OK so as I'm using a lot of support with my gameplay from this board I've decided to create a thread sharing my 15 years of experience with everyone who feels uncomofortable having recently started playing the game.It is the return i can provide as i do not often create tactics and we have some great tacticians on this board and i still would like to conribute.There are several important diferrencies from other guides ive seen :
1) I love playing with lower reputation teams.This is a completely diferrent point of view and i believe i can help any newbie who doesnt want to start with Man City. 2) Im not going to imply how you should act or how exactly you should play.Instead I ll be trying to explain and summarize the things Ive learned(i have some experience with analyzing stuff in my job so i hope it will work : )
3) I will try to be more specific with the aspects of the gameplay-there are enough explanations of the therms in the game themselves. So here we go:
Part I: Assessing your belongings I.1. The staff Ok, you picked your team, what next?First things first, you need to evaluate what you have.This includes mainly the staff, the players and the facilities of the club. The staff, this is a very important part of your future job.The most important one is the Assistant Manager.As you probably have noticed he is the man to create team reports, evaluate players give you advise on oposition instructions and team talk.He also usually has some training to do.So the obvious attribute you should look after is man managment.It it also the main attribute that determines how good pre-match reports you get-if your Assman is good he will tell you which of your players feel nervous before match(and even the reasons behind this) who is complacent, etc.As pointed in many other threads determination, motivating, judging ability and potential are also crucial.Level of discipline is a very good bonus here as he will have to look after the way your players do their job on the training ground.All the above mentioned also make for a good coach, although i highly recommend if you have the possibility to hire a coach who lacks one or two of those but has great coaching skill.So most likely you will have some staff that will not be very good, like a coach with no coaching attribute of above 10.The best time to get rid of them is now.Like your chairman told you-they will all accept mutual termination of their contracts if you wish to.Naturally you have to take into consideration your wage budget-you will have to pay compensation to those guys even though they are incompetent!The other thing i strongly recommend is to look after your possible replacements.Is there a better option for this coaching position that might be interested in signing for your club?The best moment to release a coach is to negotiate the contract with his replacement and terminate the contract before the replacement agrees the contract.If you dont have an option for replacement it is better to keep even the poorest coach in the team-they still "produce" some goods on the training ground which is better that nothing!Be patient with that part of your squad building though-if you play your game your team will grow in reputation and so will you, thus allowing you to attract better staff. The scouts-there are many trends in evaluating who a good scout might be, but trying to keep things simple the obvious works good enough for me-judging ability and potential, plus tactical knowledge for the one assigned to your next team opposition.The others Ive heard of as important attributes here include adaptability(can easier move from country to country) and determination( being braver in applying his knowledge and picking recommendations).You might even want to take a look at the physio at your desposal.Their crucial attributes i think is agreed are phisyotherappy(for obvious reasons) determination and level of discipline(in order to force injured players to work hard to overcome their injuries).
I.2. Your squad Than we go for the real deal: your players.There are several way of examining them.The one that gives you an overview is the assistant report.From the Team report tab you can see the squad depth.Quite obviously you need at least 2 good players per position in the tactics you will choose to use.This also works vice verca-if you see you have several 3,5-4 star rating players in the AML, AMR positions you can go for 4-2-4 or 4-5-1 based tactics.If you dont have good fullbacks and enough money to get some you can opt for a 3-CB tactic.After this fist observation you can doa second one-checking the personal reports of your stars and starlets.These as per my experience are lets say 90 % correct so you can count on them.The exclusions: you can get more resulst from a 2,5 stars player that perfectly suits your tactic than a 4 star one that has built his reputation mostly on pace or another physical attribute.Also sometimes the pottential ability rating has some tendency to varry, due to injuries or other in-game defaulted fluctuations.
I.3. Your squads personality.
