FBCB2 discussion: Full version now available
 

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EDIT:

Fast Break College Basketball Released!
Published By: Tara Clover- Tuesday, April 6 2010
Grey Dog Software, a Phoenix based developer of sports management simulation software for personal computers, today announces the release of Fast Break College Basketball. The full version of FBCB is now available for digital download exclusively through Grey Dog Software for $34.95. You can purchase the game at our web store.
You can also download the full install or just try the free demo at one of the locations below:
Full Install:
server 1
server 2
Updated Free Demo:
server 1
server 2
Please visit our forums for more information.

Latest Patch can almost always be found here:
http://www.greydogsoftware.com/forum...d.php?t=444748

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So this is my FBCB2 discussion/motivation thread. My approach to FBCB has always been to make a game that I enjoy playing. From reading previous comments it seems like most of the requests were along the lines of making certain parts of the game work better rather than making major changes. This is what I've tried to do based on the old requests thread:

FBCB 1.1.1 questions and FBCB 2.0 Suggestions! - Front Office Football Central

Some highlights of the changes include:

*The default league is stored in .csv files now to make editing easier. It is possible to add/remove teams to keep up with real life changes. You can add teams to active leagues as well.

*Transfers have been added

*Redshirting will be much less frequent

*Early departures are now announced after the season more like real life

*The whole assistant phase has been revamped. Coaches can't make lateral moves for atleast 2 seasons. During the offer phase teams can make multiple offers for each coaching vacancy.

*computer teams do a better job of finding good recruits that aren't receiving interest. High quality foreigners shouldn't be available in the later months.


As a point of discussion I'd like to hear thoughts on transfers and what reasons players should have for transferring. Currently in the game it is purely based on issues with playing time. Should there also be a chance of transferring due to being homesick? Any other reasons why a player might transfer?

For the transfer period itself, players rate each school for things including likely playing time and distance from home. Each player has different factors for how important each item is. Each team can make transfer offers until they have used up any available scholarships. You can offer any player but if they don't have a high interest in your school to start with, they are very unlikely to accept your offer.

Coaching changes are another huge reason for transfers, as we saw with the whole "Calipari to Kentucky" situation.

A couple of things I would like to see you address if possible.
- Reduce effectiveness of fullcourt/trapping press.
- Reduce technical fouls.
- Ability to turn off the shot clock and/or change to 45 seconds.

I love the .csv file!

Can't wait to play this!

I agree with the first 2 and options are always nice.

As far as transferring, I think the 3 biggest reasons (playing time, coaching changes, and being homesick) have already been mentioned. I do think that players should sometimes leave for being homesick (whether that be a family member who is ill, a pure distance thing, etc.) I just wanted to post saying that I'm looking forward to playing this.

I don't have much to add, other than encouragement, I'd love to play this game.

I think maybe at a college sports sim should have a little more roster chaos - a few players here and there just randomly quitting, getting kicked out of school, leaving for personal problems, etc. That could be a part of the risk/reward of recruiting - like a "stability/character" rating. Get too many of these guys together and you might have some problems.

Looking forward to this as well.

As for recruiting, I think the 3 mentioned reasons are the biggest ones. I can't recall transfers happening for other reasons.

As for the game, I'd like to see hardship years added. When a senior is injured for the season before a certain time, they can then be redshirted and allowed to play the next season. Make it so that it is rejected from time to time.

Also, if you're going to move the announcement of going pro to the end of the season, can you add some emails about rumors of a player thinking about it during the season and change the recruiting to not change everyone's interest to none after all scholarships have been filled?

I think I speak for everyone that we all just want to see whatever you have come up with.

FBCB has stood the test of time extremely well, more than many other text sims since released or patched.

It be nice to get an update which fixes the trapping/fullcourt strategy as well as closes the international recruiting gaps which make easier recruiting (easily solved by house rules I know, but if it can get fixed in an udpate, the more the better).

Also, I love .csv as well.

