Before you start building your custom playbook, be sure to pick a book that best represents the formations you want to use. In so doing, you will have the ability to take advantage of formation substitutions. Once you've settled on a playbook, select one play from a formation you wish to save and put it in all gameplan situations, except hail mary. Doing this will insure you avoid being prompted that a play cannot be deleted, since it's the only play in a given situation. Keep in mind that you will not be able to delete any play designated as "safe situation". Next, delete all plays and formations you do not wish to have in your book. From there, delete the rest of the plays you don't want to keep, but make sure you save at least 1 play per each of these formations, in order to keep the integrity and order of your playbook intact. If you don't, your formations may scramble and thus may not appear where they belong. Finally, build your playbook by first adding plays to the formations you've saved. Afterwards, you can select additional formations and plays you wish to install. Everyone has their own tastes, but I would highly advise that you try to stay as balanced as possible. Writing your playbook to a simple word pad file will allow you to keep track of how many runs, short, medium, deep passes and nickel packages you are installing. Think "situation". When you have finished, name your book and save.
In order to start building your gameplan, start by simply selecting your offensive playbook for editing. You would then select 9 plays you absolutely want to show up all the time for each situation. This is done by awarding 3 plays 5 stars, 3 plays 4.5 stars, and finally 3 plays 4 stars. Continue to do this throughout every situation or copy and paste situations. Of note, 3rd & 4th down medium situations only allow for 6 selections. Make sure you are picking plays from every formation in your playbook or that formation may not show up in game. These plays will show up under Frequent Playcall Window. If you want to further enhance your gameplan, select 9 additional plays for each desired situation and award a star rating of 3.5 for each play chosen. While these plays will not show up under Frequent Playcall Window, you will notice 5 or 6 of them will randomly rotate under the Strategy Pick Window. What I did was add 2nd and short to both 1st and 10 and 2nd and medium/long situations. I also added 3rd and medium to my redzone situation. When you are finished, save playbook as gameplan. Finally, you will have to go through a game and call all of your plays at least 1 time. After you do this, you will find that all of your plays in your gameplan will show up according to situation under the Frequent Playcall Window, while supplemental plays you've added by rating them 3.5 will start rotating under the Strategy Pick Window.
In the future, I hope EA improves the gameplan feature, as it had done so well in Madden 12. Being that there are 27 available playcall windows, it flies in the face of all logic to not be able to assign more plays into a gameplan window than 9. Having said that, having at least 9 plays for almost every situation and the supplemental use of formation substitutions is better than nothing.
I have uploaded both my core offense named EdgeOffense and 60 play gameplan named Edgeplan for XBOX users in case you want to download and use either as a template. My apologies to PS users as I regretfully have no means to upload for you folks.
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