Here you should take into consideration the squad personality of your team.Players with similar personalities as often mentioned gel in together more easily.There are feuer guides on this so Ill try to be more specific.The "positive" personalities include resolute, resilient, spirited, driven, determined and naturally profesional.Ambitious and loyal i would add also have their positives, but for those 2 remember they are almost opposite to each other so you should try and not have both type of personalities in your squad.So now it will be a good thing to decide 1 or 2 suqad personalities arround which you will build your team.The top recommended are professional and determined(spirited and resolute being mostly variations of this) but i have to say i like the way "ambitious" players handle the team talk(more on this later on).After you've taken this decision it will be good to stick to that type of players while attracting new signings-it will be extremely beneficial.I would also add here that you might take into consideration in which positions you have very talented youngsters as if you attract too many good, experienced players for their positions you will stop their development-they need competitive matches in order to grow!
I.4. Examine the squad yourself
Enough said about the advise from your staff i believe you should always look at players attributes yourself.If you read other guides you have already noticed mental attributes are crucial-no player can deploy his skills without those.So what are the most important attributes per position?I would say almost any.If you want to play counter-attacking football, you will need quick attacking players, if you want to have more possesion it will be important that everybody in your team passes the ball well.So keeping this in mind i would recommend you look for defenders anticipation and decisions, all the other attributes are obvious, but those 2 will be crucial!Pace and acceleration are needed for practicaly every position on the pitch so keep them also in high regard.Off the ball for attacking players is often overlooked but it will also be detrimential in most of your games.I think you can figure yourself the obvious part of these-finishing for stikers, tackling for defenders, passing for midfielders, etc.You can also think of the specific the specific roles you will require from your players and use the grea new feature by FM called "key attributes" in the players attribues tab.Choosing the desired role / duty from the dropdown menu will highlight the most important attributes so you can determine how suitable this player is for the role you are planning for him to play.Finally you can use player roles calculators there are several for fm11 and none for the new version but they actually can do.You can use them to create a scheme for your more important players-at which roles / duties they play best.And finally you might want to have a look at the potenital attributes of your youngsters-infomation that genie scout will reveal to you.Here you have to remember that not a single player in the game can reach 100 % of his potential. 2.
Part II The transfer market. Once again i will try to avoid all parts of the game that are self explanatory.Like negotiating-everyone of you can easily understand what its word about.
II.1. So lets start with picking the right players.My most important tip: scout your potential singings!After your scout reports he has found a very good player(3,5 stars and above) you may want to re-scout him for 2-3 games.The creators of the game insist that the precision of the report improves dramaticaly after such scouting.As from my experience and what Ive read there is not a single case affirming the opposite. Second most important thing is the player's personality.Even if he is not exactly the same "blood type" as your main squad check what you scout reports read in the personality tab.e.g. a professional player can be fairly determined at the same time.So he might gel in the squad and your scout will tell you so.The biggest controversies that you should always avoid are sporting-determined, loyal-ambitious and casual-everything else.These are opposite personalities and it is strongly recommended you dont keep players of both types from any of the couples in the same scuad.The last thing you should keep a firm eye on is the approximate financial values of the transfer.Can you afford the transfer fee?Can you afford the salary the player will ask?
II.2. Negotiating with agents.So one tip on this: scouting is very good for limiting the agent demands.Most of them are quite greedy but what yous scouting report says the player will ask is actually the fair price.As a general advise i would recommend to start with an offer a bit lower than the minimum your scout has supposed.The agents always bargain so if you start with what you believe a fair price is you will end up paying more than the limit matched in the report or not succesfuly negotiating the contract offer.
II.3. Creating your own filters. You might want to attract players for a position with specific attributes that suit your vision of football best. Like planning to play with very high D-line and therefore you might not want to buy defenders with pace and acceleration less than 13 or even 14.Now its so easy as already noticed above you can retrieve all the most important attributes for a specific role / duty and than add them in the filters in the player search.And if you want something more like pace or anticipation you can just add it to those.Just dont forget to tick the "filter unrealistic targets" box.This way only players that might be interested in joining you will appear in the search.Because...yes, you got it right, even if you filtered what you want from a player you really should scout him.And you dont want to waste time on the transfer market, and the time of your scouts for players that dont want to negotiate with you.