Just release something new for the text-sim community. Please? Pretty Please?

Cheerleaders

FBCB is one of those games I remember so fondly I can't even say offhand what I'd want changed or it was lacking. I absolutely loved it, but haven't fired it up in years which I think I need to remedy now.

Is there a place I can download it still? I've seen some shareware type sites with versions but they look to be older and I have no idea how shady the files are.

I imagine I'll have to try and talk to elicense also as I think my license got used up in a reformat years back which led to my stopping.

Fantastic game though, and I'd buy just about anything you put out next.

Pretty sure you can still download it from his website.

http://www.fbbgames.com/fbcb/

We've (FBCB) come across an apparent algorithm that gives coaches a lifetime contact for winning the FBIT, that would be cool if you could get that fixed.

Other than that and the other stuff I mentioned I don't think there is much to really address.

Yeah I tried there, I'm getting one of those funky default search engine pages, so I wasn't sure if HR had shut down the site or what was going on.

I obviously echo the sentiments that whatever you come up with, would be great for me (esp. a revamped assistant coaching phase).

Couple of thoughts. I can't comment about transfers. Truthfully, I don't know how they work in real life and wouldn't know how important they would be in FBCB.

If redshirting will be much less frequent (assuming by the AI), what will prevent a human player from taking advantage of redshirting as we do now (i.e., redshirting all freshmen and cranking them up with training, esp. conditioning)?

In looking back at my (and other) suggestions, I think one of the main comments, besides the asst. coaching phase, was the exploits of OOC scheduling (front-loading, cupcaking, etc.) and the lack of travel costs/fatigue. Can anything be done there?

Again, I look forward to playing FBCB again in a few months with my son, even if it's 1.1.1. He keeps asking when we will be playing again. The game is so good that it has become our gaming highlight of the year.

HR, in case you're not aware, this is a huge imbalance in the game. The easiest way to win is:

1. Recruit based on steals above all else.
2. Max train every player on defense/steals.
3. Maximize pressing/trapping on defense.
4. Pwn.

This really needs to be taken care of.

A little more balance on where the recruits come from. Top 5 talent from Idaho and Montana isn't very realistic. A little less randomness on it as well. No idea how that would work, but ya...

Single Player

-- I feel that the game is essentially 'solved' with the steals/pressing & trapping strategy. Steals and Blocks seem to be completely independent of any other defensive rating, so you can take a guy with no talent in any area(including PRD) but give him an A in Steals and make him an all-american. FBCB: Learning the System - Front Office Football Central or pretty much any successful team in our online league for examples.

-- Agree w/ Bucc on frontloading schedules. Fatigue carrying over from day to day would be big for this and could add an interesting dynamic to tournament time.

The game isn't perfect outside of that, but I personally don't have any huge preferences on what needs to be changed.

Multi-Player

-- Assistant Hiring is a huge fun-killer in multiplayer.

-- Some sort of stage management with exports to make sure that an export fits the stage its being imported for. If a user exports off of Day 1 of assistant hiring because he didn't download the updated league files, and then I import that file into Day 3 of assistant hiring, the game lets me, and the game attempts to apply hiring instructions that are no longer applicable. Hopefully that makes sense. Similar things can happen with recruiting and scheduling, exporting off an earlier file can mess up the results and goes unchecked.

-- There aren't any HTML pages dealing with preseason tournaments, conference tournaments, or the NCAA/NIT tournament. just tournament brackets would be enough I think :) The fact that there is nothing done for the postseason in the HTML hurts the immersion a bit.

-- Human Scheduling Weirdness/tedium - the biggest problem with multiplayer scheduling is that if UGA tries to schedule Georgia Tech to play a game on Dec 14 and Ga Tech tries to schedule UGA to play on Dec 15 in the same scheduling round, both games get scheduled and the two teams end up playing twice. It would be nice if it were easier for two human teams to schedule each other outside of the request->response over two stages deal.

