Eigth day - It's a trick of the light

I hate my coaches, not only they are useless at football, they also are bad at counting money.

My plan is to promote all my 6 coaches to assistant managers and leave two empty slots to hire real coaches. Of course, this is an extremely expensive thing to do, because this promotion usually comes with a doubling of the salary. But as I said, for certain things, I'm the richest club in the league and I can afford some luxuries.

I start offering contracts to the coaches and most of them seem to understand that I'm offering doubling the money I give them every week for doing the same shitty job. However, two of them refuse. They don't want the money, they want to keep their post, the idiots.

And of course, they are the two I cannot fire, because without my goalkeeping coach I go from a skill of 13 to a skill of 1. The other guy is already covering alone 3 areas of the game and I cannot replace him positively.

So I cancel everything and leave it for later, there are more urgent matters to do.

The next part is going to be difficult, because I have never done it, so I better get to it.

I need to develop tactics.

A tactic is not only a positioning in the field, it's also a set of instructions to each player so that they interact with each other in a meaningful way. The instructions of each player amount to roughly 20 different parameters with moving sliders and 20 positions in most sliders, so each player could basically have 400 different configurations, times 10 players, times the many, many possible positions in the field...

Welcome to Football Manager, the biggest tamagochi in the world.

Queen's Park nickname is the spiders, and that fits with our black and white kit. It also fits with my approach to the game. I'm going to play this game in a proactive way, planning little tricks and letting others fall in my traps. Acting and controlling instead of reacting.

Right, so my first decision is how many tactics I need. 

Ideally, I'd like to have 5 basic tactics, one fully defensive, one fully offensive and three balanced.

The defensive one seems to be the simplest. I am leaning for a 4-2-3-1 so that I can use two defensive midfielders (I love defensive midfielders) and a lone striker. That way, I'll have plenty of destroying power but a life line through the centre towards the enemy's goal. This would be my preferred lineup in away matches against strong teams. If it proves to be offensively useless against attacking teams, I'll later try a 6-4 and let my runners run, but for the moment, I'd like to try this one.

The offensive one will also be quite straightforward and only to be used in desperate times. I intend to do a 2-2-2-4 so that the enemy's penalty box is covered in spiders. However, this tactic is almost sure to fail against any slightly competent enemy wingmen.

The real meat of the problem lies in the 3 balanced tactics. Ideally, I'd like to have three tactics that play tricks with the light. I'll explain. This league is going to be decided in the matches against human opponents, that is clear to me. So I need to play tactics that will fool a human opponent, not the computer.

So what I'd like to do is to have 3 tactics, one balanced but attacking on the left, one balanced but attacking on the right and one balanced but going through the centre but to have it so that they all use the same positions. They'll look like being the same one

In this way, I could start with a left tactic, for example, so that the statistics go up on the left and when I see the enemy coach react to that, change immediately to the right tactic. Basically, fudging his perception of what is happening in the field by fudging his stats.

But of course, doing this is more difficult than saying it.

To do this "psychology game", the ideal is a classic 4-4-2 that could mutate into an assimetric formation. However, if I do that, I lose the defensive midfielder position. Did I say already that I love the defensive midfielder position?

The other alternative is to have a 4-4-2 in a diamond, which is my prefered lineup on a piece of paper, but this would make it very clear that I'm coming from the wings, and I don't want to be too obvious.

One answer would be to have a false midfielder that would fall back to the DMC position as soon as the whistle blows, but I think it's basically going to invalidate any advantages by straining the system to the limit. My players are not that clever.

For the moment, I'm leaning more towards the 4-4-2 classic, but until the hordes of Anglia have left Hampden Park, nothing will be decided.

Speaking of which, Notthingam Forest is coming, I can already see the smoke rising in the horizon.

Hampden Park is the Scottish national team's stadium and our home. 

The british are coming, man the walls!