Tactics are still a bit screwed. I am doing better anyways, but thats not the point. 3 man back line rarely works, I haven't tried it with a good team yet, but with sorrier teams its horrid. In the end, the things you complain about superdave are things they look at I believe. I think their downfall has come with the new engine, the 3d engine and fixing the damn thing over the past 3 games has caused them to somewhat slack on adding new features such as those you point out. It's not that they aren't but I think if it was still all text, the interactive features would be much more advanced by now.
One more thing about team talks...just last night, my team won a match 3-0. Just for the hell of it, I told them I was pleased. Next match, we laid a total egg. We only lost 2-1, but the Crew just were rampant. Had 80+% of the chances, etc. 3-0 or 4-0 would have been the fairest result. DFR's point is a good one. They posters at the forums were clamoring for more interaction with the players for years. Fine. But they did such a horrible job of it!! Give me more tools to communicate with my players, and more tools to get an insight into their personalities. Howzabout the AM give me practice reports occasionally. Player X was dogging it at practice...well, that tells me I have a volatile personality on my hands. Player Y was helping Youth Player Z in a drill...hmm, Player Y has great team spirit. When it was being discussed, I even started a thread called something like Training Reports: A Window to the Soul. The idea was training reports would illuminate each player's personality. Obvious, really. But they'd rather add 4 half-assed features that each make the game worse than 1 feature that makes the game better. Just adding a simple feature where a player who feels threatened by a rumored (or actual) acquisition asks me what's up before sulking. I can tell him I brought the guy in because other players are leaving the club after this season, he's a competitor for playing time, he's cover for injury, he's needed squad depth. That should about cover it. IRL, a manager can initiate conversations with players. Not in WWSM...in fact, players go off without even giving the manager a chance. What I HATE HATE HATE about player interaction is that the key is to figure out which lie to tell the players. IRL, that's the OPPOSITE of good man management. But the players have no memory, so lie away!!! Meanwhile, the players are retarded, so you HAVE to lie to them or they react in a stupid way. And I've tried every permutation of tight/not marking, and man/zonal marking. The problem is that the defenders act very, very retarded. The only thing that works decently is tight/man marking. They still f' up the offside trap alot. But by adding tight to man marking, at least my LDC doesn't wander out toward the opp. RW like a 10 year old after an ice cream truck. What drives me f'ing nuts is how the opp. can crush me by switching the left and right strikers. It completely discombobulates my defenders. I "watch" matches from formations, cuz I wanna know when they pull the switch. I frantically hit pause, then go to quick tactics and reset the assignments. Still give up too many goals that way, but before I realized that my LDC wasn't marking the RS, but the actual player, I was CONSTANTLY conceding goals within 5-10 minutes of the switch. In a ranting thread at the SI forum, I used the analogy of babelfish, that communicating your tactical ideas to your players is like a babelfish translation, and everyone was like, yeah! It just kills me to watch my players not only make the OBVIOUSLY wrong play, but the obviously wrong play that's the OPPOSITE of what I told them to do. This happens way, way, way too often. If I were coaching a junior high school team and they did, one time, stuff I see my DC boys do all the time, I'd pull the player and explain the mistake. If it happened again, the player could play next week. Stuff that basic. The player bots are just really, really stupid. So as for what Teso was getting at...I think the main way they've ignited the AI is that their players don't do retarded things all the time. Or possibly there are magical combinations of instructions that work; to get your players to do the right thing is like using a combination lock. But that makes the game less realistic, and more like, I dunno, Myst and stuff like that. Howzabout if they make the AI smarter about picking players, and not give them an advantage in the match engine? The AI is still pretty retarded about player selection.
I have to disagree. I use a 3-man back with Boston United and am having an outstanding season. My goal for the season was to battle against relegation, and with my 3-5-2 I'm in the top half of the table.