What's Going On With Playsheets and Custom Playbooks In Franchise Mode?

[ChaseB]

I updated the title of the thread just to better summarize what the beef is, carry on!

[adembroski]

First, the play sheets. My coaches had a 4-2-5 play sheet and a nickel mug play sheet. Are these just the regular plays that show up those formations/sets? So I create a custom playbook, and now I have an additional formation/sets that I didn’t include because I didn’t want it?

And making it worse, the in game play calling recommendations just pick plays from that play sheet??? So all the time I spent setting that up in my playbook so that it would display the coverages/formations I like against trips or whatever was a waste of time and it just gets overridden? The whole gameplanning feature of the game is now pointless and taken over by ai?

And, the recommendations make no sense. It picks a play and next to it says “58% analytics” what the heck does that mean? What is that based on? The other teams tendencies? What are the tendencies? Who knows, ai just says run this play. Am I supposed to think or just be a stupid monkey that does what the ai tells me to do?

and it tells me the same 2 plays every time. It told me to run z spot and then y stick on loop.

On defense the first play of the game and it tells me I have to run hard flats because they’ve been hitting me in the flats. First play of the game!

And then the coaches garbage. If I wanted to “boosts” and “loadouts” I’d play Mario brothers or fortnite. This is supposed to be a sim football experience. It feels more like what I imagine MUT is like.

It might be looking like a you against the world thing right now, but I'm 100% with you on all of this. Just one of the absolute stupidest way to make "coaches matter" I've ever seen.

If I want those plays in my playbook, I'll put them in my playbook. The AI play calling is absolute repetitive trash and has nothing to do with analytics.

Braindead no-ball-knowledge *** design.

You want assistant coaches to matter? Here's what I would have done.

You'd have AI run coaches meetings. Similar to what Mantella does for Skyrim, but put on rails so it can't just turn into Mechahitler or something. The first of the year, it offers suggestions and asks questions regarding the type of offense you want, and it builds a playbook around those ideas and your roster. THEN you have another weekly meeting to build the gameplan, which just uses the same situational call sheet as is in the current playbook system.

I did this manually using Grok 3 last year for CFB and it was FUN as HELL. I would provide it my roster, my opponents roster and system, and we'd discuss ways to attack them, then they'd spit out a call sheet for me to follow. It was amazing and honestly did more for my fun with video game football than anything I've seen.

What EA did this year was bypass the obvious simulation answer and reach for the gamified answer. And I could have told you six months ago that's what was going to happen. Actually, I did.

[ggsimmonds]

Its my hope that one day soon we can see that kind of AI in sports games.
I'm not a big fan of this loadout stuff that they've added, but to be fair to EA if this works to ~60% of what they claim I'd consider it being ahead of my expectations.

I had a lengthy conversation regarding advanced AI in the NBA 2k forums a few months back where I said I think we are at least 3-5 years before seeing machine learning AI make its way into sports games, then Madden of all things surprises me and announces use of machine learning in their AI.

Of course it all hinges on how liberally they are defining machine learning, but improving the AI has been on the absolute backburner for so long I'm happy to see it get some attention

[Tonka3013]

I played 2 games today. One against the ravens. I figured I have to stop the run so I load up the “boosts” for inside run d and outside run D. Then I add the red zone offensive play sheet, no defensive play sheet. The red zone play sheet was actually kind of cool. I don’t have a custom offensive play book yet. The game was mostly fine. My suggested plays were not always from the Redzone play sheet. I just think it’s dumb that the “strategy” is boosting a players skills.

Then game 2 I use an offensive and a defensive play sheet. Defense play sheet was 3-3-5. 95% of the time, it recommended the same play—penny zero blitz. All the suggested plays were exactly the same—not just the primary play. And they were all from the play sheet,. This was almost every play. 4-5 times it suggested some plays outside the play sheet. Otherwise it was the same set of suggestions. I’m talking, 1st & 10–penny zero blitz. 2nd & 5–run it again. 3rd &12? Penny zero blitz. It’s glitched out. I don’t know if it’s just on defense or just with custom playbooks.

For the first game, it showed me some decent info in the weekly strategy page about their head coach, OC and HC. That was nice (if accurate).

second game it showed me only the HC and a bunch of “mismatches.” That was less helpful.

[Jummyjumjin]

Anyone else have good/bad experience of this feature yet? How does it work with custom playbooks? Will my “starred” plays show?