I have done 10 test runs so far, all across 5 Divisions. I am doing 3 test runs across 5 Divisions for each Set Piece Routine, only using the Set Piece Routine on the lowest ranked team of each Division. I have definitely ruled out using Lie Cheat Steal as it returned 20% less points per game than the current leader. Also going to exclude Fireball which 8% below current leader. Motion is the current leader and sits 5% above the base Phoenix results. The tests continue.

Madundwa said: Sorry to go off-topic boss, I don't know whether it was a fluke, or have you tested on this fm21, your pyramid long-throw setup from fm19? I just managed to score 3 goals in one match using the Rego long throw, the first time I tried it on the latest fm21 patch. Expand

Can you upload the throw in tactic from FM19?

I always try and work towards being a professional club but dont really expect it until I make the top of League 2

ZaZ said: The more the players get affinity to this tactic, the worse they play. They won matches with @Mark because they didn't know the tactic yet. Expand

I am back to playing Blue and working on finding the best set piece to go with it

I will post when I complete the runs. I have found duplicates so not sure how many there will be. Should be done in a couple of days or so.

Ok, I think I will try them in the save I had testing lower league management. All the Set Pieces are coming from the successful tactics for FM21 on FM Arena. The are very much all similar with most being 4-1-3-2 strikerless and a few 4-1-2-3 strikerless. Mainly MC moving to AMC. I will adjust where positioning/roles are substantially different. I understand the complexities on role and duties but will see what it throws up and then test the winner in my real save or against the lower league management save I had with Viola and ZaZ Blue. On the comments from @ZaZ, I think have the same team means these things would even out. Anyhow, still keen to see if any of the set pieces deliver a dominant result after 3 runs in 5 divisions for each routine versus the original Phoenix v3.0 results. Let me know if you want to know the results

Zippo said: I find that testing Set Pieces is a highly complicated thing to do. You can't just take one tactic set pieces and put them into some other tactic and expect to see it works the same in both tactics. I can tell you it doesn't work this way and if you try to do that then you'll end up with a complete mess because Set Pieces are tied to the formation/roles/duties so you have to tune them for every tactic and you must be good at doing that and understand what are you doing so it requires a lot of efforts and knowledge. Expand

Fair enough. I thought it was worth a punt as there really are no forums on this around, unlike my last game which was FM19 which had a set piece flaw with throw ins

What do you think @Zippo?

If anyone wants to test set pieces I have downloaded the routines for the following tactics:

Phoenix 3.0
ZaZ Blue 2.0
Viola V1
Fireball Stepback
Killer
Motion
Void
Knap Holy Ghost

All rated pretty highly. Put Knap in as the first non strikerless tactic.

Also included TFF as many used his set pieces early on, and one that claimed to have the best set pieces on FM Scout (Lie Cheat Steal) plus my interpretation of the set pieces from SP God.

Grimlock said: Only Corners or Throw-ins makes any meaningful difference and other set pieces are irrelevant. Expand

Do you have a set that works well?

Any thoughts on taking Set Pieces routines from some of the top tactics and testing them with Phoenix to see which is best?

Cant believe that. I won 5 games straight with it with an underdog team. Oh well, good to know

Done

I have been using ZaZ Blue and Phoenix but thought I would try this tactic. I was looking for a tactic that was reasonable and used a real striker. Very impressed so far. Here are the results from the author of the tactic Boroboy116. It is so much better to watch than the forward balls from the current leading tactics. I would be interested to know how it tests.

@Zippo the original post and download is here

What is the attribute importance table?

ZaZ said: He tested Blue 2.0, which is better than original Blue. That tactic didn't get selected for tests here.

@Mark , can you make a compilation of each teams average attributes, from team report? It would be interesting to know the first touch, determination and other attributes to find some correlation. Expand

I have struggled to find too much correlation. What I thought might help was to turn the approach around.

We covered 6 leagues with the top ranked side and the bottom ranked side for each league. So I looked at the top ranked side that performed the worst and looked at the attributes where they were ranked top or second in the league overall going in to the season. Salford performed the worst of the top ranked sides, being substantially below the other top ranked sides with just 1.844 points per game, and even below one of the bottomed ranked sides.

