Warrior General Games

I have over 200.

Originally posted by jkid2
I have over 200.

But you only run like 10

Originally posted by iStoner
On what grounds? You think its better to leave unchecked weaknesses in your defense daring people to attack them?

To be honest...this isn't a bad strategy IF a team can find that you only run this one certain defense in a given situation...you can get killed. However, if it's much lower than that it's not always a big deal and can sometimes help.

Let's say I have a defense that completely leaves open a weak toss, but that defense is only likely to fire 10% of the time that the offense would possibly call that play. Is that bad? Every once in awhile that defense will get hit with that play and go big...in a really close, low scoring game that can be bad. However, the majority of the time what happens is that a lazy OC will watch a few plays, see that it is open (and not put together the fact that there is a small chance that play will get called) and stack up on that play. It will get stuffed the first 4-5 times it's called and pretty much auto-adjusted out. Meanwhile, the offense just wasted 3 possessions.

I know some of you will think it's crazy...but I think teasing an OC with a weakness is a good strategy. If you are facing a team that has a lazy OC that doesn't change anything so you know they won't call a play...leave it WIDE open. If you know the next team has a mediocre (but very active) OC, you can get them. They'll stack for that play, you close the loop...cue credits.

But I do love a good mind-game. Too bad I've never figured out builds as well as a lot of you.

This is why I never scouted or adjusted for the next team I was playing. Training (before the days of auto-train) and adding skill points to 30-55 players took enough time. Then you have to watch a new sim every day and see where you could have improved, and tweak your gameplan a bit (not by looking at the next game you play, but having looked at the last game you played). This is more than enough work to get you into the playoffs in Gold. Obviously if you want to go further, your builds need to be better, and you need to actively scout the next team you play.

The most I will do is tag and leave my AI to do the rest of the work.

Well PING, believe it or not but you are in the minority of people that has a 10% chance any play will be called.

I know its been a few seasons since I scouted, but I know that in Season 18 that your team was the ONLY team I scouted all season that I wasn't able to discover exactly what plays would be run in every situation.

Sure there was a team or two I was unsure whether they would tag me this way or another, but other than that... I usually had a really good idea of exactly when to call what plays to scorch holes I had found.

Granted, most of this gave way to me just targeting a receiver a single extra time in the progressions because of no double coverage or basic placement against one of the broken slant plays (if you didn't have your guy like 11 yards inside he was getting torched back then) but it is a rarity for teams to not have pretty much 100% outputs for their defensive AI.

I've tried several times to make complex AIs that never had 100% outputs, but the thing is... its way too much work to upkeep these defenses.


I have never ever in all of my seasons actually done any kind of scouting for defense, essentially... I knew what you were going to run, and that is the same shit I got dominated by last week.

I do know some teams don't regularly change their OAI to where they are running similar stuff all season or from game to game, but lets be honest... I wasn't scared of those teams.

Originally posted by iStoner
Well PING, believe it or not but you are in the minority of people that has a 10% chance any play will be called.

I know its been a few seasons since I scouted, but I know that in Season 18 that your team was the ONLY team I scouted all season that I wasn't able to discover exactly what plays would be run in every situation.

Sure there was a team or two I was unsure whether they would tag me this way or another, but other than that... I usually had a really good idea of exactly when to call what plays to scorch holes I had found.

Granted, most of this gave way to me just targeting a receiver a single extra time in the progressions because of no double coverage or basic placement against one of the broken slant plays (if you didn't have your guy like 11 yards inside he was getting torched back then) but it is a rarity for teams to not have pretty much 100% outputs for their defensive AI.

I've tried several times to make complex AIs that never had 100% outputs, but the thing is... its way too much work to upkeep these defenses.


I have never ever in all of my seasons actually done any kind of scouting for defense, essentially... I knew what you were going to run, and that is the same shit I got dominated by last week.

I do know some teams don't regularly change their OAI to where they are running similar stuff all season or from game to game, but lets be honest... I wasn't scared of those teams.

I know I'm in the minority. But going back to your OP...you're basically calling out the way I run a defense. I'm just providing my opinion for why that type of defense would work.

And I can typically set my defense in about 10 minutes, FWIW. There is no point in having a lot of defenses if they are all designed to stop everything. If that's the case, you only need 2-4 defenses. But the strength of having a lot of defenses is being able to plug in the ones that stop specific plays that the offense always run. Scout opposing offense...if they only run slam & sweep in SI in that situation...plug in those defenses.

Or, in rare occassions against a really lazy OC where you know exactly what play they'll run (or that it's 1 of 2 plays) you can spend a little more time and create a defense to stop those 2 plays. It only takes 90 seconds to create a play and plug it in. I probably shouldn't call him out, but jkid is like this. You can easily know exactly what play he is going to call...but his builds are really good so it's still tough to stop.

Originally posted by zmj44
But you only run like 10

Not true

I'm actually not calling out your defensive style, like I said my post was about people who have a play for every tag possible, every situation possible, for every score difference... all with 100% outputs... and they just update their plays once in a blue moon...

You also have had 10 seasons to work on your plays, thus are an anomaly since it was really aimed towards people attempting to maybe make their first defense.

Defenses

I like to take a middle of the road approach. Too many defenses means you generally don't tweak your plays that often, but too few plays means either you have to have the perfect plays, or tweak them very often so OC's don't discover them too easily.

Except for Goal Line & 5WR, you generally only need an anti-pass, anti-run(RQB), and balanced set of plays per formation. With a good DAI, that's really all you need, but how many of those plays depends on how much you split up the 2WR and 3WR formations. If you split them into every formation, then you are talking four 2WR formations and two 3WR formations, so you would need 18 plays(6x3) to fill your needs. But there are ways to reduce those and still be very effective, or you can go the other way and add even more plays for other situations.

I would say that 15 plays on the low side to 30 plays on the high side is a good range IMO. Just remember that the more plays you add, the more plays need to be tweaked, so be careful not to go overboard and it can backfire on you, and I speak that from experience!