FIFA 12 Ultimate Team

This is the game mode where you buy and sell players to create a squad or squads to play against others offline or online in friendlies and cup tournaments. You can buy and sell players in the trading area or you can go to the store and buy packs. These can be bought with virtual coins you make in the game. You can buy packs using Microsoft points also which of course you can pay for with real money. We don’t advise this as our guides show how you can make the virtual coins in the game.All the players in the FIFA game are split into three categories. There are Bronze players, Silver players and Gold players. These generally reflect their ability and the price reflects their popularity within the game. You can create a team mixing any of them but some competitions online might have to meet certain requirements, more on that later. Don’t worry there are lots of competitions offline and online tournaments open and close so many are available for a few days until the next version of FIFA.Each category is further broken down into Normal, Rare and In Form. Look at the following image which shows one of each for bronze, silver and gold. Normal is a standard card, rare means it is just that and more valuable. Every week in real life some players are outstanding. Ultimate team on FIFA recognises this and creates new versions of the players with increased better stats. These are called In Form players and become available to buy and are inside packs at the end of each week. EA announce when the team of the week players are available and we let people know on twitter. Easily recognisable as they are now black in FIFA 12. Bronze outline, silver outline and gold outline so you can tell which they represent. 

Everyone starts off with a team of bronze players and maybe a silver if lucky. Look at your squad screen and you will see the players in your squad and a square with holes in under their picture and a boot. This stands for formation and position. If the box is bright green it means the player is in the formation you have picked for your team (which you can change to the left using Left Trigger). If it is dark green the player is close to that formation and is quite happy playing in it. For the boot bright green means they are in the position which shows at the top of their card. A dark green boot means they are not perfect for that position but again quite happy. Flick your right stick to the left or right and on the players you will notice more information. CON, FIT, MOR and CHM stand for Contract, Fitness, Morale and Chemistry. You will also notice scrolling their Formation, Country they are from, Club they play for and the League the club is in. All of this determines the chemistry which shows to the right of the screen and is rated out of 100.So why is chemistry important in FIFA 12 Ultimate team? Basically because EA decided to have it. They could have left it so you could have used any player anywhere and just play games but they wanted a structure to the game. So you have to build a team and have players in the right positions playing with players from their club, league or country to give them better chemistry. When you play an Ultimate team game the chemistry helps your players perform better, pass better and generally play better. You will notice your manager to the right also adds to this chemistry, if he is the same nationality as a player that gives better chemistry. Also his formation can match too to make it higher.The players have contracts so they can play games. Default is 7 but you can add contracts which you can buy in the trade area. Every time a player plays a game they go down by 1 contract. Fitness is gained by resting and lost by playing. Generally a player with 80 or lower fitness will be much slower in the game. Morale also affects their ability to pass and shoot. Similar to Torres at Chelsea (sorry Fernando). If you win morale goes up, lose and it goes down. The stadium you play in can also help increase morale so look out for +8 stadiums in the trade area. If you buy a new stadium you have an option to “Make it active”. Same for kits and balls which you can buy for your club or indeed sell.