FM 2020, The death of the casual player?

[Shippers77]

Id like to start this off by saying that I have played FM for years, 05/06 my earliest memories of playing the game, across that time I have always been fairly active on the various FM forums knocking about and have always rolled my eyes at the various threads over the years that all say things along the same lines "tactics dont work!! why am i not winning every game!!! this ME is BROKEN!!!" however this year I have been driven to becoming one of those people!!

I do consider myself a "casual" player, I may dabble here and there with my own tactics but mainly ill download a bunch I like the look of and have a mess about with them, Ive never expected plug in and plays to literally give me 100% records cause where would the fun in that be? but over the years ive found a strong tactic, bought in and developed players to suit the tactic and thats where my enjoyment has come from. This year however tactics seem to have a shelf life of about half a season, maybe a full season if you are lucky, now I know the instinct reaction this is to tell me that the AI teams get used to how I play through scouting and adjust their gameplan accordingly but this year that has been majorly cranked up, hence the question in the threads title, I really feel like FM20 could be too much for many casual players.

Ive got four saves running at the moment, all employing different tactics, based in different countries and with all of them ive found the same problem of tactics losing their effectiveness very quickly. The latest save is the one that has made me post this really . Starting as Birmingham I have a two tactic system (switching between the two depending on home/away, underdog/favourite) very strong season with a lot of draws. ended up finishing third and losing in the play off final, into season two, largely the same team and all of a sudden the team cannot score, is leaking goals dramatically and come october I am in the bottom three and look poised for the sack, other saves with Llandudno (wales) Palarmo (Italy) and St Pauli (Germany) have largely worked out the same for me. At this point it seems to me that the only way for long term success is to change tactics every season or even halfway through every season, in which case how are you supposed to recruit players if you know that the team shape and tactic will HAVE to change sooner rather than later?

Maybe the new patch will change things up a bit but at the moment this veteran of the football manager series is feeling very demoralised and really not feeling like wanting to play the game all that much!

The death of the casual player?

 

[WJ]

I've been using the same tactic (my own) for 3 seasons now.

AI teams don't get "used to" how you play. The become more defensive or more attacking depending on your team's rep and form. If that changes dramatically, the adjustments will be more pronounced. If you're already a top team, there's not going to be too much they can do.

 

[kuroske]

I've been using the same tactic (my own) for 3 seasons now.

AI teams don't get "used to" how you play. The become more defensive or more attacking depending on your team's rep and form. If that changes dramatically, the adjustments will be more pronounced. If you're already a top team, there's not going to be too much they can do.

I am facing the same problem at the moment with my save. I just won the La Liga with FC Andorra and was almost invincible. In my season following up my championship season, I start with draws and loses to bottom tier teams. Any idea how I need to tweak the tactics? Like dropping the defensive lines etc.?

 

[Jedd95]

I've found my formation to have stuck out so far, so well. I do play FMTouch however, moved across around 3 FM's ago. Found the game was getting too complicated for myself as a casual gamer!

 

[sexandviolence]

What has frustrated me in the 2020 version (and i am seriously considering going back to the 2019 version) is the inconsistency of it. For example, i am in 2023 i believe, and i am Newcastle now, i beat Man Utd 5-2, then in the next game i lose to Arsenal 5-2, then i think i beat Spurs 1-0, followed by losing to Bournemouth 4-0 at home. 5-2 seems to be a common scoreline in my game over the last two seasons, and it clearly isnt a common scoreline. There also seems to be a lot of late late goals, i know there are late goals in games but it just seems too common for me.

 

[Blues1215]

I consider myself a casual player. I play maybe 2-3 days a week a few hours at a time. I think its all about working with what you have and adapting to the game. Do I agree with some of the changes to the game? No. Have I adapted? Absolutely. Why? Because I am addicted to FM.

 

[TheeRash]

I am facing the same problem at the moment with my save. I just won the La Liga with FC Andorra and was almost invincible. In my season following up my championship season, I start withdraws and losses to bottom-tier teams. Any idea how I need to tweak the tactics? Like dropping the defensive lines etc.?

Andorra has a low rep, winning the league will result in a massive boost for you which will result in teams being more cautious when playing against you.

I'm assuming that your either drawing and when you concede it's because of counter-attacks/setpieces after you've pushed for the win?

Manage the game - might need a tactical shift.

With Leipzig, I won the league 2nd year using a tactic where I moved the ball forward extremely quickly - following year it was a lot less effective as teams didn't open up against me. I tweaked 2roles in my team (and looked for more of a midfield creator as opposed to the pressing runners I had) and won the treble.

 

[Tomsou]

I am facing the same problem at the moment with my save. I just won the La Liga with FC Andorra and was almost invincible. In my season following up my championship season, I start with draws and loses to bottom tier teams. Any idea how I need to tweak the tactics? Like dropping the defensive lines etc.?

How did you manage the B team? In my save, they are completely useless because they are not a part of a championship...

 

[MRCX]

It's not that consistent for me.
I have one save where I've been using the same tactic for about 4 full seasons now, and it hasn't gotten significantly worse. In my third season, I won the league by an overwhelming margin.

In an other save of mine, I'm close to the end of the first season and I haven't really found a tactic that works at all. I've created some, if used some that I know work decently with the match engine, and I am doing slightly better than the expectations were, but none of the tactics really work, whether I win or lose feels very random.

I've had an especially harsh experience in my own tactic testing, where I created a tactic in the public beta to see if it could work with the match engine update.
I tested it with a mid-table team in Spain and got an overwhelming 44 points out of my first 19 games, which put me on top of the table - just by simulating, no finetuning.
I continued simulating and stopped it because I saw myself just falling in the table. Turns out that from the 14 games of the second half of the season that I had simulated so far, I only got 9 points. The only reason I didn't get sacked was probably because I was still 7th in the league (and projected to finish around 10th before the season).
I figured that it might have to do with a few things: While half a season probably isn't enough to alter reputation, I believe that the AI evaluates the table around december/january. (I might be mistaken, that's how it feels)
And now they see someone who was expected to finish 10th on top of the table, with like 7 wins in a row. Naturally, they will play more defensively against that team that they did in the first clash.
If it happens that my tactic is weak against very defensive set-ups, that could cause me to plummet massively.
And, of course, there's always a bit of randomness and luck involved, there's morale, there's momentum.

I've then played around and made my tactic perform more consistently, but those are just things that can happen. I'm by no means an expert - neither regarding tactics nor regarding AI/game engine.