II.4. To wrap up things i remind you those are just recommendations.Its not the only way to play the game(where exact guidelines are given) and you should take from them whatever suits you most.Also im not against reshaping your tactics arround a superstar player when the oportunity to get such in lower reputation team arises. For exapmle, when i played Ipswich and managed to retain Juan Mata he was doing very well as deep lying forward in Raikans tactic but i created a classical 4-2-3-1 (with 3 AMC) wich perfectly suited him, so i could play him in his facourite position and it really paid off.
Part III: Match preparation. So i suppose you already have some ideas what tactics you should deploy.If not i will soon post some advise on this too. As you can easily notice the match preparation is "teaching" your team how to play and fit into certain tactics.As advised in general i would agree that starting from first day of the pre-season you should put your match prep on very high with no specific focus.This way your team learns the tactical part and the formation required most quickly.There was a thread on this board stating that the specific focus preparation is producing the same outcome no matter how dense the match preparation is but Ive noticed that this was probably only valid for the previous(FM11) version.
III.1 Another important thing you should remember is that the only match prep that produces outcome in the long therm is "teamwork"-it helps your players gel in together and this is extremely important for your team in order to play attractive footbal.
III.2 And here is some concrete advise for you, the first Original Content in this thread: Ive played a lot with match prep and noticed that it still has some leaks.You can set your formation without specifying the exact roles / duties you will require from your players.The match engine will accept your team knows the tactic at 100 % as long as you do not touch the team instructions.So for example you may have created a tactic with 3 CM's wich read(by default from FM) CMD, CMS & CMA.But as long as players that can perform those role in CM are not that many, you can change those roles even right before the match starts.So you can play BWD to counter oposition thread in midfield, APMA to run with ball or pass it to the stirkers transitioning play from defence to attack and box-to-box midfielder.If you've read the manual attentively you will ask at this point-but the players PI in part of the mentality will change?Yes it will change but still the game engine will not "understand" that.That same leak may be harmul to you as if you remove a nicely trained already tactic just for a couple of days(or even seconds) to test some other you think might be more handy.You will see your knowledge of the previously learned tactic drastically decreased.
III.3. Specific pre-game match preparation. Most of the focus pre-game I think is self-explanatory.You should generaly try to use less intense training in order to provide enough training for exanding your players attibutes.So after your tactics are all filled up it will be best to keep match prep intensity to low or even very low.The most important thing from your scouts opposition report i would say in order to determine the focus of the match preparation is the opposition goal an analysis.There it says how the opposition prefers to score.There are many AI managers in this version that love to count of set pieces for their attacking options and if you notice they scored 5-6 goals from corners...i think you know what you should do.Also i would recommend considering the options for the focus yourself and not pay much attention to the scouts advise as they have preset only few proposals for you. III.4. And one last thing, for your second season: there is a big diferrence in how quickly your team gels in with the tactics determined by how you leave them during off season.During the summer break your team will "forget" the formations and instructions being trained in match prep( one of the not very realistic things in the game, but ...well, ok). There is not much logic in it, but if you leave the settings untouched when the break starts(e.g. you had attacking set pieces on average for your last game) when you resume training the match prep will start practicaly from scratch. Things will be completely diferrent if you put in on very high with no focus JUST BEFORE the seasonal break starts.
