Welcome to Lobster Weed's comprehensive Peewee Guide, reading and pursuing ideas mentioned here will help ensure that you are ready to compete deep into the playoffs of your Silver League in your very first season.
This is currently in progress, don't mind me.
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Important Links:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nflfever2.com/Gold/Gold.swf
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Table of Contents:
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1) Purchasing a Team
2) Promotion and Demotion
3) Recruiting Players
4) Signing Players
5) Setting Depth Chart and Energy Settings
6) Building Players
7) Building an Offensive AI
8) Tagging
9) Creating Custom Defensive Plays
10) Building a Defensive AI
11) Offensive Scouting
12) Defensive Scouting
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1 Purchasing a Team
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When purchasing a team it is very important that you consider what day it is currently in the season. If you buy a team at the end of the season before the next season starts (Day 40 and above) it is possible that the team you purchased will in fact be demoted or promoted to another league based off of their standing within their current league (Promotion and Demotion covered in section 2) before you even play a game.
Be sure that you check on the league that you are purchasing a team in, Gold League is considered to be the highest quality play, while Silver League is a more casual experience with many other human owners, and Copper League is a mostly CPU owned nearly guaranteed playoff berth league.
If you like the idea of playing with the most competitive League you can it would be sensible to check on the tournaments found here in this very forum.
http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread.pl?thread_id=4661275
The Silver League tournament hosted by jkid (http://goallineblitz.com/game/home.pl?user_id=294017) every season would be a good place to check for teams who are usually competitive in the Silver Leagues.
Another good place to check are the League Home Pages
http://goallineblitz.com/game/leagues.pl
Here (on the Pee Wee tab) are links to the Home Pages of all the Leagues, you can check to see the various indicators of competitive leagues.
Competitive leagues usually will have closer games in the playoffs, teams will be less likely to have undefeated or perfect records, and there won't be any or at least very many CPU owned teams in the league. Another way to check in closely is to actually check the number of human players on each team in the league, this would be another good indicator to the leagues degree of competition.
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2 Promotion and Demotion
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Each season the bottom 8 teams by record (tie breakers are as follows: Head to Head, Points Allowed, and if I'm not mistaken the third is Points Scored) are demoted to the league tier below.
The bottom 8 teams of the Gold League will be demoted (most likely into the Silver League they won in the first place-but not always) into the Silver League.
Each season the champion of each silver league is promoted to replace those demoted Gold League teams.
Copper league works a bit differently, all copper teams not in the bottom 8 will be promoted to a Silver League (most likely with several other members of their current copper league-especially those you faced in your conference playoffs) and those 8 will remain in copper.
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3 Recruiting Players
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DON'T POST IN THIS FORUM, its only going to make you look bad and get locked.
There are 4 effective methods of recruiting:
The first is to post in the Pee Wee Recruiting Forum:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread_list.pl?forum_id=4149
The second is to head to GLB Chat:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/chat.pl
The third is to head to the Market Place:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/market_free_agents.pl
The fourth is to head to the Team Press Release or Private Forum Announcement forum and join a coalition designed to help people find teams for their players and players for their teams:
TPR: http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread_list.pl?forum_id=7
PFA: http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread_list.pl?forum_id=294
Here are some important tips when Recruiting:
• All players must be level 1 with 0 exp
• Keep messages personal, nobody wants your blob of unpersonalized spam
• Do what people ask, if you are told to reply in the forums don't PM someone...
• Include your team name and a link to the team in messages and forum replies
• If you are making a recruiting post be sure to include a list of available positions
• Be specific in what you need, people see specific demands and assume organization
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4 Signing Players
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Signing PeeWee players is completely different from signing any other leagues players.
Peewee teams financials don't transfer from one season to another, so a team is perfectly capable of going in to the red when sending out contracts-with no fear of losing anything.
It is best to keep your contracts between a total value of between 4,500,000 and 5,000,000 this should keep you from having to deal with support and give the the best access to the morale boost granted via the higher salaries.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 Setting Depth Chart and Energy Settings
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Setting your depth chart is a very important part of the game.
First you must understand how the slots are used, if you are going to be using an advanced AI you will have full control of which depth slot is responsible for each play when selecting plays, you can use the custom slots (such as QB1 QB2 HB1 etc.) to make sure that specific people are in on some plays while still allowing energy settings to decide whos in on other plays.
