Tactics and training…

It’s a relatively short one today due to me having to help set stuff up for my brothers 18th tonight. As well as various other chores, but it’s sound.

I was thinking about tactics last night. It was after one of my friends had been talking to me about how he discovered how to be shit hot at FM because he had managed to create himself a tactic which would suit to the needs of his team. Being honest I was still pretty clueless about it even after he explained it to me. So how much of an influence do your tactics really have on your game? Ever since I started playing FM I always had a rough structure of how I wanted my team to look like tactics wise before the game. I would set it up through the availability of certain players and fitness. It was not complicated in the slightest, there was the team instructions and then the structure, there were no individual player instructions and I’m not sure how much this actually mattered, whether I had been lucky, it made little difference or my team was just class. Once I had done this I manged to create myself a tactic which I used in every game I ever played, it won me 27 trophies with Juventus and a staggering 56 with Barcelona, all with this one tactic. And then it came to FM07, I set it up as I aways had, four at the back, three along the midfield, CM with an arrow to DMC and the two wingers with arrows to their respective forward positions. Then an AMC and two strikers. I thought this would be fine and dandy and I’d coast to the domestic treble and Champions League with Arsenal like I always did. How wrong I was, after 15 games I found myself languishing in 6th position, a good 8 points off the leaders. I exited at the hands of League Cup to Preston North End and was struggling in my Champions League group. I had no idea what to do, I was clueless with tactics because I had never done much apart from my own one and it couldn’t be a lack of talent because my team was shit hot. I came to the conclusion that over the last couple of versions that there has been more emphasis put on tactics than buying the right kind of players. This, in my opinion, is one of the major contributing factors as to why a lot of people have found the game a lot more challenging than previous versions, because you actually have to have some degree of knowledge of football tactics to do really well. (And for the record, I ended up winning the League, Champions League, and FA Cup somehow)

On top of this there is training, and I can honestly say it’s not something I care for too much, in the 05 times I’d just set it to my assistant’s duties. Then on 06 I took a little bit more of an interest since I was playing a career game and I managed to construct a basic schedule for the players but it seemed to make very little difference. So I conducted a little experiment. I would make a save game then split it into two, both with the same team and players, I’d give a basic schedule to one team, and a cheat schedule to the other then go on holiday for 6 months and at the end I would see the effect of this on the players. The results were conclusive, the players who had been on the basic schedule had trundled long stats wise but the ones with the cheat training had improved significantly. Now this isn’t to say you should go off to use a cheat training schedule to make your players world class, just to put a little more thought into your training.

Saying all the above though, I’m still absolutely clueless, and will be for some time.