Part IV: Picking your tactics. There is a whole thread: "which tactic should i choose?" so you should refer to it if you still feel confused.The more experienced users at the forum will give you advise for your particular team,very good and probably very concrete.If you feel like you just need some advise and want to after this go on your own with this, read the following: IV.1 Adjusting your tactics to the players you have. There are 2 basic methods for building a tactic.They are: adjusting the tactic to the players you have in your squad and building a killer tactic and than looking for the correct players that suit the tactic.For lower reputation teams, especialy in your first season I strongly recommend method A.You usualy start with no transfer budget, low wage budget and some of the good players whose claims you can cover wouldnt want to join you because they prefer to sign for a bigger club or in a better reputationed league.With the team report now available from you assistant manager i think this has become extremely easy.When you open it up you can see at which positions are your strenghts and weaknesses.So with this glance you already made your first important step-you know how your best probable tactic will look per positions.Your coaching staff will also recommend you the best formations as per their opinion.I will provide you with an example View attachment 214846View attachment 215062 So, what we see here?We have some good for the team defenders and sufficient cover for all the back 4 so we can safely accept we will play with classical flat-back 4(4 defenders in a line).We dont have good options in AM wide positions so we will not be using wingers-the resources at the club obviously do not allow attracting enough players for those positions.We also have 2 somewhat good strikers, and some good CM's.The wide positions are obvious problems but it seems you can construct something on the MR and ML positions.So the basic formation arround which we should build our squad is 4-4-2 in its most classical type: View attachment 214854 You aregoing to surely need all the options available to you to avoid the traps AI oposition will besetting for you.Thats why we will have to set all the 3 tactics in the match prep tab right in the begining.So what our second tactic should look like.With the available players and given the teams reputation you will need one defensive or counter-attacking tactic for sure.So you can train your team in 2 tactics 4-4-2 one fluid with control mentality and one rigid with defensive mentality.But as i already mentioned, having trained your team into defensive mentality you will be able to deploy it to any formation you taught them.So it is probably best that we set the rigid and defensive strategy here and create one more formation in which we should put fluid with control mentality.Later you can swap those instructions from formation to formation, so if your formation decision leans to 4-4-2, but you want to control the game you can deploy the second tactics instruction to 4-4-2. So what our 2-nd tactic migh look like?Given the players we have-we can deploy 4-1-3-2 as there are some good CM's here or look for the 4-4-2 diamond: View attachment 214862View attachment 214863 From those 2 i would opt for 4-1-3-2 as in England many teams opt to play 4-4-2, completely overwhelming diamonds midfield and we dont want most of our opposition to dominate us by just playing its natural game. IV.2. Picking role / duties for your players. What i can add is there are several PI instructions that do not influence your match prep rating.So remember that you can freely change folloowing PI without loosing from your 100 % gelled match prep: -run from deep -tackling -run with ball -try through balls -try long shots -wide play -swap position I have also tweaked manually highliy sensitive instructions like creative freedom, mentality and marking (as they all directly refer to your predetermined match prep) and after saving the tactic and uploading it in math preparation it was reported 100 % gelled. As this is intended to be a guide for newbies some specific advise on roles / duties: -in defense: I will repeat it as it is key: anticipation determines how many through balls your defense will leak!It is naturally connected to more obvious attributes-pace, acceleration and marking.Most of centre-backs in the game suit for LD only but be warry when using does-they are by default set to press a lot and may leave open spaces behind them. -if you're playing with no wingers attacking attributes of your FB are detrimential.If they can not dribble and pass the ball the oposition will smother you overloading the flanks. remember that even if you're playing through the middle only you still need to carry a thread on the wings-it is a must. -in midfield: decision making, pace and stamina are not so obvious but are very good for a newbie-these will allow your midfield to cover some of the tactical mistakes you might concede. -the attackers: if you want to play counter-attacking football they will need good anticipation, decisions and off the ball. Remember those are recommendations for less obvious attributes that are very important.Still there are some you can figure out yourself and are also widely discussed everywhere on the board.Like pace for the strikers or jumping and tackling for the CB or passing and creativity in midfield.As said almost every attribute can influence any other. The thread grew too big and a bit tought to apprehend at once I am afraid. The first step I'm taking is splitting it in 2 or maybe 3 threads. Will also work more on formatting, I promise. So here is the link for the second thread : http://www.fm-base.co.uk/forum/foot...-every-newbie-might-interested-continued.html