If you call on a position such as QB it is going to select the first guy on the list and he will play, unless of course he is below the "Out" energy setting, then he will be taken out of the game and he won't be returned until the "In" energy setting is reached from taking a break, unless of course the other person is also taken out for energy and then the two or even three of them will pretty much take turns until one of them is above the energy levels.
You can use this to your advantage in the energy settings to either ensure equal play time between equal quality players or to do just the opposite and intentionally shadow over worse players.
This can be done as follows:
If you want your team to share snaps almost equally a setting of 99/1 will suffice, this will result in your team almost directly taking turns based on the highest available energy. If you were to put the settings at something like 50/60 then your player would stay in the game for quite some time and be taken out here and there, but would also risk running out of stamina and staying benched for a good portion of the latter half of the game. Be weary of when attempting to hide players via energy settings such as these that you are going to need to use advanced energy settings to dictate specific important situations to have your player in.
In summation you want your "Out" number to be the point at which you realize that your first stringer is no longer as good as your second stringer at 100%, your in number is going to be something relatively close to that and slightly higher, something I would recommend messing around with depending on the players stamina.
Also remember that in the WR depth chart that the WR1/WR2/WR3/WR4/WR5 slots override the basic WR slot, if you have someone in the WR1 slot they will play WR1, if there was then nobody in WR2 slot then a WR would be selected via the WR slot.
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6 Building Players
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thunder66's Guide:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread.pl?thread_id=3890353
Lord Evil's Guide:
http://www.nflfever2.com/Gold/BuildSharing/PlayerGuide.htm
These guys probably know more than I do.
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7 Building an Offensive AI
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before you can build an AI you have to understand how it works:
An Input in an AI is an instance in the game, this input will lay out the situations in which you want the outputs contained inside of it to be called. Situations that may call for an intput in your AI are situations such as 3rd and 1, because obviously you wouldn't want to treat 3rd and 1 the same as 3rd and 10 there would have to be an Input for each, one could be the basic 3rd down input, the other 3rd and short.
An output is either the play or package that you want to have a chance to be called, the box next to it is the percent chance that you want that play called (as it is scaled to total 100% when combined with the other inputs) but don't worry about that, the proportions you first apply will always be kept, so making them total 100% is not needed.
Now there are different sections to an AI
there is the General section, and the by quarters section.
The by quarter section will override the general section, in other words if you put something to occur on 1st down with no other restrictions in the 1st quarter section, then it will occur on every 1st down in the 1st quarter, even if you have a input covering the situation in the general section, the quarter input would override it.
Remember when installing inputs that the sim will read from the top down of whatever section the input is in, meaning that if you want to put an input to just run the ball whenever you haven't already said to pass it, then you would put your run input at the bottom of the list where as the situations where you wouldn't want the run to occur would be above it.
The sim is just going to call the first input that matches the description of the current situation, it doesn't care if you have 10 that match it, it honestly won't even check past the first.
How do I set up my AI?
Well I honestly could go in to the specifics of this, but it is absolutely no different from basic football, any situation you can think of if you were really on the field coaching where your play calling would differ from another time is a time an input should be made. In my quest for knowledge in this forum the best piece of advice I could find that wasn't exactly what I just said except misrepresented as unique information was to play a game of Madden and use your offensive AI, any situation where you feel as if you aren't wanting to run the plays you are given would be a time to make a new input to match that particular situation, I tried this out and not only was it fun as hell-but it offered some interesting insight.
A Basic AI would look something along the lines of this:
2nd Down and Long:
100% Pass
3rd Down and Long:
100% Pass
4th Down and Long:
100% Punt
Catch All:
100% Run
Now would this be a good AI? Absolutely not, there are hundreds of thousands of possibilities, and I can only say the more specific you get the more in control you are, whether that will actually give you an advantage or not depends on how well you utilize your control, or manage your lack there of.
There are a couple of features that aren't yet explained, one is auto adjust.
What auto adjust does is within a given output or package percents are adjusted within the output or package every time a play is run, if the play does good then the play itself is more likely to be called and all of the other plays therefore less likely, the degree of this change is a direct link to the rate you choose in the drop down box. The exact opposite effect would occur if the play did badly. While auto adjust seems very appealing remember that the more you run a play the more likely you'll run into the Repeat Play Penalty which gives the opposing team stat boost when you run the play again. Also always be sure that your aware of when you expect a input to see a variety of different defenses, the more defense you expect an input or package to see the lower the setting of auto adjust you want, otherwise you'll see plays get run over and over (still doing bad) in situations that don't work because of a few anomalies in particular situations where the defense is in a different look and it does very well.
