Arena said: Hi ZaZ, I'm a huge fan of you since FM 24, u create the best tactic until now. Your current number 1 tactic is very good, i use mainly at home, when play away or when my team is weak, i will tweak a bit the "Out of Possesion" instruction. I change the Trigger Press to "More Often" and the Defensive Line Behavior to "Balance". I used the Parisian Set Piece 4, which is available in FM Scout. For Fun i tried with New Zealand and i dunno man, but i won the World Cup 2026. Great Tactic and Cheers Expand
Thank you, and glad you like it! I did not compare my set pieces with Parisian 4, but I will check it here.
Yarema said: Small sample. After half a season with old set pieces and half with new production is roughly the same. There are some new types of goals scored though but for and against. With better familiarity over time or just better RNG it might pull ahead. Keeping the new version for now, I seem to be getting hit on the counter less than before and that's probably the most frustrating thing to watch Expand
Thank you for testing. Keep in mind for any set pieces anyone develop, results from a single season can vary from 5 goals from corners to 15 goals from corners (for example), so it is very hard to measure from a single test run. That is why it is good when people talk about their results, so we can see what the majority of experiences is like. My tests were made with one of the worst teams of the league, using a tactic with three defenders, and results might be completely different under other conditions.
Testing uneven induced supporting runs. One side induces overlap through player instructions, while the other induces underlap, to compare with a similar tactic doing that through team instructions.
DJJENSEN said: Another question. Are there any beneficial player traits for each position? Expand
I can only conjecture about it since I did not do any experiments about it. Personally, my preferred traits are to beat the offside trap and goal scoring traits, like shoot with power or place shots. Other than that, traits that reinforce instructions of the tactic and role position, like knock the ball past the opponent, move into channels or throw into tackles.
If you want one example of what I would add to a frontline player, it would be: - Likes to try to beat offside trap - Knocks ball past opponent - Tries first time shots
Yarema said: Still using your old ones that produce a goal here or there from set pieces. Now that I have better jumpers maybe 5-10 per season mostly from corners. And I do occasionally get hit on the counter especially from IFK far from goal which can be frustrating.
So I'll give these a go, but I play slowly so can't really promise any feedback for a few weeks. Expand
Thank you! The old one was made in November during beta, so it got clearly outdated with new match engine changes. The new version should be better in all aspects. I still think it can improve in the defensive corners, but all changes I tried ended up being worse or reducing win rate.
Jessexripley said: Im at the beginning of a new season so i will give it a go even i play not with the best team , i play with dendsd eh and im promoted to the jupiler pro league in belgium Expand
Thank you! It should work on weak teams. In fact, I tried it with Burnley, and results of this version are presented below, for five different runs. Goals Scored Corner: 11, 4, 8, 7, 14 Direct Free Kick: 0, 2, 1, 0, 1 Indirect Free Kick: 5, 5, 7, 5, 3
As you can see, from around 80 goals per season, ~15 were from set pieces, which is almost 20% of goals. I expect numbers to be even better with teams of higher standing.
I have updated my set pieces after some extensive testing, and would like to know if any of you want to try it and report the results. The set pieces are in the first post, as well as pictures for people in consoles. Please, let me know how it worked for you!
I have updated my set pieces after some extensive testing, and would like to know if any of you want to try it and report the results. The set pieces are in the attachment, as well as pictures for people in consoles. Please, let me know how it worked for you!
Em said: This is the best tactic in FM right now, right? So it can be used with any team, right?" Expand
Any tactic from 84+ is equally good, because they fall under the margin of error from FM-Arena. This one is just the current top, and it will perform well with any team that has a squad to support it (two or three players proficient in each position).
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: I was going to add, but decided in the end not to, that you seem to to believe that GK only contributes to goals prevented rather than goals scored. The reason I decided not to is because I had a brief look at the past results to find evidence to disprove this, but realized it would just take too much time to collate all the necessary information to present it neatly. But my impression just from having running the tests and seeing the results, is that GK doesn't just prevent goals, better GK results in more team goals scored. This is more clearly demonstrated/known with better defenders resulting in more goals/wins.
So you're saying I should make your confirmation bias a prerequisite of my testing?
My testing can be taken seriously because I'm running them in the real league on full detail with players that have realistically attainable attributes, with cumulatively thousands of samples not on every attribute precisely but the basic picture. So I can say with certainty that a team of 1 CA players can win the Premier League, and that a team of 15 pace/acc players can also win the Premier League (4th/5th most typically though), but when I found in my 1 CA testing that concentration only mattered for DC/DL/DR that turned out to be wrong - or perhaps it only applied to that 1 CA limitation. Stamina also did not matter for those 1 CA players, and according to HarvestGreen stamina is one of the least important physical attributes - less important than agility he finds.
