Yarema said: Pretty sure you can get a new position to 20/20 unless they changed something in FM26, quite easily actually. New position might trigger some attribute relocation though due to different CA weights. Expand
tam1236 said: You can - tested many times. Especially at youngsters and with close positions. Of course it depends on versatility hidden attribute.
In theory professionalism is better - somebody on yt tested that there is no chance to make a good player with low prof. and sometimes it happens when a determination is low. But irl players with really low profess. are very, very few and very, very far between in FM base and in newgen. Balotelli is a lonely knight. And low determination you can see quite often Expand
I'll take your word for it on the position proficiency. I haven't done any testing on it, I've just always had the assumption from way back that 18 is the limit and I don't retrain players to new positions in my own saves.
I'll probably do a quick test of it to make sure later and update my main post later to reflect the fact that 20 proficiency can be trained.
In regards to pro vs det, aren't both just random generated for newgens now? To me, newgens are the main source of high PA signings. If I search in genie scout for players >140 PA w/ det 10< I get 472 players, 598 for pro 10<. So I still think it's clear if you had to choose one to search for, it would be high professionalism.
I've been having a rethink on my ideal player templates, trying to improve them. In testing certain changes to attributes one-by-one I've had some interesting results.
I'll explain my process a bit first. Let's take a more nuanced attribute, 'dribbling'.
First I look at other people's findings:
HarvestGreen22, using a very artificial setup method (all attributes 10 bar the one being tested) and assessing without regard for position, claims dribbling is 4th most impactful attribute and follows a largely but not entirely linear benefit through 1-20.
And then there's the FM Arena testing of course.
Orion uses a different method, he derives his attribute values from the match ratings from the actual leagues as they exist in the game, and he does it for each position. For the DR position, dribbling is ranked 6th. For DC, it is not in the top 8.
But for DR and DC, I plan to give them perhaps ~14 and ~16 dribbling respectively in my updated ideal templates. This is for several reasons:
1. With the Knap tactic I'm using, DC has 'dribble more' instruction. Normally this would be an automatic ~2 boost for me. 2. Dribbling has a very low 1.0 weighting for DC. After doing the math on it's relative value once weighted, it's clear this is worth setting very high. 3. I've read a comment that perhaps the match engine favors dribbling in general, not necessarily because dribbling is good in itself, but because simply continuing to run with the ball prevents other calculations coming into play. For instance, if a player decides to pass instead, then a decision/technique/etc error may occur, and all these calculations cause time delays. 4. According to the SI staff hints from long ago, dribbling combines well with high pace & acceleration. It intriguingly adds 'don't have too many dribblers as they'll tend to ignore any passing tactic you might have'. 5. Someone (HarvestGreen22?) theorized that attributes are simultaneously ability and tendency. Given that I expect my DC and DR to still do a fair bit of passing, that means dribbling needs to very high to take precedence. 6. A dampening factor must be applied, which is the actual availability of the attribute value. In a save I've loaded up, there are 489 DCs who are 100+ PA w/ 12+ dribbling. There are only 18 who have 14+ dribbling. Technicals decline or stagnate with HarvestGreen22's optimal training. Let's say you could take 1 of the 120 players (or newgen) with 13 drib and boost it by 1-2 with training, that's 14-15 max dribbling you're looking at. For DR it's a bit better, a small handful already start with 16. If it were not for this reason, I would get 20 drib for both positions (this is what I'm trying to communicate through my 'high' ideal templates).
In this case it's quite clear that regardless of whether the speculations are true or not, it's well established that dribbling is high performance and/or low cost. You can safely assume it without even running tests.
But sometimes there are contradictions, or nuances that haven't been explored enough, and these I perform tests to clarify.
I seem to be finding that technique and flair aren't always bad as HarvestGreen22 found them to be. Technique seems best at ~6 for most positions, flair I have around ~12. I get at least about ~10% performance loss if I drop either to 1, and 20 technique comes at high CA cost but does no better. I'm not sure what is going on here exactly. Perhaps it is that technique increases the number and quality of so-called 'tricky passes' - too much would detract from dribbling, too little would result in exponentially more lost possession, '6' takes advantage of only the most assured & promising tricky passes to nab a few extra goals that make up for any lost possession - particularly in top leagues, where the easier chances are very few and far between. Pure speculation of course.