You can also change whether you want the QB to be able to call people back to block, and I say to go ahead and turn this to no if you are setting custom progressions, but would advice leaving it on yes if you don't intend to be very heavily involved with constantly updating your offense for every team.
One last option is your ability to choose when to go for 2, as far as I'm concerned that was taken from a table made by the best NFL coaches ever, so leave them checked moron. (just kidding, but really... wtf... you know more than Madden now?).
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8 Tagging
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tagging is a very essential element to defensive strategy, the ability to tag specific players and be able to call defenses around those players is an unequivocated advantage. This could be used to tag the opposing teams Rushing Quarterback, Power HB, Blocking FB and other players who may be strong in one roll but limited in another, having a slower fullback in the game allows one to know that a slower LB could cover him, and sweeps are much less likely to be effective, these types of advantages are the ones defensive coaches can completely shut down an opponent with.
The most common tag types:
Rushing QB
Receiving TE
Blocking FB (Or anything to indicate a slower lead blocker)
Power HB (Or anything to indicate a slower running back)
Blocking TE (or anything to indicate a slower tight end unlikely to run a route)
The wonderful things you can do with these tags are only limited by the variety in the builds between the opposing teams players at the same positions.
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9 Creating Custom Defensive Plays
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many people consider this to be the most difficult part of the peewee game, since defenses here in peewee function quite differently from those you would expect to see in a real life football game.
Here are a few very important tips that should be taken in to account before we get started:
• Peewee players have very limited agility, even given the attribute being abused and everything else nearly ignored their reaction time in zones is quite slow, players who are going to be playing zone should be placed specifically in a small zone to stop a specific area of the field, whether it be an over the middle pass out of some formation, or some outside screen. Placing your safeties in deep half zones, or pretty much any deep zone is pretty much eliminating a player from effecting the play in any way.
• Positioning on man coverage is completely indicative as to which times receivers will be open during what routes, so remember that using the same corner positioning all game will likely result in a very simply implemented passing assault doing work against your defense. If you position your guy off the ball he will be exposed to short cut routes, such as ins, outs, curls, and often times slants, if you reduce the cushion the corner has less room to make up for and is more capable of covering those routes during the "hot zone" or the time at which the QB is most likely to throw him the ball. Another important aspect of man coverage alignment is that a receiver given the inside angle will be able to get open on a slant route, an in route or a crossing route quite easily, since the corner has that extra tick of space to travel- positioning the corner more inside will aide him in coverage on those routes but expose him to out routes, and deep post and sometimes even streak routes. More important even that corner alignment is the alignment of the linebackers who are in coverage, these guys have to be given the perfect amount of travel time on certain routes or there will be inevitable catches for big gains, currently HB and FB passes are the dominant aspect of the game and learning to correctly place your linebackers to arrive at the coverage at the hotspot moment every time is a key aspect to running a strong defense. Most teams in the league use the same passing plays, so learning to adjust shouldn't take much effort.
• The outside run is the hardest thing to stop in relation to your depth of knowledge at the game, this is where most younger teams seem to struggle- while even those that do prevent it are over-committing just to do so. Stopping the outside run is very very simple in concept, the important thing to focus on is not the runner-but the blockers. You must be sure that when the play gets going there is going to be someone left over to contain the outside run, and often times a linebacker is not nearly enough. Here in peewee the safeties are almost always played towards the hash marks and this is for that very reason, getting extra meat out there to take up blockers. I recommend setting up practice scrims with another competitive team and having each other run all the sweeps and just defend those-it is very important that your team not be exposed to these plays, because they are in history the most likely to one-trick-pony beat someone. It is very imperative to take in to account whether the FB or QB or HB are going to be fast enough to make the lead block assigned on the play, if so its going to be important to keep extra people out there-or at least inch them that way to prevent big plays. While this defense is intimidating to master, it also greatly loses its importance as the season goes on and linebackers gain the agility and speed needed to keep the edge contained from an outside position.
Making plays is all about selecting what areas of the field you want to focus on, and what ones your willing to let slack off. You should have a defense that covers all levels of dedication to the different aspect of the game, if your certain there is going to be a screen run on the play because of scouting (Section 12) then having a defense set up to focus completely on stopping the screen would likely leave a pretty appealing outcome on the field come game time.
