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Closing down was a major issue for FM08. A patch was released to fix it, it was such a large problem, but still there are issues with it. The opposition instructions appear to over ride the individual player instructions. If my midfielder is caught out of position when he'd usually be closing down the opposition AMC, who I have closing down set to often on, my central defender just charges out of defence leaving a huge gap for the simple through ball.
My suggestion is to remodel the tactics screen for individual instructions like this. On the right is your formation with all your players on there, naturally, and on the left are the individual player instructions. What I'm suggesting is to remove the closing down option from that, and I'll explain why later. Now that there isn't a list of players to click on to choose which player you want to do the tactics for, you would need to do it using the formation on the left.
When you click on a player then you get their profile, just like now. When you hold control and click on the player it selects them to change their instructions on the left hand side. To show that they are selected they get a red border like this around them. It would be easier to go back to the traditional circles for this, as it would look cleaner, and the shirts really don't add much.
Right, now for the actual closing down. As you can see in the previous screenshot I've selected the DMC to get his instructions up. There is no closing down slider anymore. I just use the formation screen to click and drag a box onto the screen, to indicate the area I want this player to be closing the ball down in. Once I've done it, you get this. This means I can control where I want my DMC roaming. I can do this with the slider, in a way, but this is far more concise. I can set exactly how far up the pitch I want him chasing the ball, and exactly how far wide I want him to roam.
Now for something more complex, but ultimately still very simple to implement for the manager. I've now selected my striker, I've set him a nice area to close down at the top end of the pitch, but I want him to pressure the goalkeeper more. So I could again, hold down control and drag an additional box, or more than one additional box, to select an area to close down, so you're not just limited to a rectangular area. Once I've set it to close down up the pitch, with additional pressure on the goalkeeper and a defensive midfielder like I'd like my strikers to do, I get this.
To make it easier to check on your team's closing down, you need the ability to select more than one player. To select multiple players you should be able to just hold control, and click on any of the players on the formation screen that you want to add to your selection. Each player you add should have their closing down area added to the formation screen as before, so you can check the closing down for your entire team, or just one bank of players. Here is how it would look if I selected my entire back four, to check what they are doing with regards to closing down. You can see the centrebacks have been instructed not to close down any further forward than the yellow box. This eliminates the problem of a midfielder breaking free, and my central defender just charging way out of position.
Further implementations and ideas that could be developed from this
A deselect all button. When I have my entire back four selected, I could hold control and click again on individual players to remove them from the selection, or I could just click on this deselect all button, that removes all the selected players and gives me a blank formation screen.
When no players are selected, the left screen changes from individual player instructions to the team instructions. This removes the need for seperate drop down items for team and player instructions, merging them into one screen, entitled 'instructions' where you can easily access both as described.
A possibility with selecting multiple players on the formations screen, is that you can adjust both of their instructions at once. For example I could select both of my wingers, and move the mentality slider to attacking, and it would do this for both of the individual wingers. When you have multiple players selected, the bottom section of the tactics should be greyed out and unable to be changed. This prevents you accidentally setting both central defenders to man mark the same striker, or attack the back post or whatever, if you forget that you have multiple players selected.
Originally posted by gillsminnow:
actually one of the most solid ideas in a long, long time.
Agree- although its not a new idea, many have suggested ways of graphically setting up tactics- albeit not presented in such a good way as here.
Defensive line is another area where it would be so much better to just mark the line on the pitch.
Why SI choose to ignore this area when its clear the whole tactical interface is absolutely awful is beyond me. Yet they'll give us a new skin which clearly nobody uses rather than improve important areas.
Graphical representation is so much more logical and intuitive for closing down and as George Graham said defensive line. The tactical side feels so complex and ambiguous purely because of the number of options, but there are some basic things that you can't get across very easily. What I would like to see is Player -> Player Opposition Instructions. So instead of the whole team closing down based on OI you can be more specific.