-- Assistant Hiring needs a "cpu hire" team option. A coach can let the CPU do everything for them from scheduling to recruiting, but there is no way to have the CPU handle assistant hiring. So when a coach disappears for a week during assistant hiring, the only two options are to fire the head coach, or have the commish manually hire for the coach.

-- CPU recruiting needs to work a lot better. If a human coach submits an export for Recruiting Month 1, Recruiting Month two but forgets to export for Recruiting Month 3, turning on CPU Recruiting for that coach is catestrophic. The CPU doesn't build on existing recruiting actions, it deletes the entire call and contact list and starts over.


-- Depth Chart verification - There's a current bug where a team's depth chart may be incomplete/illegal going into a new season.. no starting lineup, or multiple players set to start at Center, some weird things happen. If a team in multiplayer is inactive/doesn't fully correct this on their own, the results from this end up being totally off the wall. Players will end up playing for other teams, stats get very messed up. You'll end up with guys that play 70 games a season because they're playing for two teams, etc.


The fact that so many players care so much about a game that's 6 years old now is a great testament to how good a game it is. I'd love to see what could be done in a new version :)

Coach Data

That's the coach in question. Alabama's goals are to avoid last place in the SEC, but this coach's "performance is the stuff of legend" :D I know its a football school, but someone in the athletic department would have noticed they have a basketball team by now!



I'll go ahead and quote this again to emphasize it. If nothing else changes in a new version of the game, but this one thing gets balanced in some way, it'd be worth $35 to me.

Where can I re-download the game?

Glad to hear HeavyReign is willing to listen to our input for FBCB2. Hope we see this game in time!

It would be nice if you could add a column to the players csv file to indicate if they are red-shirting for those of use who fiddle with that. :) Why do players transfer? ------------------------ - Playing time - Recruited over - Home-sick - Injuries - Asked to redshirt - Desn't get along with the coach Academic Suspensions: ---------------------- It would be nice if the academic suspensions happened at realistic times, too, rather than at the end of every month. Redshirts: --------- It might be useful to have players make it known that they don't want to red-shirt, and if you do tell them they have to you might wind up losing them to transfer. In addition, they might ask if you intend to redshirt them during the recruiting process--or make you promise them not to. There are some options available there, depending on how complex you want to get.

Hmm...for whatever reasons I can't get the formatting to work right. Sorry.

Not much to add -- I've always enjoyed the way the game plays as a single player. I like the sound of making coaching assistants jump around a little less, but am a little hesitant on how the declaring for the NBA stuff might throw off recruiting. It might make it better if you had an early and late signing period -- it would certainly make things more challenging, as there are often seasons where my recruiting has been wrapped up in the first month of signees.

Anyway -- I love the game, as is. I'm more here for motivation/support than any suggestions.

Lots of input over at FBCB-FOFC. It's interspersed through the thread, starting about halfway down.

FBCB Download Links
 

RapidShare: 1-CLICK Web hosting - Easy Filehosting

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For now you can access the page here:

Fast Break College Basketball

The domain expired last week because the emails were going to one of my old email addresses that I never check. It should be working again soon.

I'll just chime in here to say that unless I post arguing with him, consider me a +1 on whatever Radii says. The FOFC-FBCB league has discussed this stuff ad nauseum, and he's summarized it pretty well above. The base game is really good, just a few quirks / exploits / usage issues to iron out, and given how long I've played the game I'm more than willing to pony up some dough for a cleanup pass.

HR great to see you working on this. I will go with what Radii says. I love this game and am excited about whatever you come up with.

The issue with pressure d will be addressed. I haven't gotten to it yet but it is on my list. If anyone has a save file with a super stealing team already built that will help me out when I start testing it. I'll also go over the thready Radii posted.



Should be possible


This is on my list of things to look at.


There is a top prospects for the draft screen. Emails should also be possible.



If a player is not willing to redshirt, the option will be disabled for that player.


I'm going to work on this as well. I'll probably do a little brainstorming session on this when I get there. I have some ideas for how I'm going to deal with it but I need to write it down and make sure it all makes sense.