As far as stopping the inside run game goes, the more guys you have in there-the better they do, I do know that putting people closer to the whole the back is going to be going to will at least make the HB change directions-whether that is for better or for worse is another thing, essentially the movements here are very tight and disorganized-but are at least consistent so if you tweak these movements around for long enough you will find positioning that will show promise in stopping most run plays-since running is somewhat underdeveloped at the moment.
Remember football is a game of angles and acceleration, nothing is more important than speed and agility when positioning your players on the "battle" field.
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10 Building a Defensive AI
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Well this is pretty simple really, here you will make inputs for every indicator in which you see a reason to call anything besides your basic defense. Whether the input be by scouted (Section 12) scenarios in which the team favors a different style of play, by personnel (via tagging) scenarios in which the team favors a different style of play, or by timely quarter inputs (such as 2 minute defense). If there is a situation you wouldn't want to call the basic play for a formation or number of wide receivers you need an input and a custom defense to match it.
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11 Offensive Scouting
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Scouting is a very intelligent and involved part of the game, how one scouts is really a summation of watching the enemy team game film and picking out points of attack for your team's offense. There are several things people have to take in to account when scouting however, and those things are something you should be familiar with-as its been discussed in the guide above. Remember that when you are scouting a defense that they too set up a defense around tagging your players, noticing patterns in situations, and basic down and distance situations. This means that you should be aware that just because a sweep is working on 4th down when an anti-pass defense is in doesn't mean the play should be run frequently on other downs throughout the game. This means to truly be able to scout your opposing team you really need to just watch the games and take extensive notes-or rather use one of the scripted game scouts which (filled with bugs) attempt to pull the same thing off without you having to write it down-just annoyingly search through it.
Scouting defenses for weaknesses can be as simple as using the built in GLB scout function, if you are sure to keep notice of what situations plays are doing well, and being sure that they are consistently doing well it is a pretty safe bet to use those plays. Scouting will become easier as you start to learn what plays you use to expose what weaknesses, and learn how to target custom progressions based off of man alignment.
:Break Time:
This is currently in progress, don't mind me.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Important Links:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nflfever2.com/Gold/Gold.swf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Purchasing a Team
2) Promotion and Demotion
3) Recruiting Players
4) Signing Players
5) Setting Depth Chart and Energy Settings
6) Building Players
7) Building an Offensive AI
8) Tagging
9) Creating Custom Defensive Plays
10) Building a Defensive AI
11) Offensive Scouting
12) Defensive Scouting
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Purchasing a Team
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When purchasing a team it is very important that you consider what day it is currently in the season. If you buy a team at the end of the season before the next season starts (Day 40 and above) it is possible that the team you purchased will in fact be demoted or promoted to another league based off of their standing within their current league (Promotion and Demotion covered in section 2) before you even play a game.
Be sure that you check on the league that you are purchasing a team in, Gold League is considered to be the highest quality play, while Silver League is a more casual experience with many other human owners, and Copper League is a mostly CPU owned nearly guaranteed playoff berth league.
If you like the idea of playing with the most competitive League you can it would be sensible to check on the tournaments found here in this very forum.
http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread.pl?thread_id=4661275
The Silver League tournament hosted by jkid (http://goallineblitz.com/game/home.pl?user_id=294017) every season would be a good place to check for teams who are usually competitive in the Silver Leagues.
Another good place to check are the League Home Pages
http://goallineblitz.com/game/leagues.pl
Here (on the Pee Wee tab) are links to the Home Pages of all the Leagues, you can check to see the various indicators of competitive leagues.
Competitive leagues usually will have closer games in the playoffs, teams will be less likely to have undefeated or perfect records, and there won't be any or at least very many CPU owned teams in the league. Another way to check in closely is to actually check the number of human players on each team in the league, this would be another good indicator to the leagues degree of competition.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 Promotion and Demotion
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Each season the bottom 8 teams by record (tie breakers are as follows: Head to Head, Points Allowed, and if I'm not mistaken the third is Points Scored) are demoted to the league tier below.
The bottom 8 teams of the Gold League will be demoted (most likely into the Silver League they won in the first place-but not always) into the Silver League.
Each season the champion of each silver league is promoted to replace those demoted Gold League teams.
