FM 2013 Guide — How to create your own tactic, part 3: Testing Tactics

Hello and welcome to my Football Manager 2013 guide on testing tactics. This is the third and final part of the series, so if you haven’t already, I suggest skipping back to any parts you may have missed. Part one covered formations, strategy and style. While part two covered player roles.

I know these posts have been extremely long, so lets try keeping part three as short as possible. Testing tactics is all common sense really, but you won’t succeed and find those flaws without patience. Pressing continue, continue and rushing through your save just won’t work. Remember its not just your tactic that makes the players under perform, so get everything else in order and then there will be no question marks over what is causing poor results. So with that in mind, below are some key points on what must be done before you can successfully test your tactic.

• Make sure you have great backroom staff and an excellent assistant manager. I suggest Johnny’s guide to getting good coaches.
• Set your training correctly & make sure the match preparation is appropriate, Johnny has made another good guide on training and match preparation.
• Sign the right players, your tactic won’t work if you don’t have good players. The Scouting Network can help there.
• Set your tactic well before the first Friendly of the season and make sure its set as your primary tactic, the squad need time to learn the new system.
• And finally be sure to set your opposition instructions and team talks correctly.

If all of the above is spot on and your tactic still isn’t working then chances are one of the below is effecting it. If  that is the case its a waiting game, these issues will pass and you should see better results after 6-7 games.

• Too many new signings or foreign players struggling to communicate.
• Poor morale and or confidence.
• Signing too many players can result in the squad needing time to blend and learn the tactic.

Now that you have everything set up right and know what to expect, I’ll explain how you should go about testing your tactics.

There is one sure fire way of spotting errors and problems in your FM13 tactic, by watching the match engine. Don’t watch the opening games in ‘key highlights’, you have no chance of spotting any issues. Always watch the opening 3-4 competitive matches in ‘comprehensive highlight‘ mode. This way you can see every chance and as a result where play is breaking down. After the opening three or four games you can switch to ‘extended highlights‘ and I’d suggest doing this for at least half a season, by then the tactic should be perfected and you can watch in ‘key highlights’ mode if you wish.

My pet hate is people who manage three competitive matches, lose all of them and then come moaning, ‘your tactics crap’. It took more than a day to build Rome my friends, so don’t be in a rush. I would also suggest disregarding early matches against the top teams, you can’t judge your side getting thrashed by a far Superior team especially when the tactic is still been learnt. Yes there will be defensive lessons to learn from those types of defeats but don’t overhaul your system based on matches like that. Its the teams you expect to beat or that have a similar reputation to yourself, they are the ones you should concentrate on.

Always pay close attention to your player ratings. If one particular position gets quite a few low ratings, chances are its a problem with the role or how that area of the tactic blends in with the rest. Player ratings are a great way of spotting which area is causing problems, but for confirmation maybe try changing the player in that position, just to be sure it isn’t the players fault (assuming he isn’t incredible of course.) Now when I say ‘low ratings’ I mean lower than 6.7 on a consistent basis.

Whatever you do, don’t let these player ratings deceive you. Lots of gamers are wrong in assuming a central midfielder isn’t working if he keeps getting 6.9. Remember some players do a lot of the dog work and receive no credit for it, but without them the tactic may fall to pieces. Every other game my striker fails to score and doesn’t go above a 7.4 rating too often…but I win a lot of matches and the inside forwards always look very dangerous. So I sacrifice my striker because the tactic works, you should consider this when getting frustrated by what you may class as a ‘player under performing’.

The other telling sign of whether a tactic works is goals. If you keep scoring a lot of goals then great, but how many do you concede? If you win the odd game but those goals against lead to sloppy draws and losses then its time to change. This means you don’t have the balance right between attack and defence. Now this usually doesn’t represent a mistake in your philosophy and strategy but more so the formation and players roles. Your shape and player roles are probably committing too many bodies forward leaving you vulnerable at the back.

Now onto another handy way of seeing where the problems are. In the match engine set the ‘match feed settings’ to the information you want from your backroom staff. I personally just tick all the ‘staff feedback’. But beware, while this is handy it can also be misleading. You need to use some common sense, like I keep getting a message claiming I should encourage my players to try a direct passing style, I have ignored that to great success all season.

Conclusion

The key to creating and testing a brilliant tactic is observation. And you can only manage this through the match engine, I could go on about certain statistics indicating change is required, but if I am honest there’s no point. I never use them, so you shouldn’t have too either. Plus, statistics can lie, especially if you’re creating a tactic that is solid and for the sole purpose of winning games.

Well that concludes my FM 2013 Guide — How to create your own tactic! Its been a marathon (more than 6300 words) but if this helps just a handful of readers I’ll be delighted. But if not, I’ll be posting my attacking tactic soon enough so you can all enjoy that. Thanks for hanging in there everybody and taking the time to read this guide. As always I look forward to your comments and questions.