives. 2 transfer windows go by, and Bamba is now furious that I broke my promise to sell him? I never promised to sell him. He was told he could go if a stronger team bid a certain amount, and the promise at no point was "I am going to attempt to sell you for any amount." But of course, because player interaction is absolutely barebones you quite literally cannot discuss anything with the player nor the agent. You just get a big red message and no opportunity to have any sort of discussion about anything. Now onto inverted fullbacks. This role offers up the chance for so much experimentation, but the AI just don't seem capable of building a system with it properly. If a full back is rubbish going forward, and once newgens come into play a lot of them are, the AI tends to just slap an inverted role on them.

At this point I'm utterly convinced I could have Miles Jacobsen himself as my GK in my team and it wouldn't have any bearing on the result. What do they offer at all in a good team? Because I'm truly not seeing anything that would make me think it's worth spending a lot of money on one.

I've experienced this a lot too and it's incredibly grating. Where keepers are concerned it feels like an arbitrary balancing act. If I'm creating lots of chances then the AI keeper becomes god because otherwise we'd rack up the score, whereas my keeper has to let in the few attempts against him otherwise we'd have a silly goals conceded record. As soon as we play a team capable of creating lots of chances against us, it switches and he becomes competent again. The only way I see this being 'fixed' as such is if the game created less chances as a whole. I agree with the part about personalities etc feeling the same too. You'd have thought the most professional sorts would behave better but they seem to be exactly the same, in regards to transfer moves etc, as those who should be a bit more temperamental and a bit more ambitious. It feels like personality is strictly a development thing now, as opposed to how a player actually is.

It's a weakness in the match engine, but one that's only prevalent when people do silly stuff like sticking a goalkeeper upfront. The match engine doesn't live second by second like a real game, so whereas in real life if a chance falls to someone who's bad at finishing there's a good chance they miss, FM has already calculated the outcome of the game. Some might argue you should be absolutely crap with that level of striker up top, but reality is these examples are almost always shown with 10 solid players behind a dodgy striker and I don't think FM has the intelligence to separate that in the way people expect. If people want to test the importance of attributes or anything in that sense, there's far better ways of doing it than here's 10 good footballers and a ludicrously out of position striker.

Automatic just switches between defend, support and attack based on your mentality, and none of the roles you've mentioned have an option to be set as all three. For example you wouldn't have a defensive midfielder on attack duty, or an advanced playmaker on defend duty.

Maybe the AF just suits the rest of your team more? You still have 10 solid PL players in your line ups, and the game doesn't really have the ability to determine that a player is going to miss a chance in said moment, at least as I understand it.

But you're watching for the basics that you'd see in the real world and things that coaches can actively look to work on if they see aren't working. What do you have on the game that impacts passing lanes being closed down? Your options on the game are how high you press, how often you trigger that press and whether or not you press from goal kicks. Do you think pressing high isn't a viable tactic in the game?

Maybe FM25 will change how it looks, but I disagree that it's in the game "for the sake of it." It's quite literally the most dominant system in the game, it might not look exactly as it does in real life but you can set up a pressing system and in the FM world it will work. I mean you're talking about efficiency? It's by far the most efficient system in the game and most would probably say it's too efficient. They've made attempts with certain elements of Man City's play, and there are plenty of people on these forums who have had success playing a deep counter attacking tactic. Is it a game flaw? I disagree, I don't think it looks pretty, but I also don't think it's not working. It just looks how it does in the realms of the FM world. I understand why people don't like that, but I don't think it's having half the effect on the actual game as people seem to think.

This is like that save someone did a few years back where they put Phil Jones as a striker with PSG and won things. You aren't supposed to come to the conclusion that Setford or Jones are good strikers. The conclusion should be that the other 10 players are solid footballers and the system is solid, so yes, the game doesn't make these players absolutely useless. Real life is moment by moment, second by second. The Football Manager match engine isn't.

