IMPROVED - DELISTING SCREEN
- Open Your List screen rebuilt. Every player now has their own Delist button and a View button that opens their full player card. Underneath each name there's a line showing age, career games, games last season, current rating, potential where they can still improve, and what stage of their career they're at — plus their premiership cups and medals shown inline.
IMPROVED - TACTICS
- Tactics rebalanced. Man Up and Loose Man Back now hold their own against Normal, and Forward Press leaks far fewer goals than it did. Man Up in particular was close to unusable — it barely scored at all.
- Zone holds its shape and pressures the ball when it comes into its area, instead of standing off and watching.
- Flood Back no longer hands over the midfield. The ruck and on-ballers stay in the contest — previously they were parked in front of goal all game, which meant the flooding side never won the ball to use.
- Three different comeback modes. A CPU side that's chasing now picks between throwing everything forward, a balanced quick-ball approach, or chasing while leaving a man home. Which one it goes with depends on how desperate the situation is and varies from match to match, so comebacks don't play out the same way twice.
IMPROVED - CPU COACHING DECISION MAKING
- The CPU coach picks plans that work. It used to treat all six team setups as interchangeable, and when it was being scored against it was actually more likely to switch into one of its worst. It now favours sound setups, and a plan that's leaking goals gets replaced with a good one rather than something at random.
- A trailing CPU chases earlier, not just the last stages of a game.
- The CPU protects a late lead by locking down in its tightest defensive setup.
- The CPU reads what it's up against. It varies its ball movement according to the opposition's setup — it'll bomb the ball long far more often against a Forward Press than against a standard defence.
- CPU Long Kick now tries to land the ball inside 50 rather than just kicking it a long way.
BUG FIX
- The off-season picks up where you left it. Close the game during season awards, the board review, retirements, list management or the draft, and reopening takes you back to that step instead of dumping you into the next season. If you close mid-draft the picks are still completed for you, but you now land on the draft-haul screen so you can see what happened.
- A season's awards could be lost entirely if you closed the game before reaching the board review.