[jerome]

one important thing is to set your creative freedom to lower settings as CF basically completely ruins your teams positioning (give one or two offensivep players, a bit more though; your playmaker and target man or deep striker perhaps)

also consider having one "one-track-mind" striker (perhaps two if your formation would allow it, where mentality=full attacking and everything else = minimal (aka extreme to the left) apart from forward runs, run with ball, try through balls which basically means a/ no closing down whatsoever b/ no creative freedom whatsoever this should lead to a setting where your striker's one and only job is to score. the simple assumption / requirement behind this is that the rest of your team should be doing the creative work required well enough to supply your striker with the chances so he doesn't need to focus on anything else apart from finding spaces (closing down = more time for defensive duties/less time for finding space on a quick counter etc) and charging straight forward, in a high tempo set up of course (with run with ball and if that's impossible, try a through ball etc)

i usually play such a striker with a 'deep lying' target man, a la no forward runs so it complies with 'always' forward runs of this one-track-minded striker for lay-offs etc. obviously you'd need competent people for both positions. otm striker requires dribbling/off the ball/acceleration as well as the generic striker stats. target men with some flair/creativity. incidentally, if you were to have 2 strikers being one dimensional as described, i've had it work where my AMC was the target man (remember, you can focus your passing to your target man to feet etc so you're not limited to having some big **** off type for the role) and he (matias fernandez) revelled in the role providing an immense amount of assists to the 2 strikers.

also DM's are exceptionally useful people try and avoid formations without it, unless you're using MC's where they avoid running forward as well.