Panneton0 said: Out of curiosity, anyone tested part-time training? Only having 6 slots (2 of them likely being a game) changes things. Not clear to me if the "unavailable" slots count as rest. Anyone tested the progress cap with that? Wondering how to boost a semi-pro team :P Expand
Doesn’t make sense to worry about it. Sign the best free agents and loans you can get at the start of each year. No young player is ever going to progress enough from training to get into your team, or to stay with the team as you get promoted.
Go to change the schedule. Click create new schedule Top left select an existing type of schedule Choose custom schedules Bottom of that is load schedule Load it, then select and save it. You'll then likely have to advance a day for it to "save" in the system Then you should be able to go back into the calendar select a custom schedule and your imported one will be there.
It's honestly way trickier than it used to be, but it's doable.
Deleting schedules works similarly so your custom schedule don't pile up. Expand
Two things about this. 1) it only works for the first team, SI confirms that general training is not under our control for u21, u18 etc. you can change individual training and intensity but no commitment yet that si brings back ability to edit general training. 2) sometimes advancing time isn’t enough, you may have to completely exit the game and restart it before the custom schedule shows up.
CryosFeron said: ok here is another interesting find: I thought/hoped that the passing skills made this big difference, but I wanted to be sure that it actually changed how the match engine behaves on the pitch. So I ran another experiment and this time I left every attribute unchanged and only increased PA and CA to 200 of every player. So basically nothing had changed except for PA and CA - and this was right before the match started so the attributes were 100% untouched. And guess what: I also won every match (reloaded 10 times) against this much stronger side that beat me every time before I made any changes in the first place. I guess this means two things:
1. The Match Engine isn't directly linked to each and every attribute - it seems that SI just skews the general match odds a little bit into the direction of the side it things should be stronger.
2. Things like passing and off the ball etc. do have an impact after all, since SI considers them to be so strong for certain positions assigns so much CA points towards it. So indirectly these attributes should have an impact on matches. Maybe not as strong as Pace but hey: winning every game that I previously lost is not a small change. Expand
If you increased the CA then the game is going to change to the attributes to match the new CA.
EvensenFM said: The tests I’ve seen show that the effects of consistency aren’t very large anyway if players have high morale.
Sorry for showing up late - but could you link to any of those tests?
FM Arena has attribute testing that is easy to find. Those attribute tests indicate that neither morale nor consistency is really all that meaningful over the long term. The attributes to focus on are pace and acceleration - and it's been that way for years.
Also — that old FMM Vibe post is not rooted in reality and really needs to stop being brought up in these discussions. It's a wild rumor written by some guy 13 years ago that has never shown up in testing and contradicts things we know about the match engine. It's amazing how a "trust me bro" post like that has stuck with people through all these years. Expand
What you are referring to as an “old FMM Vibe post” is originally from an SI dev on the official forums. That it still works this way is supported by recent tests.
I don’t think your characterization of morale and consistency in FMArena testing is correct. The idea that they aren’t meaningful is wrong and there are multiple posts about why that is. The tests also have nothing to do with “long term”. The link above shows the impact of both; as with many effects in FM the relationship is not linear so you can get most of the benefit without maxing out, but they do have an effect. In the long term the main thing to know about consistency is that it grows fast in high potential players. You can put a consistency 1 player in a good team and he will typically get to consistency 15 by the end of his career. So if you are in lower leagues and have limited ability to sign players it makes sense to pick on a few attributes like pace, acceleration; you won’t be keeping those players around long anyway. But at the top level you should factor in more attributes because there are only a limited number of world class players and a player with a bit less speed but much higher PA can be better (but also not be afraid to take low consistency players if they have massive potential).
Zippo said: No, of course not... we've been working hard on our testing DB to make it less and less representative of normal gameplay because at the end our goal is finding good tactics to play FIFA and PES and not FM.
Pfff... it would be ridiculous to assume that we've been updating our DB to make it better for finding good tactics to play FM! The less our DB represents normal gameplay, the better for us! Isn't it obvious?
I can only take a wild guess here... it could be that we want to keep the result of our hard work on learning the FM privately for ourselves? Yes, I know it's unbelievable selfishness but unfortunately, we're that evil. Once more, it's just my wild guess. Expand
His question may have been worded rather rudely, but do you think it’s helpful to reply like that? Why not just give a straightforward answer and if you need to be vague to protect your work then say that.
