Zippo said: We've tried adding "Force Opponent Outside" TI in different tactics and it always improved the result but it requires testing 1,824 matches to see that. Expand
Ok, I will add the instruction and put the tactic to be tested to see how it goes, with the new set pieces. I think it's in a good state and it's nice to hear some confirmation other than my tests. When Mark finishes his tests, he might give some extra input to improve it even further.
P.S.: One more question, @Zippo. I see the top tactics removed the instruction "Play Out Of Defense", but it doesn't seem to give me better results when I remove it in my tests. Did you do any experiments to know if it's good or bad?
Zippo said: @ZaZ, I just want to let you know that we tested your ZaZ - Blue DM tactic with the default attacking throw-ins routine and got 65 points vs 61 points ( the current ZaZ - Blue DM score ).
But I want to add that we tested 1,824 matches because only on the 1,824 matches distance the difference started to appear clearly. Expand
Yeah, I told Mark via PM that I identified attacking throw-ins as the main flaw in the tactic, which was then changed in this new version. I believe the new throw-ins are better than default, but I will do some tests to compare anyway. Thanks for the tip!
P.S.: What about "Force Opponent Outside"? I see people using it and making defense better, but it doesn't show much difference in my tests.
P.S.2: I just checked the throw-ins of Blue 3.1, which I sent to Mark earlier. It's exactly the same as default, which is funny because that was not intentional. In other words, I played around lots of time just to get to that very same shape that I should have tested first.
BTtw do you know why some tactics have a different grade on different forums ? Expand
Different methodologies get different results. If you get a tactic and try it in England, it might have a different result than trying it in Sweden, Brazil or China, because they have different teams, squads and tactics.
For example, Premier League has many managers that use 4231, meaning tactics effective against this formation will have higher score. It also means some teams have more players available to certain positions, making tactics that use those positions more effective.
Those are just a few examples, but there are many other things that can affect results. A testing league that has good players for all positions, resets injuries, freezes players, blocks firing managers and resets physical status like condition and fatigue will be more consistent and favour more intense tactics, while testing leagues that don't do those things will favour more the teams with balanced squads instead of focusing on evaluating exclusively the quality of a tactic (standard holiday testing usually fall into this category).
Anyway, tests are just methods to calculate some sort of metric and allow test subjects to be compared. You can't compare meters with feet, yards or other of those primitive metrics, because they use different methods of calculation. It's even further if you go from meters to grams, which is what usually happens between two different testing leagues.
After 25 matches, I got a really bad sequence of matches and dropped to second place in the table. It's not ideal, but not a big deal either since I'm now 5 points ahead third place, giving me some lead in the promotion race.
My training and youth facilities finished upgrading and board is now upgrading youth facilities again. I'm trying to get some money to upgrade training facilities too, so either I do well on FA Cup against Aston Villa or I'll have to wait for the end of season rewards. Board also accepted to improve again my youth recruitment and coaching and the youth intake for this year will be five stars (possibly because my youth setup is becoming top notch and the quality of my team is still terrible).
Other than that, transfer window just opened and I got a free player as replacement for my ML (pictures below). I have been searching for a replacement for that guy for over a season, so I'm really glad to find it as a free agent. Board also accepted to increase my staff size to 10 members, so I can finally have one exclusive person on each workout as well as one on everything to lower training load. I also assist since my profile is set to get 5 stars on quickness training.
@Mark, if you have time and interest, wanna test my new set pieces to see how they compare to old? I did hundreds of tests myself, but it's always good to try other methodologies to avoid bias.
To present a tactic at FM-Arena, you need a tactic name, thread title, tactic picture and results. Description is appreciated, but optional.
Tactic Name Spoiler
The name of a tactic should be used to identify the tactic and differentiate it from others. Avoid overused or meaningless names. Examples of bad names are:
- "433" or "tiki-taka": There are too many tactics with each formation or style, so names like these don't have much meaning. - "John 433 tiki-taka": A bit better than before, but can very be confusing if you have multiple tactics with similar names, like "John 4231 tiki-taka" and "John 4132 tiki-taka". - Any name with non-international letters (like korean or chinese): Meaningless for people that can't understand those languages. - "rnd 2.2 VA v48": Any coded name is bad because most people don't know what it means.
Examples of good names include "Calcite", "Reaper", "Snow Halation" and so on, because you can easily identify which tactic it is or find it with a simple Google search.
