Whilst our league form remains sporadic, our European ventures are surging full steam ahead. Thanks to our 6th placed finish last season, Palace are now competing in the Europa League, and so far remain unbeaten in the group stage, here is the group we were drawn into:
Wins in all three of our opening matches have cemented an early top of the table position, and put clear daylight between ourselves with 9pts and AZ, whom we beat 2-0 away, on 6pts, just a draw from our remaining 3 games should be enough for qualification to the knockout stages.
Whilst European form is good, our performances in the Premier League have been a mixed bag, hovering around mid-table after 10 games, Professional level is still proving to be a more than accomplished challenger, worth remembering of course this is layered up with the OS sliders and FIFER v1.3 realism and game play mods, which add extra difficulty to the Professional level challenge.
Exciting youth prospect Schinkel, is developing well, with a rigid training routine every other week, he has developed from 54 OVr to 61 OVR in half a season, and have currently listed him for loan, to help him gain match experience.
I’m also keeping a close eye on the youth academy as there are several players with a very high potential, but as per how the FIFA stats/scouting system works, you never know if these young players will reach their potential or bottom out as yet another disappointing 55 OVR makeweight.
One drawback to this very in-depth youth system is that I’ve had several youth players (15-18yr olds) say they want to leave as they feel they should be promoted to the first team, but then dont want to go out on loan when you promote them, maybe a side-issue from the mod that reduces the rate which English players move abroad.
I’ve switched to a new formation for this season, moving to a 4-4-2 Wide formation, rather than the 4-3-3 I employed the previous 2 seasons, I have always preferred having 2 forwards up top for link up player rather than a lone striker with 2 wide wing forwards, but maybe the players I have aren’t suited to this system as well, as results are showing, will adapt throughout the season if need be.
I did plan to record a full length match with commentary, showing how I use tactical defending and my methods for defending, but even after 30 minutes of fiddling I could not get the microphone working, its a gaming headset with mic on, its enabled and shows up in Windows settings and everything, and is selected in the Geoforce experience settings, but when recording match footage, the game audio records fine, but my talking is just a very feint crackly white noise sound, I will invest in a proper mic, and get something up soon.
Lastly, a small selection of goals from this early season 3 action:
FIFAFX.com 
Paul – quick and dirty solution, record the game as normal and don’t worry about mic input for now – instead, have your phone next to you or in a top shirt pocket with the mic pointed upward, with Voice Recorder on. Export at the end and mix the audio and video tracks in the editor. I remember us both using this method to record a commentary vid each many years ago, PES2012-era.
My mic input was too low until I went into Windows settings (right click the audio icon in system tray) and boosted the input to 80%. There’s also a setting in the GeForce app to do the same.
I’ve also shifted formations with good results – this is the most tactically deep football game ever, I think. I know you’ll say many preceding FIFAs were too. It’s Football Manager levels of tactical subtlety and it’s great.
I’m getting better with Tactical Defending day by day.
Nice goals too at the end and has Zaha ever done that reverse handspring celebration in real life??!
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NG – yeah i did consider that but after half hour of fiddling, it was getting late, I wanted to squeeze a few matches in before then editing the video together, resizing pics and writing the post so I just left it.
I will definitely get that video recorded at some point over the weekend and post here in the cmments.
I dont recall Zaha ever doing some kind of reverse crab flip, i just press buttons during celebrations and see what happens!
The crowd chanting “Wilf Zaha, Zahaaaaa!!” was nice though.
Im very seriously contemplating switching from the FIFER mods, to Paulv2k4’s mods, but it would require a career mode restart, so will wait for the Palace one to come to a logical conclusion.
I will probably start my next CM in the Championship or league one .
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Paul – I sneakily have had a few goes with the Paulv2k4 mod whilst waiting for Fifer, and can report that there are no issues with using the same save file. There’s a Purity consideration, of course, but not a technical one. The CM save continues to work. I tried that other mod after reading a bit on Discord about the different philosophies and rivalries between the two camps, very interesting! I still prefer the Fifer one though, but give the other a try by all means. Make side-saves and backups etc.
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NG – Paul himself replied to me on his Discord server saying that it would need a new career mode to implement his Mod.
He’s just about to release a new version, along with that modding tool, but there is another EWA title update due first week of march so think people are holding off until that drops in case it all breaks.