Interestingly they also had the highest number of attribute rankings at highest or second highest in the league. I looked at all these attributes, because you would expect if these mattered Salford would have performed much better.

Interestingly Salford only had 2 attributes that ranked badly, both at 23rd for their league (the remainder average just over 4th). These attributes were Acceleration and Pace. The second worst performing side of the top ranked sides, Notts County also performed badly on just these 2 attributes plus Determination. Adding weight to these attributes, is that St Albans were ranked 2nd and 3rd for these in their league and they were easily our best lowest ranked side beating Salford in points per game. All the top 4 sides in our test were ranked above average in Acceleration and 3 were ranked above average for Pace.

Safe to say Acceleration and Pace are very important.

Next I looked at where an attribute was ranked 4th or better for the 3 of the 4 top scoring sides and not in the top 10 for Salford or Notts. The one that stood out is Vision. Ranked 4th or better for the 3 top sides in our test, and 6th for the other top 4 side. Ranked 13th for Salford and 10th for Notts.

I will put Vision in at 3rd in most important attributes.

Out of the top 4 sides in our test, 3 had Decisions ranked number 1 in their league with the other being well above average at 7th. Salford and Notts had it ranked 2nd and 3rd in their leagues. Not sure. However, St Albans (lowest ranked side in their league) were ranked 6th for Decisions, and finished 6th of our sides, the only top 6 side not to be top ranked.

I think this swings it for Decisions to be the 4th attribute I will be looking for in finding players.

There are 2 other attributes that were of interest, being the only attributes where the top 4 sides in our test all had them ranked 4th or better in their leagues - Composure and Passing. Salford were ranked 1st for Composure and 2nd for Passing, and Notts were ranked 10th for Composure and 9th for Passing. Jury is out but worth thinking about these 2 as well.

PS: @ZaZ, what is happening with the Leamington save.

@ZaZ A few interesting observations as I drill into the data.

Sides that had a lower number of players in the Squad were either worse off or more variable in their results. Weymouth had the smallest squad with just 16 players when I stopped them recruiting. It would only take a suspension or injury to impact them.

The stats that they all seemed to have that were consistently high for their sides were (in order):

Determination
Natural Fitness
Work rate
Stamina
Team work
Acceleration

Of these there were 3 that increased in importance as you moved up through the grades ie you needed these to increase as you move through the leagues:

Work rate
Stamina
Team work

@Droid and @Zippo I would be interested in your thoughts on the original question. How do we test the tactics for the Lower Leagues. That was all I was attempting to do. Viola was only behind due to performance with lower ranked sides. I think they were all impressive in my tests but my observation was there was a small but measurable difference.

Poacher said: @Mark, if you'd ask me then I wouldn't say there's a clear winner




ZaZ Blue 2.0 tactic: Avg. points per game = 1.916

Phoenix 3.0 tactic: Avg. points per game = 1.849

The difference in PPG is less than 3.5%

I guess you tested without eliminating RNG factors like in the fm-arena testing, I mean freezing the morale and conditions and so on. In the fm-arena testing Phoenix tactic has 2.114 PPG and Blue tactic has 2.092 PPG so in fm-arena testing the difference in PPG is less than 1.1% and I'm sure if you were eliminating RNG then you also had like a 1.1% difference in PPG and you really can't say that there's a clear winner when the difference is less than 1.1% Expand

Just an observation, but you cant average the numbers from that table because they played different numbers of games in each league. The real average points per game are in the summary and details tables for each tactic.

ZaZ Blue 2.0 is 1.905269058
Phoenix V3.0 is 1.832399103
Viola V1 is 1.755605381

Using these figures the overall percentage differences are as follows:

ZaZ Blue 2.0 is 3.977% higher than Phoenix V3.0 and 8.525% higher than Viola V1.
Phoenix V3.0 is 4.374% higher than Viola V1

All these are above your 3.5% threshold.

I am loving that this has generated so much discussion. Clearly is an area of interest for people.

@ZaZ I will look at player attributes in the next few days to see if there is any correlation to the results.