alexej said: Hey @ZaZ any development on promising tactics tou have tested recently? Expand
I am taking a break from FM and focusing on work for now, but I always come back to the game after a while. However, I'm quite sure most places stopped testing for this version since we are getting closer to new version (last tactic tested in FM-Arena was over a month ago).
Mark said: That is an interesting question and one I have thought about a few times. I have meant to run some tests on this but have yet to get to it. Leave it with me and I will have a look in a few weeks. Expand
You can probably normalize by multiplying the weight of all attributes for some X factor. I'll give an example using the case @lordus used: "For example, if I create a player with 20 in all attributes, a winger gets 120% and a FS gets 109%."
In this case, X factor would be 1.0 for winger and 0.90 for fast striker (120% is 1.0, 109% is X, basic rule of three). Then you multiply all weights from winger by 0.9, and they will now have a normalized rating. You can do the same to all roles, based on the position with lowest rating (since all others will be reduced to reach similar level).
LaXatiif said: Big fan of your tactic! Big up! Great results however the RPM is the only player with terrible results. Can we change the role position to another one without creating any conflict? Any advices? Expand
He gets bad grades, but he is one of the most important players of the team. It's fine if his grade is bad as long as you are winning. It's just that his actions don't give many points to the scoring system of the match engine.
okocpinar said: I've been following you since fm 20. You know this job. Great tactic. Expand
Thanks!
JTC said: I have never thought that playing this formation in cautious mentality actually performs better (i.e. Solid Blue?).
In this formation, cautious does not mean defensive - far from it. The formation is still attacking. The two AF are still under positive mentality (when team mentality is cautious). In fact no player in the team except the two CB will be defensive. Tempo is still high.
Who doesn't want to score a lot of goals? But playing in cautious mentality does not mean scoring less goals - it just means taking chances in a measured manner. With better quality chances the team will still score and may even score more.
Of course if you have great players with high CA your team will always do well. But if your players are not stars and do not have particularly good off the ball or positioning attributes then it may well be worth trying playing cautious throughout the whole game (even when you are trailing behind).
I am playing an online game with friends and I use Oxford, promoted to PL after 2 seasons. Players are decent but not spectacular. I just beat Man City (which has both Haaland and Mbappe) 4-2 away. When I started the game in positive mentality (i.e. the default mentality) I had absolutely zero chance. Once I turned to cautious I can actually see my whole team started to dominate - this goes way beyond what Zaz describes as using Solid Blue to "de-stablize" your opponent. The passing was spectacular, the players took their chances well. I was at one stage leading 4:1 and Man City only managed to score back with Mbappe using his monstrous speed to beat my two mediocre CB. At the end of the game I think I had close to 20 shots attempted, over 13 shots on goal, and a higher xG than Man City. And I was the away team.
Try cautious! Expand
Solid Blue, or Blue with cautious mentality, concedes around 15% less goals than normal Blue. It takes less risky choices, so it might be more suited to players with lower skill.
I've read it all, many times, here and on other sites, I'm passionate about the work done by the members here, but I have a simple request. My way of looking for players on Genie Scout is as follows: I use the 50 minus 25 zaz balanced by Mark, as I much prefer a filter that maximizes important attributes rather than a balance that can lead to misinformation. Now I encounter a problem with this magnificent filter: I would like to have the raw rating (general rating) which does not modify the rating according to the affinity with the position. Because I want to be able to manage this problem on my side and decide to teach the player the new position. But I would like the general note to come out directly, I find it easier to find players who can stick to several positions. I hope my request is clear, and if this filter already exists, I apologize, I'm not English and I may have missed a subtlety.
thank you again for the exceptional and exciting work done here.
