BBCF Strategy Questions

[Radii]

I finally got hooked by BBCF recently, after picking up and trying it two or three times over the last couple years, for some reason its really stuck this time, even grabbing me with a pretty strong "just one more turn" vibe over the weekend. Anyway, I've got a bunch of questions for those of you still playing:

1) How much time do you spend gameplanning? How much better than the recommend button can you do in this area? If you have a coordinator with a good gameplanning rating, does that impact your decision on how much gameplanning to do yourself?

2) Similarly, how well does the recommend option work for player training? Do most of you go through each player to maximize training, hit recommend and go, or something in betwee?

3) Is there a consensus on when to make your pitch in recruiting? Thus far I've been waiting a couple weeks to try to find a "very important" item to pitch, but not waiting longer after that to find the single best pitch. Is there an ideal here or is this someting that varies player to player?

4) So far, i've found myself getting heavily involved in recruiting, transfers, coach hiring, the offseason stuff basically, but a bit overwhelmed with the week to week micromanagement of the depth chart(usually going with the recommend button instead of making my own adjustments each week for injuries/suspensions, etc), and as mentioned above, avoiding gameplanning altogether. Any suggestions on steps that can be taken to maximize my team's performance during the season, or ways to get my feet wet in gameplanning without completely wrecking everything at random?

5) Last question is a quick UI type question. Is there a way to get a quick overview of the morale of all the players on your team without going through the entire roster, player by player?


Thanks for any help!

[Alan T]

For #3, a good thing to listen to for some pretty insightful looks to how BBCF recruiting happens would be the recruiting primer audio cast that I believe Cooley and Dutch over at Totalsportsworld did, which you can find here:

http://www.gridiron-glory.net/Primers/RecruitingPrimer.mp3

Many of the things they mention in regards to pitches are fairly similar to what I have always done, and there isn't really that much on the recruiting side that I disagree with them on. (Recruiting historically had always been my strongpoint in BBCF).

I'll let someone else answer #1 and #4 for you, as I still am in the same boat (after several years of playing). By nature I am far more able to make strategy adjustments in Baseball games than football games, and most of what I do ends up being counter-productive. I do spend time now trying to gameplan, but I honestly have not seen much or any improvement over the results of just letting the AI do it for me :) There are some others that are absolutely genius in game planning for BBCF however.

For #2, it depends on the league for me. In an online league where I have a highly competitive team, I generally do go in and min/max my training. In the BB-BBCF I spend so much time actually running the league now that I generally just have it auto-recommend for me. I wouldn't recommend going with the "Recommend" button for training in cases where you really want to get involved though. It could do far better in who it chooses to allocate time for academics and such.

[Radii]

bumping this for the weekday crowd. Thanks for the info so far Alan!

[jeheinz72]

My thoughts.

1. I've never let coordinators dictate for me. I don't spend a ton of time on it. I usually do use the playbook feature though, and focus on plays that were successful previously.

2. I start by hitting suggest all. Then I go to each player and adjust his adaptability and academic amount based on what the player needs. Like for a QB who will only ever be a QB for me, I drop that down to 0 or 5. If I have a smart guy, I'll drop academics down, and vice-versa.

3) I pitch once I know the ideal pitch. Only time I waver on this is if I have a high-interest (9 or 10) recruit who is a reach for me (say a 5* at a mid-major or a nice 4* at a low end school, etc.) I'll take the 50/50 shot if someone else is offering the recruit as well. For about half the options you can make an educated guess anyhow.

4) I'd start by hitting suggest on the gameplan and then trying use of the playbook.

5) Not that I know of (though that doesn't mean it doesn't exist)

[Radii]

One other question I have after playing through a season where my team pulled off couple great victories(defeating the team taht eventually became the 3 seed in the playoffs on the road) but lost 3 games to teams that were well under .500:

How important is motivation for a coodinator? Does this have anything(a lot?) to do with not playing up to your abilities and choking away easy wins?

I had two coordinators who were good with player development and gameplanning but were below average or worse at motivation. After this season I fired both of them and took on coordinators who are still adequate, but not outstanding at player development, who both have green motivation ratings. But I kinda did this without a lot of confidence that there's a direct correlation...