1) I love playing with lower reputation teams.This is a completely diferrent point of view and i believe i can help any newbie who doesnt want to start with Man City. 2) Im not going to imply how you should act or how exactly you should play.Instead I ll be trying to explain and summarize the things Ive learned(i have some experience with analyzing stuff in my job so i hope it will work : )
3) I will try to be more specific with the aspects of the gameplay-there are enough explanations of the therms in the game themselves. So here we go:
Part I: Assessing your belongings I.1. The staff Ok, you picked your team, what next?First things first, you need to evaluate what you have.This includes mainly the staff, the players and the facilities of the club. The staff, this is a very important part of your future job.The most important one is the Assistant Manager.As you probably have noticed he is the man to create team reports, evaluate players give you advise on oposition instructions and team talk.He also usually has some training to do.So the obvious attribute you should look after is man managment.It it also the main attribute that determines how good pre-match reports you get-if your Assman is good he will tell you which of your players feel nervous before match(and even the reasons behind this) who is complacent, etc.As pointed in many other threads determination, motivating, judging ability and potential are also crucial.Level of discipline is a very good bonus here as he will have to look after the way your players do their job on the training ground.All the above mentioned also make for a good coach, although i highly recommend if you have the possibility to hire a coach who lacks one or two of those but has great coaching skill.So most likely you will have some staff that will not be very good, like a coach with no coaching attribute of above 10.The best time to get rid of them is now.Like your chairman told you-they will all accept mutual termination of their contracts if you wish to.Naturally you have to take into consideration your wage budget-you will have to pay compensation to those guys even though they are incompetent!The other thing i strongly recommend is to look after your possible replacements.Is there a better option for this coaching position that might be interested in signing for your club?The best moment to release a coach is to negotiate the contract with his replacement and terminate the contract before the replacement agrees the contract.If you dont have an option for replacement it is better to keep even the poorest coach in the team-they still "produce" some goods on the training ground which is better that nothing!Be patient with that part of your squad building though-if you play your game your team will grow in reputation and so will you, thus allowing you to attract better staff. The scouts-there are many trends in evaluating who a good scout might be, but trying to keep things simple the obvious works good enough for me-judging ability and potential, plus tactical knowledge for the one assigned to your next team opposition.The others Ive heard of as important attributes here include adaptability(can easier move from country to country) and determination( being braver in applying his knowledge and picking recommendations).You might even want to take a look at the physio at your desposal.Their crucial attributes i think is agreed are phisyotherappy(for obvious reasons) determination and level of discipline(in order to force injured players to work hard to overcome their injuries).
I.2. Your squad Than we go for the real deal: your players.There are several way of examining them.The one that gives you an overview is the assistant report.From the Team report tab you can see the squad depth.Quite obviously you need at least 2 good players per position in the tactics you will choose to use.This also works vice verca-if you see you have several 3,5-4 star rating players in the AML, AMR positions you can go for 4-2-4 or 4-5-1 based tactics.If you dont have good fullbacks and enough money to get some you can opt for a 3-CB tactic.After this fist observation you can doa second one-checking the personal reports of your stars and starlets.These as per my experience are lets say 90 % correct so you can count on them.The exclusions: you can get more resulst from a 2,5 stars player that perfectly suits your tactic than a 4 star one that has built his reputation mostly on pace or another physical attribute.Also sometimes the pottential ability rating has some tendency to varry, due to injuries or other in-game defaulted fluctuations.
I.3. Your squads personality.
