Just great...
I coutinued testing the tactic after my first post (very good results with Santos), and it was really a unbelivable season... It feels almost like cheating, really
.
Below is my Club World Championship result against Man Utd! It's unbelievable really... I wonder if anyone will even believe this to be legit...
In the end I won 2012 Copa Libertadores, First Division, Sao Paulo State Champ and Club World Champ. Neymar as best player of the year, I as best coach. Below the last fixtures.
To be honest I haven't used the 4-5-1 original formation throughout the whole season. After 10 or so games doing great the AI seems to get used to formation and if I don't change I just start losing. You can notice specific periods where I lost/tied many games, usually when I was forced to change tactics.
I ended up creating a 4-3-1-2 formation based on Raikan's 4-5-1. What I did was change the AMR Winger to a Trequartista upfront, the DMC turned into a Central Midfielder Support and the AML was kept as a adv. playmaker but in the middle. So I ended up with 3 central midfielders (playmaker att, ball winning def, central support) , one AMC (playmaker support), and two STs (trequartista + poacher). I also changed defensive line to deep in this adapted formation, and it worked quite well. Everything else was kept as set in the original tactic but for very specific tweaks due to the formation change. But that's kind of off topic...
I used Team Blend match preparation for 50% of the season, changing to defensive positioning and defensive set pieces after the team got fluid with the tactic.
In the fixture list I can point out the 8/29 game against Palmeiras as the game I started switching between 4-5-1 and 4-3-1-2 and after I did that I started getting great results again. I pretty much played 6,7 games with one tactic then changed to the other, planning ahead to make sure the switches to 4-5-1 happened one or two matches before major games.
I wonder what have you guys been doing to counter this problem (AI getting used to the tactic). I also want to know if everyone has been using the touchline instructions and assistant's OI. I always use the assistant's OI but I only use the touchline instructions every so often and really didn't miss it a lot (although it is true that I did some very nice goals with pass into space, clearly seeing the instruction working).
Thanks again,
Big Goat