Thread Title Spoiler
Make sure to include the tactic name in the thread title. The version number can be omitted since you can add multiple versions in the same thread. The same is valid for the engine version.
Tactic Picture Spoiler
Use a screenshot of the tactic page, which includes positions, roles and team instructions.
Results Spoiler
Avoid misleading results like 2048/49 season, since any team will be completely different from start of the game. If possible, either use one of the most popular testing leagues or show results from default database on first season in holiday mode, without any transfers. It's also fine to show results of a game you are playing yourself, but make sure to state it clearly.
The number of titles or position in table are not very useful information. A team can win everything with only 74 points in the league or lose everything with over 100 points. What actually matters are the points per match, or total points in the league by the end of season.
Don't use results to brag, like saying your tactic is unbeatable, that it won all titles or self-proclaiming it as the best tactic. FM-Arena tests will give an unbiased score and people will let you know if the tactic is good or not. Any results with Liverpool or PSG carry very little information and should be avoided, since they are clearly above the competition.
After 15 matches, my team is barely leading by goal difference. I got another long term injury (6 months) in one of the strikers (again), and both my goalkeepers got injuried at once. Other than that, I renewed contract with most my players that would expire this year (two more to go) and kept morale in good shape despite some bad results.
After every single match, my ritual is to rest players (half heart for 2 days and 75% heart for 1 day if less than a week to rest), compliment players to increase morale (last match > 8), and once a week compliment everyone that trained over 8.
I changed my tactic to Blue 3.1, which is the same as before, but with improved set pieces. I'm now observing the set pieces during matches to see if I can spot some flaw like taking too many goals in far/near post or anything like that.
WALTON1981 said: Just made a tweak of this tactic with the IWB's pushed further forward, it scored less than the original and conceded more but got 1 more point in my test league. Expand
Difference doesn't seem to be statistically relevant.
fmgamers said: Several tactics are tweaks of each other but there are of different formation with different roles. For example the original ZaZ Blue DM has DW and SS but Blue DM ( Double Tweaked ) has CM-AT, W-SU and F9.
It's a measurement of how frequent a role is used in top 20 tactics and how much points the role gets. For example, if the top one tactic uses CD but the remaining 19 tactics uses BPD the BPD will rank higher. Expand
I'm just saying that frequency of use or sum of points is not the same as telling which roles are more effective. If you want a suggestion, I would tell you to keep only the best score achieved by each role.
Also, it's kinda rude to change just a small detail and then call the tactic like "my_name v4", it seems like it's a continuation of your old tactics and not a tweak. Just my opinion, though.
This ranking is pretty pointless since several tactics are tweaks of each other. For example, a tactic with CD is at the top, yet BPD is by far the best role for defenders according to the list.
meclaranjas said: Hi, I would like to ask something.. It’s not the first time that this happens to me, I’m using a tactic that works well, and than in mid season, always start getting bad results, and cant understand why… It happened again with this tactic, it was working really well until January, and suddenly, can’t win a game… And I can see directly the difference in play, not so fluid anymore, the guys keep missing chances, always losing possession, don’t understand…. But always happens, no matter which tactic I’m using, if I’m creating one, or if using one from somebody’s.. Than I’m always struggling until the end of the season…
It happens to somebody else?? Or do you guys know what I can do to change it… Expand
It's very common for some people to have a series of bad results during a season and think the tactic stopped working. Below are ten reasons why your team might stop winning for a while.
1. Complacency: When a team wins too much, players start to take victories for granted, not giving their best. To avoid that, you must motivate them with team talk, shouts and media handling.
2. Pressure: When playing against stronger teams, your players might feel pressured and perform worse. To avoid that, you need to relieve pressure with team talk, shouts and media handling.
3. Fatigue: When a player has high match and training loads, he starts building fatigue. It's not the same of condition or match fitness and can only be seen if you have a sports scientist, in the medical centre. To avoid that, you need to rest from training and rotate your squad.
4. Morale: When you lose matches or certain events happen (like player getting unhappy), players lose morale. It is one of the things that affects performance the most, so it can create a bad spiral if not managed properly. To avoid that, praise and warn players based on last match score, form (last 5 matches) and training. You can also increase morale with team talk after matches, team meetings and other forms of interaction.
5. Bad form of players: Sometimes, strikers can get into a bad form that lasts a long time, like ten matches without scoring or more. I am not sure if there is an internal mechanic for that, but it certainly happens fairly often. If both your strikers get into bad form at once, it can get really hard to win matches. To avoid that, I believe you need to score to avoid the bad form, but it might also be just RNG.