Here you should take into consideration the squad personality of your team.Players with similar personalities as often mentioned gel in together more easily.There are feuer guides on this so Ill try to be more specific.The "positive" personalities include resolute, resilient, spirited, driven, determined and naturally profesional.Ambitious and loyal i would add also have their positives, but for those 2 remember they are almost opposite to each other so you should try and not have both type of personalities in your squad.So now it will be a good thing to decide 1 or 2 suqad personalities arround which you will build your team.The top recommended are professional and determined(spirited and resolute being mostly variations of this) but i have to say i like the way "ambitious" players handle the team talk(more on this later on).After you've taken this decision it will be good to stick to that type of players while attracting new signings-it will be extremely beneficial.I would also add here that you might take into consideration in which positions you have very talented youngsters as if you attract too many good, experienced players for their positions you will stop their development-they need competitive matches in order to grow!
I.4. Examine the squad yourself
Enough said about the advise from your staff i believe you should always look at players attributes yourself.If you read other guides you have already noticed mental attributes are crucial-no player can deploy his skills without those.So what are the most important attributes per position?I would say almost any.If you want to play counter-attacking football, you will need quick attacking players, if you want to have more possesion it will be important that everybody in your team passes the ball well.So keeping this in mind i would recommend you look for defenders anticipation and decisions, all the other attributes are obvious, but those 2 will be crucial!Pace and acceleration are needed for practicaly every position on the pitch so keep them also in high regard.Off the ball for attacking players is often overlooked but it will also be detrimential in most of your games.I think you can figure yourself the obvious part of these-finishing for stikers, tackling for defenders, passing for midfielders, etc.You can also think of the specific the specific roles you will require from your players and use the grea new feature by FM called "key attributes" in the players attribues tab.Choosing the desired role / duty from the dropdown menu will highlight the most important attributes so you can determine how suitable this player is for the role you are planning for him to play.Finally you can use player roles calculators there are several for fm11 and none for the new version but they actually can do.You can use them to create a scheme for your more important players-at which roles / duties they play best.And finally you might want to have a look at the potenital attributes of your youngsters-infomation that genie scout will reveal to you.Here you have to remember that not a single player in the game can reach 100 % of his potential. 2.
Part II The transfer market. Once again i will try to avoid all parts of the game that are self explanatory.Like negotiating-everyone of you can easily understand what its word about.
II.1. So lets start with picking the right players.My most important tip: scout your potential singings!After your scout reports he has found a very good player(3,5 stars and above) you may want to re-scout him for 2-3 games.The creators of the game insist that the precision of the report improves dramaticaly after such scouting.As from my experience and what Ive read there is not a single case affirming the opposite. Second most important thing is the player's personality.Even if he is not exactly the same "blood type" as your main squad check what you scout reports read in the personality tab.e.g. a professional player can be fairly determined at the same time.So he might gel in the squad and your scout will tell you so.The biggest controversies that you should always avoid are sporting-determined, loyal-ambitious and casual-everything else.These are opposite personalities and it is strongly recommended you dont keep players of both types from any of the couples in the same scuad.The last thing you should keep a firm eye on is the approximate financial values of the transfer.Can you afford the transfer fee?Can you afford the salary the player will ask?
II.2. Negotiating with agents.So one tip on this: scouting is very good for limiting the agent demands.Most of them are quite greedy but what yous scouting report says the player will ask is actually the fair price.As a general advise i would recommend to start with an offer a bit lower than the minimum your scout has supposed.The agents always bargain so if you start with what you believe a fair price is you will end up paying more than the limit matched in the report or not succesfuly negotiating the contract offer.
II.3. Creating your own filters. You might want to attract players for a position with specific attributes that suit your vision of football best. Like planning to play with very high D-line and therefore you might not want to buy defenders with pace and acceleration less than 13 or even 14.Now its so easy as already noticed above you can retrieve all the most important attributes for a specific role / duty and than add them in the filters in the player search.And if you want something more like pace or anticipation you can just add it to those.Just dont forget to tick the "filter unrealistic targets" box.This way only players that might be interested in joining you will appear in the search.Because...yes, you got it right, even if you filtered what you want from a player you really should scout him.And you dont want to waste time on the transfer market, and the time of your scouts for players that dont want to negotiate with you.