Copper league works a bit differently, all copper teams not in the bottom 8 will be promoted to a Silver League (most likely with several other members of their current copper league-especially those you faced in your conference playoffs) and those 8 will remain in copper.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 Recruiting Players
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DON'T POST IN THIS FORUM, its only going to make you look bad and get locked.
There are 4 effective methods of recruiting:
The first is to post in the Pee Wee Recruiting Forum:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread_list.pl?forum_id=4149
The second is to head to GLB Chat:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/chat.pl
The third is to head to the Market Place:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/market_free_agents.pl
The fourth is to head to the Team Press Release or Private Forum Announcement forum and join a coalition designed to help people find teams for their players and players for their teams:
TPR: http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread_list.pl?forum_id=7
PFA: http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread_list.pl?forum_id=294
Here are some important tips when Recruiting:
• All players must be level 1 with 0 exp
• Keep messages personal, nobody wants your blob of unpersonalized spam
• Do what people ask, if you are told to reply in the forums don't PM someone...
• Include your team name and a link to the team in messages and forum replies
• If you are making a recruiting post be sure to include a list of available positions
• Be specific in what you need, people see specific demands and assume organization
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4 Signing Players
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Signing PeeWee players is completely different from signing any other leagues players.
Peewee teams financials don't transfer from one season to another, so a team is perfectly capable of going in to the red when sending out contracts-with no fear of losing anything.
It is best to keep your contracts between a total value of between 4,500,000 and 5,000,000 this should keep you from having to deal with support and give the the best access to the morale boost granted via the higher salaries.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 Setting Depth Chart and Energy Settings
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Setting your depth chart is a very important part of the game.
First you must understand how the slots are used, if you are going to be using an advanced AI you will have full control of which depth slot is responsible for each play when selecting plays, you can use the custom slots (such as QB1 QB2 HB1 etc.) to make sure that specific people are in on some plays while still allowing energy settings to decide whos in on other plays.
If you call on a position such as QB it is going to select the first guy on the list and he will play, unless of course he is below the "Out" energy setting, then he will be taken out of the game and he won't be returned until the "In" energy setting is reached from taking a break, unless of course the other person is also taken out for energy and then the two or even three of them will pretty much take turns until one of them is above the energy levels.
You can use this to your advantage in the energy settings to either ensure equal play time between equal quality players or to do just the opposite and intentionally shadow over worse players.
This can be done as follows:
If you want your team to share snaps almost equally a setting of 99/1 will suffice, this will result in your team almost directly taking turns based on the highest available energy. If you were to put the settings at something like 50/60 then your player would stay in the game for quite some time and be taken out here and there, but would also risk running out of stamina and staying benched for a good portion of the latter half of the game. Be weary of when attempting to hide players via energy settings such as these that you are going to need to use advanced energy settings to dictate specific important situations to have your player in.
In summation you want your "Out" number to be the point at which you realize that your first stringer is no longer as good as your second stringer at 100%, your in number is going to be something relatively close to that and slightly higher, something I would recommend messing around with depending on the players stamina.
Also remember that in the WR depth chart that the WR1/WR2/WR3/WR4/WR5 slots override the basic WR slot, if you have someone in the WR1 slot they will play WR1, if there was then nobody in WR2 slot then a WR would be selected via the WR slot.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6 Building Players
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thunder66's Guide:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread.pl?thread_id=3890353
Lord Evil's Guide:
http://www.nflfever2.com/Gold/BuildSharing/PlayerGuide.htm
These guys probably know more than I do.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7 Building an Offensive AI
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before you can build an AI you have to understand how it works:
An Input in an AI is an instance in the game, this input will lay out the situations in which you want the outputs contained inside of it to be called. Situations that may call for an intput in your AI are situations such as 3rd and 1, because obviously you wouldn't want to treat 3rd and 1 the same as 3rd and 10 there would have to be an Input for each, one could be the basic 3rd down input, the other 3rd and short.
An output is either the play or package that you want to have a chance to be called, the box next to it is the percent chance that you want that play called (as it is scaled to total 100% when combined with the other inputs) but don't worry about that, the proportions you first apply will always be kept, so making them total 100% is not needed.
Now there are different sections to an AI
there is the General section, and the by quarters section.
The by quarter section will override the general section, in other words if you put something to occur on 1st down with no other restrictions in the 1st quarter section, then it will occur on every 1st down in the 1st quarter, even if you have a input covering the situation in the general section, the quarter input would override it.