There may be something that can be done in terms of the states the recruits are generated in. It would be harder get more specific though in terms of focusing on certain cities for instance. I don't know that you could say it never happens to have elite talent in weird places but it should certainly be more rare.



Shouldn't be too hard to address


On the list


I've redone the scheduling interface but I'll do more testing for scheduling between human teams. My goal is to make it so you can agree on a date and both submit during the same stage.


Cpu hiring has already been added.




This is on my list as well.



I should have this fixed but I'll do some testing to make sure.


I have an old league file that I'll use to see what's going on here.



Maybe something more like 2 possible suspension periods: oct-dec and jan+

I´d like to chime in with sth. that shouldn´t be changed, also in relation to the steal-recruits :

Please leave it that you will have specialists and such great variety of players.

As good as TCB/DDSCB (from over at Wolverine) are, they don´t nearly offer the immersiveness of your game as basically recruits are too similar. 5 star = awesome all arround, 3 star = average all arround
Whereas in FBCB you could get a 3 star guy that´s great for your system (not just steals) and 5 star guys could be high potential guys with little game or great in some but terrible in other areas.

I'd expect the steals adjustments to be within the game engine itself rather than something like having less players who are good at stealing.

I guess the next question that has to be asked: Is there a tentative timetable for the next update?

Hey, is that how Tennessee is dominating our FBCB league?

Yes yes. Thumbs up. QFT. +1. IWS. And whatever other "I agree" things I can say here. ;)

A really fun thing in text sims is building a team around a certain strategy. FBCB probably does this better than any other text sim I've played. It's just that this particular strategy is overpowered. If a team is filled with guys who are generally good all-around talents with a strength in defense, then by all means, the press/trap thing should work well. The problem isn't the strategy itself; it's that you can execute it with a bunch of players who are mediocre or even poor otherwise and win the whole shebang, at least in SP.

So, per your request above for a stacked steals team, I would be looking more for a team of 1 to 3-star steals guys that is winning far more than it should than a team that has been running the strategy for 10-15 years and has built itself up to 100ish prestige and therefore has basically nothing but 3 to 5 star guys who are good at steals. The former team should cause some problems for a top-tier team, and maybe pull off an upset to get to the Sweet 16 or even Elite 8 from time to time, but as it stands now, that team is a legit title contender. The latter *should* be a national title contender, but they shouldn't win every game by 40 as they do now. ;)

I haven't played MP because of the existence of this imbalance, so I don't know for sure. But unless there's some other one out there that hasn't been mentioned, I can't imagine building a team to elite status in MP without using this strat.

My suggestion is a bit different from other peoples, but I'd just suggest to make sure the game has no obvious memory leaks in the new version, and works on all different operating systems, maybe say back to windows 2k? or XP should be fine. I think increasing the compatibility with windows 7, vista, and XP would cover most of the user base. But its always a good idea to cover a couple older ones, just in case someone wants to throw it on an older machine if thats all they have.

If assuring an additional purchase motivates FBCB2 at all, then count me in.

I feel pretty inadequate in my FBCB skills now because I played this for probably hundreds of hours and didn't know about this steal/trap imbalance, so apparently I never noticed it or attempted it.

Glad I didn't. The strategies I did try seemed to work about as well as I expected them to with the personnel I had, so it never felt gamey to me.

I am also a definite buy as soon as we can order, hell I might even buy 2 copies if it helps.

Legal issues might cause a player to transfer

Please have player development tied at least partially to playing time.

Just look at any team Al has put on the floor in FOFCFBCB. I'm sure he would tell you which year was his best team and radii probably has an archived file from that season.


If this is going in the game, it would be really helpful to have this information available when recruiting the player.

Yes.

A couple of cosmetic things that would be cool:

1) Some way to keep track of your assistant coaches who have gone on to become head coaches - to see how successful they become. Like a coaching tree.