II.4. To wrap up things i remind you those are just recommendations.Its not the only way to play the game(where exact guidelines are given) and you should take from them whatever suits you most.Also im not against reshaping your tactics arround a superstar player when the oportunity to get such in lower reputation team arises. For exapmle, when i played Ipswich and managed to retain Juan Mata he was doing very well as deep lying forward in Raikans tactic but i created a classical 4-2-3-1 (with 3 AMC) wich perfectly suited him, so i could play him in his facourite position and it really paid off.
Part III: Match preparation. So i suppose you already have some ideas what tactics you should deploy.If not i will soon post some advise on this too. As you can easily notice the match preparation is "teaching" your team how to play and fit into certain tactics.As advised in general i would agree that starting from first day of the pre-season you should put your match prep on very high with no specific focus.This way your team learns the tactical part and the formation required most quickly.There was a thread on this board stating that the specific focus preparation is producing the same outcome no matter how dense the match preparation is but Ive noticed that this was probably only valid for the previous(FM11) version.
III.1 Another important thing you should remember is that the only match prep that produces outcome in the long therm is "teamwork"-it helps your players gel in together and this is extremely important for your team in order to play attractive footbal.
III.2 And here is some concrete advise for you, the first Original Content in this thread: Ive played a lot with match prep and noticed that it still has some leaks.You can set your formation without specifying the exact roles / duties you will require from your players.The match engine will accept your team knows the tactic at 100 % as long as you do not touch the team instructions.So for example you may have created a tactic with 3 CM's wich read(by default from FM) CMD, CMS & CMA.But as long as players that can perform those role in CM are not that many, you can change those roles even right before the match starts.So you can play BWD to counter oposition thread in midfield, APMA to run with ball or pass it to the stirkers transitioning play from defence to attack and box-to-box midfielder.If you've read the manual attentively you will ask at this point-but the players PI in part of the mentality will change?Yes it will change but still the game engine will not "understand" that.That same leak may be harmul to you as if you remove a nicely trained already tactic just for a couple of days(or even seconds) to test some other you think might be more handy.You will see your knowledge of the previously learned tactic drastically decreased.
III.3. Specific pre-game match preparation. Most of the focus pre-game I think is self-explanatory.You should generaly try to use less intense training in order to provide enough training for exanding your players attibutes.So after your tactics are all filled up it will be best to keep match prep intensity to low or even very low.The most important thing from your scouts opposition report i would say in order to determine the focus of the match preparation is the opposition goal an analysis.There it says how the opposition prefers to score.There are many AI managers in this version that love to count of set pieces for their attacking options and if you notice they scored 5-6 goals from corners...i think you know what you should do.Also i would recommend considering the options for the focus yourself and not pay much attention to the scouts advise as they have preset only few proposals for you. III.4. And one last thing, for your second season: there is a big diferrence in how quickly your team gels in with the tactics determined by how you leave them during off season.During the summer break your team will "forget" the formations and instructions being trained in match prep( one of the not very realistic things in the game, but ...well, ok). There is not much logic in it, but if you leave the settings untouched when the break starts(e.g. you had attacking set pieces on average for your last game) when you resume training the match prep will start practicaly from scratch. Things will be completely diferrent if you put in on very high with no focus JUST BEFORE the seasonal break starts.