It is telling that you think changing your mind is a sign of weakness. What the data is showing is actually that there perhaps aren't any outfield positional differences. I think what is going on with stamina is that it affects the decay rate of pace/acc over a match. So in my 1 CA tests where players have 17-20 pace/acc, low stamina is insignificant because pace/acc is from a high starting point to begin with. This would also therefore be true once you have your 18+ pace/acc players in game. For this 15 pace/acc where we are hitting the lower threshold of the pace/acc requirement, stamina is necessary to make up for its shortfall towards the end of the match. I have done another test earlier where 14 pace/acc/sta comes 8th, so it does appear to work this way. What this means is that in any case, stamina is less important than pace/acc in any position including fullbacks, and one would guess that 20 stamina = 4 pace or acc, so 20% of pace/acc. This happens to align neatly with HarvestGreen's finding of 21.7%.
As far as I'm aware, no one else is doing the kind of testing I'm doing, which is using the real league in situ. Everybody else seems to be doing carefully controlled custom leagues where every player has 10 attributes or whatnot, and even making morale and such identical. I've been influenced to take my approach from previous experience, where I couldn't work out the newgen factors based on isolation tests, so I ended up simply testing the median PA for every single playable club in Football Manager. And from those results it turned out that there is a hidden factor I couldn't have found in my isolation tests and why I could never get my formula to work properly. The great thing about this method is that there's no question of 'yes, but will this work in the Premier League?' - it simply does.
My observations are:
1) Certain attributes seem to have more result variability than others. For instance, important matches 13 > 8 results in say 4th, 12th, 4th, 12th instead of the typical 4th, 5th, 5th, 8th, 5th, 3rd, 4th, 10th.
2) Say my team comes 2nd almost every test. Liverpool gets 68 points, I get 66 points. I get 88 points, Liverpool gets 91 points. Liverpool gets 76 points, I get 71 points. I'm not sure how this gels with your idea of how it works, but if it was just 2 sets of randomness, why would two team's points track each other like this? In any case, I don't know on this one, all I want to assert is that table position is an adequately reliable measure. Even if you're correct in that it's just as random, but the scale is smaller so it doesn't show, then for all intents & purposes it still works - the RNG does not overwhelm the predictability of table position. Not that I mean to be dismissive of your theory, I actually think it's somewhat important to get to why it works like this and I'm open to ideas on it.
2) The typical position variability for me is less than you have observed. Maybe it's the tactic, maybe it's the unevenness of players, and so on. Now unfortunately I don't save my dud results, so I can't really present data on this. But based on my saved successes, and recollections of duds, I reckon it will be in the range ~3rd-8th ~80-90% of the time. But I've done a test of this below to determine the truth.
So I did 10 one-season tests of 14 pace/acc/stamina + new GK template since I want more samples on both of those anyway:
8th 4th 3rd 9th (sacked after 14 games) 8th 2nd 13th (sacked after 15 games) 6th (sacked after 36 games) 10th (sacked after 20 games) 6th
So 7/10 times (I'm going to count 6th sacked after 36 games) the team did 8th or better. The mode was 6th or 8th. The median was 7th. The average was 7th (6.9).
And that's assuming those early sackings wouldn't have led to higher results later if not sacked. If I were summing up these results, I'd say 14 pace/acc/sta does ~6th-8th. Expand
There are many ways to avoid the variance in tests. You could perform statistical tests, use stuff like medians instead of averages, or try simple solutions like "Do ten tests, discard the three best and three worst results, and average the middle four". Those techniques are made to avoid outliers.
Thank you, and glad you like it! I did not compare my set pieces with Parisian 4, but I will check it here.
Thank you for testing. Keep in mind for any set pieces anyone develop, results from a single season can vary from 5 goals from corners to 15 goals from corners (for example), so it is very hard to measure from a single test run. That is why it is good when people talk about their results, so we can see what the majority of experiences is like. My tests were made with one of the worst teams of the league, using a tactic with three defenders, and results might be completely different under other conditions.
Are there any beneficial player traits for each position?
I can only conjecture about it since I did not do any experiments about it. Personally, my preferred traits are to beat the offside trap and goal scoring traits, like shoot with power or place shots. Other than that, traits that reinforce instructions of the tactic and role position, like knock the ball past the opponent, move into channels or throw into tackles.
If you want one example of what I would add to a frontline player, it would be:
- Likes to try to beat offside trap
- Knocks ball past opponent
- Tries first time shots
In my experiments my new set pieces did better, but I was hoping more people could try and compare with ARSENAL21 or parisianplay3.
So I'll give these a go, but I play slowly so can't really promise any feedback for a few weeks.
Thank you! The old one was made in November during beta, so it got clearly outdated with new match engine changes. The new version should be better in all aspects. I still think it can improve in the defensive corners, but all changes I tried ended up being worse or reducing win rate.
Thank you! It should work on weak teams. In fact, I tried it with Burnley, and results of this version are presented below, for five different runs.
