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MVP
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Re: Weekly Challenges (2K18)
SUGGESTIONS ON HOW TO BEAT THE WARRIORS CHALLENGE
Yeah, it's hard
I didn't find this easy. Took me four tries. Took it lightly and first tried it with a moderate lineup of Emerald Starters, Gold Bench, and thought I'd try out automatic playcalling and just follow that, use it as opportunity to learn some new plays. Bad idea. Then tried it with same lineup a second time and tried to pull standard anti-CPU cheese. Didn't work out.
It's supposedly All-Star in difficulty but it doesn't feel like that. It's fundamentally hard because the Warriors are high-level cards and the off-ball screens and constant motion is hard to track and defend perfectly. And you have to pretty much defend perfectly, otherwise the CPU will punish you. In fact, you can defend it perfectly, and the CPU will still punish you for the cheesy pleasure of it: Curry will drop characteristic deep bombs on you, if you let him break free for a moment, he'll nail turnaround threes with a hand in his face. Klay and Durant will nail shots with strong contests. All of that...well, okay. It's the Warriors. But the CPU will also pull stuff like: Draymond does not miss open 3's, neither does Iguodala, David West will swish turnaround fadeaways with a defender blanketing him, Livingston will drain any open midrange shot and will also drain heavily contested fadeaways, Zaza is more than competent on the boards and will hit close shots over guys like Ruby Bill Russell, and even McCaw will get in on the action and pull Kyrie-esque stepback threes.
I was p!ssed after 2 games of this and decided to just field my best team and cheese the CPU right back. Lost by 10.
Now I was really mad and ran my A-squad again, adjusted defensive settings again, tried more or less the same cheese again, and...this time I beat them by 15, and was in control the entire way.
General Lineup Suggestions
Obviously, you want good to elite perimeter defenders at 1-3 at least, maybe 1-4. Two squads deep. I actually don't think you can trust even the elite guys to negotiate the Warriors screening superbly, anyway, so I can see argument for sacrificing some D for offensive capability.
I think one main thing is to make sure you get an athletic perimeter defender with high Shot Contest on Curry. Hopefully that will blunt his ability to make contested threes. To the extent to which it's possible, do the same with Klay and Durant. But I prioritized stopping Curry, so I switched Artest on him and had my 1 guard Klay.
I think it's best to have a Center who can post up and try to exploit Zaza defensively, in the paint. Hopefully he's a two-way guy. And maybe it's actually more important for him to be a rim protecting rebounder to try and at least stop GSW drives and not give up O-boards. I mostly used Ruby Russell and Emerald Gasol.
I'll get into later, under offensive strategies, but I'd also make sure you have a couple guys on deep bench who are big and athletic drivers. Gold Carmelo and Silver Simmons. (I had Ruby Penny and Diamond Jo Jo too, but I mean bigger and stronger than those guys.)
Defensive Strategies and Settings
I don't see any choice but to set Smother/Deny on Curry, Klay, and Durant. They laugh at Tight/Tight. You also actually need to stay Tight or even Deny Off-Ball on Draymond, otherwise someone will whip a cross-court pass to him in the corner and if you didn't Deny, then his defender was gapping him too much and he gets a wide open 3 that he will drain. Iguodala needs to be Tight, and of course McCaw, Swaggy, and Cassspi. Gap/Leave Zaza, JaVale, and Jordan Bell so you at least have some roaming help defense. I played Livingston Moderate/Moderate.
I tried Switching on all screens, and also tried Go Over for Curry/Klay/Durant and I think it's probably better to Go Over to try to stop them from putting up threes after sidestepping behind the screen. But you need to be agile with the other defender to show and prevent the drive while still being able to recover to stop the roll.
But, really, the main thing you need to do on D is to watch the whole court and anticipate all the off-ball screens and manual the defender to not get caught up on these. Keep in mind that you don't have to follow the same path as the assignment. You know he's going to run out past the arc and you just have to meet him at the Wing or Corner or Top. This is especially the case with Curry, who plays true to life and will be constantly looping all around the court, around his teammate's screens like they're gymkhana cones. Get hung up on a single one and he will be open and will swish a 3.
Keep in mind that, if you get caught up with his defender, you can switch to another defender to make sure he's contested when he receives the ball.
And use Right Stick to shove/chuck/get in the way of Curry as much as possible. Do like teams do in real life and try to be as physical as possible with him off the ball. Not sure if the game counts this into Fatigue, but I figured I'd just assume that it does.
I wouldn't try to get cute with doubling or playing Half Court Trap or any of that, against the GSW starters. I wouldn't, against the bench, either. There's too many knockdown shooters on the team.
You're still not going to stop them. Just slowing them down is good enough. I think I held them to something like 48% FG% overall but, more importantly, held them to something like 30% (or lower) from outside.
In the games I lost, the difference, aside from a handful of stupid unforced errors on my part, was that they were hitting so many threes, whereas I was only really shooting twos.
Offensive Strategies
The main point is to beat up on Steph Curry every moment he's on the court. I started off with running standard 1-5 PnR cheese with Jo Jo and Penny. That was pretty reliable, but if you cheese that constantly, ACE will adjust and Curry will suddenly be a guy who can steer Penny completely away from the paint. Somehow, you can't even really reliably post-spin off of him without an extremely significant size mismatch and, even then, it's tough. The CPU had Curry pulling some weird motions that seemed sort of like a lite version of Pull the Chair or something that would make it not easy to get into post-up position or to back him down.
The most reliable thing for me was to just overwhelm him by later putting Carmelo in at point. Also tried Silver Simmons, who was okay. But I'd just ISO Carmelo on the wing and either blow past Curry with a drive from ISO, preferably triple-threat, or post-spin off him. Thankfully, CPU is not so cheesy that they made Zaza capable of blocking good dunkers after rotating over to help in the paint.
Try to mix things up a little bit. Try to drive on him out of P&R, from ISO, from Triple Threat, from a live dribble, and post up on him early, at high post, starting at low post. Don't repeat precisely the same action over and over again. Also mix in post-ups on Zaza with a solid post-up big. Also try to have guys who can post up and abuse someone like McCaw. With their bench unit, try to have a 5 who can shoot and use your 4 to run P&R because it's better to involve Jordan Bell than JaVale, who is a very solid rim protector.
And try to have outside shooting at 4 positions because they will double on you and you need to kick out to a reliable shooter...though I'd rather not risk the missed three, of which I had plenty, and would rather drive off the catch.
My goal was not just to find a very reliable way of scoring on the Warriors, but also to fatigue Curry as much as possible and, hopefully, his shooting would suffer. On offense, I didn't try to score quickly. If posting up, I tried to post and re-post and use up the clock and force him into physicality as much as possible. Don't know if that was necessarily effective, but he had terrible %'s in the game I won.
If All Else Fails
Just keep playing. At some point, the CPU will actually get tired of cheesing you and will let you win.
Last edited by harryl; 10-26-2017 at 05:15 PM.
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10-26-2017, 02:43 AM
