What's your Recruiting difficulty?

[Saber]

So what's the difference in difficulty? Is it less points per pitch the higher difficulty, or smarter school AI, or what?

[canes21]

Quote: Originally Posted by Saber

So what's the difference in difficulty? Is it less points per pitch the higher difficulty, or smarter school AI, or what?

I think you get less points per pitch, you can only change topics once on Heisman, twice on AA< and three times on Varsity, and the CPU is more competitive(I guess they maybe get more points per call).

That's on Heisman.

[zmcman1]

I've been using All-American in all my dynasties. I pulled in five 5*, ten 4*, and 10 3* with LSU the past season.

[theaub]

Did a season on Heisman at Auburn and ranked 2nd in the country...four 5-star, thirteen 4-star and eight 3-star. I'll give my advice below in terms of what I do each week

Week 1: At this point I fill up my big board with all 35 slots. However, at the start, I'm only targeting 10 recruits. Any top 200 Alabama recruit that has me #1 I automatically recruit (gotta win those key in-state recruiting battles dammit), but other than that I have no house rules. Of the ten, usually 3-4 of them are positions I need. I never really go after recruits that have my school lower than 3rd since its very tough to get them and I don't want to waste my time. Of the 10, at least five have my school at #1, and usually its 7 or 8.

In this week, I spend sixty minutes on each recruit, and offer them all scholarships. Usually I can get a couple of auto commits. For the rest of this...whatever it is (tutorial? suggestion?) I will call this process "Week 1 recruiting." On rare occasions, I might only spend the max time on nine recruits and then offer six scholarships with the last hour if a lot of good prospects have my school #1. However that doesn't happen very often.

Week 3-4: By this point, all of my targets have gone one of two ways (outside of the rare auto-commit to a CPU team). The first option is that I am locked in a tight recruiting battle as one or more of the CPU teams has made a scholarship offer. In this situation I am still spending the max time each hour. However, with at least half of the recruits, I've already opened up a 300+ point lead since I am their only offer. At this point you can slowly decrease the amount of time used since you have essentially locked up the recruit. During these weeks I knock it down to forty minutes, and then twenty in weeks 5-6. I should have a 600+ point lead by this time; if its lower due to another school offering I'll up the minutes used. Now that I have extra time (usually around two hours), I can start the Week 1 process on a couple more recruits on my Big Board that have not been offered scholarships yet.

Week 6-8: These are the main visit weeks for the first wave of recruits. I am able to successfully attract about 4-5 of the main targets on the actual visit, with another 4 coming to my school the next week after being a soft commit. Of the initial ten that I target, I usually am happy with getting eight of them to commit, although there's times I have had all of them come to my school, and there's times where I only get five. The former is always a top recruiting class (in terms of the school; obviously with a one star school its not anywhere near the top 10 or even top 25), the latter is an off-year. They usually even out though and that's also realistic as schools have good and bad recruiting years anyways.

I will now have a ton of minutes left, which means I can start the Week 1 process again with a bunch of players. At this time, there will be some players who I haven't looked at since they may have ranked my school 5th or lower, but they don't have any scholarship offers. Since they are usually a higher calibre than the recruits that really like me, I will go after them.

Week 11-13: This is the second wave of visits. Hopefully I can get another five or six recruits, and then settle into my final ten targets before the offseason. My goal is to be in the top three of all my recruits heading into the offseason phase, since usually a good home visit can sway them to your school.

Offseason: This usually defines how good your class is. I just hope that the offseason generated recruits like my school. In my test run, I managed to get a five star, two four stars and a three star which is pretty rare. Usually I can only get 1-2 good recruits in this phase. However, I also should have my pick of the recruits I carried over from the in-season process. As such, I would use about five hours to target new recruits, and five hours to pick your best five carried over recruits to sign.

In conclusion, two points to stress. The Week 1 recruiting process is a cycle that should be used throughout the entire season

Step 1: Find a recruit that is has interest in your school (preferably top three or number one obviously)
Step 2: Offer him a scholarship in your initial call, spend sixty minutes for at least two weeks
Step 3: Determine how the recruit is being targeted by other schools. If other schools have made offers, continue spending 60 minutes per week. If you are opening up a large gap, slowly reduce the minutes spent and use the extra minutes to go back to Step 1 with a new recruit.
Step 4: Sign recruit.
Step 5: Win championships.

As well, the breakdown per "phase" should be as such

Week 1: 1-2 recruits
Middle weeks: 6-9 recruits
Later weeks: 4-7 recruits
Offseason: 6-8 recruits

Remember, getting 25 signees is pointless since you can only have a 70 man roster. A strong 20 person recruiting class (ie 2/11/7/0/0) is far better than a 25 man weaker one (1/9/8/8/1).

Hopefully that helps (and makes sense)

[theaub]

Just one more point that I'll add on regarding the "strong recruiting classes." In this game there are certainly some very good 2/3 star recruits. I guess it would be more accurate to say, getting the 20 players you want is better than getting 12-15 that you want and then 10 more you're just adding in to get a full class.

[DrDogg]

I use AA for recruiting and playing.

[canes21]

I do my recruiting sort of similar to yours.

As Miami in the preseason I add every 3* or better that has me #1. That is usually around 10. After that I search for recruits that have me in their top 3. I go through those and add the players in positions I need.

Doing all of that leaves me with around 15-18 recruits on my board and most, if not all, have me as their top school. When I enter week one I call each recruit for 30 minutes and offer them all scholarships as the first pitch. I usually get 2-3 commits in week one which leaves with around an hour left.

I then go into the recruiting pool, search for recruits with me in their top 3 and add new recruits to replace the ones committed to me. So if I had 3 insta-commits, I'll add 3 new recruits to my board.

I do that every week through the season. If I start to drop on one recruit's board I will spend 40 or 50 minutes on him and try to get him back. Usually though I don't drop on that many people's list since I was their number 1 choice and offered them right away.

In short, I go after whoever has me in their top 3 and offer a scholarship the very first call. Then every week I add new recruits to replace the ones that just committed to me.

[DorianDonP]

Quote: Originally Posted by kingkilla56

Varsity. Im not trying to have a stroke while I recruit. I save my strokes for when I play the actual game...

LOL yeah.

I don't like the generated recruits or the way recruiting works in the game (nonsensical mini game) to try it at the most challenging levels.