Personally I remove get stuck in from all tactics since I don’t believe it does anything if the players already have tackle harder. Then like Mark I ease off tackles for anyone getting yellows. It’s pretty rare for me to get more than one or two red cards per season. Getting a lot of yellows doesn’t bother me; sure I get some suspensions for accumulated yellows but I rotate a lot anyway so it’s just rearranging which games the player gets rested. I do have a pretty strict code of conduct ( it’s either the one recommended by ZaZ or a slight modification).
Not sure what that even means, but changing the number of tests based on the result just introduces bias. There’s now no way to know if the result is more or less accurate than before.
Any thoughts on the default selection of players for various set piece roles? I noticed that aerial threats seem to be selected based on an average of jumping reach, heading and strength, but this does not seem optimal. Jumping reach seems much more important than the other two; some level of heading is needed to get the ball on target, but I can’t tell if strength has any benefit at all.
pixar said: My friend, with your method, my injuries have decreased significantly and my players continue their physical-mental-technical development. I do not give my players individual training. I only provide weak foot strengthening training for my eligible players. They usually solve it in 1 season. I do not give my players manual holidays. But I play in rotation. I play with my main squad in Europe, with my reserve squad in the matches I play at home before or after the European matches in the league, with my main squad in the remaining matches and finally with my reserve squad in the local cups.
The key to this program is to give players full rest (for 3 sessions) the day after match days. If there is no match on Wednesday-Saturday, it is just a corner routine or shot stopping training for goalkeepers. Additionally, if there is no match on Wednesday, I added team bonding training to the evening session to boost team harmony and motivation.
I played 6 seasons with 24.3.0 using this method. I play my matches on Wednesday-Saturday.
Below is a preview of the training program and download links.
Cheers.
Expand
Are you actually doing what ZaZ said, because you also say you don’t manually rest players? If you just have 3 rests in training and the players are “in training” then they recover substantially less than 3 rests plus manual rest for the day. It’s still better than scattering the 3 rests on different days but not a “super rest”. The strangest thing in the testing done by EBFM and ZaZ is that players on manual rest, no pitch or gym work, or even holiday, are affected by the training that the rest of the team is doing. This has to be a bug, but doing even one training session on the day makes all the players, including resting and on holiday, recover less. I suspect this bug is also part of what makes recovery sessions useless.
I always train 3 tactics with different shapes but I only change shape if the games is going badly (to me this means losing on the scoreboard and on xG during the second half). Otherwise I adjust the intensity and maybe a few specific instructions. Your question is more about automating the game with a match plan so you are going to be very limited with only the starting tactic plus two modifications. The most common change I make is when winning easily and it’s just designed to save fitness and reduce yellow cards. The next most common would be either defending a narrow lead (reduce mentality, have the GK slow things down, maybe time waste in the last 10 minutes), or trying to get a goal (increase mentality, maybe work the ball into the box, maybe move some players from support to attack). One thing you just can’t do with match plans is identify who is playing really badly and sub them out; this will be as or more effective than any tactical change.
The stamina increase at half time isn’t relevant since the replacement will always have more stamina. You also can’t start your best 11 every single game, so if you are replacing selectively (not substituting your star player when he’s playing well) then its quite possible the substitute will be better. You may also be winning comfortably at half time and bring on players to grow attributes. I would agree with ZaZ, and I’m sure he wasn’t saying to substitute early if it’s the CL final and the sub is clearly worse.
P.S. I predict, some people will rush to remove "Overlaps" TIs from the top tactics in hope to see their scores improves but I can assure your that highly likely it won't happen because almost all tactics at the top already hit a quite high positive RNG which is about +2 points so imagine you remove the Overlaps TI from the top tactics which would give +1 points but you struck -2 points negative RNG after 4,000 matches and as result you end up with a worse score. Expand
Your general point is correct that making this change is unlikely to lead to a higher score in the test league, but the logic is wrong since what you refer to is actually ranking bias which is not the same as the random error in estimating the score. The size of the ranking bias is not possible to calculate given the nature of the submissions to the ranking table, but it would only be +2 by an unlikely coincidence.
I think more relevant is that for use in the game, removing overlaps would be expected to be favorable (at least for the role combinations used). Anyway thanks for the useful experiment.
Meriten said: It's really strange when you say "Only 9 attributes matter but I set other attributes to 13 because these attributes matter too".