Some others I wonder about are strength, agility and stamina. I figure that knap tactics can be weaponized against you in just the same way by certain AI managers, and that attributes have direct counters. So the counter to your AML with 20 speed (acc then pace) making a 10m charge towards goal cutting in from the left flank may be 15 agility (rapid direction change to sideways left) + 10 acc/pace to reach your AML in 3m the time it takes him to do the 10m. So if your DC has 20 agil/acc/pace, good luck to your opponent.
Yet we also see that HarvestGreen22's results show high agil/strength does relatively little. But then again, in his test his opponent has DCs with 10 agil/strength. In a tussle or direction change, they'll neither totally dominate you nor lose every contest. And what is clear is that 10 - that is, equaling them - does the job. Now in the premier league the best DCs you'll be coming up against have agil/pace/acc/strength around ~15. My theory is that it's probably best to at least equal that for optimal play, as your chance of winning a tussle probably exponentially decreases the wider the gap between the DC's strength and your striker's strength.. so agil/strength 15 on a striker. And if you put strength down to 6, because strength doesn't seem to overall matter much, are you sure you know what you're getting yourself into, because HarvestGreen never put a 6 strength striker up against a 15 strength DC.
So that is why I am in two minds about these attributes in particular. What I've found so far is that 6 str/11 agil is significantly worse than 15 str/agil, but it's not that bad (~7% worse maybe). For comparison, I found difference in off the ball to be fairly negligible.
Note that in the SI staff notes, it says of agility 'agility is an attribute which is most necessary for players in top flight football...combined with high acceleration and dribbling a high agility rating can make for a great attacking footballer'. And if you look at top goalscorers, they seem to have high agil/str - Haaland has 17 agil/17 str.
I have also tried to replicate the success of the Chinese forum member who won the Premier League with 1 CA players a few years ago. I've managed to nab a few wins and draws, but overall no cigar. This tells me that there are indeed certain non-meta attributes that you need to have certain minimums in for success, which makes me feel more justified in being wary of 6 strength and 1 technique.
How much do the latest findings indicate the importance of pace/acc/dribbling and overall physical attributes?
Let me explain what I mean:
Player X: 18 Dribbling, 18 Pace, 3 Flair, 2 Technique Player Y: 15 Dribbling, 15 Pace, 6 Flair, 12 Technique
In this scenario, Player X would clearly perform better than Player Y, right? Expand
My impression is:
Orion's attribute coefficients are most accurate to use for each position, more effective than HarvestGreen22's attribute ratios
HOWEVER Pace/acc/jump 20 will override this (possibly some other attributes in certain positions too)
Pace/acc 15 will not be sufficient for the override. But this doesn't mean they still aren't highly valuable attributes, I'm just talking about having it override other attributes to the point where you could have a DC with 1 tackling, marking & positioning and it wouldn't matter, the 20 pace/acc player would still be better than the more balanced pace/acc 15 one
Details from old SI staff-written manuals, such as [forward runs - stamina, anticipation, off the ball] seem generally correct
HOWEVER such rules/combos can and should be broken to shift valuable high weighting attributes to valuable low weighting attributes. I.e. [DC - Positioning 2, Dribbling 1] should be changed to [DC - Positioning 1, Dribbling 20] (same CA cost) even though both Orion's attributes and the guides tell you to get positioning
My theory is that putting high weights on key attributes for the relevant position carries an implicit necessary corollary: those attributes are so heavily weighted simply to dissuade you from making 20 marking/tackling/strength DC beasts out of thin air, not because marking has 8x performance and your DC will actually only be hampered by ~1x performance if you decrease marking to 1. You take that 7x leftover and make 20 dribbling/finishing/long shot beasts instead and utilize them with a knap forward-throwing tactic
I've come to these conclusions by trying to get a 1 CA team to win the premier league. Here's a brief summary of how it's progressed:
Base my 1 CA players off my combined HarvestGreen22/Orion/etc templates - Near bottom of table. Base it more on Orion's attribute coefficients - Mid table finish. Try Orion's + decrease pace/acc to ~15 to put some 7s and 8s on some key mentals/technicals - Back to bottom of table. Do the opposite, try to get pace/acc/jump 20 for most players while preserving what I can of what Orion & manual says - High mid table finish (6th, 66 points). Reduce positioning to 1, get dribbling 20 instead, etc. - 4th, 74 points.