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NG – as for tactics it is and levels up further from last year. I still use this tactics guide from last year. I have 4 different team sheets set up, which I tweak for the upcoming game. Before a match I check the formation of the next opponents and take it from there.
https://www.fifauteam.com/fifa-19-formations-guide/
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I must admit, i rarely ever change formation to match the opposition. Its unrealistic.
There is an underlying value that is determined by players playing in a familiar formation and position regularly, this boosts team cohesion, morale etc, and you dont see teams changing their formatrion week in week out in the premier league, they stick to their preferred formation and system, but change their tactics within that formation to match the opposition, which is what I do.
I keep my 4-4-2 wide formaqtion, and if I play say, Liverpool, who have fast wide men, then i adjust my tactics to have more width, so the wingers are covered, i’ll reduce my fullback runs frequency so as to not get caught out of position as much, I’ll change the instructions to force my CM’s and CDM to stay backj more rather than push forward, etc.
Every now and then i will change to maybe a 4-5-1 to try and stifle treams that are strong in midfield or such b ut only very rarely.
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NG – some info you may find interesting:
Last night I did some testing with modding game play elements of FIFA, using the vanilla game as a base, it seems you can alter the locale.ini file found under the FIFA Data folder to affect gameplay.
I made some entries to make the CPU much more aggressive with its fouling, hopefully leading to more fouls. if you feel so inclined it would be good if you could test it out and see what you think.
Below I have provided a download link to the amended locale.ini file I created:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/fshg7060rcddyxg/locale_with_fouls.ini/file
Go into Origin > FIFA 20 > Data and back up your locale.ini file (just rename it or place a copy somewhere safe) then copy in the file from the link above into that same folder and rename it to ‘locale.ini’
Just playing vanilla, playing friendlies you should see an aggression and increased frequency in AI tackles, to maximise this effect and increase fouls, you can also use RDBM tool to change the referee foul strictness, as shown below:
Open RDBM, and load in the squad file you are using.
Then under DB1 tab, scroll down to ‘referees’ andsort the table by league ID, LeagueID 13 is the premier league, you can tell by the referees names, to the right there is a field called ‘refereefoulstrictness’ if you look there are a mix of values, 0,1 and 2 for each ref, this is their eniency level, with 0 being very lenient, 1 being normal, and 2 being strict.
Change all the premier league refs foul strictness values to 2. Save the file ( you can give it a name by typing in the box where it says ‘Squads1’ above the table. The click Save (Green disc icon at top left)
Go into the game, go to settings and load squads and choosew the file you just amended in RDBM
Play some friendlies, and let me know how you find it.
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Paul – fantastic stuff and it’ll be tomorrow night at the earliest before I get a chance to test. Workand life squeeze going on at the moment – one of the things I would love a Lottery win for isn’t the yachts and mansions but just to have time to myself to do whatever the hell I like with.
I’ve been playing and loving FIFA20 so much as it is that I’ve not delved too deep but the time is at hand as I want to go into my full-on Career Mode save in League Two with a setup that’d be more or less stable across the whole thing.
Still waiting on Fifer’s update but as soon as that hits and assuming it’s as good as his previous one, I’ll have a good few days of experimenting with Your Mod Suggestions (thought about doing a FIFAFX modding package yet – you easily could 😉 )and then mosey on out.
Re. the .ini file in general I knew there were some powerful options with that but didn’t think it was this flexible. I know that Paul2k makes use of it with his mods though as when I tried one of his out I had to do the backup-original-and-overwrite thing then.
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Would definitely appreciate you testing it NG and seeing what you think, in the few matchesI played with just the locale ini file change, not the RDBM refs, AI was so much more aggressive with tackling.
One of the reasons I’m strongly considering switching to the Paul2k4 mods is that its much more flexible, you can choose which parts of it to enable, if theres parts you dont like, just turn them off, also all his work is his own original work and he understands the game engine, whereas FIFER’s mod is a mashup of lots of other work done by other people that be bundles into one big mod, that isn’t flexible, also has a lot of bugs.
Plus the fact that the way he mashes it all together, when a title update comes out, it takes him ages to fix it and re-release.
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my level of tactical sophistication doesn’t go much beyond setting a 3-4-1-2 as a ‘defensive’ formation I can switch to on the fly if the usual 4-2-2-2 is not working for whatever reason; the different shape in particular the AMF can tease out a bit more space.