I've been testing a lot lately and have regained the joy of FM (I haven't bought an FM every year in the last few years because it's become too easy for me). But the results of tests should always be presented objectively and the Reddit user didn't do that. All attributes matter and it is interesting to find out how important each attribute is for each position. I would beat e.g. this reddit users team with my 19 acceleration, 19 pace, 19 anticipation, 19 jumping reach, 20 finishing, 20 technique, 20 first touch, 20 heading striker. This problem is more complex than reddit users posts. Yes, we found meta-attributes but this isn't the end of the research. Expand
Tbf one experiment involved only the 9 attributes, the other did involve 4 others but they didn’t matter in the sense that a mediocre value was sufficient. I think you are interpreting the word “matter” different to me. This doesn’t mean they do absolutely nothing, only that you really don’t have to pay attention to those attributes. If I sign a PL quality player then he probably will have at least 10 passing but I am never looking for the guy with 20 passing because there is always someone else who has better physicals and that’s what matters in the match engine.
Yarema said: Dribbling is one of the 9 at 20, super important. In fact dribbling attribute isn't even dribbling in the classical sense, but more like ball control.
Anyway, I think anyone visiting this site is hardly surprised by the results. Expand
Thanks for pointing that out, I was writing from memory. The other one set to 13 was work rate. I’ll fix my post.
Since you can’t see the original post now, one point that isn’t clear in the text but was shown in images is that in test number 2 there were 4 attributes being set to 13 (this is why the word “almost” is used). These were work rate, determination, natural fitness and stamina. I think it’s obvious that with natural fitness 1 and stamina 1 your players will be exhausted most of the time and either injured or playing badly. There was a big firestorm on Reddit but the main points were:
- despite several claims to the contrary the experiments were done correctly and verified by multiple people, so the 9 attributes are the important ones (as this site has shown repeatedly)
- you need certain other attributes to be able to use the 9 effectively. Fitness and stamina are obvious ; work rate and determination less so but you don’t want a really low value.
- Dribbling is interesting; if you dropped this down to 1 and set one of the other technicals to 20 performance crashed. So your super fast players do need to be able to run with the ball.
- Of course the profile of player used in experiment 2 doesn’t really exist in the game since the initial attributes are not completely random, and can only grow 5-6 points at most (and with limited user input). So you are not going to find some 80 CA player that can rip up the PL while on £50 a week. In some searching on a large database I did find a couple of 120-130 CA players that were so high on the 9 attributes that they could probably be world class. But the main conclusion is that when selecting players you can just focus on 9 attributes being as high as possible and it’s ok if some of the other attributes look really bad with the only red flags being low stamina, fitness, determination or work rate.
Edit: made some corrections based on Yarema’s comment.
Hope it’s ok to post a link to Reddit, since this experiment is based off FM Arena research. CA 180+ version of Man City gets totally destroyed by CA 90 version of Man City. I am not the OP on Reddit.
Meriten said: I don't agree. You have to vary one attribute for one position to know its value for this position (in a particular tactic). If you vary multiple attributes than you don't know which attribute is important for the performance increase.
Spoiler
Why do scientists change only one variable in a controlled experiment?
In a controlled experiment, scientists change only one variable at a time in order to accurately determine the effect of that specific variable on the outcome. By isolating and manipulating one variable while keeping all others constant, scientists can establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the variable they are testing and the results they observe. This helps in drawing accurate conclusions and making reliable predictions based on the experiment's findings. If multiple variables were changed at the same time, it would be difficult to attribute any observed effects to a specific variable, leading to unreliable or inconclusive results.
Neither you or the quote are correct in the context we are discussing, which is optimizing performance of a team with many positions and attributes. If you think of performance as a multi-dimensional surface, changing one variable only tells you that performance is sloping upwards in that region of the surface. But this can be towards only a local maximum, not the global maximum. Think of climbing a mountain; if the steepest path from where I am standing is North then will going North always lead me to the summit? No, if I looked around me I might see the summit is to the east and that what is North is just in a smaller peak below the main one. Or suppose I test the strength of a bond by varying the amount of glue; what will happen is that strength will increase up to a certain point, but beyond that more glue will actually weaken the bond. This is because I failed to consider another variable, the size of the surface to be bonded; this and the amount of glue interact and the optimum is actually a particular thickness of the the glue applied. I could go on about chemotherapy’s that are effective when used on their own but are useless for practical purposes because they add nothing but side effects when used with other more effective treatments. But you hopefully get the point. There are simplistic problems where it’s possible to isolate a single variable, but FM is really not such a case.
Doesn’t make sense to worry about it. Sign the best free agents and loans you can get at the start of each year. No young player is ever going to progress enough from training to get into your team, or to stay with the team as you get promoted.
Go to change the schedule.
Click create new schedule
Top left select an existing type of schedule
Choose custom schedules
Bottom of that is load schedule
Load it, then select and save it.
You'll then likely have to advance a day for it to "save" in the system
Then you should be able to go back into the calendar select a custom schedule and your imported one will be there.
It's honestly way trickier than it used to be, but it's doable.
