Hahahaha oh dear. I've been playing an offline Champions League (on Professional), and was just starting to get embarrassed at the ease with which I was sweeping teams aside, and wondering if I should go up a difficulty level. I'm playing 20- and 25-minute games (depending on how much time I've got to spare) but to begin with the scores were coming out as 2-1, 3-1, etc and all was fine. Then I thumped Panathinaikos 5-1 at their place in the last group game, before a second round match against Valencia which I won 6-0 without even breathing hard.
Quarter final v Real Madrid. Ah. Not one of my players has an upward arrow, 3/4 of the squad are blue or purple, while almost all of Madrid's first team are a healthy orange. Oh well, first leg at my place. I set all the defensive stuff as deep as possible, prepare to defend for my life, and...
Madrid are 3-0 up within 10 minutes, after 3 through balls down the middle for which my defenders, who were standing six miles from their own goal, helpfully stepped aside. Chuckling, I play on... 8-0 at half time. Seven of the goals were through balls, the other one was a hilarious run from the halfway line by Higuain, who beat four players - two by fair means, two by breaking the laws of physics.
In the second half, they eased off - or rather, my defenders had their usual mobility restored to them and suddenly those through balls were possible to cut out. They only added another 4 goals in the second half, and only one of those was a through ball down the middle. The other three were bullet headers from corners, including two from well-known aerial beast Kaka. Final score 12-0, which is pretty good considering they only had 15 shots on goal. I had 26 shots on goal, 15 of which were on target... but Casillas caught every one. Didn't even have to parry: I had 1 corner in the whole game. Oh yeah, and Real Madrid committed 4 fouls, three of which were offsides.
It was pretty hilarious, I have to admit, as I haven't really seen too much AI cheating until now. But this was as full-on as I've ever seen - and the lousy thing was, I didn't particularly feel as though I was playing against better players. They were just faster, and my players were behaving more stupidly than usual. Does the scripting only cut in when you're playing someone like Real Madrid, or is it something to do with the knockout stages of the CL? Whatever, the transition from "this is too easy" to "WTF, is this a joke?" was so extreme I think it gave me whiplash.
We won 13-12 on aggregate, by the way.