Oh for Cup’s sake…
Posted by: not-Greg in D1 Cup, European Cup (ECC), Treble, scripting, tags: D1 Cup, European Cup (ECC), scripting, TrebleSo much for predictions. Several times this season I’ve said (foolishly, it turns out) that I think this is the season when I win my first proper Treble. Yes, yes, yes: I did win a Treble two seasons ago, in 2016, but that came with lots of suspicious baggage. What I want is to win a Treble easily, without the feeling that the game has noticed me struggling in mid-table and decided to take pity on me and blatantly let me catch up.
Here in season 2018 it was all going so well. I’ve been top of the league almost from the start. I’m really tearing up trees in Europe—odd games notwithstanding. I think I’ve got those two competitions sewn up, as long as I’m careful.
The first round of the Division 1 Cup pitted me against RC Strasbourg. I haven’t played them in I don’t know how long. This might well be their first year in the top flight since I started this Master League. If so, then this would the first time I’ve played them since I was in the lower division myself.
Out of curiosity I checked the Division 1 league table before playing the cup match. As I suspected, Strasbourg were the current basement club, down there in 16th position. They were propping up the rest of the division. Their league record was pretty shocking, only a couple of wins all season. Yes, I felt afraid immediately. This is PES.
I was right to be afraid. That first leg was a home one for me. It finished 1-1, and I was actually fortunate to come away with the draw. I conceded an early goal—always a bad move, in any game—and spent the rest of the match struggling to create chances against a sturdy and skilful Strasbourg team. Yes, it really is the teams who should be non-entities who give you the toughest games. This being the Cup, you could half-close your eyes and ‘explain’ it by saying the minnows are strongly motivated to play against me, causing their players to play above themselves, as we see happen so often in real life.
Despite the slight setback in the first leg, I felt 100% confident about winning in the second leg at their place. So they’d got an away goal against me. Big deal. It’s happened before, and it will surely happen again. All I had to do was score at their place, and it’d be squared up.
And that’s what happened. I got the early goal in the second leg to make it 0-1 to me on the day and 1-2 to me on aggregate. When half-time came and that was still the state of play, I thought I’d done almost everything I needed to do. All that remained was to guard against complacency for the second half.
But Strasbourg had other plans. They slipped into a kind of God Mode… I say kind of, because despite them suddenly having the bulk of possession and shots on goal, I was still capable of stringing passes together and launching dangerous counter-attacks. When the AI is in full-on God Mode, you’re not allowed to have any attacking presence at all. Your players will just pass the ball to the opposition, or mysteriously allow the ball to bounce off their shins into touch, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So I suppose I should have felt grateful. Just play it cool, I told myself. Play it cool.
Then they scored, damn them. 1-1 on the day, 2-2 on aggregate. Both teams had an away goal. This match was heading for extra time, unless somebody scored.
That somebody should have been me. After their goal, the semi-God Mode effect was lifted, and I was allowed to exert consistent pressure once again. I almost had them a couple of times—one more away goal for me would kill them off completely—but just couldn’t apply the finish. Yes, I suppose I could complain about the many near-misses and miraculous AI keeper saves being just another example of AI scripting, but I’m less certain of scripting when it comes to my misses in front of goal, so I won’t complain. I’m just mentioning that it seemed odd, is all…
The inevitable happened. Strasbourg streaked away upfield and scored the winner in the dying minutes. Noooooo.
I had about a minute left to do something. All I needed was that one goal… I went off on a run—a rare, mazy dribble—with Camacho, and actually created a half-chance, but shot ludicrously high… The final whistle went there and then. My players fell to the ground and I just stared at the screen.
The Treble is gone. That’s it for season 2018. I haven’t even got to the mid-season period yet. It all leaves me with a peculiar empty feeling. If I could fast-forward to 2019, I probably would.
Never mind. I’m still unbeaten in the league—if I can finish the season with that record intact, it’d be my first unbeaten season since PES5, I now recall. If I can win the European Cup as well, that’d make it a great season by any standards. The Treble will still be there to go for next season.
Entries (RSS)
Sorry to hear about your Cup blunder.
I’ll tell you something, whenever I face a situation where I really need to score, and nothing is working, I try to slip out of my usual playing mode. If all I’m doing is launch through balls to my CF, I’ll try and get a cross in. Something like that.
But most often my last resort is to play the ball to Kim Cyun Hi, and dribble my way to the goal. It works frequently, but sometimes it at least warrants a pen or a freekick near the box.
I believe you’ll find in a couple more seasons, as your team reaches its peak, that not even God-mode can stop you from winning the treble at least a couple of seasons in a row.
You’re right to call it a blunder. Despite all my ranting about scripting/God Mode/black cats crossing my path, I still believe that it’s perfectly possible, if you play with patience and discipline, to win any and every game whatever the AI throws at you.
The key there is ‘patience and discipline’ - I think just about every gamer, and every PES gamer, frequently plays with a harem-scarem approach that plays right into the AI’s virtual hands…
[...] Earlier this season I was knocked out of the Division 1 Cup by the bottom team, RC Strasbourg. As often happens in PES, the minnows seemed to raise their game to epic proportions. When I met them again in the league in game 25, my spider sense started tingling. I sensed the trap. I felt that the game would go all-out to stop me in this fixture. The question was: could I avoid the trap? [...]