I've managed to tinker my way from this being the most frustrating FIFA in memory to possibly the best and most balanced Career Mode I've experience in a long time. To start with I kept having high-scoring games, like insane results 4-6, 5-8, 4-4 were regular occurence. Almost no games ended up with under three goals scored. Now I often have hard working, grafting 0-0 games, where each team has chances, but they are difficult ones and hard to convert. As it should be really. Sometimes my strikers are on point and I'll brush a team aside, sometimes it's more frustrating and I get punished by stupid mistakes.
I do play on full manual, so no idea how any of these would work for assisted controls. Manual adds a welcome layer of difficulty and chaos to FIFA, which can't be recreated through sliders alone. Mind you, I've been playing manual since FIFA 09, so that may impact the balance if you're not as familiar with those controls.
At the moment I'm playing on Ultimate difficulty (sliders should work fine for Legendary as well), Slow speed and full manual controls. Some of the control settings I use are Tactical defending, Manual Jockey, Contextual Dribbling, Player based difficulty and very strict referees - but sliders are what makes the real difference. These are the sliders I'm using - User left, CPU right.
Sprint 20/20
Acceleration 42/40
Shot Error 60/64
Pass Error 60/64
Shot Speed 30/30
Pass Speed 30/30
Injury Frequency 70/70
Injury Severity 25/50
Goalkeeper Ability 65/72
Marking 95/100
Run Frequency 75/75
Line Height 60/50
Line Length 5/35
Width 50/50
Fullback 50/50
Power bar 47
First Touch Error 75/75
You can probably tweak most of these to your preference, but the one I've bolded is the key - Line length.
When this was on default, my team was constantly stretched vertically - with acres of space between the lines. Attack would not participate defensively at all, no matter what you told them to do in tactical settings. Midfield would meekly observe runners bypass them and in a second AI would find it's way to your box - with only your defenders there, stretched out and stupid. On anything above World Class I would concede 4-5 ping pong goals a game. No tracking of runners, no difficulty for AI. They would do the same bloody thing every single time - kick it wide, run to the line, cut back, ping it in the box - bang it in the corner. With super short line - my whole team is more compressed and it actually forces AI to combine in a more realistic way.
Also if you have that match setting 'Player based difficulty' turned on, it makes it bit more more interesting - as you know which players will AI try to exploit and how they might react in certain situations. These star players will have an arrow above them. If it's a tricky winger for example - they'll try to dribble past you and feed the striker, if it's a big striker - close off the avenues towards him and AI will lose their shit and make mistakes. But in general, condensing my vertical line finally gives me some use from midfielders and even strikers when defending - they all participate. Defending is actually kind of fun now. Also I had no idea they now have double press option that works with Tactical defending (R1 button, or double click R1 to activate two additional players). These players lose stamina quickly, but it's helpful in a pinch to guide AI away from most dangerous avenues.
Hope this helps someone - changing that one single slider transformed the game for me.
