I should have known that the success in Exhibition Season 1 was too good to be true.
I made a bunch of adjustments to address the punt return issue and the "slow WR" issue, and replayed the game against the Oranges. Still a blowout, but a little more realistic. My log of items to fix got pretty long during the game, though.
Before diving into the fix-log, I played the Reds. I just wanted to be sure what I was seeing was real, and not just because of the Oranges. The list got even longer.
UGH!
I think the new player pool is exposing a lot of things I didn't see in Ex1. Some of the heavy-hitters are:
- Slow WRs are completely useless. Seems to make sense that you don't want a slow WR, but the way the engine works right now he can't ever get open. That's not what I wanted.
- QBs rated lower than 70 are all basically garbage. There's no real difference between my scrambling QB (20) and my OL/QB (64). They both can't even complete a screen pass reliably.
- OL is still at a disadvantage. It seems like the best an O-line can hope for is a stalemate. They never have the advantage.
- Almost all plays are either no-gain or a breakaway TD. You don't have any sustained drives.
I'm not going to waste any more time trying to get Ex2 to work. I'll just use the player pool to try and balance the engine again, and then see where we end up. I'm going to give myself a week to fix everything. After that I'll generate another player pool and see if the engine holds up. If it does, we'll have to see if Ex2 still makes sense, or if we start preparing for Ex3 instead.