Deleting schedules works similarly so your custom schedule don't pile up.
Two things about this. 1) it only works for the first team, SI confirms that general training is not under our control for u21, u18 etc. you can change individual training and intensity but no commitment yet that si brings back ability to edit general training. 2) sometimes advancing time isn’t enough, you may have to completely exit the game and restart it before the custom schedule shows up.
I thought/hoped that the passing skills made this big difference, but I wanted to be sure that it actually changed how the match engine behaves on the pitch. So I ran another experiment and this time I left every attribute unchanged and only increased PA and CA to 200 of every player. So basically nothing had changed except for PA and CA - and this was right before the match started so the attributes were 100% untouched. And guess what: I also won every match (reloaded 10 times) against this much stronger side that beat me every time before I made any changes in the first place. I guess this means two things:
1. The Match Engine isn't directly linked to each and every attribute - it seems that SI just skews the general match odds a little bit into the direction of the side it things should be stronger.
2. Things like passing and off the ball etc. do have an impact after all, since SI considers them to be so strong for certain positions assigns so much CA points towards it. So indirectly these attributes should have an impact on matches. Maybe not as strong as Pace but hey: winning every game that I previously lost is not a small change.
If you increased the CA then the game is going to change to the attributes to match the new CA.
Sorry for showing up late - but could you link to any of those tests?
FM Arena has attribute testing that is easy to find. Those attribute tests indicate that neither morale nor consistency is really all that meaningful over the long term. The attributes to focus on are pace and acceleration - and it's been that way for years.
Also — that old FMM Vibe post is not rooted in reality and really needs to stop being brought up in these discussions. It's a wild rumor written by some guy 13 years ago that has never shown up in testing and contradicts things we know about the match engine. It's amazing how a "trust me bro" post like that has stuck with people through all these years.
What you are referring to as an “old FMM Vibe post” is originally from an SI dev on the official forums. That it still works this way is supported by recent tests.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ECe0ygapG-8
I don’t think your characterization of morale and consistency in FMArena testing is correct. The idea that they aren’t meaningful is wrong and there are multiple posts about why that is. The tests also have nothing to do with “long term”. The link above shows the impact of both; as with many effects in FM the relationship is not linear so you can get most of the benefit without maxing out, but they do have an effect. In the long term the main thing to know about consistency is that it grows fast in high potential players. You can put a consistency 1 player in a good team and he will typically get to consistency 15 by the end of his career. So if you are in lower leagues and have limited ability to sign players it makes sense to pick on a few attributes like pace, acceleration; you won’t be keeping those players around long anyway. But at the top level you should factor in more attributes because there are only a limited number of world class players and a player with a bit less speed but much higher PA can be better (but also not be afraid to take low consistency players if they have massive potential).
Pfff... it would be ridiculous to assume that we've been updating our DB to make it better for finding good tactics to play FM! The less our DB represents normal gameplay, the better for us! Isn't it obvious?
I can only take a wild guess here... it could be that we want to keep the result of our hard work on learning the FM privately for ourselves? Yes, I know it's unbelievable selfishness but unfortunately, we're that evil. Once more, it's just my wild guess.
His question may have been worded rather rudely, but do you think it’s helpful to reply like that? Why not just give a straightforward answer and if you need to be vague to protect your work then say that.
Not sure what that even means, but changing the number of tests based on the result just introduces bias. There’s now no way to know if the result is more or less accurate than before.
I do not give my players manual holidays. But I play in rotation. I play with my main squad in Europe, with my reserve squad in the matches I play at home before or after the European matches in the league, with my main squad in the remaining matches and finally with my reserve squad in the local cups.
The key to this program is to give players full rest (for 3 sessions) the day after match days. If there is no match on Wednesday-Saturday, it is just a corner routine or shot stopping training for goalkeepers. Additionally, if there is no match on Wednesday, I added team bonding training to the evening session to boost team harmony and motivation.
I played 6 seasons with 24.3.0 using this method.
I play my matches on Wednesday-Saturday.
Below is a preview of the training program and download links.
Cheers.
Are you actually doing what ZaZ said, because you also say you don’t manually rest players? If you just have 3 rests in training and the players are “in training” then they recover substantially less than 3 rests plus manual rest for the day. It’s still better than scattering the 3 rests on different days but not a “super rest”. The strangest thing in the testing done by EBFM and ZaZ is that players on manual rest, no pitch or gym work, or even holiday, are affected by the training that the rest of the team is doing. This has to be a bug, but doing even one training session on the day makes all the players, including resting and on holiday, recover less. I suspect this bug is also part of what makes recovery sessions useless.