Edit: i haven't mentionned that maybe the problem is the choice of column in my GS, but i haven't find a column which gave me this General Note without balance of positionning. Expand
Thank you for your words about the filter! About what you want to do, @Mark might have some idea about how to do it. I can't think of any way other than creating a filter for each position, copying the weights to all positions in those filters, so you can sort by highest rating in general.
keithb said: So I lost my best player to a minimum fee! Sold both my left wingers, gk and one CB. But I bought a much better lw, a wonderkid cb who was incredible and my younger gk stepped up. Managed to keep the rest of the team and with them all being a year older, they had improved a lot, had some team leaders and more influential players and team cohesion was max!
We won the UCL, beating Bayern on pens! We destroyed our group and every knockout tie was the same. Your training definitely helped, our injuries were down 70%😂. And the quickness is noticeable all over the pitch!
Anyway my rule is I win the UCL, resign and move on in this game. Gladbach approached me a year later, lol, and we have won every game in the bundesliga, inherited a team rated 81% and the AMC won the balloon for as he's scored more than he's played.
I've seen you write some stuff about green 5.0 and may try that next season. Expand
Gratz!
Reduction of 70% in injuries is very good, were you using default trainings or some other custom before that? Did you also set rules to rest all tired players from training?
Let us know how you feel about Green later, if it felt better or worse than playing with Blue.
keithb said: Love all the information available on here, from multiple sources. It's helped me improve so much at FM and also made it far more enjoyable as well!!
I am managing OH Leuven in Belgium. We have won the league+cup four seasons running, reached the final and semi of the CL once each. Now the board want CL semi's as a minimum and its what I really struggle with!! This year Im going to look to improve my acceleration and pace across the team where it is weakest, along with training my positions in Zaz Blue with the above recommendations from Mark.
Sorry for the long (first) post, really I just wanted to say thanks for all the information available on here and the time people, like Mark, spend helping everyone. Expand
keithb said: Love this tactic! Your first post is so detailed and helps so much. Have used it for four seasons, breaking records every season, in the Belgian Pro League with OH Leuven. Have reached one CL final and one CL semi. We do well in the CL, some amazing away wins using solid in both the group and knockout stages. But we always seem to get RNG'd or just beat by a team of much higher CA players..... We cant keep our top stars and every season lose between 2-7 of the first team...... This summer every player in the first eleven is wanted by the biggest clubs in Europe.... and the board want CL semi as a minimum!
This coming season Im going to buy more pace and acceleration players, use your training for the whole season as I just want to win the CL now!!
Anyway love the game using Zaz Blue, solid and light!! Thanks! And also the amount of information and help is really amazing. Thanks for all your time and efforts! Expand
Elec said: Tactic is brilliant, currently using it with arsenal in my 5th season. Only issue I notice is that away from home, especially against the gods teams like city, Liverpool etc I seem to struggle. Is it best to start of with solid blue and then change accordingly. Also when should I use solid blue or light blue? Expand
It says in the first post when to use light and solid. "Use Solid Blue 4.0 when you want to hold a score. It concedes around 15% fewer goals than Blue 4.0. It's also a good idea to use Solid in the first half of matches against hard teams, to unsettle them, then change back to Blue during the second half, when their players are getting nervous.
You should use Light Blue 4.0 when you want to rest your players and avoid bookings, thinking about the rest of the season. I recommend using it anytime you think a match is under control, like two or three goals of difference. If your aim is to hold a score, use Solid Blue instead."
About losing to Liverpool, City and similar teams, the tactic can only help your team overachieve, but it's not invincible. As long as you still win the season by the end, it should be fine.
Middleweight165 said: Thanks for such a detailed reply. I have uploaded your balanced ratings file into Genie Scout. Can I ask does your file override the existing file or do i need to load it in when Im in GS? I copied the file into the ratings folder in the C drive. When clicking between your ratings file and the old one 'Football Manager 2016', the ratings dont seem to change, so I'm wondering if it has automatically updated to yours Expand
Middleweight165 said: Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. I understand completely what you're that the FM arena testing is limited because that's all they are capable of doing, but it still provides us with a huge insight into whats important and whats not.