2) The ability to tag recruits even if you lose them, so you can track their careers easily.

3) The ability to create a new school and start from scratch.

4) An easy way to set all team's prestige to one number and all conference prestige to one number. For example, all conferences prestige 2, all teams prestige 30 and let the best teams/conferences rise to the top.

5) In single player, but even more so in multi-player, the ability for human coaches to actually vote in the Coaches Poll.

A minor issue, but in FBCB there are a ton of bigmen who do nothing but rebound, and average 10+ boards a game with only 5 or so points per game. In real life you don't see so many rebounding specialists, and I suspect that the low SHT/INS ratings of the player to go with their position (guards are set to shoot more in the ini file) means that these guys just aren't taking many shots. I would like to see teams penalised for having these one dimensional players on the court a little more, by making them take more shots.

I'd like to see a beer tent added to the game.

Glad to hear that you are working on this again, HR.

My .02--I know that nobody wants to micromanage academics, but with that being said, I think that academics should count for something. As someone who often plays FBCB with Ivy League schools, it is a tad unrealistic that I can recruit someone with a 850 SAT score and see him get through without any academic difficulties.

A relatively simple solution would be to assign a rating to each school based on academic rigor. 3-Ivy/Service Academy type schools that cut their athletes no slack, 2-Schools like Duke and Stanford, which are normally considered elite academically, but can still manage to keep athletes with good (but not necessarily stellar) academics eligible, 1-Everyone else.

So, the school's academic rating could be coupled with the player's academic rating to determine the probability that player will be suspended due to academics at any given point. So, a guy with a 850 will be more likely to run into trouble at a 3 school, but may skate through a 1 school.

Again, this solution does not require micromanagement since it will only affect the chance of suspension. But, if you are coaching a school with higher academic standards, it does force you to do a cost-benefit on whether recruiting a low academic performer is worth the trouble.

I just wanted to chime in to say my only real complaints have already been addressed quite a bit - steals and foreign recruits. Can't wait to play the new game.

I'm for a simple version of this - but if you penalize good academic schools you at least need to reward them by giving them some kind of boost on recruits with strong academics. Maybe to spice it up, maybe get a boost for recruits with a good GPA (SAT would be irrelevant for determining the academic boost a school gets).

Aren't package deals somewhat common. Like you recruit a high level player but you also have to take one of his somewhat inferior friends(or brother)?

Also some sort of "tipping point" where if player X goes pro, teammates Y and Z become highly likely to follow.

Oooh, I have one more....I love the way the prestige scale works from 1-100, but there are a few programs that transcend this scale. Either have certain teams (UNC, UCLA as 2 examples) set as a legendary program - meaning even if their prestige dips due to some bad seasons, it should be relatively easy to get them back up. Or, if a team achieves some legendary accomplishments, they should also get tagged as a legendary program (Duke since Coack K?).

Also, teams can lose this legendary team tag, but it would take a while (some teams from decades ago who never kept up the commitment, or Indiana if they don't get their shit together).

Anyway, this type of thing is part of the allure of college hoops to me, and would be neat to have it reflected in the game somehow.

Top tier recruits probably won't be lured by an Ivy even if they have strong academics, though they might think about major conference schools like Stanford or Duke. Mid-tier recruits with Ivy academic credentials definitely would look at an Ivy League school much more favorably than other mid-major schools, so a top-tier academic school definitely should get a recruiting boost for those guys.

Perhaps the "Ivy Bonus" would be a sliding scale depending on a recruit's academic and athletic rating? Something like:

- High Athletics, Low Academics - No bonus interest
- Low Athletics, Low Academics - No bonus interest
- High Athletics, High Academics - Some bonus, but not too much (perhaps major conference elites like Stanford & Duke might get more of a bump)
- Low Athletics, High Academics - High bonus interest

Again, this would be a continuum, so someone with average athletics and high academics would still have significant bonus interest, not as low as the guys who are high on both academics and athletics, but not as high as a low athletics, high academics guy.