In your example, player X performs better. But there are some nuances. Flair and technique are generally unimportant, even detrimental in certain positions. However let me show something that astonished me:
Player X (ST): 20 pace, 19 acc, 1 jump, 1 strength, 6 finish Player Y (ST): 14 pace, 9 acc, 19 jump, 8 strength, 3 finish
You would assume that Player X is far superior. However I used these 2 players as STs in my 1 CA testing, and they got me to that 6th-66 points result. But what's more, Player Y scored 7.08 rating with 29 goals in 55 appearances, while Player X scored 6.42 rating with 15 goals in 57 appearances.
Now you could theorize and say, well that's because set piece headers are the only way you're going to score goals with 1 CA, or that perhaps the wingers are doing the work throwing it to the target man, or something else. But my point would be is that your attribute choice, even pace/acc and down to such low levels, is genuinely subject to your tactical setup in a certain minority of cases. Note that if either player were actually *bad*, the team wouldn't have ended up in 6th spot.
That does not mean we are back to where we started. I suspect ST target man is one of 2 or 3 roles that can work with low pace/acc. On the other end of the spectrum, for DC, 20 pace/acc is simply essential.
I suppose a general rule of thumb you could use is physicals over mentals, and mentals over technicals. If you choose strength 16 over 16 dribbling or 16 composure, it's almost a sideways trade and this is one of the worst you could do with this rule, whereas trading pace/acc for anything is going to be iffy or catastrophic.
Yarema said: Pretty sure you can get a new position to 20/20 unless they changed something in FM26, quite easily actually. New position might trigger some attribute relocation though due to different CA weights.
tam1236 said: You can - tested many times. Especially at youngsters and with close positions. Of course it depends on versatility hidden attribute.
In theory professionalism is better - somebody on yt tested that there is no chance to make a good player with low prof. and sometimes it happens when a determination is low. But irl players with really low profess. are very, very few and very, very far between in FM base and in newgen. Balotelli is a lonely knight. And low determination you can see quite often
I'll take your word for it on the position proficiency. I haven't done any testing on it, I've just always had the assumption from way back that 18 is the limit and I don't retrain players to new positions in my own saves.
I'll probably do a quick test of it to make sure later and update my main post later to reflect the fact that 20 proficiency can be trained.
In regards to pro vs det, aren't both just random generated for newgens now? To me, newgens are the main source of high PA signings. If I search in genie scout for players >140 PA w/ det 10< I get 472 players, 598 for pro 10<. So I still think it's clear if you had to choose one to search for, it would be high professionalism.
I've been having a rethink on my ideal player templates, trying to improve them. In testing certain changes to attributes one-by-one I've had some interesting results.
I'll explain my process a bit first. Let's take a more nuanced attribute, 'dribbling'.
First I look at other people's findings:
HarvestGreen22, using a very artificial setup method (all attributes 10 bar the one being tested) and assessing without regard for position, claims dribbling is 4th most impactful attribute and follows a largely but not entirely linear benefit through 1-20.
And then there's the FM Arena testing of course.
Orion uses a different method, he derives his attribute values from the match ratings from the actual leagues as they exist in the game, and he does it for each position. For the DR position, dribbling is ranked 6th. For DC, it is not in the top 8.
But for DR and DC, I plan to give them perhaps ~14 and ~16 dribbling respectively in my updated ideal templates. This is for several reasons:
1. With the Knap tactic I'm using, DC has 'dribble more' instruction. Normally this would be an automatic ~2 boost for me.
2. Dribbling has a very low 1.0 weighting for DC. After doing the math on it's relative value once weighted, it's clear this is worth setting very high.