Part IV: Picking your tactics. There is a whole thread: "which tactic should i choose?" so you should refer to it if you still feel confused.The more experienced users at the forum will give you advise for your particular team,very good and probably very concrete.If you feel like you just need some advise and want to after this go on your own with this, read the following: IV.1 Adjusting your tactics to the players you have. There are 2 basic methods for building a tactic.They are: adjusting the tactic to the players you have in your squad and building a killer tactic and than looking for the correct players that suit the tactic.For lower reputation teams, especialy in your first season I strongly recommend method A.You usualy start with no transfer budget, low wage budget and some of the good players whose claims you can cover wouldnt want to join you because they prefer to sign for a bigger club or in a better reputationed league.With the team report now available from you assistant manager i think this has become extremely easy.When you open it up you can see at which positions are your strenghts and weaknesses.So with this glance you already made your first important step-you know how your best probable tactic will look per positions.Your coaching staff will also recommend you the best formations as per their opinion.I will provide you with an example View attachment 214846View attachment 215062 So, what we see here?We have some good for the team defenders and sufficient cover for all the back 4 so we can safely accept we will play with classical flat-back 4(4 defenders in a line).We dont have good options in AM wide positions so we will not be using wingers-the resources at the club obviously do not allow attracting enough players for those positions.We also have 2 somewhat good strikers, and some good CM's.The wide positions are obvious problems but it seems you can construct something on the MR and ML positions.So the basic formation arround which we should build our squad is 4-4-2 in its most classical type: View attachment 214854 You aregoing to surely need all the options available to you to avoid the traps AI oposition will besetting for you.Thats why we will have to set all the 3 tactics in the match prep tab right in the begining.So what our second tactic should look like.With the available players and given the teams reputation you will need one defensive or counter-attacking tactic for sure.So you can train your team in 2 tactics 4-4-2 one fluid with control mentality and one rigid with defensive mentality.But as i already mentioned, having trained your team into defensive mentality you will be able to deploy it to any formation you taught them.So it is probably best that we set the rigid and defensive strategy here and create one more formation in which we should put fluid with control mentality.Later you can swap those instructions from formation to formation, so if your formation decision leans to 4-4-2, but you want to control the game you can deploy the second tactics instruction to 4-4-2. So what our 2-nd tactic migh look like?Given the players we have-we can deploy 4-1-3-2 as there are some good CM's here or look for the 4-4-2 diamond: View attachment 214862View attachment 214863 From those 2 i would opt for 4-1-3-2 as in England many teams opt to play 4-4-2, completely overwhelming diamonds midfield and we dont want most of our opposition to dominate us by just playing its natural game. IV.2. Picking role / duties for your players. What i can add is there are several PI instructions that do not influence your match prep rating.So remember that you can freely change folloowing PI without loosing from your 100 % gelled match prep: -run from deep -tackling -run with ball -try through balls -try long shots -wide play -swap position I have also tweaked manually highliy sensitive instructions like creative freedom, mentality and marking (as they all directly refer to your predetermined match prep) and after saving the tactic and uploading it in math preparation it was reported 100 % gelled. As this is intended to be a guide for newbies some specific advise on roles / duties: -in defense: I will repeat it as it is key: anticipation determines how many through balls your defense will leak!It is naturally connected to more obvious attributes-pace, acceleration and marking.Most of centre-backs in the game suit for LD only but be warry when using does-they are by default set to press a lot and may leave open spaces behind them. -if you're playing with no wingers attacking attributes of your FB are detrimential.If they can not dribble and pass the ball the oposition will smother you overloading the flanks. remember that even if you're playing through the middle only you still need to carry a thread on the wings-it is a must. -in midfield: decision making, pace and stamina are not so obvious but are very good for a newbie-these will allow your midfield to cover some of the tactical mistakes you might concede. -the attackers: if you want to play counter-attacking football they will need good anticipation, decisions and off the ball. Remember those are recommendations for less obvious attributes that are very important.Still there are some you can figure out yourself and are also widely discussed everywhere on the board.Like pace for the strikers or jumping and tackling for the CB or passing and creativity in midfield.As said almost every attribute can influence any other. The thread grew too big and a bit tought to apprehend at once I am afraid. The first step I'm taking is splitting it in 2 or maybe 3 threads. Will also work more on formatting, I promise. So here is the link for the second thread : http://www.fm-base.co.uk/forum/foot...-every-newbie-might-interested-continued.html
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you can preview your post before you re-post the updated version just to make sure it is correct. I'm in no doubt it will be helpful though, very nice of you.