Honestly I think people in here would be better off seeing the match engine as a visualisation of team vs team and system vs system, as opposed to watching it as you would a normal game of football. To give a more specific example of what I mean, take how many goals originate from throw ins. Yes it's frustrating to watch, but there's nothing you can do about it. It's less "look how good this team is at exploiting throw ins" and more "the game has calculated that x team is better and is going to score here" and it just chooses a starting point on how to display that. Take the pressing example above too. I agree it looks silly and is annoying because we all watch football every weekend and we know what pressing looks like, but FM is simply not going to be able to match the intricacies of a real life pressing machine. I've made my peace with that. If your team is good and your set up is good, you'll win plenty of games, it just won't look exactly as it looks in real life. The only stuff I really look at in terms of watching the match engine are the basics, such as are we getting done over the top regularly, or do my players have good passing options. If I sat there and tried to analyse every moment of weakness I think I'd have binned this game a long time ago lmao

Best bet is to either go for young players who will be happy to get minutes here and there to develop. Ideally you want these players to have the potential to become your starting player with the right amount of game time. The other option is to take your standing as a team, as well as the quality of the player, and just look a level below that. If you're say, Man City, you've probably got a lot of 'leading players' for the league, and your best bet is to look for players who's ability is 'good premier league player'. These players will understand they're not as good as who's ahead of them, however they'll still be able to play at a good level for the league. If you find a player you want as a squad option, you can speak to the agent and get an idea of what the player will ask for, and if you think they're asking for too much you even have the chance to get the agent to lower their playing time demands. In my view squad players are one of two things. 1) players who have the potential to be a regular starter for you. 2) players who are good for your level so you can reliably play them when needed, but aren't so good they're going to get above their station.

I'm sorry but I think you're having a bit of a laugh there. He's got mainly 14's across the board for attacking roles and has good acceleration and physicals in general. I'd be very surprised if you're signing players with that spread of attributes for less than £20M regularly. And yes, I'm aware that the stars are relative to the team, I've played this game long enough. He's still considered a leading player, and has had both Man United and Arsenal, who've just won the league, interested in him over the last 6 months. £20M is nowhere near a fair valuation for that sort of player.

Who's talking big money? I don't expect to get an offer of 100M for him, but you would absolutely expect at least double the supposed 20m. If Manchester United have an active interest in the player, with the reason of their interest being "would strengthen the starting 11", then yes, you would expect a good sum of money. He's considered a leading player in a league that has a reputation of 4*s, that's good ability. Their initial offer was 12.5M upfront, with another 4m over 6 months in instalments and another 3.7m after playing 50 league games. That is such an absurdly pathetic offer and has only been made in that way because valuations are just not where they need to be.

Strongly disagree. 27 isn't young? It's a striker coming into his prime with a proven goalscoring record, not someone in their early 30s on a downward slide. Also don't understand the Portugal comment? Darwin Nunez, Enzo Fernandez and Joao Felix all came from the Portuguese league. Anyone putting up numbers like David has in my save would be getting solid transfer offers.

I've said this before but transfer valuations are just sheer nonsense. Not only do the AI set absurd valuations for anyone half good (I've posted this in the thread before), but the human valuations are just so clearly lower than they should be. Jonathan David has scored 24 league goals in 25(2) games, as well as 9 goals in 15 Champions League games, and I'm supposed to be expecting a measly 18-25m? The most expensive player I have in my squad is Karim Konate, and he's on loan from Bayern. His valuation is 60-71M. The transfer market on the game is dead.

You're using real life concepts and applying them to the game when it just doesn't work like that. If you spent your time on this game looking for realistic value you aren't going to sign anyone because realistic value just doesn't exist. Teams don't slap out of this world transfer valuations on players because the vast majority of clubs in the world (outside England) make most of their income on outgoings. How many clubs do you see holding on to their star players waiting for over £100M offers? Compare that to how many you see who are happy to negotiate. There's a select few clubs in world football who want to hold on to their players, the rest are more than happy to negotiate. I won't go in to Premier League players. Like I've already said, those clubs are very strong financially and have the power to ask for massive fees. The rest of the world is a different story, and that's what needs looking at because in its current form, it's quite silly.

That's not how a lot of players are valued nowadays though. You've gone on to name two of the best and youngest number 9's in the world at a time when there aren't many good forwards on the market, as well as the stupid clubs involved in the deals on the buying side. By plenty of Portuguese clubs I'm going to guess you mean literally just Benfica, the biggest club in Portgual? No one in the real world is valuing their players to the absurd levels they do in FM. No one.

Because none of these clubs are in a position to ask for something stupid. Not every football team has the financial strength of premier league clubs and nor should they in the game. It is such a lazy workaround to just let any club slap on £100M+ valuations on players. Pretty much any player is priced out of a move on the game, and the clubs themselves are barely benefitting because they're leaving themselves with shoestring budgets to improve the squad on.