Great post, the thing with me is i'm lazy and alot of times cant be bothered going with the hazzle of spending 15 minutes prior to the game adjusting my tactics to suit the opposition, and constantly through games keep stopping to adjust. So i'll download a tactic or use my own and play key highlights however when i do this i will always have a dissapointing results, then morale goes down and it can be very hard to break the cycle.
However once i get fed up of losing and i use my own tactic and spend the time before game and during matches to make alteratons then i always do well currently on a 17 match unbeaten run with Oldham which has taken me to 2nd in the table whilst after the first 15 games i was just outside the relegatin zone because i was being lazy downloading peoples tactics playing on key highlights and hoping for the best.
I too always look at the opposiition defence when choosing my strikers and something i've implemented in the last few games which has created alot of scoring opportunities with my strikers are: If the opposition defender is really weak on accelerstion and pace i have my really quick striker to man mark the defender tightly, i set my striker as a target man and distribution to run on to ball. The reason for this is on many occasions if i match up the quick striker to play against their slowest defender without the man marking the AI will switch their defenders around during the game to counteract this but if i set my striker to tightly man mark their slowest defender it wont matter because wherever they put the defender my striker will follow. This will also work if a defender is poor in the air just man mark him with your big striker and set distribution to head. It makes a massive difference to the point my quick striker has scored at least 1 every game since i've employed this tactic and if his finishng was better he would have had a hatrick in every game.