Fair enough. I copied the usual corner tactic out of this version of Blue into my own tactic (and of course moved around the players to match my formation) and I've been scoring one corner goal every 6-8 matches. (about 4-6 per season) I've been trying to find a way to improve that ratio and had some success putting one player attack near post, one player attack far post, 3 stay back and everyone else go forward, with corners aimed near post and floated or whipped.
I have very good aerial players but am lacking a really good corner taker, so it'll be interesting to see what my impression is as my team improves in technicals.
Anyway my point was simply to give you something to think about when you start looking at set pieces. Not criticizing the current tactic or anything, but I have found that I needed to get rid of low crossing when I actually wanted to have a chance to get on the end of a corner. Maybe it's placebo but I thought it was worth having someone who makes the better tactics test out.
ZaZ said: Low crosses are definitely crosses by the ground, to the feet. Crosses from corners are clearly to the head. I don't think they are related. Expand
Even with low crosses set, I have not been seeing players actually send crosses in on the ground nearly at all. Low crosses are typically sent in with a flat trajectory about the height of a player.
When I have low crossing on, the near post deliveries are driven in much lower than when I have whipped or floated crossing on. I have been playing on comprehensive with my own tactic for 2.5 seasons.
I'm not saying that I think it changes aiming, I'm just saying that I think it affects trajectory on it's way to the near post.
Corners have long been included in the crossing statistics so it's not far-fetched at all to think that it would be treated pretty much as any other cross from the ME perspective.
I personally have, over time, started trying to avoid traits. Although I have a soft spot fot "plays one-twos" on attackers. The reason for me is that I prefer my players to be versatile, and I don't like having to think too hard about "so-and-so is natural at CM and DM but can't play CM because he has comes deep to get ball and dictates tempo".
I do really love plays one-twos though. But pretty much every other trait I try to avoid at this point. I just don't think they're that important for improving results.
demon said: @drhay53 did you use the original tactic or did any modification? Expand
I switched the DM to DM-Support simply because I had been using Red and all of my DM's were already fluid in that pos/role/duty. I also occasionally played on balanced mentality (away matches in europe and against PSG).
Something I have done in the past and that even blue seems to benefit from is to have a totally different tactic in one of your slots to switch to when form starts to get iffy. In this case, I decided to use the MP.v2 tactic from here, due to it's similarity to blue, and also because I wanted to experiment with whether or not I could get more out of my CM-Attack player (I couldn't; I'm just selling him, I can't figure out why he won't settle into the team after 3 years). I played it probably 5-10 times.
I like to switch things up the match before a big game in Europe as well, because I have a theory that the AI gets their "scout next opposition" report and makes subtle adjustments to their style based on that report. By playing something other than my main tactic, my theory is that I can keep my true playing style "hidden" from them a little bit.
I don't believe in "the AI solves your tactic" nonsense, but all of my most successful seasons have come when I've had some sort of slightly different tactic to switch to, which I've used to halt runs of iffy form, or before important matches. I think it affects player focus/concentration/morale, and affects the AI subtly. You know that press conference question about "do you think <so-and-so-team> might mix things up?". I think that there is some sort of "unsettling" affect to the opposition if you mix things up.
Oh, also, I trained light blue on balanced mentality, and used balanced instead of cautious against big teams. I have noticed for a couple of seasons now that if I play cautious in the first half I nearly always concede 2 goals. Balanced was a lot more stable for me against big european teams.
My latest season. First 15 games or so I used red but I started realizing my team has improved enough to jump back to blue. Also in the champions league final, haven't played it yet.
update: also won the champions league. Was down 0-1 and had a player sent off at 35 minutes. Scored 2 in the 2nd half (including a dramatic 90th minute penalty) to complete the comeback with 10 men
Middleweight165 said: Is your thought process here that the 140 guy will be an overall better player with good speed as opposed to a below average player with exceptional speed? So its not just about Speed. Pace and Acceleration are the most important attributes but the other attributes need to be above a minimal threshold? Expand
That's my thought process yes but I haven't quite adopted the attribute tests here to the level that @ZaZ showed in the next post.
I think the point that I was making though is that it's probably actually pretty hard for a player with 120 CA to get up to 20 pace/acc, because those are so expensive in CA. In fact, I just looked through my own 90,000 player database in 2033, and there are no players with 20/20 or even 19/19, and only 5 players with 18/18 pac/acc. The lowest CA is 126, and honestly, he's not a bad player. I might play him if he was on my team.