Remember when installing inputs that the sim will read from the top down of whatever section the input is in, meaning that if you want to put an input to just run the ball whenever you haven't already said to pass it, then you would put your run input at the bottom of the list where as the situations where you wouldn't want the run to occur would be above it.
The sim is just going to call the first input that matches the description of the current situation, it doesn't care if you have 10 that match it, it honestly won't even check past the first.
How do I set up my AI?
Well I honestly could go in to the specifics of this, but it is absolutely no different from basic football, any situation you can think of if you were really on the field coaching where your play calling would differ from another time is a time an input should be made. In my quest for knowledge in this forum the best piece of advice I could find that wasn't exactly what I just said except misrepresented as unique information was to play a game of Madden and use your offensive AI, any situation where you feel as if you aren't wanting to run the plays you are given would be a time to make a new input to match that particular situation, I tried this out and not only was it fun as hell-but it offered some interesting insight.
A Basic AI would look something along the lines of this:
2nd Down and Long:
100% Pass
3rd Down and Long:
100% Pass
4th Down and Long:
100% Punt
Catch All:
100% Run
Now would this be a good AI? Absolutely not, there are hundreds of thousands of possibilities, and I can only say the more specific you get the more in control you are, whether that will actually give you an advantage or not depends on how well you utilize your control, or manage your lack there of.
There are a couple of features that aren't yet explained, one is auto adjust.
What auto adjust does is within a given output or package percents are adjusted within the output or package every time a play is run, if the play does good then the play itself is more likely to be called and all of the other plays therefore less likely, the degree of this change is a direct link to the rate you choose in the drop down box. The exact opposite effect would occur if the play did badly. While auto adjust seems very appealing remember that the more you run a play the more likely you'll run into the Repeat Play Penalty which gives the opposing team stat boost when you run the play again. Also always be sure that your aware of when you expect a input to see a variety of different defenses, the more defense you expect an input or package to see the lower the setting of auto adjust you want, otherwise you'll see plays get run over and over (still doing bad) in situations that don't work because of a few anomalies in particular situations where the defense is in a different look and it does very well.
You can also change whether you want the QB to be able to call people back to block, and I say to go ahead and turn this to no if you are setting custom progressions, but would advice leaving it on yes if you don't intend to be very heavily involved with constantly updating your offense for every team.
One last option is your ability to choose when to go for 2, as far as I'm concerned that was taken from a table made by the best NFL coaches ever, so leave them checked moron. (just kidding, but really... wtf... you know more than Madden now?).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8 Tagging
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tagging is a very essential element to defensive strategy, the ability to tag specific players and be able to call defenses around those players is an unequivocated advantage. This could be used to tag the opposing teams Rushing Quarterback, Power HB, Blocking FB and other players who may be strong in one roll but limited in another, having a slower fullback in the game allows one to know that a slower LB could cover him, and sweeps are much less likely to be effective, these types of advantages are the ones defensive coaches can completely shut down an opponent with.
The most common tag types:
Rushing QB
Receiving TE
Blocking FB (Or anything to indicate a slower lead blocker)
Power HB (Or anything to indicate a slower running back)
Blocking TE (or anything to indicate a slower tight end unlikely to run a route)
The wonderful things you can do with these tags are only limited by the variety in the builds between the opposing teams players at the same positions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
9 Creating Custom Defensive Plays
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many people consider this to be the most difficult part of the peewee game, since defenses here in peewee function quite differently from those you would expect to see in a real life football game.
Here are a few very important tips that should be taken in to account before we get started:
• Peewee players have very limited agility, even given the attribute being abused and everything else nearly ignored their reaction time in zones is quite slow, players who are going to be playing zone should be placed specifically in a small zone to stop a specific area of the field, whether it be an over the middle pass out of some formation, or some outside screen. Placing your safeties in deep half zones, or pretty much any deep zone is pretty much eliminating a player from effecting the play in any way.