6. Injuries: It is fairly common to have injuries by the mid of season, forcing you to use worse players or play with lower condition. To avoid that, you need good physios, lighter training during season, rest and rotate players.
7. Condition: By the middle of season, you usually have several championships being played at once, forcing you to play 2 or 3 matches a week for several weeks in a row. That can force you to rotate to players of lower quality or use players with lower condition. To avoid that, you need to rest players from training and build a balanced squad to rotate.
8. Match fitness: Injuries and lack of rotation can make your players lack match fitness, decreasing their performance. That can cause your team to suffer when you are forced to rotate due to injuries or tight schedule. To avoid that, either rotate your squad or use those players in reserve friendlies.
9. Hidden attributes: There are hidden attributes like consistency and important matches that make your players not have maximum performance during some matches. There are also other attributes like injury proneness and dirtness which can harm your chances to win some matches. You cannot avoid that unless you hire players with better hidden attributes.
10. RNG (or randomness): Sometimes, your luck is just bad during certain matches. There is no way to avoid that, just keep playing and results should normalize eventually.
Guidito said: Hey @Albert have you changed the set pieces or are they the same from original blue?
@ZaZ I remember you mentioned youre working on improving set pieces, news on that?
Thanks! Expand
It's going well, I'm now integrating it to the tactic routine per routine and seeing how they affect the performance measured by points per season. I'm also trying some changes to match the new improvements found on people's tweaks, but results seem good for now.
Below is the result from my last run that just ended, as an example.
I was thinking about hosting a competition of Football Manager 2022 so players can compete with each other. My idea is slightly inspired by PGM League from China and would work as follows.
- There will be a single save file, with the custom league and one unemployed manager. - To simulate a match, moderators will add a manager to both teams and create a friendly. Morale, condition, fatigue and tactical familiarity will be set to maximum and injuries removed. - The match will be played by both Managers (players) at an agreed time and be streamed in a Discord server, and possibly recorded to a Youtube channel. Results would also be announced by a Twitter account to increase engagement, with a link to the Youtube video. - If there are enough Managers for more than one league, other leagues would be created simulating different countries, with the possibility of creating a continental league between them. - Each Manager can have another player as Assistant Manager, to substitute him when he cannot play a match. He can also assist during preparation and match day. - Initial teams would be clones with the same reputation, no staff and 23 players picked by Manager from the same pool (different teams can have the same player, which would get different names). - During transfer windows, there will be a pool of players that can be bought by multiple teams by fixed prices, under different names. - Each team will have the same budget during first season. - Red and yellow cards will be tracked and have effect in game. - Injuries only last for the match they happen.
This is the initial idea that I wanted to discuss with you and see if anyone is interested. What do you think?
Archadis said: you do this only with your heavy preseason training or every game day in the season? how many days you let the guys rest then 1 day? Expand
I do it during pre-season and every time I feel they won't have time to recover before next match. The time to rest is usually one or two days, depending on how close the next match is.
Ok, I will add the instruction and put the tactic to be tested to see how it goes, with the new set pieces. I think it's in a good state and it's nice to hear some confirmation other than my tests. When Mark finishes his tests, he might give some extra input to improve it even further.
P.S.: One more question, @Zippo. I see the top tactics removed the instruction "Play Out Of Defense", but it doesn't seem to give me better results when I remove it in my tests. Did you do any experiments to know if it's good or bad?
But I want to add that we tested 1,824 matches because only on the 1,824 matches distance the difference started to appear clearly.
Yeah, I told Mark via PM that I identified attacking throw-ins as the main flaw in the tactic, which was then changed in this new version. I believe the new throw-ins are better than default, but I will do some tests to compare anyway. Thanks for the tip!
P.S.: What about "Force Opponent Outside"? I see people using it and making defense better, but it doesn't show much difference in my tests.
P.S.2: I just checked the throw-ins of Blue 3.1, which I sent to Mark earlier. It's exactly the same as default, which is funny because that was not intentional. In other words, I played around lots of time just to get to that very same shape that I should have tested first.
BTtw do you know why some tactics have a different grade on different forums ?
Different methodologies get different results. If you get a tactic and try it in England, it might have a different result than trying it in Sweden, Brazil or China, because they have different teams, squads and tactics.
