November 25, 2009

The new tactical interface, the tactics creator and the in-game shouts have converted tactics design from a secret science into something almost as simple as watching a football game. Unless you don’t know that the vast majority of football tactics use four defenders and have at least one holding player in midfield, there will not be too many obstacles in building a successful tactic.

This is an overwhelming change – and within the small universe of Football Manager it is, in fact, a revolution. Surprisingly, these changes are not only welcomed by the majority of casual players, but also by tactical theorists and game “nerds”. Everyone seems to be happy that they are finally talking football instead of talking sliders. And for the theorists and nerds the view under the hood will be as thrilling, entertaining and challenging as ever. In fact, right now before my very eyes for the first time the match engine seems to be the most evolved side of the game.

However, there always is a downside. And you can easily recognize this when visiting any tactical forum. Shouts, roles and duties have given us the chance to personalise our approach to the game more than ever before by applying few simple steps. And you may only guess how many different tactic sets you would have to prepare to include all possible single shouts – and you would probably be swamped with files, creating sets for each and every possible shout combination!

I have always been quite expansive with building new versions for my sets, but based on only three to four basic versions which have been used regularly. On top of this, I might have a similar amount of rarely-used tactics plus some muddy pitch variants. In total, this already is quite a massive number, and always has been too much in my eyes; but over the course of many seasons these different versions of one tactic have been indeed needed. But still this crazy number would not be enough to translate only half of in-game shouts into preset tactical versions now.

Tactical Theorems and Frameworks did a lot to promote the idea of tactic sets for every situation in game and even over several seasons. And, just as some players may have get used to the idea of preparing more or less complicated sets and learned how to use them, they now have to make another step. Prepared sets are not obsolete at all, but tweaking via shouts and strategy switches or roles switches is so easy in game now that some players with a versatile formation may not see a need to use specialised versions any more.

However, the downside of this easy tweaking – which is something certainly the vast majority of us have been dreaming of for many years – is that more than ever now your judgment and reading of the game is what matters. If I had published a tactics set in the past, most of the time after several weeks or months of work, I could be sure about my own in-depth testing, as well as I relying on the feedback of the FM-Britain members. So most of the time if things went wrong for specific users it was easy to find errors from a forum post or in a replay; be it in-game judgment, version picking or even man and squad management. I knew how each of these tactics was set up and when to use it – and no less important, when not to. So it wasn’t rocket science to detect possible errors.

Right now this has changed, strange enough because of those highly desired changes the game has made. Even if you decide to download a tactic, there is no guarantee left at all. It will be at your discretion when to use shouts or even to apply changes in mentality. So, in fact, even the creator of a tactic will be lost at giving any advice if things go wrong. And almost every one of us will see the same game in a different way and hence will apply different shouts at different times. Basically, this is what makes the game more real, more exciting and more challenging than ever, but is also can leave us stranded at giving any advice without seeing replays – and even based on a replay advice may strongly differ according to interpretation and football philosophy.

So, on the one hand our own ideas have become easy to apply; on the other, our own faults will come to haunt us and hurt us, because our experiences become far more individualised. But at least there is something you can do: use the tools the game offers for reading a game, in game and in stats - Tactical Theorems, The Tactical Bible and Communication and Psychological Warfare for the motivation side will give you many hints. Try to read the game better and keep an eye on the space behind your fullbacks closely. This can decide many games. Everyone playing TT&F Creativo, Arsenic or RoOmbus in the past knows that I am a proponent of aggressive and attacking full back play – but is there any need to press your full backs bombing down the wings up to the byline when already leading comfortably by three goals? Ask yourself if this approach is helpful in any real life match. And that’s the point again: watch football and ask yourself if you can back the decisions real life managers make or if you could do better – in the FM universe, at least.

While getting deep into the game engine was absolutely mandatory for any FM version since 2006 – unless you did not rely on discovering match engine flaws or downloading tactics – this is less needed for building tactics right now. However, it will become more and more vital trying to improve your game-reading skills. Since 2007 I have been strongly advertising extended highlights as a measure for in-game observations and sometimes even full mode if things went wrong completely (which, to be honest, is rarely ever needed). Everyone who has been getting used to this for making his in-game decisions will now clearly have massive advantages. I would even go as far as to say this could spare us many rant posts completely.

The game has offered something very special – the final switch towards football and football speak. This development in such a short period of time is nothing less than thrilling. But now we have to take the consequences as well. Some people may have been assuming football was a very simple game, but many, many books and brilliant minds have proven this utterly wrong. Now it’s up to us to take the challenge. Is it still a game? Certainly somehow, but to be honest, I would not bet on it any more.