Honestly though I do things a bit differently. I try to make my entire team home-grown. So I only use either my own youth, or I buy them before they turn 19. I evaluate my team by dumping their attributes to html and then calculating the weighted average of the player's attributes for each role that he could play in. (I sometimes override the numbers for things like PPMs or hierarchy). So I'm kind of stuck with how well players develop. In practice, I've seen a few players get to 17/17, but they were quite good overall. So in my experience, if you find a 16/16 140 CA player, he's going to be good enough to play significant minutes on a team that can win any league in europe fairly regularly.
MiZuki said: This is the first time to share tactics in fa.Thank you so much for your suggestion.My English is not good, I am slowly exploring this forum Expand
Add some screenshots of results and some more details to the original post if you want the tactic to get tested.
Here's a look at my club ~40 games into the season. I'm in 2033 in Ligue 1 with RC Lens.
I took the metrics from FM Stag I believe. The attacking metric is: (key passes / 90) + (chances created / 90) + (assists / 90) + (shots on target / 90) + (goals / 90) + (xG / 90) + (xG / shot)
the defensive metric is: (interceptions / 90) + (tackles / 90) + (headers won / 90) / 2
positions of the players: Abbate - DL/DR Balde - AMC Balikwisha - MC Benjelloun - AMC/ML/MR Correa - DC Cristiano - AMC/ML Cuzcueta - ML Damilola - MR/AMC Emeljanov - MR Gamba - MC/AMC Jesus - ML Jimenez - DL/DR Juan - DM Kozuchowski - DM/MC Lambert - DL Mashigo - DR/DL Demirel - DC Navio - DC Nina - DC Salvatori - DL Vandenbroeck - AMC Vera - MR Vranckx - DM
The red lines are the team average in the attacking/defensive metrics. Players in the upper right are above average in both attacking and defensive metrics. They're nearly all primarily ML/MR players. Also, I move around set pieces every match, and the ML/MR are not always my corner takers.
Players in the upper left are above average attacking and below average defending. They're usually the AMC/MC positions.
The lower left are below average defending and attacking. In this case it's my DM's and GK's (who should really be left off the plot but I'm too lazy to filter them out).
The lower right are above average defending and below average attacking. These are mostly the back 4.
I've been making this plot for a few seasons with the red version of this shape, and the distribution of players shown here is pretty universally what I've seen.
There's nothing all that surprising about where the positions end up but I use this type of thing to compare players against each other, i.e. Vandenbroeck is a world class player making $10 million/yr, whereas Damilola is 17 years old making $1 million / yr, and they're practically performing the same. Vandenbroeck plays tougher matches of course but he's really not playing as well as I think he should.
I make a lot of plots and stuff from the player stats, and from a sheer numbers perspective, the defensive wingers do the most work for me (caveat, I'm using red instead of blue). This is in terms of things like int/90, tkl/90, key passes/90, chances created/90, etc. The wingers stand way out in terms of their overall production in those kinds of stats. They just do a ton of work in both phases of play.
That said, pace at AMC/MC is very important. If I had a player who was my best winger but also my fastest player, I'd play him at AMC/CM first.
I would try red instead of blue... it's practically the same tactic but it removes a lot of instructions that cause more mediocre players to be careless with the ball.
Also I personally add Attacking Movement, Defensive Shape, Teamwork, and Attacking Corners for match prep for as many matches as possible. I prioritize them in that order.
Europe is damn hard in FM21 IMO. There's a lot of luck involved. Being drawn away in the first leg is a big bonus.
ZaZ said: It's not viable to test all variations of set pieces since they often have very little impact in results. What I did was comparing set pieces of different tactics to find out which was better in each type of set pieces. Then, I assembled those components into a single tactic. You can see the discussion about that in this topic here: https://fm-arena.com/thread/967-set-pieces/ Expand
Interesting thanks. The main reasons I asked are: 1) Historically in-swinging corners have been far more effective in FM 2) I have the anecdotal sense that out swingers result in more dangerous counterattacks by the opposition 3) I have a general preference for in-swingers and didn't want to change it if you knew for certain that it was like a 20% decrease in goals.