P.S. I predict, some people will rush to remove "Overlaps" TIs from the top tactics in hope to see their scores improves but I can assure your that highly likely it won't happen because almost all tactics at the top already hit a quite high positive RNG which is about +2 points so imagine you remove the Overlaps TI from the top tactics which would give +1 points but you struck -2 points negative RNG after 4,000 matches and as result you end up with a worse score.
Your general point is correct that making this change is unlikely to lead to a higher score in the test league, but the logic is wrong since what you refer to is actually ranking bias which is not the same as the random error in estimating the score. The size of the ranking bias is not possible to calculate given the nature of the submissions to the ranking table, but it would only be +2 by an unlikely coincidence.
I think more relevant is that for use in the game, removing overlaps would be expected to be favorable (at least for the role combinations used). Anyway thanks for the useful experiment.
I've been testing a lot lately and have regained the joy of FM (I haven't bought an FM every year in the last few years because it's become too easy for me). But the results of tests should always be presented objectively and the Reddit user didn't do that. All attributes matter and it is interesting to find out how important each attribute is for each position. I would beat e.g. this reddit users team with my 19 acceleration, 19 pace, 19 anticipation, 19 jumping reach, 20 finishing, 20 technique, 20 first touch, 20 heading striker. This problem is more complex than reddit users posts. Yes, we found meta-attributes but this isn't the end of the research.
Tbf one experiment involved only the 9 attributes, the other did involve 4 others but they didn’t matter in the sense that a mediocre value was sufficient. I think you are interpreting the word “matter” different to me. This doesn’t mean they do absolutely nothing, only that you really don’t have to pay attention to those attributes. If I sign a PL quality player then he probably will have at least 10 passing but I am never looking for the guy with 20 passing because there is always someone else who has better physicals and that’s what matters in the match engine.
Anyway, I think anyone visiting this site is hardly surprised by the results.
Thanks for pointing that out, I was writing from memory. The other one set to 13 was work rate. I’ll fix my post.
- despite several claims to the contrary the experiments were done correctly and verified by multiple people, so the 9 attributes are the important ones (as this site has shown repeatedly)
- you need certain other attributes to be able to use the 9 effectively. Fitness and stamina are obvious ; work rate and determination less so but you don’t want a really low value.
- Dribbling is interesting; if you dropped this down to 1 and set one of the other technicals to 20 performance crashed. So your super fast players do need to be able to run with the ball.
- Of course the profile of player used in experiment 2 doesn’t really exist in the game since the initial attributes are not completely random, and can only grow 5-6 points at most (and with limited user input). So you are not going to find some 80 CA player that can rip up the PL while on £50 a week. In some searching on a large database I did find a couple of 120-130 CA players that were so high on the 9 attributes that they could probably be world class. But the main conclusion is that when selecting players you can just focus on 9 attributes being as high as possible and it’s ok if some of the other attributes look really bad with the only red flags being low stamina, fitness, determination or work rate.
Edit: made some corrections based on Yarema’s comment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/footballmanagergames/comments/1ameaot/exposing_the_fm_match_engine_only_9_attributes/
Spoiler Why do scientists change only one variable in a controlled experiment?
In a controlled experiment, scientists change only one variable at a time in order to accurately determine the effect of that specific variable on the outcome. By isolating and manipulating one variable while keeping all others constant, scientists can establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the variable they are testing and the results they observe. This helps in drawing accurate conclusions and making reliable predictions based on the experiment's findings. If multiple variables were changed at the same time, it would be difficult to attribute any observed effects to a specific variable, leading to unreliable or inconclusive results.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-change-only-one-variable-in-a-controlled-experiment
Neither you or the quote are correct in the context we are discussing, which is optimizing performance of a team with many positions and attributes. If you think of performance as a multi-dimensional surface, changing one variable only tells you that performance is sloping upwards in that region of the surface. But this can be towards only a local maximum, not the global maximum. Think of climbing a mountain; if the steepest path from where I am standing is North then will going North always lead me to the summit? No, if I looked around me I might see the summit is to the east and that what is North is just in a smaller peak below the main one. Or suppose I test the strength of a bond by varying the amount of glue; what will happen is that strength will increase up to a certain point, but beyond that more glue will actually weaken the bond. This is because I failed to consider another variable, the size of the surface to be bonded; this and the amount of glue interact and the optimum is actually a particular thickness of the the glue applied. I could go on about chemotherapy’s that are effective when used on their own but are useless for practical purposes because they add nothing but side effects when used with other more effective treatments. But you hopefully get the point. There are simplistic problems where it’s possible to isolate a single variable, but FM is really not such a case.