For example I set my FB to close down the Winger heavily as a Player -> Player instruction and the opposition Full Back to never, and then his general closing down slider would affect his behaviour in the way it does now. This way I can (if I choose to) set up my full back to stop him rushing out after the full back and leaving a gap behind. I'm not discounting that player attributes should contribute to what he does, but I feel like this would be the type of thing a manager would instruct his full back to do.
I don't like the way it works currently which creates unrealistic deterministic behaviour. You'll see it with a DM where he goes out to close down a player in a wide position, but if that wide player gets a bit beyond him and his team mate FB comes to close down, said DM will act like the ball isn't even there and return to his central DM position regardless of how close he is to the guy in possession.
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originally posted by Poyplemonkeys:-
Closing down was a major issue for FM08. A patch was released to fix it, it was such a large problem, but still there are issues with it. The opposition instructions appear to over ride the individual player instructions. If my midfielder is caught out of position when he'd usually be closing down the opposition AMC, who I have closing down set to often on, my central defender just charges out of defence leaving a huge gap for the simple through ball.
The exact reason I rarely if ever use OI for closing down.
You can try to prevent the gap opening up through your centre by adjusting your settings for your FBs, CBs and DM in the formation in your posted screenshot (closing down, forward runs, mentality and Defensive Line). Have a look at the sreenshots I posted in this thread, in particular the difference between Bolton and Arsenal when Carrick runs into the gap between midfield and defence:-
Unfortunately I don't see this change from sliders to graphics happening anytime soon as I remember reading a post in here by someone from SI when it was suggested that the manual should be more in depth re tactical sliders and their effect/interaction. The gist of it was that they see figuring out what the sliders do as part of the game.
Originally posted by Phippsy:
can i just ask is your 'location' message about ballack a joke or a true statement? x
It's true. Ballack actually said it.
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For example I set my FB to close down the Winger heavily as a Player -> Player instruction and the opposition Full Back to never, and then his general closing down slider would affect his behaviour in the way it does now. This way I can (if I choose to) set up my full back to stop him rushing out after the full back and leaving a gap behind. I'm not discounting that player attributes should contribute to what he does, but I feel like this would be the type of thing a manager would instruct his full back to do.
This is another alternative that I think can be done using the original idea. You just set the full back to close down in an area that doesn't stretch all up the wing like mine, and set the winger's closing down to be much further back. As you can tell by the farrows, I like my full backs to be very adventurous, and I set up the pictures to reflect how I'd use it, however it's just as possible to choose a smaller area to stop the full back haring up the wing.
The problem with having player > player opposition instructions is that it would be hugely more complex than is needed in my opinion. 11 players, 11 opposition players, meaning up to 121 screens could be used. Especially for something that could potentially be solved with 1 screen like in the original post.
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I don't like the way it works currently which creates unrealistic deterministic behaviour. You'll see it with a DM where he goes out to close down a player in a wide position, but if that wide player gets a bit beyond him and his team mate FB comes to close down, said DM will act like the ball isn't even there and return to his central DM position regardless of how close he is to the guy in possession.
Yeah, this is one of the main situations that lead me to think of alternatives. Time and time again I see my DM just wander out wide to close down a slightly narrow winger, leaving acres of space in the middle for the AMC to use. We all know how deadly an AMC can be in space, so this eliminates that by setting the area you want a DMC to chase the ball in, thus enabling you to say, 'don't ever chase it out wide' to him.
i like this idea very much allows for more control on closing down. if there is one thing i hate about fm08 its the closing down.
also tactics override each other everywhere if you got tight marking on a striker but high closing down on an amc the central defender will ignore the tight marking instrcution to close down the amc.
hopefully SI cn get it right in the next game.
i also noticed that even when i tell players to tackle a winger very hard they sometimes still make no challenge on the said winger and just run up to him and stand their.
any type of new implementation on closing down that works similar to this would be better. maybe even telling players what players they should close down would be best to stop wandering players running way out of position to close down someone else.
FM09 Idea: Closing Down 
Linear Mode
