Ensign Greco

I was always one of those who complained about the w/ball w/o ball removal. I felt I had no more control over specific player movement anymore.

After some time, and quite a few unsuccesfull tactics, I have come to realise some things about the match engine, but I still have that gripe about not being able to tell my players where to stand and what to do exactly in a given situation on the pitch.

So I thought: on the tactics screen, it would be useful to give individual player instructions on pitch position, area marking and pitch movement.

My defensive midfielder, when given a high closing down slide position, tends to press on an imaginary circle with a radius of "so many steps". But I want my defensive midfielder to move ONLY horizontally on the pitch.Like so:

<------- O -------->

and never up and down. That way he will hold his position but still close down.
Currently I am unable to do this. IRL it would be one of the most common and easy instructions.

I want my attackers to close down and press and tigh mark ONLY when the ball is infront of them, otherwise I want them to roam and find themselves attacking positions. I know the current match engine does this up to a point but I want my peripheral forward to move like this, and not left or right (which my other forward would do):

!
!
!
!
O
!
!
!

Maybe we need a w/b w/o b switch, without neccesarily having to put exact player positions (although in our era of the high science of tactics it is very usual for managers to instruct their players on specific pitch positions and automatic moves - giully's goal last year from the ronnie pass was one such automation).

But I would definitely like to see some way of instructing players on areas within which they have to mark/move/attack/roam.

FrazT

Yes- good ideas and hopefully might be in future versions.

bflaff

e g: Definitely good ideas there. I think the sticking point, apart from coming up with an interface that isn't so complex as to be user unfriendly, is that the more sophisticated the options we have for setting up tactics, the more sophisticated the computer opponent needs to be as well. (Or else it gets to be too easy to beat the opp.) And assuming that getting the computer opp to properly adapt to a more sophisticated tactical palate is reasonably hard, we may not be offered options like this, as good as they are, for some time. (Wouldn't mind being wrong though.)