Did you do testing to determine that out-swinging corners are better?
I've also noticed that the "lurk outside area" player on attacking corners picks up a ton of yellow cards due to fouls on corner counter-attacks. I usually switch it up so the DM is lurking, just to get a player with better defensive attributes into that role.
ZaZ said: I checked here if any team managed to win a big league while rotating the entire team, and found out it happened in Brazil in 2018, with Palmeiras. Expand
Last season I played 4231 (home) and 451 (away) and had an unbeaten season in the league and won the champions league. I never played anyone with a heavy match load the entire season and none of my backups were older than 21. But I have I think 16 HGC players in my squad, so they all knew each other, were settled, and knew my tactics.
All of the little things add up. Match prep is hugely important, team leadership, morale, and happiness, fitness, team talks, press conference answers; I take them all seriously.
After the success of last year I had a few players orchestrate moves to big clubs and my team this season is struggling to settle in. 21/25 of my team are the same as last year and I'm not managing any differently, but I've dropped a bunch of points and struggled with morale.
The point is just that you get out what you put in with FM; you can delegate all of that and still get good results, but if things are going wrong, you won't know why unless you've managed it yourself and discovered the ins and outs. I personally like to take control of most or all of it so that my successes and failures are down to my own decisions. I do not like creating tactics so this is where I like to make my influence.
I have very good aerial players but am lacking a really good corner taker, so it'll be interesting to see what my impression is as my team improves in technicals.
G'day
Even with low crosses set, I have not been seeing players actually send crosses in on the ground nearly at all. Low crosses are typically sent in with a flat trajectory about the height of a player.
I'm not saying that I think it changes aiming, I'm just saying that I think it affects trajectory on it's way to the near post.
Corners have long been included in the crossing statistics so it's not far-fetched at all to think that it would be treated pretty much as any other cross from the ME perspective.
I do really love plays one-twos though. But pretty much every other trait I try to avoid at this point. I just don't think they're that important for improving results.
I switched the DM to DM-Support simply because I had been using Red and all of my DM's were already fluid in that pos/role/duty. I also occasionally played on balanced mentality (away matches in europe and against PSG).
Something I have done in the past and that even blue seems to benefit from is to have a totally different tactic in one of your slots to switch to when form starts to get iffy. In this case, I decided to use the MP.v2 tactic from here, due to it's similarity to blue, and also because I wanted to experiment with whether or not I could get more out of my CM-Attack player (I couldn't; I'm just selling him, I can't figure out why he won't settle into the team after 3 years). I played it probably 5-10 times.
I like to switch things up the match before a big game in Europe as well, because I have a theory that the AI gets their "scout next opposition" report and makes subtle adjustments to their style based on that report. By playing something other than my main tactic, my theory is that I can keep my true playing style "hidden" from them a little bit.
I don't believe in "the AI solves your tactic" nonsense, but all of my most successful seasons have come when I've had some sort of slightly different tactic to switch to, which I've used to halt runs of iffy form, or before important matches. I think it affects player focus/concentration/morale, and affects the AI subtly. You know that press conference question about "do you think <so-and-so-team> might mix things up?". I think that there is some sort of "unsettling" affect to the opposition if you mix things up.
Oh, also, I trained light blue on balanced mentality, and used balanced instead of cautious against big teams. I have noticed for a couple of seasons now that if I play cautious in the first half I nearly always concede 2 goals. Balanced was a lot more stable for me against big european teams.
My latest season. First 15 games or so I used red but I started realizing my team has improved enough to jump back to blue. Also in the champions league final, haven't played it yet.
update: also won the champions league. Was down 0-1 and had a player sent off at 35 minutes. Scored 2 in the 2nd half (including a dramatic 90th minute penalty) to complete the comeback with 10 men
That's my thought process yes but I haven't quite adopted the attribute tests here to the level that @ZaZ showed in the next post.
I think the point that I was making though is that it's probably actually pretty hard for a player with 120 CA to get up to 20 pace/acc, because those are so expensive in CA. In fact, I just looked through my own 90,000 player database in 2033, and there are no players with 20/20 or even 19/19, and only 5 players with 18/18 pac/acc. The lowest CA is 126, and honestly, he's not a bad player. I might play him if he was on my team.