Goals Scored
Corner: 11, 4, 8, 7, 14
Direct Free Kick: 0, 2, 1, 0, 1
Indirect Free Kick: 5, 5, 7, 5, 3
Goals Conceded
Corner: 4, 5, 5, 5, 3
Direct Free Kick: 1, 0, 0, 2, 0
Indirect Free Kick: 2, 2, 4, 2, 3
As you can see, from around 80 goals per season, ~15 were from set pieces, which is almost 20% of goals. I expect numbers to be even better with teams of higher standing.
Yeah, it got the highest points per match in the tests.
Any tactic from 84+ is equally good, because they fall under the margin of error from FM-Arena. This one is just the current top, and it will perform well with any team that has a squad to support it (two or three players proficient in each position).
So you're saying I should make your confirmation bias a prerequisite of my testing?
My testing can be taken seriously because I'm running them in the real league on full detail with players that have realistically attainable attributes, with cumulatively thousands of samples not on every attribute precisely but the basic picture. So I can say with certainty that a team of 1 CA players can win the Premier League, and that a team of 15 pace/acc players can also win the Premier League (4th/5th most typically though), but when I found in my 1 CA testing that concentration only mattered for DC/DL/DR that turned out to be wrong - or perhaps it only applied to that 1 CA limitation. Stamina also did not matter for those 1 CA players, and according to HarvestGreen stamina is one of the least important physical attributes - less important than agility he finds.
It is telling that you think changing your mind is a sign of weakness. What the data is showing is actually that there perhaps aren't any outfield positional differences. I think what is going on with stamina is that it affects the decay rate of pace/acc over a match. So in my 1 CA tests where players have 17-20 pace/acc, low stamina is insignificant because pace/acc is from a high starting point to begin with. This would also therefore be true once you have your 18+ pace/acc players in game. For this 15 pace/acc where we are hitting the lower threshold of the pace/acc requirement, stamina is necessary to make up for its shortfall towards the end of the match. I have done another test earlier where 14 pace/acc/sta comes 8th, so it does appear to work this way. What this means is that in any case, stamina is less important than pace/acc in any position including fullbacks, and one would guess that 20 stamina = 4 pace or acc, so 20% of pace/acc. This happens to align neatly with HarvestGreen's finding of 21.7%.
As far as I'm aware, no one else is doing the kind of testing I'm doing, which is using the real league in situ. Everybody else seems to be doing carefully controlled custom leagues where every player has 10 attributes or whatnot, and even making morale and such identical. I've been influenced to take my approach from previous experience, where I couldn't work out the newgen factors based on isolation tests, so I ended up simply testing the median PA for every single playable club in Football Manager. And from those results it turned out that there is a hidden factor I couldn't have found in my isolation tests and why I could never get my formula to work properly. The great thing about this method is that there's no question of 'yes, but will this work in the Premier League?' - it simply does.
My observations are:
1) Certain attributes seem to have more result variability than others. For instance, important matches 13 > 8 results in say 4th, 12th, 4th, 12th instead of the typical 4th, 5th, 5th, 8th, 5th, 3rd, 4th, 10th.
2) Say my team comes 2nd almost every test. Liverpool gets 68 points, I get 66 points. I get 88 points, Liverpool gets 91 points. Liverpool gets 76 points, I get 71 points. I'm not sure how this gels with your idea of how it works, but if it was just 2 sets of randomness, why would two team's points track each other like this? In any case, I don't know on this one, all I want to assert is that table position is an adequately reliable measure. Even if you're correct in that it's just as random, but the scale is smaller so it doesn't show, then for all intents & purposes it still works - the RNG does not overwhelm the predictability of table position. Not that I mean to be dismissive of your theory, I actually think it's somewhat important to get to why it works like this and I'm open to ideas on it.
2) The typical position variability for me is less than you have observed. Maybe it's the tactic, maybe it's the unevenness of players, and so on. Now unfortunately I don't save my dud results, so I can't really present data on this. But based on my saved successes, and recollections of duds, I reckon it will be in the range ~3rd-8th ~80-90% of the time. But I've done a test of this below to determine the truth.
So I did 10 one-season tests of 14 pace/acc/stamina + new GK template since I want more samples on both of those anyway:
8th
4th
3rd
9th (sacked after 14 games)
8th
2nd
13th (sacked after 15 games)
6th (sacked after 36 games)
10th (sacked after 20 games)
6th
So 7/10 times (I'm going to count 6th sacked after 36 games) the team did 8th or better.
The mode was 6th or 8th.
The median was 7th.
The average was 7th (6.9).
And that's assuming those early sackings wouldn't have led to higher results later if not sacked. If I were summing up these results, I'd say 14 pace/acc/sta does ~6th-8th.
There are many ways to avoid the variance in tests. You could perform statistical tests, use stuff like medians instead of averages, or try simple solutions like "Do ten tests, discard the three best and three worst results, and average the middle four". Those techniques are made to avoid outliers.