For example, Premier League has many managers that use 4231, meaning tactics effective against this formation will have higher score. It also means some teams have more players available to certain positions, making tactics that use those positions more effective.
Those are just a few examples, but there are many other things that can affect results. A testing league that has good players for all positions, resets injuries, freezes players, blocks firing managers and resets physical status like condition and fatigue will be more consistent and favour more intense tactics, while testing leagues that don't do those things will favour more the teams with balanced squads instead of focusing on evaluating exclusively the quality of a tactic (standard holiday testing usually fall into this category).
Anyway, tests are just methods to calculate some sort of metric and allow test subjects to be compared. You can't compare meters with feet, yards or other of those primitive metrics, because they use different methods of calculation. It's even further if you go from meters to grams, which is what usually happens between two different testing leagues.
It's just an update to set pieces. It's still being tested, though.
My training and youth facilities finished upgrading and board is now upgrading youth facilities again. I'm trying to get some money to upgrade training facilities too, so either I do well on FA Cup against Aston Villa or I'll have to wait for the end of season rewards. Board also accepted to improve again my youth recruitment and coaching and the youth intake for this year will be five stars (possibly because my youth setup is becoming top notch and the quality of my team is still terrible).
Other than that, transfer window just opened and I got a free player as replacement for my ML (pictures below). I have been searching for a replacement for that guy for over a season, so I'm really glad to find it as a free agent. Board also accepted to increase my staff size to 10 members, so I can finally have one exclusive person on each workout as well as one on everything to lower training load. I also assist since my profile is set to get 5 stars on quickness training.
Sent you via PM. Sorry for the extra work and feel free to use any methodology you prefer to compare it to other options!
I have to at least try. Every week I see someone breaking all of those points at once, like bringing a tactic named "433psg114ptsalltrophies".
Tactic Name
Spoiler The name of a tactic should be used to identify the tactic and differentiate it from others. Avoid overused or meaningless names. Examples of bad names are:
- "433" or "tiki-taka": There are too many tactics with each formation or style, so names like these don't have much meaning.
- "John 433 tiki-taka": A bit better than before, but can very be confusing if you have multiple tactics with similar names, like "John 4231 tiki-taka" and "John 4132 tiki-taka".
- Any name with non-international letters (like korean or chinese): Meaningless for people that can't understand those languages.
- "rnd 2.2 VA v48": Any coded name is bad because most people don't know what it means.
Examples of good names include "Calcite", "Reaper", "Snow Halation" and so on, because you can easily identify which tactic it is or find it with a simple Google search.
Thread Title
Spoiler Make sure to include the tactic name in the thread title. The version number can be omitted since you can add multiple versions in the same thread. The same is valid for the engine version.
Tactic Picture
Spoiler Use a screenshot of the tactic page, which includes positions, roles and team instructions.
Results
Spoiler Avoid misleading results like 2048/49 season, since any team will be completely different from start of the game. If possible, either use one of the most popular testing leagues or show results from default database on first season in holiday mode, without any transfers. It's also fine to show results of a game you are playing yourself, but make sure to state it clearly.
The number of titles or position in table are not very useful information. A team can win everything with only 74 points in the league or lose everything with over 100 points. What actually matters are the points per match, or total points in the league by the end of season.
Don't use results to brag, like saying your tactic is unbeatable, that it won all titles or self-proclaiming it as the best tactic. FM-Arena tests will give an unbiased score and people will let you know if the tactic is good or not. Any results with Liverpool or PSG carry very little information and should be avoided, since they are clearly above the competition.
After every single match, my ritual is to rest players (half heart for 2 days and 75% heart for 1 day if less than a week to rest), compliment players to increase morale (last match > 8), and once a week compliment everyone that trained over 8.
I changed my tactic to Blue 3.1, which is the same as before, but with improved set pieces. I'm now observing the set pieces during matches to see if I can spot some flaw like taking too many goals in far/near post or anything like that.
Difference doesn't seem to be statistically relevant.
It's a measurement of how frequent a role is used in top 20 tactics and how much points the role gets. For example, if the top one tactic uses CD but the remaining 19 tactics uses BPD the BPD will rank higher.
I'm just saying that frequency of use or sum of points is not the same as telling which roles are more effective. If you want a suggestion, I would tell you to keep only the best score achieved by each role.