What instigated my question was my assumption that the chinese research was more thorough, therefore a more accurate analysis of which attributes are most important for each position, but it felt to me, and this could just be a personal feeling is that members of this forum have't abandoned the FM Arena test results in favour of the Chinese results and I wanted to know why. Maybe paragraph 3 of your reply provides more info on this.
What is your personal opinion now? Do you follow the Chinese guidelines or the FM Arena ones? For the DM position would you prioritise Work Rate (Chinese) or Acceleration (FM Arena)? Expand
I leave this question for @Mark since he is the boss in attribute filters. Maybe you can ask him to test the filter from FM-Arena vs the filter from Chinese guys and compare performance between them.
Middleweight165 said: Can you give me a practical example? I don't understand. Looking at the chinese table, for out field players Work Rate is 5th most important for CB, 4th FB, 1st DM, 4th W, 4 AM, 7th ST, so on average should be around the 4th most important attribute. yet on the FM arena testing it is around 23rd Expand
Testing the impact of attributes is something very hard to do, because important attributes for DC are different from important attributes for ST. Basically, you need to test each position/role individually. It's also not something linear, which means the effect from 10 > 12 can be very big, but from 12 > 14 can be negligible. That means there are too many combinations to test, and FM-Arena just doesn't have the resources to do so. What they did was an approximation that is pretty accurate for most cases. We should be thankful they did that when no one else wanted to do it, and appreciate their contribution to FM community.
About the study from the Chinese group, they had more resources since they are a company that works in a basketball game with focus on statistics. That includes machines (possibly a supercomputer), experts in the field of statistics / machine learning, and time. I believe their results are more precise, but you have to consider the difference in their methodology.
For example, the AI made variations in attributes but kept the same CA for players, while in FM-Arena the attributes were changed without considering CA. The result is that attribute weights have direct impact in the Chinese study, while it was not considered by FM-Arena since it wanted to isolate the impact of the attribute.
Again, you have to understand that even if FM-Arena wanted to do a similar methodology, that wouldn't be possible because they just don't have resources to do so. I think FM-Arena's approximation is pretty decent considering how hard it is to test attributes. The Chinese guy itself said they wouldn't be doing any more similar tests using machine learning since the cost was too high to repeat the experiment.
So, in short, FM-Arena's results are different mainly because they are an approximation, and also because they chose to not consider the weight of attributes to CA, which has the potential to counter-balance the impact and make the analysis even harder.
For anyone curious, there is an Easter egg in FM22. If you manage to get a team with all players being model citizens, the team gets renamed to "Boy Scouts".
nator said: I saw a list a few days before that shows the best traits for every role in every position but I dont know if they have test it or something Expand
I think it's very situational and depends on the tactic you plan to use. In my case, I like to only train traits that reinforce some instruction from the role.
CR7THEGOAT said: Hey Zaz, i have a question. If I change camera settings for 2D change something? In some sites people say when they change the quality of the tactic change… and your tactic is a monster tactic , the goat 😂 Thanks by the way and sorry for my English Expand
I don't think it changes anything other than player view. It's the same match happening, using the same match engine, and you can even watch the match in different views over and over again. I believe it's just a fake rumour.
I am taking a break from FM and focusing on work for now, but I always come back to the game after a while. However, I'm quite sure most places stopped testing for this version since we are getting closer to new version (last tactic tested in FM-Arena was over a month ago).
You can probably normalize by multiplying the weight of all attributes for some X factor. I'll give an example using the case @lordus used:
"For example, if I create a player with 20 in all attributes, a winger gets 120% and a FS gets 109%."
In this case, X factor would be 1.0 for winger and 0.90 for fast striker (120% is 1.0, 109% is X, basic rule of three). Then you multiply all weights from winger by 0.9, and they will now have a normalized rating. You can do the same to all roles, based on the position with lowest rating (since all others will be reduced to reach similar level).