Honestly though I do things a bit differently. I try to make my entire team home-grown. So I only use either my own youth, or I buy them before they turn 19. I evaluate my team by dumping their attributes to html and then calculating the weighted average of the player's attributes for each role that he could play in. (I sometimes override the numbers for things like PPMs or hierarchy). So I'm kind of stuck with how well players develop. In practice, I've seen a few players get to 17/17, but they were quite good overall. So in my experience, if you find a 16/16 140 CA player, he's going to be good enough to play significant minutes on a team that can win any league in europe fairly regularly.
Add some screenshots of results and some more details to the original post if you want the tactic to get tested.
Here's a look at my club ~40 games into the season. I'm in 2033 in Ligue 1 with RC Lens.
I took the metrics from FM Stag I believe.
The attacking metric is:
(key passes / 90) + (chances created / 90) + (assists / 90) + (shots on target / 90) + (goals / 90) + (xG / 90) + (xG / shot)
the defensive metric is:
(interceptions / 90) + (tackles / 90) + (headers won / 90) / 2
positions of the players:
Abbate - DL/DR
Balde - AMC
Balikwisha - MC
Benjelloun - AMC/ML/MR
Correa - DC
Cristiano - AMC/ML
Cuzcueta - ML
Damilola - MR/AMC
Emeljanov - MR
Gamba - MC/AMC
Jesus - ML
Jimenez - DL/DR
Juan - DM
Kozuchowski - DM/MC
Lambert - DL
Mashigo - DR/DL
Demirel - DC
Navio - DC
Nina - DC
Salvatori - DL
Vandenbroeck - AMC
Vera - MR
Vranckx - DM
The red lines are the team average in the attacking/defensive metrics. Players in the upper right are above average in both attacking and defensive metrics. They're nearly all primarily ML/MR players. Also, I move around set pieces every match, and the ML/MR are not always my corner takers.
Players in the upper left are above average attacking and below average defending. They're usually the AMC/MC positions.
The lower left are below average defending and attacking. In this case it's my DM's and GK's (who should really be left off the plot but I'm too lazy to filter them out).
The lower right are above average defending and below average attacking. These are mostly the back 4.
I've been making this plot for a few seasons with the red version of this shape, and the distribution of players shown here is pretty universally what I've seen.
There's nothing all that surprising about where the positions end up but I use this type of thing to compare players against each other, i.e. Vandenbroeck is a world class player making $10 million/yr, whereas Damilola is 17 years old making $1 million / yr, and they're practically performing the same. Vandenbroeck plays tougher matches of course but he's really not playing as well as I think he should.
That said, pace at AMC/MC is very important. If I had a player who was my best winger but also my fastest player, I'd play him at AMC/CM first.
Also I personally add Attacking Movement, Defensive Shape, Teamwork, and Attacking Corners for match prep for as many matches as possible. I prioritize them in that order.
Europe is damn hard in FM21 IMO. There's a lot of luck involved. Being drawn away in the first leg is a big bonus.
Interesting thanks. The main reasons I asked are:
1) Historically in-swinging corners have been far more effective in FM
2) I have the anecdotal sense that out swingers result in more dangerous counterattacks by the opposition
3) I have a general preference for in-swingers and didn't want to change it if you knew for certain that it was like a 20% decrease in goals.
I've also noticed that the "lurk outside area" player on attacking corners picks up a ton of yellow cards due to fouls on corner counter-attacks. I usually switch it up so the DM is lurking, just to get a player with better defensive attributes into that role.
Last season I played 4231 (home) and 451 (away) and had an unbeaten season in the league and won the champions league. I never played anyone with a heavy match load the entire season and none of my backups were older than 21. But I have I think 16 HGC players in my squad, so they all knew each other, were settled, and knew my tactics.
All of the little things add up. Match prep is hugely important, team leadership, morale, and happiness, fitness, team talks, press conference answers; I take them all seriously.
After the success of last year I had a few players orchestrate moves to big clubs and my team this season is struggling to settle in. 21/25 of my team are the same as last year and I'm not managing any differently, but I've dropped a bunch of points and struggled with morale.
The point is just that you get out what you put in with FM; you can delegate all of that and still get good results, but if things are going wrong, you won't know why unless you've managed it yourself and discovered the ins and outs. I personally like to take control of most or all of it so that my successes and failures are down to my own decisions. I do not like creating tactics so this is where I like to make my influence.