3. I've read a comment that perhaps the match engine favors dribbling in general, not necessarily because dribbling is good in itself, but because simply continuing to run with the ball prevents other calculations coming into play. For instance, if a player decides to pass instead, then a decision/technique/etc error may occur, and all these calculations cause time delays.
4. According to the SI staff hints from long ago, dribbling combines well with high pace & acceleration. It intriguingly adds 'don't have too many dribblers as they'll tend to ignore any passing tactic you might have'.
5. Someone (HarvestGreen22?) theorized that attributes are simultaneously ability and tendency. Given that I expect my DC and DR to still do a fair bit of passing, that means dribbling needs to very high to take precedence.
6. A dampening factor must be applied, which is the actual availability of the attribute value. In a save I've loaded up, there are 489 DCs who are 100+ PA w/ 12+ dribbling. There are only 18 who have 14+ dribbling. Technicals decline or stagnate with HarvestGreen22's optimal training. Let's say you could take 1 of the 120 players (or newgen) with 13 drib and boost it by 1-2 with training, that's 14-15 max dribbling you're looking at. For DR it's a bit better, a small handful already start with 16. If it were not for this reason, I would get 20 drib for both positions (this is what I'm trying to communicate through my 'high' ideal templates).
In this case it's quite clear that regardless of whether the speculations are true or not, it's well established that dribbling is high performance and/or low cost. You can safely assume it without even running tests.
But sometimes there are contradictions, or nuances that haven't been explored enough, and these I perform tests to clarify.
I seem to be finding that technique and flair aren't always bad as HarvestGreen22 found them to be. Technique seems best at ~6 for most positions, flair I have around ~12. I get at least about ~10% performance loss if I drop either to 1, and 20 technique comes at high CA cost but does no better. I'm not sure what is going on here exactly. Perhaps it is that technique increases the number and quality of so-called 'tricky passes' - too much would detract from dribbling, too little would result in exponentially more lost possession, '6' takes advantage of only the most assured & promising tricky passes to nab a few extra goals that make up for any lost possession - particularly in top leagues, where the easier chances are very few and far between. Pure speculation of course.
Some others I wonder about are strength, agility and stamina. I figure that knap tactics can be weaponized against you in just the same way by certain AI managers, and that attributes have direct counters. So the counter to your AML with 20 speed (acc then pace) making a 10m charge towards goal cutting in from the left flank may be 15 agility (rapid direction change to sideways left) + 10 acc/pace to reach your AML in 3m the time it takes him to do the 10m. So if your DC has 20 agil/acc/pace, good luck to your opponent.
Yet we also see that HarvestGreen22's results show high agil/strength does relatively little. But then again, in his test his opponent has DCs with 10 agil/strength. In a tussle or direction change, they'll neither totally dominate you nor lose every contest. And what is clear is that 10 - that is, equaling them - does the job. Now in the premier league the best DCs you'll be coming up against have agil/pace/acc/strength around ~15. My theory is that it's probably best to at least equal that for optimal play, as your chance of winning a tussle probably exponentially decreases the wider the gap between the DC's strength and your striker's strength.. so agil/strength 15 on a striker. And if you put strength down to 6, because strength doesn't seem to overall matter much, are you sure you know what you're getting yourself into, because HarvestGreen never put a 6 strength striker up against a 15 strength DC.
So that is why I am in two minds about these attributes in particular. What I've found so far is that 6 str/11 agil is significantly worse than 15 str/agil, but it's not that bad (~7% worse maybe). For comparison, I found difference in off the ball to be fairly negligible.
Note that in the SI staff notes, it says of agility 'agility is an attribute which is most necessary for players in top flight football...combined with high acceleration and dribbling a high agility rating can make for a great attacking footballer'. And if you look at top goalscorers, they seem to have high agil/str - Haaland has 17 agil/17 str.
I have also tried to replicate the success of the Chinese forum member who won the Premier League with 1 CA players a few years ago. I've managed to nab a few wins and draws, but overall no cigar. This tells me that there are indeed certain non-meta attributes that you need to have certain minimums in for success, which makes me feel more justified in being wary of 6 strength and 1 technique.
@GeorgeFloydOverdosed
How much do the latest findings indicate the importance of pace/acc/dribbling and overall physical attributes?