He gets bad grades, but he is one of the most important players of the team. It's fine if his grade is bad as long as you are winning. It's just that his actions don't give many points to the scoring system of the match engine.
I've been following you since fm 20.
You know this job.
Great tactic.
Thanks!
JTC said: I have never thought that playing this formation in cautious mentality actually performs better (i.e. Solid Blue?).
In this formation, cautious does not mean defensive - far from it. The formation is still attacking. The two AF are still under positive mentality (when team mentality is cautious). In fact no player in the team except the two CB will be defensive. Tempo is still high.
Who doesn't want to score a lot of goals? But playing in cautious mentality does not mean scoring less goals - it just means taking chances in a measured manner. With better quality chances the team will still score and may even score more.
Of course if you have great players with high CA your team will always do well. But if your players are not stars and do not have particularly good off the ball or positioning attributes then it may well be worth trying playing cautious throughout the whole game (even when you are trailing behind).
I am playing an online game with friends and I use Oxford, promoted to PL after 2 seasons. Players are decent but not spectacular. I just beat Man City (which has both Haaland and Mbappe) 4-2 away. When I started the game in positive mentality (i.e. the default mentality) I had absolutely zero chance. Once I turned to cautious I can actually see my whole team started to dominate - this goes way beyond what Zaz describes as using Solid Blue to "de-stablize" your opponent. The passing was spectacular, the players took their chances well. I was at one stage leading 4:1 and Man City only managed to score back with Mbappe using his monstrous speed to beat my two mediocre CB. At the end of the game I think I had close to 20 shots attempted, over 13 shots on goal, and a higher xG than Man City. And I was the away team.
Try cautious!
Solid Blue, or Blue with cautious mentality, concedes around 15% less goals than normal Blue. It takes less risky choices, so it might be more suited to players with lower skill.
I've read it all, many times, here and on other sites, I'm passionate about the work done by the members here, but I have a simple request.
My way of looking for players on Genie Scout is as follows: I use the 50 minus 25 zaz balanced by Mark, as I much prefer a filter that maximizes important attributes rather than a balance that can lead to misinformation.
Now I encounter a problem with this magnificent filter: I would like to have the raw rating (general rating) which does not modify the rating according to the affinity with the position.
Because I want to be able to manage this problem on my side and decide to teach the player the new position. But I would like the general note to come out directly, I find it easier to find players who can stick to several positions.
I hope my request is clear, and if this filter already exists, I apologize, I'm not English and I may have missed a subtlety.
thank you again for the exceptional and exciting work done here.
Edit: i haven't mentionned that maybe the problem is the choice of column in my GS, but i haven't find a column which gave me this General Note without balance of positionning.
Thank you for your words about the filter! About what you want to do, @Mark might have some idea about how to do it. I can't think of any way other than creating a filter for each position, copying the weights to all positions in those filters, so you can sort by highest rating in general.
https://fm-arena.com/thread/1175-how-do-i-read-this-weighting-table/
Yes, but you might have to adjust if your days are different.
For training: https://fm-arena.com/find-comment/13573/
For set pieces, you can download the tactic and save all in a single file.
We won the UCL, beating Bayern on pens! We destroyed our group and every knockout tie was the same. Your training definitely helped, our injuries were down 70%😂. And the quickness is noticeable all over the pitch!
Anyway my rule is I win the UCL, resign and move on in this game. Gladbach approached me a year later, lol, and we have won every game in the bundesliga, inherited a team rated 81% and the AMC won the balloon for as he's scored more than he's played.
I've seen you write some stuff about green 5.0 and may try that next season.
Gratz!
Reduction of 70% in injuries is very good, were you using default trainings or some other custom before that? Did you also set rules to rest all tired players from training?
Let us know how you feel about Green later, if it felt better or worse than playing with Blue.
