Advanced Tactics - Aggression

The Aggression setting is one of the most important setting son the tactics page and can be very significant in deciding the outcome of a match.

There are three aggression settings - in ascending order

• Careful
• Normal
• Bruise

The more aggressive you play the stronger your players perform, challenging harder for each ball. It is generally accepted to be around 10% bonus for each level of aggression. This will generally give more ball possession which can lead to more chances.

Equally more aggressive play can bring risk of bookings, even red cards, and conceding free kicks and penalties.

Playing aggressively affects the chance of players getting injured. The risk is a factor of both teams aggression, so if one team plays careful and the other bruise then the chance is less than if both played bruise but more than if both played careful. The risk of injury is not dependent on which team plays more or less aggressively.

Playing more aggressively tires players out more - especially towards the end of halves. The stamina SQ mitigates this problem to an extent.

Players with the tough SQ will gain a bonus to their performance when playing bruise, but perform below par when playing careful.

Playing to the referees

The textbook way to play aggression is bruise for H1-3 referees, normal for H4-6 refs and careful for H7-9 refs. Playing like this is fine but can often give an advantage to a savvy opponent and so you may wish to play more or less aggressively.

Reasons to play less aggressively

There are a number of reasons to play more carefully. If you wish to avoid injury above competitive advantage then play more carefully.

If the opponent has a very skilled freekicker in comparison to your goal keeper then you may want to reduce your aggression slightly to avoid conceding free kicks. This is more significant if the referee is good for cheating (has a low skill rating).

When playing less aggressively than normal for the referee it is often a good idea to reduce your attacking style a notch.

Playing careful will help your manager ranking - as long as you still get a good result.

Reasons to play more aggressively

There are also good cases for playing more aggressively. If you feel you really need the competitive advantage and the opposition doesn't have a good freekick taker compared to your keeper then playing overly aggressively can offer a big advantage. X11 tends to allocate freekicks to teams who have more possession so while playing aggressively on a whistle friendly referee might be counter intuitive these freekicks won't be near your goal if the opposition doesn't have the strength to attak you effectively.

Playing overly aggressively on a consistent basis can be problematic as yellow cards and increased injuries do tend to stack up and can cause problems.

If you need to know more about XpertEleven Referees see my previous post on the subject.