It’s not the first time that this happens to me, I’m using a tactic that works well, and than in mid season, always start getting bad results, and cant understand why… It happened again with this tactic, it was working really well until January, and suddenly, can’t win a game… And I can see directly the difference in play, not so fluid anymore, the guys keep missing chances, always losing possession, don’t understand…. But always happens, no matter which tactic I’m using, if I’m creating one, or if using one from somebody’s..
Than I’m always struggling until the end of the season…
It happens to somebody else?? Or do you guys know what I can do to change it…
It's very common for some people to have a series of bad results during a season and think the tactic stopped working. Below are ten reasons why your team might stop winning for a while.
1. Complacency: When a team wins too much, players start to take victories for granted, not giving their best. To avoid that, you must motivate them with team talk, shouts and media handling.
2. Pressure: When playing against stronger teams, your players might feel pressured and perform worse. To avoid that, you need to relieve pressure with team talk, shouts and media handling.
3. Fatigue: When a player has high match and training loads, he starts building fatigue. It's not the same of condition or match fitness and can only be seen if you have a sports scientist, in the medical centre. To avoid that, you need to rest from training and rotate your squad.
4. Morale: When you lose matches or certain events happen (like player getting unhappy), players lose morale. It is one of the things that affects performance the most, so it can create a bad spiral if not managed properly. To avoid that, praise and warn players based on last match score, form (last 5 matches) and training. You can also increase morale with team talk after matches, team meetings and other forms of interaction.
5. Bad form of players: Sometimes, strikers can get into a bad form that lasts a long time, like ten matches without scoring or more. I am not sure if there is an internal mechanic for that, but it certainly happens fairly often. If both your strikers get into bad form at once, it can get really hard to win matches. To avoid that, I believe you need to score to avoid the bad form, but it might also be just RNG.
6. Injuries: It is fairly common to have injuries by the mid of season, forcing you to use worse players or play with lower condition. To avoid that, you need good physios, lighter training during season, rest and rotate players.
7. Condition: By the middle of season, you usually have several championships being played at once, forcing you to play 2 or 3 matches a week for several weeks in a row. That can force you to rotate to players of lower quality or use players with lower condition. To avoid that, you need to rest players from training and build a balanced squad to rotate.
8. Match fitness: Injuries and lack of rotation can make your players lack match fitness, decreasing their performance. That can cause your team to suffer when you are forced to rotate due to injuries or tight schedule. To avoid that, either rotate your squad or use those players in reserve friendlies.
9. Hidden attributes: There are hidden attributes like consistency and important matches that make your players not have maximum performance during some matches. There are also other attributes like injury proneness and dirtness which can harm your chances to win some matches. You cannot avoid that unless you hire players with better hidden attributes.
10. RNG (or randomness): Sometimes, your luck is just bad during certain matches. There is no way to avoid that, just keep playing and results should normalize eventually.
@ZaZ I remember you mentioned youre working on improving set pieces, news on that?
Thanks!
It's going well, I'm now integrating it to the tactic routine per routine and seeing how they affect the performance measured by points per season. I'm also trying some changes to match the new improvements found on people's tweaks, but results seem good for now.
Below is the result from my last run that just ended, as an example.
- There will be a single save file, with the custom league and one unemployed manager.
- To simulate a match, moderators will add a manager to both teams and create a friendly. Morale, condition, fatigue and tactical familiarity will be set to maximum and injuries removed.
- The match will be played by both Managers (players) at an agreed time and be streamed in a Discord server, and possibly recorded to a Youtube channel. Results would also be announced by a Twitter account to increase engagement, with a link to the Youtube video.
- If there are enough Managers for more than one league, other leagues would be created simulating different countries, with the possibility of creating a continental league between them.
- Each Manager can have another player as Assistant Manager, to substitute him when he cannot play a match. He can also assist during preparation and match day.
- Initial teams would be clones with the same reputation, no staff and 23 players picked by Manager from the same pool (different teams can have the same player, which would get different names).
- During transfer windows, there will be a pool of players that can be bought by multiple teams by fixed prices, under different names.
- Each team will have the same budget during first season.
- Red and yellow cards will be tracked and have effect in game.
- Injuries only last for the match they happen.
This is the initial idea that I wanted to discuss with you and see if anyone is interested. What do you think?
I do it during pre-season and every time I feel they won't have time to recover before next match. The time to rest is usually one or two days, depending on how close the next match is.
great tactic!
I have a Question with your Traning schedule i get so many injuries. with your preseason traning i get alot more. what can i do?
After matches, sort players by condition and rest the tired players (right click, training, rest).