• Positioning on man coverage is completely indicative as to which times receivers will be open during what routes, so remember that using the same corner positioning all game will likely result in a very simply implemented passing assault doing work against your defense. If you position your guy off the ball he will be exposed to short cut routes, such as ins, outs, curls, and often times slants, if you reduce the cushion the corner has less room to make up for and is more capable of covering those routes during the "hot zone" or the time at which the QB is most likely to throw him the ball. Another important aspect of man coverage alignment is that a receiver given the inside angle will be able to get open on a slant route, an in route or a crossing route quite easily, since the corner has that extra tick of space to travel- positioning the corner more inside will aide him in coverage on those routes but expose him to out routes, and deep post and sometimes even streak routes. More important even that corner alignment is the alignment of the linebackers who are in coverage, these guys have to be given the perfect amount of travel time on certain routes or there will be inevitable catches for big gains, currently HB and FB passes are the dominant aspect of the game and learning to correctly place your linebackers to arrive at the coverage at the hotspot moment every time is a key aspect to running a strong defense. Most teams in the league use the same passing plays, so learning to adjust shouldn't take much effort.
• The outside run is the hardest thing to stop in relation to your depth of knowledge at the game, this is where most younger teams seem to struggle- while even those that do prevent it are over-committing just to do so. Stopping the outside run is very very simple in concept, the important thing to focus on is not the runner-but the blockers. You must be sure that when the play gets going there is going to be someone left over to contain the outside run, and often times a linebacker is not nearly enough. Here in peewee the safeties are almost always played towards the hash marks and this is for that very reason, getting extra meat out there to take up blockers. I recommend setting up practice scrims with another competitive team and having each other run all the sweeps and just defend those-it is very important that your team not be exposed to these plays, because they are in history the most likely to one-trick-pony beat someone. It is very imperative to take in to account whether the FB or QB or HB are going to be fast enough to make the lead block assigned on the play, if so its going to be important to keep extra people out there-or at least inch them that way to prevent big plays. While this defense is intimidating to master, it also greatly loses its importance as the season goes on and linebackers gain the agility and speed needed to keep the edge contained from an outside position.
Making plays is all about selecting what areas of the field you want to focus on, and what ones your willing to let slack off. You should have a defense that covers all levels of dedication to the different aspect of the game, if your certain there is going to be a screen run on the play because of scouting (Section 12) then having a defense set up to focus completely on stopping the screen would likely leave a pretty appealing outcome on the field come game time.
As far as stopping the inside run game goes, the more guys you have in there-the better they do, I do know that putting people closer to the whole the back is going to be going to will at least make the HB change directions-whether that is for better or for worse is another thing, essentially the movements here are very tight and disorganized-but are at least consistent so if you tweak these movements around for long enough you will find positioning that will show promise in stopping most run plays-since running is somewhat underdeveloped at the moment.
Remember football is a game of angles and acceleration, nothing is more important than speed and agility when positioning your players on the "battle" field.
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10 Building a Defensive AI
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Well this is pretty simple really, here you will make inputs for every indicator in which you see a reason to call anything besides your basic defense. Whether the input be by scouted (Section 12) scenarios in which the team favors a different style of play, by personnel (via tagging) scenarios in which the team favors a different style of play, or by timely quarter inputs (such as 2 minute defense). If there is a situation you wouldn't want to call the basic play for a formation or number of wide receivers you need an input and a custom defense to match it.
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11 Offensive Scouting
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Scouting is a very intelligent and involved part of the game, how one scouts is really a summation of watching the enemy team game film and picking out points of attack for your team's offense. There are several things people have to take in to account when scouting however, and those things are something you should be familiar with-as its been discussed in the guide above. Remember that when you are scouting a defense that they too set up a defense around tagging your players, noticing patterns in situations, and basic down and distance situations. This means that you should be aware that just because a sweep is working on 4th down when an anti-pass defense is in doesn't mean the play should be run frequently on other downs throughout the game. This means to truly be able to scout your opposing team you really need to just watch the games and take extensive notes-or rather use one of the scripted game scouts which (filled with bugs) attempt to pull the same thing off without you having to write it down-just annoyingly search through it.
Scouting defenses for weaknesses can be as simple as using the built in GLB scout function, if you are sure to keep notice of what situations plays are doing well, and being sure that they are consistently doing well it is a pretty safe bet to use those plays. Scouting will become easier as you start to learn what plays you use to expose what weaknesses, and learn how to target custom progressions based off of man alignment.
:Break Time:
Edited by Lobster Weed on Jul 9, 2011 12:51:16
Edited by Lobster Weed on Jul 9, 2011 12:37:41
Edited by Lobster Weed on Jul 8, 2011 21:46:14
Edited by Lobster Weed on Jul 8, 2011 21:44:16
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