I am managing OH Leuven in Belgium. We have won the league+cup four seasons running, reached the final and semi of the CL once each. Now the board want CL semi's as a minimum and its what I really struggle with!! This year Im going to look to improve my acceleration and pace across the team where it is weakest, along with training my positions in Zaz Blue with the above recommendations from Mark.
Sorry for the long (first) post, really I just wanted to say thanks for all the information available on here and the time people, like Mark, spend helping everyone.
Mark is a huge asset to FM community. =)
This coming season Im going to buy more pace and acceleration players, use your training for the whole season as I just want to win the CL now!!
Anyway love the game using Zaz Blue, solid and light!! Thanks! And also the amount of information and help is really amazing. Thanks for all your time and efforts!
Thank you and good luck in UCL!
It says in the first post when to use light and solid.
"Use Solid Blue 4.0 when you want to hold a score. It concedes around 15% fewer goals than Blue 4.0. It's also a good idea to use Solid in the first half of matches against hard teams, to unsettle them, then change back to Blue during the second half, when their players are getting nervous.
You should use Light Blue 4.0 when you want to rest your players and avoid bookings, thinking about the rest of the season. I recommend using it anytime you think a match is under control, like two or three goals of difference. If your aim is to hold a score, use Solid Blue instead."
About losing to Liverpool, City and similar teams, the tactic can only help your team overachieve, but it's not invincible. As long as you still win the season by the end, it should be fine.
Thanks! It seems to work better with Vol-At, though.
It keeps the last rating you used.
What instigated my question was my assumption that the chinese research was more thorough, therefore a more accurate analysis of which attributes are most important for each position, but it felt to me, and this could just be a personal feeling is that members of this forum have't abandoned the FM Arena test results in favour of the Chinese results and I wanted to know why. Maybe paragraph 3 of your reply provides more info on this.
What is your personal opinion now? Do you follow the Chinese guidelines or the FM Arena ones? For the DM position would you prioritise Work Rate (Chinese) or Acceleration (FM Arena)?
I leave this question for @Mark since he is the boss in attribute filters. Maybe you can ask him to test the filter from FM-Arena vs the filter from Chinese guys and compare performance between them.
Testing the impact of attributes is something very hard to do, because important attributes for DC are different from important attributes for ST. Basically, you need to test each position/role individually. It's also not something linear, which means the effect from 10 > 12 can be very big, but from 12 > 14 can be negligible. That means there are too many combinations to test, and FM-Arena just doesn't have the resources to do so. What they did was an approximation that is pretty accurate for most cases. We should be thankful they did that when no one else wanted to do it, and appreciate their contribution to FM community.
About the study from the Chinese group, they had more resources since they are a company that works in a basketball game with focus on statistics. That includes machines (possibly a supercomputer), experts in the field of statistics / machine learning, and time. I believe their results are more precise, but you have to consider the difference in their methodology.
For example, the AI made variations in attributes but kept the same CA for players, while in FM-Arena the attributes were changed without considering CA. The result is that attribute weights have direct impact in the Chinese study, while it was not considered by FM-Arena since it wanted to isolate the impact of the attribute.
Again, you have to understand that even if FM-Arena wanted to do a similar methodology, that wouldn't be possible because they just don't have resources to do so. I think FM-Arena's approximation is pretty decent considering how hard it is to test attributes. The Chinese guy itself said they wouldn't be doing any more similar tests using machine learning since the cost was too high to repeat the experiment.
So, in short, FM-Arena's results are different mainly because they are an approximation, and also because they chose to not consider the weight of attributes to CA, which has the potential to counter-balance the impact and make the analysis even harder.
It can be several reasons. For example, it can be very important until certain value, then less important after some point.
I think it's very situational and depends on the tactic you plan to use. In my case, I like to only train traits that reinforce some instruction from the role.
Thanks by the way and sorry for my English
I don't think it changes anything other than player view. It's the same match happening, using the same match engine, and you can even watch the match in different views over and over again. I believe it's just a fake rumour.