Be careful with drop deeper and hassle, this will cause all players to close down more, inlcuding your midfielders which could leave a huge gap in front of your defence, and could see you concede alot of chances to good teams in particular. I'd say that you need at least 1 DM if you do still...
Iwould take off push higher up and higher tempo as with an attacking mentality, these will both be at an extreme. Also I'm not sure about the two central midfielders on automatic. Again, with attacking mentality this will be like 2 cms set to attack. Could change one to a DLP, defend or support...
I think that by default the libero will only go forward when he has the ball at his feet. What mentality are you using and do you have DMs that could be blocking the liberos path?
Using the get further forward instruction might help, but could have some unwanted consequences as well.
While I agree that those features would be cool, it seems that the most popular gripe with fm14 is that it's actually too complex, so I'm not sure if we will see those features, and we will be stuck with the very ambiguous and potentially suicidal (can pull your own defence apart) 'hassle...
It comes from how the tactic was first made. For example, if somebody started with a 442 in the tactic creator, but dropped one striker to amc in one tactic, and dropped the same striker to dmc in another tactic, when you switch between the two you will get the amc and dmc switching for example.
I managed to win league and league cup with one tactic, but I've found that the wheels tend to come off in the second season when the opponent knows alot more about how you play.
I don't even know any more. Ask different people, they give you different answers. Some even say that the descriptions in FM or wrong/outdated and need changing.
I've also saw somebody say that 'balanced' is more fluid than 'fluid'.
You raise a very interesting point regarding philosophy and...
Ill have a look at it, just going through a rough patch and the AI teams have figured out my currently successful tactic, so hopefully this could change my fortunes.
I would keep one of your wide attackers set to attack, and the other set to support. Counter is initiated automatically when you regain the ball and the opposition have committed players forward, except on the contain mentality I think.
2 DM's with an AMC maybe? That would probably play to your strengths. Also, you could be a bit more offensive with your fullbacks/wingbacks due to the extra protection from the DM'S.
I noticed that you said you use ball winning midfielders. I'm not saying never use them, but they will not hold position and you will basically be overrun especially with wing backs. A central midfielder set to defend or a deep lying play maker set to defend are much better options in my...
Id agree with this 100%, its a huge thing to ask of your players to completely change the way they go about playing football. Keeping fluid will ensure that your forward players help out with defense more.
Centrally, you could have a deep lying playmaker set to defend, alongside a box-to-box midfielder. I would only recommend this to a strong team like Bayern, as it is not a water-tight midfield, unless you have suitable quality players. Just make sure that the DLP(D) does NOT have 'gets forward...