Let me explain what I mean:
Player X: 18 Dribbling, 18 Pace, 3 Flair, 2 Technique
Player Y: 15 Dribbling, 15 Pace, 6 Flair, 12 Technique
In this scenario, Player X would clearly perform better than Player Y, right?
Sanfierro said: @GeorgeFloydOverdosed
How much do the latest findings indicate the importance of pace/acc/dribbling and overall physical attributes?
Let me explain what I mean:
Player X: 18 Dribbling, 18 Pace, 3 Flair, 2 Technique
Player Y: 15 Dribbling, 15 Pace, 6 Flair, 12 Technique
In this scenario, Player X would clearly perform better than Player Y, right?
My impression is:
Orion's attribute coefficients are most accurate to use for each position, more effective than HarvestGreen22's attribute ratios
HOWEVER Pace/acc/jump 20 will override this (possibly some other attributes in certain positions too)
Pace/acc 15 will not be sufficient for the override. But this doesn't mean they still aren't highly valuable attributes, I'm just talking about having it override other attributes to the point where you could have a DC with 1 tackling, marking & positioning and it wouldn't matter, the 20 pace/acc player would still be better than the more balanced pace/acc 15 one
Details from old SI staff-written manuals, such as [forward runs - stamina, anticipation, off the ball] seem generally correct
HOWEVER such rules/combos can and should be broken to shift valuable high weighting attributes to valuable low weighting attributes. I.e. [DC - Positioning 2, Dribbling 1] should be changed to [DC - Positioning 1, Dribbling 20] (same CA cost) even though both Orion's attributes and the guides tell you to get positioning
My theory is that putting high weights on key attributes for the relevant position carries an implicit necessary corollary: those attributes are so heavily weighted simply to dissuade you from making 20 marking/tackling/strength DC beasts out of thin air, not because marking has 8x performance and your DC will actually only be hampered by ~1x performance if you decrease marking to 1. You take that 7x leftover and make 20 dribbling/finishing/long shot beasts instead and utilize them with a knap forward-throwing tactic
I've come to these conclusions by trying to get a 1 CA team to win the premier league. Here's a brief summary of how it's progressed:
Base my 1 CA players off my combined HarvestGreen22/Orion/etc templates - Near bottom of table.
Base it more on Orion's attribute coefficients - Mid table finish.
Try Orion's + decrease pace/acc to ~15 to put some 7s and 8s on some key mentals/technicals - Back to bottom of table.
Do the opposite, try to get pace/acc/jump 20 for most players while preserving what I can of what Orion & manual says - High mid table finish (6th, 66 points).
Reduce positioning to 1, get dribbling 20 instead, etc. - 4th, 74 points.
In your example, player X performs better. But there are some nuances. Flair and technique are generally unimportant, even detrimental in certain positions. However let me show something that astonished me:
Player X (ST): 20 pace, 19 acc, 1 jump, 1 strength, 6 finish
Player Y (ST): 14 pace, 9 acc, 19 jump, 8 strength, 3 finish
You would assume that Player X is far superior. However I used these 2 players as STs in my 1 CA testing, and they got me to that 6th-66 points result. But what's more, Player Y scored 7.08 rating with 29 goals in 55 appearances, while Player X scored 6.42 rating with 15 goals in 57 appearances.
Now you could theorize and say, well that's because set piece headers are the only way you're going to score goals with 1 CA, or that perhaps the wingers are doing the work throwing it to the target man, or something else. But my point would be is that your attribute choice, even pace/acc and down to such low levels, is genuinely subject to your tactical setup in a certain minority of cases. Note that if either player were actually *bad*, the team wouldn't have ended up in 6th spot.
That does not mean we are back to where we started. I suspect ST target man is one of 2 or 3 roles that can work with low pace/acc. On the other end of the spectrum, for DC, 20 pace/acc is simply essential.
I suppose a general rule of thumb you could use is physicals over mentals, and mentals over technicals. If you choose strength 16 over 16 dribbling or 16 composure, it's almost a sideways trade and this is one of the worst you could do with this rule, whereas trading pace/acc for anything is going to be iffy or catastrophic.