Happy days in my Exeter City career mode as we are promoted to the Premier League at last, a great winning streak at the end of the season to pull clear of Leeds and take 2nd spot in the Championship. One thing that strikes me about FIFA is that the gameplay generally gets better as you get better players, in contrast to PES (these days) where the AI scripting gets more and more maddening as your squad improves
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Paul – had a chance for a go at your experiment tonight, but something is up with the .ini file… when the game loaded it skipped all the usual splash screen intro and went straight to the Arena with Ronaldo, where my controls were all reset to EA default (shudder) and when I went to the main menu there was no sign of any of my previous activity in the game! It was a weird North Aemrican setup with an MLS game selected as the quick game option. All made me feel odd.
Ok I understood this was just meant as a trial, so I started a Premier League game with the RDBM Squads file as recommended. Had two games of Bournemouth vs Newcastle, Professional, one as Bournemotuh, one as Newcastle… Fouls count in both was 1-1 and 2-1. Only a quick late late Sunday effort.
I have the new FIFER mod and will be trying that out later Monday.
Abbeyhill – I will soon start out on my own Rags to Riches story hopefully. Recommend a L2 team?
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NG – the locale.ini file is tied to your profile.
Go into the customise menu, then load profile and when loaded your default controls should all be back to normal.
I forgot to mention I put a line in the locale.ini which disables the boot flow, so skips all the loading and splash sceens, did this for speed of testing, you can remove that line from the locale file if you wihs, it just speeds things up when testing things.
Installed FIFER v2.0 and had several matches withib my existing career last nifght, plays beautifully so far. Had to re-do the mini kits and tv logo mods as these are legacy files and are broken by the last EA update, but all back in and working again now.
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Paul – I love the flexibility of the platform and will be putting your custom .ini through another couple of friendlies later. I was distracted last night by tiredness and by having to change all the default values back to mine, I will do it again later.
I will also be applying the FIFER mod and this time lesson learned, Origin updates firmly off.
I’ve played quite a bit with the Paul2k gameplay only mod and it’s not bad either you know.
What I’ll be doing over this coming week is seeking a stable setup with which to start my League 2 Career Mode. All my noob errors in CM will inform how I approach it. Principal errors: speeding through transfer windows and not scouting, and not getting granular enough yet with the tactical settings.
Side-note: I’m teetering with Tactical Defending and might need to put the Legacy stablisers back on for a bit. Yes, it’s too hard for me! Great to say that again about football gaming.
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NG – Yes, absolutely turn updates off and put origin in offline mode as there is a title update on 3rd March which will break things again, its a biggie too, EA are putting the CONMEBOL and CONCACAF into the game.
Have you read over the lst of changes to FIFER v2 ? its huge, stuff like scouting and all that has been changed so well worth familiarising with whats in the mod.
No shame in going back to legacy defending, they both have their pro’s and cons and the gameplay, especally with the mods added, is so good that AI individuality is super charged without needing tactical on.
In fact the FIFER v2 game play mod describes improved AI individuality, increased AI long shots, dribbling, skill moves, etc, and I noticed it IMMEDIATELY, played Chelsea last night and every time Willian got the ball he was dribbling hard at me, using skill moves, shooting from outside the box, was superb to see.
And you’ll be please to know, I scored, and recorded a 28 yarder, so long shots are still definitely in.
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Paul – just had time for a long session with the 2.0 FIFER mod, and I have to say he has done another good job so far as I can see. A little worried about fouls early on but then they came along. The only thing I saw that I didn’t like was when the AI subsituted its goal-scorer immediately after he scored – and then did it again a minute later, when another striker scored, and he was subbed again immeidately. That struck me as a little ‘off’ and not something I recall ever seeing on vanilla, and certainly not something I’d expect to see in a real game. That one thing aside, the 7 or so matches I managed to play were a triumph. This is the football gaming I want and need right now.
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NG – I haven’t noticed the subbingh off goalscorers at all in my game, was maybe a freakone off thing!?
I’ve probably played 10+ matches now on v2.0 and its an improvement over the last version so all is good, Love that stamina has been tweaked and players now need resting much more regularly.
Spent a good 4 hours plus yesterday inside frosty and fifa file explorer figuring out adboards and other bits, started working on my own custom broadcast cam mod too.
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